Prince would have preferred to have his Purple Rain costar Apollonia Kotero all to himself, but there was one man between them: Kotero’s boyfriend at the time of the movie’s filming, Van Halen singer David Lee Roth.
In a new interview with The Sunset Sound Roundtable, Kotero recalled how Prince insisted she break things off with Roth at the time.
“I was in Minneapolis filming [and] Dave had sent flowers,” she said. “One day, I went down to the production office at the Holiday Inn and there were flowers and a card, and I was like [gasps]. [Prince] didn’t let me get the flowers.”
She said that Prince “didn’t want me to be seen with anybody else,” going as far as instructing her not to go out with anyone famous until the movie was released. “He wanted to be the one to discover me,” she explained. You can check out the interview below.
Kotero also remembered a moment where Prince dramatically leapt off his piano and touched his toes, Roth-style. “He stands on the piano, and he says, ‘Who’s this?'” she recalled.
“And I looked over, and he jumps off the piano in his living room at the purple house and he touches his toes. I said, ‘Excuse me, I’m sorry, I didn’t see that.’ I did, but I made him do it again. So he gets back up, in his heels on the piano, and he does it again. And I go, ‘Oh, I know who you are.'”
But what started as a joke to poke fun of Roth may have been more fun for Prince than he let on. In subsequent years, he would be spotted performing the stunt at his shows.
“I don’t really believe Prince did that number, those splits, before that moment,” Kotero noted. “Because I’ve looked for him doing those onstage, and I don’t see that. So I know that afterwards he did that.”