At the time, Paula Abdul was one of the label’s top artists: Her 1989 album Forever Your Girlhad spawned four No. 1 singles, the 1991 follow-up Spellbound went triple-platinum, and she’d become a national spokesperson for Diet Coke. Most of the Fly Girls knew her personally, at least in passing, as did their choreographer Rosie Perez.
Despite Abdul’s huge and somewhat unlikely success, recently she’d been beset by bad PR. In April 1991, one of her backup singers sued Virgin, saying it was actually her voice, not Abdul’s, singing the lead on several of her hits. In Living Color, as the show was wont to do, piled on. A vicious musical parody of Abdul’s hit, “Promise of a New Day,” retitled “Promise of a Thin Me,” mocked her troubles, her struggles with her weight and her romantic relationship with Arsenio Hall. Perez says she begged off choreographing the sketch, which featured a few Fly Girls, handing the work to her assistant.
“It was kind of cruel,” she says. “I respected Paula so much. Keenen was like, ‘Get over it. It’s comedy. It’s not personal.’ But I was like, ‘If that was me, I’d die.’”
The irony, of course, was that the transition Abdul had made -- from dancer to pop star -- was exactly the one the Fly Girls were attempting. As Gold recalls, during a break from their meeting with Ayeroff, some of the Girls went to the bathroom.
“The girls go into the bathroom and start talking shit about Paula Abdul,” says Gold. As karma would have it, at that very moment, in one of the other bathroom stalls, was none other than Paula Abdul. “Out of the stall comes Paula, who walks into Jeff Ayeroff’s office and says, ‘They go or I go.’ Virgin dropped them.”
Though Gold swears by it and Keenen somewhat confirms it, neither Fly Girl members Lisa Marie Todd nor Cari French has any memory of the incident. Nor does Ayeroff or Virgin A&R Gemma Corfield. But like most myths, there might be at least a grain of truth in it.
“I’m sure if Paula heard about us signing another girl group she would’ve been pissed,” says Corfield. “Certainly, when we signed Janet Jackson, we had to give Paula her own label.”
To Ayeroff, the idea of Abdul freaking out about the Fly Girls being on the label is completely plausible. “That makes total sense. The fact she was in the bathroom while they were talking smack, that’s like something from a bad Jon Cryer movie.” He says that they would’ve likely had a discussion with Abdul before finalizing a deal with the Fly Girls, “because you don’t want to kill the goose who’s laying the golden egg.”
Excerpted from HOMEY DON’T PLAY THAT!: The Story of In Living Color and the Black Comedy Revolution by David Peisner. Copyright © 2018 by David Peisner. Reprinted by permission of 37 Ink, a division of Simon & Schuster.
This article originally appeared in the Feb. 17 issue of Billboard.
