by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
During the next hour, Snider moved the corpse across the room to the bed and had intercourse with it at least once before writing a terse suicide note. He then turned the shotgun on himself.
At 12:30 p.m., private detective Mark L. Goldstein, who had been hired by Snider to follow Dorothy, called from his car phone and was told by Snider that all was going well. Soon after 2 p.m., he called again, but received no answer.
That evening, Patti Laurman and Dr. Steve Cushner, friends of Snider’s who were living in his house, became concerned about his unanswered ringing phone. Later, Goldstein called the doctor, again from his car phone, and asked him to check Snider’s room while Goldstein held on. The doctor and Patti went downstairs, found the door unlocked, and opened it. Laurman, horrified, fled from the room, returned to the phone, and told Goldstein what they had found. Goldstein said he would be right over.
The doctor went into the room. Snider was lying on the floor, his face blasted away. There was an arc of his brains and blood splattered across one wall and the entire ceiling. It was later ascertained that he had been on his knees when he pulled the trigger, and the impact had ricocheted him forward onto the floor with the weapon frozen in his hands.
Dorothy did not look dead. Her torso was draped over the end of the bed, her hair hanging down, still vibrant. There were bloody fingermarks on her buttocks and one shoulder. The coroner later found semen in her vagina and rectum. The violent sodomy had disfigured her. Along black line of ants and other insects led to her face, with a similar trail crawling toward Snider’s head.
Goldstein arrived within minutes, before the police. Later, police detective Richard DeAnda would say that if Goldstein knew of Snider’s mood over the past weeks, knew of the drugs and sex perversions Snider had indulged in, knew of his fury over being barred from the Playboy mansion five days earlier, and knew of Snider’s attempts to secure a weapon. He should have warned someone.
Goldstein reached Hugh M. Hefner by phone with the news that Stratten and Snider were dead. 'Murder/suicide?' Hefner asked, to confirm his first searing thought. The skin on Hefner’s body, his secretary would recall, seemed to be moving as he spoke; all the blood had drained from his face. Several of his staff had been trying desperately to reach Stratten for the past twenty-four hours. The first call Hefner made was to me.
***
I had been worried about Dorothy ever since she left my house that morning. Hefner told me a few days earlier that he had barred Snider from his mansion, assuming I knew the impact this would have, but I had never met Snider, and unfortunately knew little about him.
Surely Hefner knew precisely what Snider was like: He had often been to the mansion in the past eighteen months. His vulgarity and strutting machismo were contrary to the Hefner style, which was far more insidious and subterranean. Snider’s sleazy taste and braggadocio were a little too crass. Dime-store pimps like he was could sully the fine liberal name of Playboy, and of Hugh Hefner, who had become a kind of Walt Disney of pornography homogenized for the masses.
Although Snider wasn’t respectable, the girl he married was. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, thin but voluptuous, Dorothy Stratten was the quintessential American sweetheart, maybe a little too beautiful to be the girl-next-door. She was an A — high-school graduate who was especially interested in law and acting and who expressed herself best in poems. Kind, selfless, and good-natured, Dorothy was an angel in the shape of Aphrodite. 'Her beauty,' a friend of mine would say, 'had a kind of genius.'
I first met Dorothy Stratten at the Playboy mansion in late October of 1978, at about the time that Snider made his initial appearance there for the annual Halloween party. That was when Hefner told Dorothy that Snider looked like a pimp. She laughed and said that was only his costume, but she knew it was the way he normally dressed. Dorothy had had only one boyfriend before Snider seduced her: an unhappy adolescent affair that lasted a year and yielded few happy memories, none of them sexual. When Snider walked into the Vancouver Dairy Queen where Dorothy was working in late 1977, he had been on the city streets since he was fourteen, and had practiced his skills on women and lived off them for over a decade.
