Life Stories: Cyndi Lauper

Best known as the girl who wanted to have fun, Cyndi Lauper burst on to the 80s music scene in a riot of colour. But her rise to fame was far from straightforward. Now, aged 62, shes back with a new album.

- Caroline Corcoran

SOAKING IN THE BATH IN HER ground-floor apartment in Queens, New York, 17-year-old Cyndi Lauper felt someone watching her. ‘I heard a creepy giggle and saw my stepfather’s pear-shaped shadow against the frosted glass,’ she recalled about the man who beat her mother and had previously threatened to rape her and her sister Ellen. ‘I even saw his crazy eye looking through the hole.’ But while Cyndi’s mother Catrine may have been a strong matriarchal figure, she was also an old-school Sicilian. She didn’t think it was her place to confront the ‘man of the house’, her second husband, who she’d married after divorcing Cyndi and her siblings’ father Fred in 1958.

So, climbing out of the tub, Cyndi (then Cindy – the spelling change came about later) packed her bag with nothing but a toothbrush, an apple, a change of underwear, and a copy of Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit. And she committed to doing something her mother had never done: escaping.

‘My mother taught us to think and ask questions,’ Cyndi has explained since. ‘She challenged everything, but she didn’t get very far, the poor thing, ’cause she wound up with three kids, living downstairs from her parents.’

Not wanting the same for her children, Catrine encouraged Cyndi, her elder sister Ellen and younger brother Fred (aka Butch) to live their lives without fear. For Cyndi, that seemed to mean going it alone. Having already left high school, the teenager hopped between jobs as diverse as life model and horse walker, sleeping rough or in roach-infested apartments and once skinning a squirrel for dinner (seasoned with a bay leaf, naturally). It was far from romantic, and invariably dangerous. She was once forced to perform a sex act on a man who picked her up when she hitched a ride.