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“Look at these guys,” Cyndi Lauper whispers discreetly as she nods toward a strait-laced couple strolling through the Sunset Marquis hotel in West Hollywood, a favourite of rock legends. “I wonder what they think of a rock’n’roll hotel.” The 72-year-old pop icon is hanging out on a September afternoon in a leafy alcove at the spot that has been her go-to in Los Angeles since the early 1980s. Back then, Lauper was a disruptive new star raising eyebrows with her chaotic fashion sense and her earthy “Noo Yawk” accent. Now, nearly half a century later, she has just wrapped a two-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl to finish off what she is calling her farewell tour. Filled with quirky yet heartfelt classics like “Time After Time”, “She Bop” and the timeless “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, the gigs came as Lauper prepares to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in a ceremony set for November. In announcing that she had been voted in, the hall hailed Lauper’s “distinctive four-octave voice and songwriting chops” and noted her influence on younger acts like Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj and Chappell Roan, whom she had “empowered to perform as their unique, authentic selves”. “She broke all the rules,” says Lauper’s friend Cher, who joined her onstage at the Bowl along with Joni Mitchell and SZA. “She even broke the accent rule.” That is not all. Lauper will also premiere a new musical, Working Girl, at the La Jolla Playhouse – the long-awaited follow-up to her Broadway hit Kinky Boots. And the other day she revealed that, with her farewell tour barely behind her, she will head to Las Vegas next year for a limited residency at Caesars Palace to do it up “one last time” – or so she claims. “We weren’t the fortunate ones and we weren’t the most beautiful ones,” Cher says. “Nothing said that either one of us were going to be famous. And yet we were. And yet we are. We’re still here – still working, still performing, still making records.” Does Cher, who famously mounted one farewell tour after another, believe Lauper when she says she has finished with the road? “She’s tired now – I mean, of course she’s gonna say that,” Cher says. “She needs a rest. Every time you come off a tour, you’re dead. It’s not easy to get up there in high heels and run around and sing. “But if she can do it, it’s not the last one. If you’re a performer, you want to perform – it’s just that simple.” Lauper knew she was an artist basically from the get-go. After a turbulent childhood in Queens in which her mother’s devotion was offset by the abuse of her stepfather, Lauper left home at 17, she wrote in her 2012 memoir, “with a toothbrush, a change of underwear, an apple and a copy of Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit”. In 1981, she met Dave Wolff at a party and they would go on to become girlfriend and boyfriend then, professionally, as client and manager. He helped her land a record deal as a solo act; she remade Robert Hazard’s somewhat pouty “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” as a kind of exuberant liberation cry. “God, that was a good record,” Lauper says. “Great musicians. And David Lee Roth killed me. What’d he always say? ‘Doesn’t matter if you win or lose – it’s what you wear.’ I was like, ‘I’m with you.’” Lauper’s 1983 debut album She’s So Unusual included “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, the punky “Money Changes Everything” and the wistful “Time After Time”; the LP, which went platinum seven times over, garnered six nominations at the 27th Grammy Awards, where Lauper picked up the trophy for best new artist. For Lauper, the real testament to her achievement with “Time After Time” is the dozens of covers of the song that have been performed since she wrote it. In 1985, she took part in “We Are the World”, arguably stealing the show from the likes of Lionel Richie and Bruce Springsteen; that same year she sang the Goonies theme song, which today she swears would have been bigger if the film studio had not insisted on putting the film’s name in the song’s title. Lauper followed her smash debut in 1986 with the True Colors album, the title track of which she framed as a tribute to a friend who had died from Aids. “She didn’t record it because it sounded like a hit,” says Billy Steinberg, who co-wrote the stark, slow-moving ballad with Tom Kelly. Yet “True Colors” became a hit anyway, topping the Hot 100 for two weeks thanks in large part to Lauper’s deeply unguarded vocal performance. Says Steinberg: “She just sings it with so much empathy and warmth.” Indeed, “True Colors” heralded Lauper’s decades of work as an activist fighting homelessness among LGBTQ youth and combating efforts to restrict women’s reproductive rights. “I’m very political. Always was,” she says. Lauper got into acting in the late ’80s when her music career temporarily cooled; little-seen films like Vibes and Off and Running did not exactly turn her into a film star, though she met her husband, actor David Thornton, on the set of the latter. “I realised, ‘Hey, this guy’s really cute and funny and sweet,’ and so we started seeing each other,” she says. “I didn’t know if it was just gonna be a movie thing because people in this business, they’re weird, right?” Lauper and Thornton married in 1991 and had a son, Declyn, in 1997. “He’s not a rocker,” she says of her husband. Last night, Lauper got a new tattoo of a seahorse on her arm. “I’m gonna try and wear a shirt so he doesn’t actually see it for a while. He’s such a Wasp. When I met him, he looked Italian, but the poor b*****d has relatives that go back to the Mayflower.” In 2006, after she released an album of pop and jazz standards, Lauper appeared in The Threepenny Opera on Broadway; seven years later, Kinky Boots – about a drag queen who saves a struggling shoe factory – won six Tony Awards including best musical and best original score. (Lauper was the first woman to take the score prize by herself.) Set to begin previews on October 28, Working Girl has been in development since at least 2017. “It’ll go this way, get a little pear-shaped, then it’ll come back this way,” Lauper says of the show, which is based on Mike Nichols’ 1988 film about a secretary navigating the male-dominated business world. To help her out, she brought in Rob Hyman, with whom she wrote “Time After Time”, and Cheryl James of the rap group Salt-N-Pepa, which will also be inducted into the Rock Hall next month. According to Lauper, her agent wanted her to audition for the lead part Melanie Griffith played in the film. “But I said, ‘I can’t work in an office – I can’t even pretend. I worked in an office and it was so awful I’d be traumatised,’” Lauper recalls. As she is talking about the musical, a guy passes us at the hotel and stops to tell Lauper how much he enjoyed her concert at the Bowl. She thanks him and watches as he walks away. “Now let’s hope that he’s inspired enough to stand up for himself,” she says. That is what her show is for, in her mind? “Let me tell you something: I had Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Campaign, the League of Women Voters – that was our little village,” says Lauper. “I had information for people to help themselves if they need help, and I had information about the Save Act that they’re trying to put over on the American women so that if you got married and you have your husband’s name and it’s not the same name on your birth certificate, you can’t vote. “We’re not going back to that s***,” Lauper continues. “So of course that’s why I went out this summer – to wake people up. Everything you do, don’t you want it to have the highest purpose? Don’t you want it to be something worth all the heartache and sacrifice? “I’m not interested in just making money. I got a lot of money. And how much money do you need, really? What am I going to do, buy an island?” She probably could, right? “Ehh, not really,” she says. “Too expensive.”
