Anyone who mentions Cyndi Lauper, our minds immediately jump to her wild and crazy personality. I mean, all of her pictures in a Google search portray her eccentric, outrageous character. With her hair having been dyed all the colors of the rainbow, twenty colorful necklaces, crazy makeup with bright red lipstick, earrings that touch her shoulders and electric blue eye shadow, it’s pretty easy to pick her out of a crowd.
I do have to give her credit; she knows who she is and she’s not afraid to show it.
Best of all, she’s inspired millions around the world, especially her fans, with her success, music and wild ways to never settle for anything less than amazing. She also contributed to the question on why were the 80s so weird?
This brings me to where ever did Cyndi Lauper get her crazy personality. How can anyone that wild get so much popularity? Well with an image like that, it’s not hard to get the attention. It’s what you do with it that can make you a star or give you the disgusted look.
Where Did Cyndi Lauper Get Her Crazy Personality?
Cyndi Lauper gets her crazy personality from her challenging childhood experiences, financial difficulties, artistic talents, resilience and refusing to settle for anything less. Although this has not been confirmed by Cyndi herself, the pieces of the puzzle put together a colorful image for her wild character. Here are some of the details on how she never grew out of her wild child.
1. Challenging Childhood
Cyndi Lauper’s childhood was anything but easy. She was born into a Catholic family in Brooklyn in 1953, growing up with a younger brother, Fred (nicknamed Butch) and older sister, Ellen. At the age of five, her parents divorced. While she and her siblings were living off a single mother’s waitressing income, the family made frequent visits to Manhattan to see Shakespeare plays and visit art museums.
Cyndi grew up in a railroad-style apartment in Ozone Park, a neighborhood of Queens, listening to major artists like The Beatles and Judy Garland. After her inspiration to write and play songs, her sister gave her an acoustic guitar at the age of 12 to kickstart her passion.
While this doesn’t sound so crazy now, her personality and preference for eccentric clothing and variety of hair colors was what made her stand out. She also took the advice from her friend to change the spelling of her name from “Cindy” to “Cyndi”. But growing up in the 60s wearing wacky clothing certainly wasn’t popular yet, so she was bullied and hit with rocks by her classmates. She certainly felt like an outcast.
Cyndi attended Richmond Hill High School, but never graduated; she was expelled and later earned her GED. She then left home at the age of 17 to escape her abusive stepfather, with the goal of studying art. Fleeing to Canada to spend two weeks in the woods with her dog, Sparkle, she was trying to find out who she was.
2. Financial Difficulties
Cyndi eventually wound up in Vermont where she took art classes at Johnson State College and took any job she could find to support her self. During the early 1970s, Cyndi performed as a vocalist with a number of cover bands, including the following:
- Doc West – disco songs
- Janis Joplin
- Flyer – songs by Bad Company, Jefferson Airplane and Led Zeppelin
While Cyndi did have the opportunity of singing on stage, she wanted more. But luck wasn’t on her side. She was forced to take a year off from singing after damaging her vocal cords in 1977. Despite being told she would never sing again, her resilience thought different, seeking the help of vocal coach Katie Agresta to regain her vocal strength.
Blue Angel
In 1978, Cyndi met John Turi, a saxophone player, through her manager Ted Rosenblatt and formed a band called Blue Angel, recording a demo tape of original music. After listening to the tape and Lauper’s voice, the manager of The Allman Brothers Band bought their contract for $5,000 and became their manager.
Cyndi did receive multiple offers as a solo artist but turned them down, fully committed to her band. The golden opportunity came in 1980, when they were signed by Polydor Records and released a self-titled album. But Cyndi hated it, saying it made her look like Big Bird. Despite the hate, Rolling Stone magazine later included the album as one of the 100 best new wave album covers in 2003. But even then, the album didn’t sell well; Cyndi joked that “it went lead” and the band broke up. After having a falling out with Massarsky and firing him as their manager, he filed an $80,000 lawsuit against the band members, forcing Lauper to file for bankruptcy. And when it rains it pours, Cyndi temporarily lost her voice again due to an inverted cyst in her vocal cord.
While battling severe financial challenges, Cyndi worked in retail stores, waitressed at IHOP (before quitting for getting demoted to hostess and sexual harassment by the manager) and sang at local clubs (mostly at El Sombrero).
Music critics who saw Cyndi perform with Blue Angel thought she had potential to become a star because of her four-octave singing range. In 1981, Cyndi met David Wolff at a local New York bar, who became her manager and had her sign a new contract with Portrait Records, a subsidiary of Epic Records.
3. Artistic Talents
Cyndi Lauper released her first solo album, She’s So Unusual (very fitting) on October 14th, 1983. It didn’t take long before it became a worldwide hit, peaking at No. 4 in the United States and reached the top five in eight other countries. The main studio musicians were Eric Bazilian and Rob Hyman, Richard Termini, Peter Wood and Rick Chertoff. Because of her eclectic punk image that was crafted by stylist Patrick Lucas, she was wildly popular with teenagers and critics.
In the album She’s So Unusual, she co-wrote four songs, including “Time After Time” and “She Bop”. She also changed the lyrics in some songs she didn’t write, including “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” after finding them misogynistic. So she rewrote the song as an anthem for young women.
Numerous Awards
After her career blew up with her first album, Cyndi Lauper won a ton of awards and spots on best and top music lists, including the following:
- “Time After Time” hit No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts.
- “Time After Time” earned Cyndi an RIAA Gold certification for record sales of over 500,000 copies.
- Three other singles made the Billboard Hot 100 list, including “She Bop” (No. 3), “All Through the Night” (No. 5), and “Money Changes Everything” (No. 27)
- She’s So Unusual made Lauper the first female to have four consecutive Billboard Hot 100 top five hits from one album.