By the time Dorothy turned eighteen the following February 28, Snider had launched his campaign and managed to convince her that she was in love. He thought that the extraordinary sensation of a first orgasm would enslave a naive, romantic young girl like Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten. He figured he would be able to get her to do whatever he wanted for a while, and what he wanted most was for her to strip for Playboy’s Twenty-fifth Anniversary Playmate Contest, which would close in August 1978, half a year before Dorothy would turn nineteen, the legal age of consent in Canada.
But Dorothy refused to pose nude. She begged Snider not to bring up the subject again. She could barely stand to take off her clothes at school, or even in front of her mother. But he persisted: Playboy was the only way to get into the movies. Hadn’t he been around the big world of show biz? Wasn’t he a successful promoter, experienced in the ways of Las Vegas and Hollywood? Wasn’t Playboy now sold in stores all over the land? This was the age of liberation for men and women. All. the movie stars were showing their bodies freely. Hadn’t she heard of the sexual revolution?
It took Snider six months of constant pressure, and then he still had to trick Dorothy into a situation with a photographer she knew and trusted—because he had taken her high-school pictures. When she cried, Snider said, 'Do it for me, baby—do it for me.' Within days after she finally posed, Snider made Playboy aware of Dorothy Stratten. Within two weeks, she was in Hollywood. During her first days at the Playboy mansion, she was propositioned by numerous men, several of them famous, and then 'seduced' by Hugh Hefner. Two years later almost to the day, she was tortured, raped, and murdered.
***
When the phone finally rang in the last quarter hour of August 14, I was certain it was Dorothy calling to say that everything was all right. But the voice on the other end of the line wasn’t Dorothy’s. It was Hugh Hefner, and I heard him say: 'Dorothy’s dead.' I could hear in his terrified voice that he wasn’t mistaken or trying in some dreadful way to be funny. The phone receiver slipped from my hand and fell to the floor and Hefner’s words echoed through me. Dorothy dead? Why not say the world had blown up and all of us were dead? Everything that had ever happened to me in my life, everything in which I had ever believed, had been proved in one blinding explosion to be conclusively wrong. If Dorothy was dead, life was a terrible joke.
I was in the video room with Blaine Novak and Douglas Dilge, two associates from They All Laughed (the picture we had all just completed in New York), and I could hear Novak trying to console me and felt his arms on my shoulders. I wanted to shrug him off violently and run through the house and out to the car. Dilge was on the phone with Hefner, who gave as few of the details as he felt necessary, and Doug was reluctant to repeat even those. I had to plead before he would speak. Shotgun, he said. Shot himself too. They were dead together. It would be more than a week before I heard a hint of the torture Dorothy had been put through before the murder, more than a month before the details became horribly clear. A sound went through me—a growl that became a shriek.
Then suddenly I remembered the movie Dorothy and I had made. It had been killed as well, its two hours a moving photo album of our days together. But the comedy had turned to tragedy.
***
Eight days later, the ashes of Dorothy Stratten’s body were buried in an oak casket less than a ten-minute drive from the homes of the three men who had most influenced her life and death, less than a few yards from the remains of the last great love goddess of the screen, Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was born the same year as Hugh Hefner, founder of a magazine and proselytizer of a life-style that had helped to destroy both women. Dorothy’s mother, Nelly Schaap, in her grief allowed her new husband to make the decision regarding the body of the stepdaughter he had met only once. It was burned to a few handfuls of ashes.
Most of the p
eople responsible for the event were at the funeral. The only exception, besides the Snider lawyer and the Snider private eye, was the man who pulled the trigger. His body was returned to Canada for burial.
Nelly made the decision to bury her eldest child in Los Angeles because she would be 'close to the people she loved.' Dorothy’s younger sister, Louise, had finally told Nelly about Dorothy and me, and Nelly said she had flown to the States partly to meet 'the only man who ever made Dorothy happy.' Her daughter, she said, had not had much happiness in her life.
Dorothy asked her mother less than four months earlier to come to New York to talk about her problems. But Nelly had just met the man she would marry, and he did not want her to leave. She would never forgive him for that, or herself, for not going.
