Her name was VANITY

Her name was VANITY

The Niagra Falls Review
Posted 13 hours ago

The newspaper clipping is yellow and torn, but the face in the photo is still stunning.

Flawless features. Nothing but optimism in her smile, life in her eyes. She wears a crown like it was attached at birth.

She has no idea what's about to happen to her.

On the other end of the phone, Denise Matthews snickers as the headline is read to her: "18-year-old Westlane beauty is Miss Niagara Hospitality."

What, she is asked, would the 48-year-old Ms. Matthews tell the 1977 version of herself in this photo?

"Um ... 'Make sure you don't do what you think you're going to do," she says with a sharp laugh.

"Don't go the way of the heathen. Do not pass 'Go', do not collect $200. Be very careful and don't get mixed up with boys. What else? Let's see ... don't fornicate! Turn to Jesus and run for your life.' "I thought about that statement just last night: Run for your life." And perhaps one more: When Vanity knocks, don't answer.

It was Vanity that made her a star. Vanity that put her in movies and music videos. And Vanity who nearly killed her.

During the '80s, Matthews let her destructive alter-ego call all the shots, until there was nothing left to abuse. Her body finally gave out.

Barely into her 30s, she had become an old woman on the inside. Her liver and kidneys shut down, she temporarily lost her sight and hearing, and she suffered a heart attack. Most stories blame it on the drugs. She insists it was renal failure. Either way, the beauty queen from Niagara Falls spent three days on life support.

It was her lowest point. And the one that saved her.

She said: "It was the best thing that happened to me."

TRACKING DOWN the woman formerly known as Vanity isn't the hard part. Leave an e-mail with her website (www.denisematthews.com) and she'll usually get back to you.

In fact, if you use her photos without permission, she'll likely find you first.

But the first interview with her hometown paper in 30 years is hardly a breeze. Thanks to five dialysis sessions a day, simply holding a phone causes her pain ("it's making my limbs stick.")

Reliving her Vanity years is a different sort of pain.

At times, Matthews has to shout answers into a crackling speaker phone, talking about things she isn't proud of.

To her, Vanity is long dead. But a legion of followers won't let go. Her sexy past lives on in fan sites and YouTube clips.

Now running a ministry in Fremont, Calif., Matthews sounds tired talking about it. She lived the gory details once. She doesn't need reminders.

"I don't have a television," she says, impatiently. "I haven't seen a tape of mine in 15 years. I get calls from people saying 'Your movie's on!' That's nice, but I don't have a television.

"My tapes as Vanity ... I destroyed those years ago."

She tolerates talking about her old life if it means sharing her new one. Being Vanity was sad and meaningless. Being evangelist Denise Matthews is exhilarating.

"Constantly telling people what colour I like, or what is my favourite place to live ... it's nothing," she says. "It doesn't save anybody. I don't understand how people could be more enthralled about 'What's your favourite colour?' while they're dying.

"But telling people about God, that gets you life."

Growing up in Niagara Falls, God wasn't her priority. She was more concerned with hiding bruises from her classmates at Princess Margaret elementary school. Routinely beaten by an alcoholic father, Matthews rarely discussed her home life with friends.

"She didn't really like to," recalls Debbie Rossi, one of Matthews' best friends at Princess Margaret and later Stamford Collegiate. "And I wasn't one to force. I just wanted to listen."

Matthews didn't confide because she thought every household was like this.

"It wasn't a happy childhood. How do you keep your mind off of abuse when you're constantly being abused? Your friends don't take away your abuse. Your school doesn't take away your abuse.

"Do you understand what I'm saying?," she asks, her anger rising. "It's not like you're an adult and you can say, 'Oh, I'll just sink myself into my job.' An abused childhood affects the entire life ... it affects every facet of the life. It affects going to school, with welts all over your body.

"The times that were supposed to be the highlight of my life were the most miserable."

Her father, James Levia Matthews, died in 1974 when she was 15 years old. Instead of feeling free, she watched her mother sink deeper into depression and alcoholism.

She felt more confused than ever, but had one huge advantage - she was one of the most gorgeous young women in Niagara Falls. A modelling career beckoned.

While her sister, Patricia, became a star athlete at Stamford (she still holds nine school records), the younger Denise was turning heads.

"Denise kind of blossomed and got really, really beautiful," recalls Rossi. "She was fun-loving, and very aware of her beauty.

"She had a little bit of trouble in Stamford with prejudice - guys wanted to go out with her, but they didn't want anybody to know. It really hurt her, so she changed schools."

After jumping to Westlane, where she graduated, Matthews got her first taste of success by winning the Miss Niagara Hospitality pageant.

She was calm and poised accepting the crown. She seemed like a natural.

"You just knew she had ambitions of making it big," says Stamford classmate Vito DiMartino, now head of phys ed at A.N. Myer. "Denise always had good looks."

"Everyone seemed to like her," adds friend Linda Clarkstone, now a librarian at Westlane. "She was always smiling, always happy.

"She was beautiful, and even back then she could sing."

Within a year, Matthews left Niagara Falls for Toronto, and then California.

Vanity was waiting.

AFTER A FEW dismal movies - "Terror Train" and "Tanya's Island" - Matthews was given two tickets to a Prince concert in the early 1980s. She was enthralled with the funky Minneapolis singer, who wasn't quite a superstar yet.

