Music: These Big Girls Don’t Cry

Wait, wait. Wait! Don’t go away yet. “I think,” laughs Cyndi Lauper, “we all need a break from me.”

Oh.

“I think she’s a victim of overexposure,” says Freddy DeMann. Freddy manages Madonna, not Cyndi, and frets — is, in fact, “absolutely worried” — that all the p.r. heat might burn out his client. Now, then. While the ladies play tag with the limelight, a few thoughts occur.

Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual, for anyone without access to electric entertainment of any form, has become the first debut album in history to rack up four top-five singles. Name those tunes and, very likely, you can sing a chorus, along with all the Lauper loopies who cover the age spectrum, from dress-alike five-year-olds to grannies gone groovy: All Through the Night; She Bop, which inverted Gene Vincent’s classic Be-Bop-a-Lula into a thoroughly unapologetic paean to female autoeroticism; Time After Time; and Girls Just Want to Have Fun, a kind of antic feminist anthem that helped get Cyndi on the cover of Ms. as one of its women of the year. No other woman has made an album at any point in her career that launched so many heavy hits.

Lauper is nominated for five Grammies, including Best New Artist. She is also a) nice to her mom, with whom she frequently appears in photos and whom she cast in three of her wacky videos; b) tireless, until very recently, in her pursuit of media exposure (appearances during the past six months have included telethons and Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s TV sex-advice show); and c) a wrestling fan, who has shown up at ringside to bait her sometime buddy, Captain Lou Albano, with a rush of feminist banter and a fan’s hortatory impertinence.

Cyndi Lauper is the manic outsider in every high school class — brassy and sensitive, dippy and shrewd — whose hair seems to have been colored by a box of melted Crayolas and who dresses in the kinds of duds gypsies might wear if they had proms. Part Piaf, part Little Peggy March, she also has a razzle- dazzle, multi-octave range, a voice that can coax a broken promise out of a ballad or pin a rocker right to the mat. She has the whole package. But Madonna has the look.

Madonna — or Madonna Louise Ciccone, as her birth certificate reads in Bay City, Mich. — has an action-packed body, always prominently on display, and doleful, knowing eyes that seem to encourage every male fantasy of lust with no limits. “Baby Dietrich!” exclaimed Glamour Photographer Francesco Scavullo as he shot a fashion layout of the abrasively photogenic young (24) woman. If she could get her voice around a song the way she moves her shape for the camera, she would be pure nitro.

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In truth, she is an indifferent singer, but her voice has the whispered assurance of one of those phone-for-sex girls, and — with five high-voltage videos tossed in for good measure — this has been quite sufficient, thanks. Like a Virgin, released at Christmastime, has already sold 3.5 million copies and was No. 1 album in the country for three weeks running. Produced by Nile Rodgers, who funkified David Bowie not so long ago, the record is as slick as a dance floor, which is the place where it sounds best. Songs like the title track (“Like a virgin, ooh, ooh . . . Feels so good inside”) and Material Girl (“Some boys try and some boys lie but/ I don’t let them play/ Only boys that save their pennies/ Make my rainy day”) are like an endless series of come-ons, all promise and no follow-through. Madonna’s whole image, in fact, is like a finger-flip to feminists and earnest liberals. BOY TOY, says one of her most famous accessories, a belt buckle that competes for body space with various pieces of sacred jewelry — crucifixes, rosaries — that seem to be advertising some unholy sacrament.

“She’s a product of the shopping-mall culture,” says Rock Journalist Dave Marsh of Madonna. “But there’s also a real rock side to her, a side that’s independent and honest, that says, ‘You don’t like me, that’s your problem.’ ” But some people in the music business have that problem. “McDonna,” goes the current industry gag: “Over 1 million served.” Others, whether they like Madonna or not, find her different from Lauper. “To me, Cyndi is more of an artist than Madonna,” says Irving Azoff, president of MCA Records. “Cyndi Lauper will be around for a long time,” says Paul Grein, an editor at Billboard. “Madonna will be out of the business in six months. Her image has completely overshadowed her music.”