Hugh Hefner was at the funeral. As was his chief photographer, Mario Casilli, who quit Playboy shortly after Dorothy’s murder. Though he had worked for that magazine for twenty years, since then he has refused print assignments that involve nudity. Dorothy’s new young lawyer, whom she had met only once, a day before the killing, was there, too; and the young business manager who had genuinely cared for her and tried to help, who had known what trouble Snider was for her.
Dorothy’s father was there too. Simon Hoogstraten had neither contributed to her welfare, seen, nor contacted her since she was four. Though he didn’t respond to Dorothy’s invitation to her high-school graduation, he somehow felt obliged to appear at her funeral. His eyes looked haunted, his expression frozen in shock. He had the look of a man who could not allow himself to think of the terrible mistakes he had made. The more he heard about the lost daughter, the more he must have realized that Dorothy would have loved him beyond devotion if she had been given even the smallest chance. He was the one who could have thrown Snider out the first time he appeared in pimp’s furs to take the eldest daughter on a date. A girl needed a father to warn her of the evils of men. Less than three months earlier, in New York, Dorothy had told me that she didn’t like her father.
Nelly would not go near the grave. She stayed in front of the chapel while the others went to stand under the large tree near the mound of freshly dug earth. Her face remained tightly closed off, beyond grief. A large part of her had died with the child she had loved the longest, for nearly half her life. Her new husband would never understand, and Nelly would be separated from him permanently before the end of the year.
My oldest daughter, Antonia, held back her tears, as did Dorothy’s sister, Louise. Her brother, John, wept openly, and so did my younger daughter, Alexandra. I looked out at the sun breaking through the leaves onto the grass under the tree and imagined Dorothy dancing there, free and happy.
Because her ashes were the only weight in the coffin, it took a long time to descend into the grave. As the casket clanked downward, Hefner stood, white and shaken, next to Casilli. I remembered his words a few days earlier when he told me that he would 'never get over what happened.' Certainly the last thing Hefner wanted was for Dorothy to die. The shock and fear in his eyes was genuine, impossible to hide or feign. He looked truly humbled, desperate for this day to end. Was he sharing with me similar feelings of guilt and remorse? A desperate ache to turn back time and do things differently? Would he share the relentless series of confrontations with himself about his culpability in the tragedy? Will the words echo endlessly for both of us: If only we had known.
The remains of the body that Casilli had photographed so intimately for Hefner, and for the boys of the world, passed them. Was Casilli remembering how Dorothy had cried when she first posed naked? Was Hefner thinking of their secret time in the Jacuzzi?
Dorothy might forgive them, of course. She might even forgive Snider. But I could not. Not him, not Hefner, not myself. If I had known more, I could have saved her—it was not only my lack of specific information and of other people’s motives but a fatal lack of intuitive awareness about people’s duplicity: All this cost me the most cherished love of my life. As the months and years of investigation went on and I found out more and more about Hefner’s role in the events, my rage toward him grew. If I had to confront my own responsibility, there could be no way to ignore his.
Perhaps the case I have built against Hefner in my mind and heart may be viewed by others as a way out of my own agony. But revealing the truth about his actions does not alter my own, nor lessen the awful awareness that if I had done certain things differently, understood more quickly, Dorothy would still be alive. None of the extenuating circumstances, nor the guilts that Hefner must bear, nor the mistakes so many others made, can ever change that terrible knowledge for me.
When people read of the death of Dorothy Stratten, they shook their heads and talked about the eternal triangle. It was the age-old story: Play with explosives and they blow up. Even I believed it, as the only living member of that triangle. But as I tried to find the truth, I discovered a fourth side to the figure— hidden and dark. Eventually there would be no doubt in my mind that if the shadowy Hefner-side of the pyramid had never existed, Dorothy would not have died. She could have dealt with Paul Snider, a small-town pimp who first spotted and sold her, but she could not handle the slick professional machinery of the Playboy sex factory, nor the continual efforts of its founder to bring her into his personal fold, no matter what she wanted.
