Everybody knows Vanity--the woman whose name bespeaks indulgence and also sounds like a cologne. As Prince's consort, she led Vanity 6, a sexy trio who dressed in teddies and expressed great enthusiasm, via song, for large male organs. She later went solo with a Motown LP, Wild Animal, and a naughty single, Pretty Mess. Now there's more to the story. Vanity is starring in a new movie, and it's much better than her last one. You say we haven't mentioned the last one? Have you ever heard of Tanya's Island? We thought not. Vanity stars as Tanya. While her screen credit reads D. D. Winters, it's plainly Vanity in the Fay Wray part in a kinky update of King Kong. The plot? Put delicately, Vanity has a, er, touching relationship with a tall, blue-eyed, long-haired ape. At film's end, she and the ape participate in a major but not unpredictable transgression against nature. It's the kind of film you enjoy watching with a roomful of seriously demented or very wicked friends. We wonder why it hasn't become a cult classic.
Vanity has now graduated to a star vehicle in which the cast is, reportedly, entirely human. In Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon (for which Vanity performs on the sound track with the group DeBarge), she's a video jock at New York's hottest dance club. She falls in love with a black man named Bruce Leroy, who believes he is actually Chinese. (It's a martial-arts comedy; get it?) Bruce wanders off to find "the glow," and Vanity follows him and slips in and out of trouble about a dozen times. And we're game for whatever trouble she wants to get into.
A long time ago, Vanity's mother offered her a choice of modeling school or karate lessons. At the time, she chose modeling. From the smashing poses in our pictorial, it appears modeling school paid off.
