It’s a warm spring afternoon in New York City and Cyndi Lauper wants to ask me a question. ‘I don’t look like me with these glasses, do I?’ she asks. ‘You can’t tell it’s me, can you?’
Lauper has on dark shades, a black hat that covers her short platinum-blonde hair and a bright red top. I have barely had a chance to reply when we hear ‘Ms Lauper! Ms Lauper!’, as an overexcited middle-aged man approaches and asks for a selfie.
Question answered: this isn’t just another glamorous older New Yorker – this is a trailblazing Grammy, Tony and Emmy award-winning pop star who has sold more than 50 million albums and recorded some of the biggest hits of the 1980s: ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’, ‘Time After Time’ and ‘True Colors’. Impossible to miss, even incognito.
Lauper has lived in New York all her life. She and her husband, actor David Thornton, have since 1992 leased the same rent-stabilised apartment on the Upper West Side – residents have included Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Conan O’Brien and the late Sidney Poitier. Now 71, she is busier than ever, with the upcoming stage-musical adaptation of Working Girl, her follow-up to the multiple Tony award-winning musical Kinky Boots, and a new documentary, Let the Canary Sing, about her life.
There are constant citations of her as an inspiration from a new generation of female artists; there’s this weekend’s Glastonbury performance; a show last week at the Royal Albert Hall; and her global Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour, kicking off on 18 October in Canada.
On the day we meet, another famous New Yorker, Donald Trump, is on trial a few miles away. Accused of trying to cover up payments made by his lawyer to former Playboy model Stormy Daniels (who claims she had sex with the former president in 2006), he has since been found guilty. Lauper knows the guy: she appeared with him on the US version of The Celebrity Apprentice in 2010.
What does she remember? ‘He was OK,’ she recalls, uneasily. ‘His kids were on the show – I thought he couldn’t be that bad, but I didn’t know they were going to put him in the f***ing White House.’ Lauper only appeared on the show to promote her work for LGBTQ+ rights, for which she has long been an advocate.
More recently, in 2022 she launched an abortion fund called ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights’: ‘If you don’t have autonomy over your own freaking body, what are you?’ she says. ‘You think a man is gonna be told whether he can or cannot have a vasectomy or can or cannot have kids?’
There is so much to talk about. Problem is, her publicist has set aside only 30 minutes for us, and we’ve hardly begun when I see Lauper’s PR signalling to start winding up. Lauper brushes them off, saying, ‘I’m the boss, I can do what I want. Let’s go for a walk.’
We enter Central Park. I ask about Glastonbury and she looks a little stressed. ‘I’m going to be OK,’ she says, almost to herself. ‘I just got to kick ass. That’s all.’ To maintain her voice, which used to have a four-octave range, and her health for performing, Lauper does three hours of vocal lessons a week along with weights, yoga and aerobics. ‘I’m not going to sing like I’m 30,’ she says. ‘But I’m not going to be a wallflower.’
We keep walking. ‘My parents used to take me here to see Shakespeare in the Park when I was a kid,’ Lauper tells me. She grew up in a Sicilian Catholic family in the borough of Queens. ‘The women were raised to do a certain thing,’ she says. ‘They said I was to learn how to cook and clean because that was what I was going to do the rest of my life.’