***
The minister read the words:
. . . Yea, though I walk through
the valley of the shadow of
death, Thou art with me . . .
And I thought: What good is any of that now to Dorothy? Where was God when she was alive? How could a woman so full of grace and talent be senselessly murdered in her twenty-first summer?
Her voice was in my ear, in the soft wind through the trees: 'Throw the rose on the coffin, Peter, it’s time, they’ve suffered enough.' And I took three steps forward, looked down into the grave at the coffin, and let the pink flower fall. John and the girls did the same, and Hefner and Mario, and we all walked away.
***
On the last full day we would ever have alone together, in London, Dorothy had asked me if I would make 'a sad love story' for her, and we both smiled, remembering the popular novel and movie she liked. I grinned and asked what kind of sad love story she had in mind: One in which there was a death at the end? And she nodded a barely perceptible yes. Our smiles faded and we looked at each other for a long moment. I touched her cheek and promised that I would, and she smiled softly.
The love story Dorothy requested turned out to be our own, as she had feared and as I could never have imagined. To tell that story now I would have to understand how all of us ended up there, standing in the blazing August sun, under an old, sheltering tree, to bury the mortal remains of this dazzling, brilliant woman.
Thornton Wilder wrote:
. . . There is a land of the living and a
land of the dead and the bridge is
love, the only survival, the only meaning.
And so, for Dorothy, because she was the noblest person I ever met, the gentlest and the bravest, how better could I serve her memory, or keep her love and spirit alive, than to honor her with the whole truth and nothing but, until death do us join? This, then, is for you, D.R. The one you asked for in London, a little more than two weeks before you were murdered.
II - The Base of the Pyramid
It’s here, everything—
Everything anyone ever
Dreamed of, and more.
But love is lost:
The only sacrifice
To live in this heaven,
This Disneyland
Where people are the games.
—Dorothy Stratten
Los Angeles, August 1978 The fourth wall of the pyramid was begun before Dorothy was born, when Hefner, an enterprising twenty-seven-year-old Midwesterner, came up with an idea: Take masturbation out of the bathroom and put it on the newsstands. In late 1953, when the first issue of Playboy appeared, it was revolutionary in its obvious approach t
o men’s fantasies. But it gained a measure of respectability as the years went by when the Supreme Court ruled, by implication, that Playboy articles were of 'redeeming social value.' In its first year, the magazine’s circulation grew from 70,000 to 175,000; in twenty years Playboy sold more than 6 million copies monthly.
An extremely shy young man from a strict Methodist family, young Hugh was a virgin through military service and into his twenties. And then there was a tremendous setback in his romantic life: His boyhood sweetheart, his first real-life pinup, made him a cuckold. Earlier in the same year Dorothy was killed, a book was published, Thy Neighbor’s Wife by Gay Talese, which told most or the story: Hefner himself (and the ex-Mrs. Hefner) had given Talese all the details of the one great disappointment of his life. The book reported how Mildred, the girl he had always planned to marry, his one and only love, had broken down during a movie they were attending— its crime story seemed to parallel hers—and confessed soon after that for more than a year she had been having an affair with another man. Mildred had told young Hefner that of course she understood why he wouldn’t want to marry her now.
But young Hef did marry Mildred; he forgave her. Also, he told Talese, for a time, having been alarmed by the competition, he wanted Mildred more than ever. She bore him two children, a girl and a boy, yet the relationship didn’t survive. Although he was still married, Hefner roamed about, lost. He continued to read sex books and any pornography he could find, and masturbated regularly. His favorite dream was to strip and seduce everybody’s girl-next-door, the one who had broken his heart.
Until Playboy arrived, pornography was not easily accessible to the average man. And it was embarrassing to buy. Then, in 1951, Marilyn Monroe’s nude calendar photograph scandalized the country. Marilyn had done the photo two years before, but her subsequent popularity in movies brought it to light. She apologized to the public. The calendar sold out and secured her stardom. The interest in Marilyn’s nude picture did not escape the notice of Hugh Marston Hefner.