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“I loved him and he loved me,” Denise Matthews reflected on her Minnesota mentor Prince. “I thought he was the greatest person ever.” So after rejecting his plan to rename her Vagina, she accepted the name Vanity…and altered the Purple One’s moniker for their all-girl group from The Hookers to Vanity 6 {“3 girls x 2 breasts = 6,” Prince explained}. The trio consisted of his 18-year-old girlfriend Susan Moonsie and butch blonde Brenda Bennett—perhaps telling the newcomer to quit messing with the boss (below left). Indeed, Susan says she broke up with Prince when “he became infatuated with Vanity.”
Perhaps because she used her mouth for more than singing (below left)—the raunchy rocker penned his ode to oral, Head, about that time: “You know you’re good, girl/I think you like to go down/You wouldn’t have stopped but I/I came on your wedding gown.” And once her Prince had come, Vanity gushed: “He was my first love. I fell so madly in love with him.” In a lyrical way: “I love sex. Sex is wonderful, so I wrote about it, but not in a dirty way,” the diva declared. Judge for yourself from her first solo effort: “Ooh and baby someday I will take you there/ Promise you the moon/ And then he pulled a seam and [pronounced semen]/ It went all the way ooh yeah/ He made such a Pretty Mess on my dress!” (below right).
Alas, hers wasn’t the only skirt on which he spurt: “Vanity lived with Prince for two years,” says a source, “yet he continued to see other women {using his tongue for Braille, below}. This hurt her deeply because she really loved him. She would confront him about it often.” As Vanity revealed when she walked out in 1984: “I needed one person to love me, and he needed more.”
"Vanity had helped Prince script Purple Rain,” reported People magazine at the time, “and had been slated to play the female lead, a role based on her own life story. But before the cameras rolled, so too had Vanity—off to California and a solo career.” After Yale freshman Jennifer Beals turned down Prince’s offer because she wanted to concentrate on college, former Los Angeles Rams ‘Embraceable Ewe’ cheerleader Apollonia Kotero was tapped for the role. “I think it’s great that somebody’s playing me and I’m not even dead yet!” smirked Vanity about her lookalike. “We met (above) and it was weird. I stared at her and thought she was extremely beautiful…we have the same profile.” Vanity, thy name is appropriate.