- Best New Artist and Best Album Package at the 1985 Grammy Awards.
- Nominations for Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance (for “Girl Just Want to Have Fun”) and Song of the Year (for “Time After Time”) at the 1985 Grammy Awards.
- The video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” won the inaugural award for Best Female Video at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards, and made Cyndi an MTV staple.
- In 1984-85 Cyndi appeared on the covers of Rolling Stone and People magazines, Time, Newsweek and was named a Ms. magazine Woman of the Year in 1985.
- “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough hit number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
- Two nominations at the 1986 Grammy Awards: Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for “What a Thrill” and Best Long Form Music Video for Cyndi Lauper in Paris.
- The True Colors (1986) entered the Billboard 200 at No. 42 and peaked at No. 4.
Since her career took off, Cyndi has been nothing but successful, especially with the release of the following albums and songs.
Later Success
Cyndi Lauper’s got awards well into the 2010s, including winning an Emmy for her recurring role in the TV sitcom Mad About You. In 2012, she wrote an autobiography called Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir. In 2013, Cyndi wrote the music and lyrics for Kinky Boots with a book by Harvey Fierstein, which one six Tony Awards. Later that year, Cyndi celebrated the 30th anniversary of the album that launched her into stardom, She’s So Unusual.
In 2016, she released a new album, Detour, a country album featuring duets with Emmylou Harris, Vince Gill, Jewel, Willie Nelson and Alison Krauss.
4. Resilience and Refusing to Settle
As successful as Cyndi Lauper is today, it wasn’t always like this; she grew up with an abusive step father, low income, sexual abuse and repetitive dangerous situations.
Sexual Abuse in Her Youth
As a teenager, she was frequently sexually abused by her stepfather, who she caught spying on her while taking a bath and threatened to rape her and her sister. Leaving home at the age of 17, she continuously found herself in dangerous situations, including not having enough money to eat, hitchhiking and being forced to perform sexual acts. She took up various jobs, including at IHOP, where she was demoted to hostess after being sexually assaulted by the manager.
While she was singing in the cover bands and performing in the clubs on Long Island, she was also sexually assaulted by one of the male members with a dild*. But still, she stayed.
She said in an interview with HuffPost, “I did because after I talked to everybody, I realized, in a way, it was just a power struggle. And the band had shifted and I became the lead singer. I wasn’t marrying these people. I was just going to remain singing in the band because I wasn’t going to let that stop me. After that I found another band. These were just cover bands. I had my eyes set on something much larger.”
Despite her sexual assault experiences, her resilience pushed her to stay committed to her musical career. Her refusing to settle for staying in cover bands brought her over the hump into fame.
Abortion
During the early years of singing for cover bands, she became pregnant with one of her first boyfriends, after being told previously by doctors she was unable to have children. She did want to have the baby, but her boyfriend didn’t, so she got an abortion. It’s a decision that she still thinks about today.
She told the HuffPost, “Nobody wants to run in and do that. It’s just that I didn’t want to have a kid that I love come into the world and not be able to share the kid with a dad…Why have a human being feel not wanted?”
Remarks from the Cover Bands
To make matters worse, the members of the recording studio frequently made negative comments about what she wore. She felt like a failure, not meeting the expectations of the recording industry, not having enough money to eat and now an abortion. She even wanted to take her own life. “It was very disappointing to me, and then when everything fell apart and fell to sh*t, I was sitting with complete idiots [in the recording industry], who were telling me, ‘Why do you have to dress like that?’ I didn’t want to hang. I didn’t want to stay. It was a big mess. And then it took a minute for me to realize that, first of all, I wasn’t going to let go of everything. There were too many people who were going to take what I did and make it mean nothing. I wasn’t going to let everyone say, ‘Girls just wanted to have fun – but just didn’t.’”
I have to give her so much credit. After all she went through, she didn’t put up with it. She made incredibly difficult decisions to leave her family, stay in toxic situations until a better opportunity came along and continue pushing towards her goals until her career blew up with her first album.
LGBT Involvement
Apart from her music career, she is heavily involved in the LGBT community, especially the plight of homeless LGBT youth, co-founding the True Colors Tour in 2007 to raise money and later, the True Colors Fund. One dollar from each ticket was donated to the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates equal rights for LGBT individuals.
She became involved in the movement because her sister, Ellen, is a lesbian and she herself is passionate about equality. She dedicated a song “Above the Clouds” to celebrate the memory of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who was beaten to death in Wyoming. Cyndi’s also a member of the Matthew Shepard Foundation Board and devoted a concert tour in 2005 to promoting the Foundation’s message.
In April 2012, Lauper started True Colors United after learning that while 10% of American youth identify themselves as LGBT, up to 40% of homeless youths do as well. The organization works to end youth homelessness, focusing on LGBT youth’s experiences. There is also a True Colors Residence in NYC for LGBT homeless youths, with 30 beds to offer temporary shelter and job placement help.
Might I also add that her True Colors Fund goes nicely with her outfits. She wears nothing but colors so she has been consistent over time with her choice of clothing and charitable organizations. I don’t think the LGBT colors are the reason for her wearing colorful clothing, but it is a nice coincidence.
True Colors United certainly relates to her homeless experience as a young adult. She knows the struggles in more ways than one, so she does everything she can to stop it. Her resilience has brought her to go above and beyond in not only improving her situation, but those of other young adults in the LGBT community.
Conclusion
While some may see Cyndi Lauper as having a crazy personality, she probably doesn’t seem so wild after reading what she’s been through, especially as a young adult. From financial issues to sexual abuse to negative remarks from her cover band members, Cyndi didn’t get to where she is today had she not made it through those experiences. I personally see her as a heroine and role model for her resilience, artistic talents, passion for music and no shame for showing the world her True Colors.