Shortly after meeting him backstage at the American Music Awards, Prince proposed an all-girl group led by Matthews. He renamed her Vanity (because he saw so much of himself in her), made her the lead singer of trio Vanity 6, and produced the group's racy debut album.

Dressed in lingerie and garters, Vanity 6 stumbled with its first single - "He's So Dull" - but the second, "Nasty Girl," became a crude classic (and a strip club mainstay).

With Vanity, Matthews had found the devilish flipside to her personality.

Prince was so taken with her, he chose her to appear with him on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1983.

Prince then offered her a major role as the female lead in his biographical musical "Purple Rain." At 24, Matthews was starting to become the star everyone predicted.

It would never get this good again.

Matthews left the film midway through shooting for a solo career, and was replaced by Apollonia Kotero in "Purple Rain," which became a huge hit in the summer of 1984. Kotero also replaced Vanity in the renamed (but less successful) Apollonia 6.

Vanity, meanwhile, responded with the mediocre-selling albums "Wild Animal" (1984) and "Skin on Skin" (1986), appeared in movies like "The Last Dragon" (1985) and "Action Jackson" (1988), and stumbled through bizarre talk show appearances with Merv Griffin and Garry Shandling.

And there were drugs. A ridiculous amount.

"I had found my way into the playground of the pearly white stuff called cocaine," writes Matthews in her still-unreleased bio "Blame It On Vanity."

"I'd inhaled enough rock so that by the age of 35, you could light me up, smoke me and stick me in the nearest cold grave.

"Easily, the devil had won me and readied my tired body for hell."

Completely addicted, Matthews started dating (and was briefly engaged to) Motley Crue guitarist Nikki Sixx, who was also at death's door most nights. Vanity appears several times in Sixx's new book "The Heroin Diaries," detailing his lost year of 1987.

At one point, the wasted couple are laying in bed when Sixx believes he hears voices and fires a .357 magnum through the door. It was only his radio.

Later that year, Matthews lost a kidney and starting losing her vision and hearing.

Even though she resents the "lies" Sixx tells in the book, she still contributed to it.

"I was the glutton for punishment (with Nikki), and also the punisher punishing," she writes. "It wasn't easy being high all the time and relating to another human being. He could have related better to a pet rock."

In the end, they're just stories to Matthews. Tales from a former life.

"What do I care? People will say what they want to say anyway. I've been lied to for almost 50 years now, and I still don't get people. Maybe the truth isn't that fascinating, I guess."

GETTING TO GOD required three days clinging to life. After years of abuse, Matthews' body had shut down.

When she awoke, Vanity was gone and there was a new purpose. She closed all ties to her film and music career and started her own Pure Heart Ministries, travelling across North America where invited.

She wasted her old life. She wouldn't do it again.

"Hollywood's not very healthy, for anyone," she says. "In any case. It doesn't have to be drugs, it could be fornication, it would be all the lies, it could be all the glamour ... it's so fake.

"Too much money when you're young. Too much candy, little girl."

But her transformation meant doing something she thought was impossible - forgiving her father.

"That was a feat right there ... the devil was defeating me because I didn't understand forgiveness. It seemed impossible.

"But it was not hard to forgive. It was hard to know that my father, quite frankly, wouldn't be with the Lord."

She speaks at churches most of the year now, using her life as an example. So many times, she sees Vanity again, in the eyes of someone looking for help. Now, she has answers.

"There are a lot of sicknesses," she says.

"People come to Jesus with all their sicknesses and all their problems and all their troubles ... and that's what God is, he comes to help you."

She's so sure she came back for a reason, she's willing to bet her new life on it. Despite 2 1/2 hours of dialysis every day, she refuses to go on a waiting list for a new kidney.

She has no doubt her kidney will work again some day.

"I am waiting on God to supernaturally give me one, as he has so many times with other people.

"I don't have to believe I'll do (dialysis) for the rest of my life. The doctors would like you to believe that. You can either believe that and receive that, or you can believe God.

"You have to understand ... I live by faith."

A faith she hopes to share with her hometown some day. All it will take is an invite, she says. She loves the Falls in ways she couldn't as a kid.

Four days after the interview, she sends an e-mail: "When I think of Niagara Falls, I get a little choked up inside. I really do miss it."

There is always one big reason to visit: A 71-year-old lady on Fourth Avenue who saw her little girl turn into Vanity, and nearly lost her.

"Her life has gotten better ... there's a lot of corruption in Hollywood," says Matthews' mother, Helga Senyk. "It was hard, but I prayed to the Lord and hoped for the best.

"When she was very sick, I was out there all the time."

Senyk is surprised by the call. The conversation is short. Her answers brief. Before she says goodbye, there's just one more question.

Are you proud?

"Yes. Of course. It's my daughter."

jlaw@nfreview.com

http://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=807987

PHOTO: A 22-year-old Denise Matthews in 1981, shortly before she became Vanity. Photographer Steve Landis took this shot in New York after meeting her at a party: "She had a beauty about her, and something special that led her to become a star."; The many faces of Denise Matthews: At right, for the cover of her upcoming book "Blame It On Vanity" (Special to The Review); top left, a rising star in 1981 (photo by Steve Landis); middle left, the Niagara Falls beauty queen in 1977 (Review file photo); bottom left, the cover of the 1984 Vanity album "Wild Animal" (Motown Records).