They wouldn't pay me enough money to go through with the crap I would have to go through [to star in Purple Rain]. I don't do things like this free of charge. I didn't want to be stuck in the snow at 6 in the morning in some camper with no place to change clothes. Who needs that?
- Vanity
Vanity is Denise Matthews. Matthews was born in Ontario, Canada, to a white mother and black father. Her large family was poor. "I thought every home to be slaughtered with abuse, but the screams only sounded from this side of the forest," Matthews writes in her autobiography.
Matthews says she suffered severe physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her alcoholic parents. Her 44-year old father died when she was 15. "Death seemed to take forever in his own torture. For the first time, I felt free. I planned my escape immediately, "she writes. "Fifteen years of cruelty, and the prison doors were finally opened ... or so I thought." After her father's death, Matthews says her mother plunged into alcoholism and attempted suicide several times. "I had been privy to see many a man beat and abuse her entire body," Matthews relates. Declaring, "Enough already!" Matthews left home at age 17. The young woman had dreams of stardom and glamour, "what I later recognized as deceptive beauty." While working as a model, Matthews met Prince in Los Angeles. As the story goes, he renamed her "Vanity" because seeing her was like looking in a mirror and glimpsing a twin soul.
Enough already? Cruelty, abuse, death, attempted suicide... enough already?
I can tell you that her autobiography has been released by a vanity publisher. It’s not a pun, that’s what they’re called.
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