Cyndi Lauper is the personification of '80s pop.
Her wild style of dress and dyed hair were pretty outlandish even for the time, but the
songs themselves were timeless bangers.
But along with her big professional triumphs came plenty of heartbreak.
This is the tragic real-life story of Cyndi Lauper.
True artists pull from real life to make their work personal and empathetic and Cyndi Lauper
is no exception.
Raised in the Roman Catholic faith, Lauper recounted the time a nun attacked her after
catching a nine-year-old Lauper scratching a friend's back.
She told Inside the Hollywood Closet:
"A nun ran in, ripped me off her back, threw me against the lockers, beat the s--- out
of me, and called me a lesbian."
But the future pop icon wasn't treated much better by classmates.
She told The Times in 2008,
"When I was a kid, I dressed differently, so people threw rocks at me."
Lauper faced a difficult home life, too.
According to WE TV, she grew up in the working-class Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens.
Her father left the family when she was 10, and her mother remarried a man described as
a violent bully.
In her book, Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir, she revealed that after her stepfather threatened to sexually
assault her and her sister, she left home for good at 17 years old.
After leaving home, Cyndi Lauper lived a frugal life.
According to her memoir, she'd work odd and low-paying jobs but still would find herself
without enough money to eat.
She'd sing on the street to get some cash for whatever food she could get.
She even resorted to eating squirrel a few times because of a then boyfriend who was
into hunting.
Lauper also faced an unplanned pregnancy, which she wanted but her boyfriend did not
and she ultimately terminated the pregnancy.
Lauper later told 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."
Lauper also started hitchhiking, putting her into dangerous situations, and she became
a survivor of sexual assault.
It all understandably got too overwhelming and she stated:
"A lot of times I couldn't take it anymore, so I just lay in bed all the time.
When I really couldn't deal with anything, I used to get the shakes, just complete anxiety
attacks."
She's So Unusual was Cyndi Lauper's first solo album, but it wasn't the first time she'd
commercially released music.
Lauper fronted the band Blue Angel, combining a New Wave look with a '60s throwback sound.
Allman Brothers Band manager Steve Massarsky managed to hear the band's early demo tape
and told Rolling Stone:
"The playing was bad.
There was something interesting about the singer's voice, but that was all."
But after seeing the band perform, he bought out Lauper's contract from her previous manager
and set up a showcase for Blue Angel to play for various record company reps.
They all shared Massarsky's initial thoughts of Lauper being something special.
But she refused to go solo, even turning down the chance to record a song for the soundtrack
to Roadie, which starred solo artist MeatLoaf.
She held firm and the label eventually relented and allowed Blue Angel to make their self
titled 1980 LP album, which completely flopped.
According to Classic Pop, the band then fired Massarsky from his manager post.
He sued for $80,000, and Lauper didn't have the money to pay him off nor fight the case,
so she filed for bankruptcy.
But the band's failure did allow Lauper to pursue a solo career.
Cyndi Lauper's solo debut, She's So Unusual, exploded in 1984, making her a household name.
Four of its singles went into the Billboard Hot 100's top 5, including "Girls Just Want
to Have Fun" and "Time After Time."
She came at the songs with her own sense of style, which made Lauper so endearing to audiences.
"You know, 'Let's go sing in the stairwell, use your accent.'
And I would be like, 'What accent?'"
She continued to release big hits like "True Colors" and "I Drove All Night", which reached
No. 6 in 1989, Lauper's last top 40 single to date.
After a long string of smashes, Lauper's career took a sudden, almost inexplicable nose dive.
Her albums She's So Unusual and True Colors had been certified multi-platinum, but her
1989 album A Night to Remember was, quote, "lackluster," according to The New York Times.
After the album was met with relative shrugs and she had split with boyfriend and manager
David Wolff, Lauper found herself living alone in a New York hotel, emotionally drained.
She even considered taking her own life.
She wrote in her memoir:
"I had come so far but felt like I had failed.
I would go to the studio, and then sit in my dark room and drink vodka.
I had to spend most of my time alone.
I was grieving.
I thought the sadness would never go away."
But it was Lauper's best-known song that encouraged her to try to crawl out of her low place.
She recalls:
"The only thing that always ­prevented me from suicide is that I never wanted a headline
to read, 'Girl who wanted to have fun just didn't.'"
While on tour, Cyndi Lauper first started to develop pains on her scalp, which she attributed
to having just dyed her hair.
A doctor later diagnosed it as psoriasis, it soon turned into a rash that spread.
Lauper later told the National Psoriasis Foundation in 2015 that it eventually felt like she had
full-body psoriasis, with pain so bad she'd have to spend whole days in bed, stating:
"I had to work.
So I stopped that.
This was the heartbreak."
Before she was about to head out on a planned tour with Cher, she suffered from inflammation
on her arms, legs, stomach, and had to cover up areas left exposed by her stage costumes
with extensive makeup.
To treat it, Lauper resorted to coffee enemas as treatment out of desperation when all else
seemed to fail.
She later found a treatment that worked and she explained:
"I'm not talking about it because I feel sorry for myself.
I'm talking about it because no one talks about it…and a lot of times you feel alone.
I know I felt alone."
Cyndi Lauper changed the course of her career in the 2010s.
Teaming up with theatrical legend Harvey Fierstein, Lauper composed the music and lyrics for the
Broadway hit Kinky Boots, a musical about a drag queen who saves a struggling shoe factory
by producing high-heeled boots.
After a tryout in Chicago in 2012, Kinky Boots opened on Broadway in 2013, where it ran for
six years and got Lauper a Tony Award for best original score.
But according to Courthouse News Service, '80s one-hit-wonder Benny Mardones [mar-DO-nes]
and his songwriting partner, Robert Tepper, filed a federal suit against Lauper in 2017,
alleging that she stole parts of Mardones' one and only hit, "Into the Night," for the
Kinky Boots song, "Raise You Up."
In their filings, Mardones and Tepper claimed that, quote, "both the notes and the words
surrounding the 'raise you up' refrain" were lifted from the "pick you up" section of "Into
the Night," and that the two songs have the, quote, "exact same progression of tones and
rhythm."
Two years later, Mardones, Tepper, and Lauper settled the case, putting just a few scuff
marks on Lauper's Kinky Boots comeback success.
If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.