Shakespeare didn’t actually have Hamlet say, “Vanity, thy name is woman” {it was frailty}, nor is it one of the Seven Deadly Sins…yet Denise Matthews aka Vanity surely made many saints think impure thoughts.

Particularly lust: Sleuth and Vanity go way back—we featured her in our very first music issue {and just the third overall}, selected her second in the inaugural “Sexiest Women in the World’ annual, and paid posterior tribute in the initial “Best Butts” special, entitled “The Living End.” Sadly that title has proven prophetic.

Over this weekend, the legions who loved her held a Celebration of the life of the hottie turned holy at a church in Union City, California.

Alas, the event had to be “closed to the public” at the last minute “due to concerns of too many people showing up in hopes of potentially seeing Prince at the service” for his protégée. “He was the love of Denise’s life,” sighed her close friend and pastor Roxane Harper.

They met when raunchy rocker Rick James (of Super Freak fame) brought his date Denise backstage at the 1980 American Music Awards to show her off to archrival Prince. The Purple One’s manager asked if the aspiring singer could show his client where the bathroom was…and the rocker fell hook, line sink for her!

“I didn’t go home with him right away,” demure Denise recalled. “I didn’t know who he was. I really, actually thought he was gay. He wanted to wear my clothes.” Yet within weeks was in her pants (and vice versa, above).

“I was jealous when he started getting big,” Rick James later admitted (Super Freak also made the mistake of introducing his girlfriend Denise Brown’s sister Nicole to O.J. Simpson}! “More than jealous,” he amended, “I was pissed”—and there was no love lost in their feud before James’ 2004 death. Not so Denise and Prince: “I always felt we’d be like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor over the years,” the beauty bemoaned when she left him in 1984. “I can say that I love the kid.” How touching …

It wasn’t enough for ‘The Kid’ to steal Rick’s lady…he also ‘borrowed’ the idea for a raunchy female trio from James’ Mary Jane Girls—for which Denise would need an image and name change: “He wanted me to call myself ‘Vagina,’” she smiled. “He said people would know me nationwide. I said, ‘No kidding.’ I told him only if he called himself ‘Dick.’ He said, ‘You can spell it Vagena, pleeeasse.’ He started begging.” She begged to defer, so they settled on “Vanity” because, she explained: “When he looks in the mirror, he sees me” (below).

“Someone dear to us has passed away,” Prince paused in his concert in Melbourne, Australia the day after Denise’s death. “Her and I used to love each other deeply. She loved me for the artist I was, I loved her for the artist she was trying to be. She was very headstrong ’cause she knew she was the finest woman in the world. She never missed an opportunity to tell you that.” Or to show you … right up until the end.

Tomorrow, we’ll start at the beginning…