That image has made Madonna rock’s first girlie pinup since Deborah Harry. An enterprising journalist for the English rock-fashion magazine The Face inquired if “she found it difficult deciding to lose her virginity.” “Oh no,” Madonna shot right back. “I thought of it as a career move.” Says Marsh: “She presents herself as very tough and sluttish, which people seem able to accept very easily from Mick Jagger, but not from her. And look at Linda Ronstadt. She was at least as ‘sluttish’ as Madonna. Madonna never had her picture taken in a pigsty with shorts on.”

Madonna may indeed have a shrewd notion of both her limitations and her ultimate appeal. “I don’t think Madonna, whom I like, has any particular interest in music,” says Rock Critic Greil Marcus. “She’s going to end up a big movie star. There’s nothing wrong with that.” As the eldest daughter in a large family whose mother died young, Madonna has always seemed to be looking for a way out. She studied dance, tried ballet and, by the time she left home in her late teens, had already starred in her first movie. It was a Super-8 project directed by an eighth-grade classmate in which Madonna had an egg cooked on her tummy. She can currently be seen, under somewhat more professional auspices, in Warner Bros.’ Vision Quest; Orion’s Desperately Seeking Susan is scheduled for imminent release. There are no announced plans for the egg epic, although at the current rate of exposure, it may be the only piece of Madonna celluloid that has not yet seen daylight.

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Lauper, 32, has her own plans, a new album for one. She will finish a theme song for a Steven Spielberg-produced adventure film called Goonies, and there were discussions about the master directing her new rock video. Nothing came of them in the end, but still it is not difficult to see how Lauper’s slapstick winsomeness and unexpected soulfulness could attract a director who has such a proximate relationship to fantasy fulfilled.

Lauper too had a very bumpy childhood, from the time she grew up in Queens, N.Y., watching her mother break up with her father and try to keep the family together with waitress jobs. Both Madonna and Lauper floundered for a time in parochial schools. Lauper eventually dropped out and stumbled around, while Madonna made a beeline for the big time. Lauper did not even know where it was. She walked racehorses; she sang in bar bands and about burned out her vocal cords before getting help from a voice coach. She felt, as she says, “so crumbled.” She was vocalist for a band called Blue Angel. They made one album that, as she says, “went lead,” and soon Lauper was back, solo, singing in a local Japanese piano bar.

But she had found a manager in David Wolff, who brought her to Portrait Records to make a deal. By the time the album was in the works, Wolff and Lauper were living as well as working together, and it is now Wolff who is doing the career engineering. “If you want to build a major superstar nowadays,” he observes, “you gotta deal with an amazing number of problems. And we aren’t even very far yet either.”

As records, neither Lauper’s nor Madonna’s efforts come within a mile of Tina Turner’s splendid album of racked soul, Private Dancer, or get into the depth and irony explored by Linda Thompson on the just released One Clear Moment. But, as pop icons, Lauper and Madonna are exerting more power right now than any other women on the scene. With her squashed face looking as if it is pressed perpetually behind glass, Lauper is every lost girl’s projection of success: a little nutty, a lot mocking and splendidly vindicated, all in her own terms. Madonna is a dream off the back of a locker door, taunting and yielding, a teen male fantasy that slips into an adolescent world where everything is outsize — even and especially (feminists take note, please) all- male heavy-metal bands. She is good grist for gossip, a cute little bundle, media-wrapped and media-savvy. “I think she’s the ‘It’ girl of the ’80s,” announces Manager DeMann, with no indication of a smile. “She’s for the moment. She’s now. She and Sean Penn are friends. They were photographed together on the front page of the New York Post. So take it from there.”

But not too far. These women may not represent a new direction for the music business, but they are up there on the dashboard, watching the curves in the road, moving with the motion and glowing weirdly, like a couple of talismans made for travelers who have a taste for the safely outrageous, and a little sense of humor.

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