Nature abhors a vacuum, but Eleganza adores someone who dares to dress with panache, elan, and all the other French nouns that mean pizzazz. You might not go for the specific look that the three Los Angeles women who are this column’s stars have in common. But you can’t contest their pizzazz.

Texas Linda Jones (so called because of the expansiveness of her personality) twirls a black lace parasol as she strolls the streets of Los Angeles in ratted black hair, ultralurid psychoslut make-up, and see-through black lace clothing. The lead singer of her own group, Tex & The Horseheds, and a featured performer in the forthcoming Joan Jett movie, she’s been a distinctive dresser since earliest childhood. “I never did have a knack for normal dressing,” she blithely reveals. “Even in kindergarten I’d find myself wearing one red sock and one blue sock.”

In junior high school, the unrelenting blackness of her attire offended some of her classmates so grievously that they ganged up on her one afternoon and bashed her face into the asphalt. She still has a scar beneath her right eye. And she still loves black.

“It’s all colors put into one,” she explains, revealing herself to have black mixed up with white. “I don’t think you can get much more beautiful than that. I always feel nice and modest—low profile—when I wear black. It makes me feel invisible. -It’s kind of a paradox isn’t it? I like attention, but at the same time I like to be invisible too. Yes,” she giggles, “you may tell your readers that I am a confused young lady.”

No one has influenced her more profoundly than Morticia of The Addams Family. “I thought she was just totally elegant, both in her dress and behavior.” Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, and Lily in the Munsters also loom large in Linda’s legend—the latter “even though she always wore light colors.”

The day she chatted with Eleganza, Linda wore three pairs of earrings, six rings, and more bracelets than Eleganza could muster the energy to count. “Well, I guess I do have a little punk damage,” she said of her studded bracelets. “I just think studs are real pretty. They don’t signify anything except that I like them.” She thinks that over for a moment, giggles mischievously, and then adds, “And that I’m tough, so don’t fuck with me.”

Linda’s look has traditionally been associated with the sort of women one glimpses strolling around on the wrong end of Hollywood Blvd. at 1:30 in the morning. Yet she views herself as looking anything but cheap. “Oh, my heavens, no!” she laughs. “It’s a terrible misconception that the human body’s weird or something. To me it’s just like drinking a glass of water. On a hot summer day like this I don’t care who looks. I’m going to wear my black lace and let the wind go right through it.

Given her fuck-’em attitude, it’s hardly surprising that her more benighted fellow Angelenos frequently feel called upon to insult her. “I’ll be walking down the street,” she relates, “and people’ll say, ‘My god, what is it?’ Once, after I put some flame red Crazy Color in my hair, this guy came up to me and said, ‘You know, you’re about the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen in rny life.’

“Sometimes it still hurts my feelings when somebody says something like that, but I really don’t feel comfortable dressing any other way. When I try to dress like other people, like when I had to go to court with my sister recently, I feel like I can’t breathe. And some people walk by me and say, ‘Beautiful!’

“I mean, I love everybody and everything, but I do think that there could be a few more individualistic dressers and thinkers.”

Patricia Morrison, who plays bass for Gun Club, is certainly one of them. Like Linda’s, the die of Patricia’s look was cast very early in life, as her long dark hair and almost ghostly paleness resulted in her being nicknamed Morticia when she was barely eight years old. Far from having been traumatized, she’s emulated the vampirish matriarch ever since. “Coming from Southern California, having skin as pale as mine [even the lightest Cover Girl is too dark for the rest of her] and not liking the beach,” she says, “it seemed the natural direction to go in.”

Like Linda, Patricia loves clothing in a wide range of colors—provided they’re all black. “For a while there, after people started coming up to me in shopping malls and saying, ‘can I have your autograph, Elvira [much more about whom momentarily]?’ I tried to get into other colors. But I just wasn’t comfortable. Black just suits me better than pink, let’s say.” She shakes her head and laughs at the very thought.

A self-described outcast at her Catholic girls’ high school in the glamorless northeast corner of Orange County, Patricia was popular only among the nuns who ran the place. “They were constantly calling me in for wearing black eye shadow,” she laughs. The cholo [chicano gang] girls with their eyelashes out to here and their raccoon 2make-up...nothing/ would get called in. o “People don’t know what it is,” Patricia - says of her look, “but they do know they H don’t want to get near it. I guarantee there’s ^ always an empty seat on the airplane next to me.

“I hear that I’m into heroin a lot even though I don’t even smoke pot, but you’d be surprised how seldom people think that I’m cheap. I mean, I don’t dress like Elvira, let’s say, whose tits stick through her nose. Maybe something from my Catholic school days stuck with me. I don’t go for that sort of thing at all.”

On the subject of Eleganza s favorite television personality, Patricia has more to say—lots more. “When Elvira first came on,” Patricia remembers, “everybody called and said, ‘Qh, you’ve got to see this!’ I thought is was just a coincidence at first, but then she admitted in an interview that she’d got the idea from a girl in a band in an L. A. club. Well, who else could it have been? Since then, someone obviously advised her to keep her mouth shut, and her story’s changed.

“It’s really warped constantly being mistaken for somebody who stole her look from you.”

(What does Eleganza make of the whole controversy? Well, one can certainly commiserate with Patricia, but only while hoping that others jump on the bandwagon too. When it comes to the look that Elvira and Patricia share, Eleganza can think only, “The more the merrier!”)

The third of our Daughters of Darkness will never be mistaken for Elvira—if only by virtue of the fact that she isn’t dark, but as blonde as Bardot herself. She is none other than Mrs. Eleganza, and she has the French nouns in spades! To dash over to the Safeway, for instance, she’s apt to wear the skintight black vinyl catsuit her fellow singing-sensation-to-be, Donna Quixote, recently bought for her in London. That’s pizzazz! Her voice is that of an angel. She awaits the call to superstardom with mounting impatience. (Nepotism rears its ugly head.)

Women like these live in your town. Find them. Take them to lunch. Learn from them.