HOLLYWOOD -- Two months after giving birth to her fourth child, Vanessa Williams looks fashionably vivid yet comfortably casual. How come?

"Vinyl pants that stretch," says Williams at a Four Seasons Hotel suite. "And I still have my maternity shirt on."

Her baby Sasha is 20 storeys above her pretty but self-deprecating mom, waiting for her next meal. "I'm still nursing," Williams cautions, "so I might get a 911 call and have to leave."

Whatta trouper. The publicity must go on. And the former Penthouse pet and disgraced Miss America knows about publicity -- good and bad. Doing this Shaft hype is the stuff she prefers.

"It definitely hindered my career," says Williams, grinning as she remembers the Penthouse commotion. "Not only was I a former beauty queen, which is a hard image to overcome, but I was a dethroned, scandalous beauty queen."

Distant memory

She shrugs it off as distant memory. An album, TV roles and impressive movie parts, especially in Soul Food and Eraser, changed minds.

"I've been singing and acting my whole life," says Williams, a Millwood, N.Y., native who went to Syracuse University before the Penthouse controversy.

It's fitting that the busy mom would find the time to do interviews for the John Singleton update of the 1970s movie about a black private eye, Shaft. She was pregnant during the whole shoot.

In the hit picture, she plays a cop buddy of Shaft's nephew (Samuel L. Jackson) who leaves the New York police force to track down a racist killer.

"I found out I was pregnant with Sasha just as I started Shaft," she recalls. "I wasn't really showing until the tail end, in the squad-room scene. Conveniently, I think, I'm sitting behind a desk to say goodbye."

Williams might say, 'Hello again' to a planned Shaft sequel. She's also planning another album, hopefully as popular as her hit, The Right Stuff. She's also in the early stages of mounting another Broadway play, hopefully as successful as her acclaimed appearances in Kiss Of The Spider Woman.

So motherhood isn't the only thing occupying her time. The musical is first up.

"It's a musical adaptation of Rain," she says of the proposed Michael John LaChiusa musical version of the film about a harlot and a preacher. "It was a silent Gloria Swanson movie, Joan Crawford did it in the early '40s, and Rita Hayworth did it in the '50s."

LaChiusa, author of the current Broadway production Wild Party, is in the process of writing it.

'Brilliant'

"He's brilliant," Williams says. "He's one of the true up-and-coming mavericks in musical theatre."

As for working in movies or in musicals with kids in tow? "Everybody has kids these days, so they accommodate."

Her husband, Toronto-born Rick Fox, is a forward on the Los Angeles Lakers, who won the NBA championship on Monday. He's on the road more than Williams.

"Yeah, he's the problem," says the smiling 37-year-old Williams, who lives with her family in the suburbs near New York City. "I said, 'Let's leave the home base in New York, and we just do the bi-coastal thing, and I'm the one who has to do most of the travelling out to L.A. But I know it's a temporary thing, too, because he's 30, and he has probably another five or six years, so it's a temporary thing."

She chuckles: "That's right," she says, "I'm the older woman, which is nice."

Williams is about to explain why when her assistant interrupts the interview proceedings. Williams is told that she's being paged.

"Have to go," she says, "duty calls."

Bach to interviews