by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
He put up six hundred dollars of his own money, borrowed more from his parents, among others, and set up shop in the kitchen of his small apartment. He paid his secretaries a little extra to strip and pose, and created the first mass-circulation magazine to openly encourage male masturbatory fantasies. And the increasingly impressive by-lines on Playboy articles gave it a patina of respectability. To the men and boys of the world, Hefner became the great emancipator, a swinger who shared the wealth, a liberal thinker who rode the crest of a revolution that changed the nation.
The concept of mass-publishing pictures of female physical perfection did not originate with Hefner. In the 1940s, Esquire started printing a monthly foldout Varga drawing of a slightly naughty, but dreamily hygienic showgirl. The work had a certain wit, an awareness on the part of the models and artist of the purpose of the drawing. It was a kind of fancified Art Deco erotica, in which Varga and his anonymous girls were collaborators. The not-so-subtle smirk in the drawings gave each woman the look of an experienced hooker.
Hefner removed the smirk and the artist, replaced the showgirl with the girl-next-door, and used glamorous color photography, aided by all the tricks of the trade: lenses, filters, makeup, touch-up. The profound difference to the reader was that Hefner’s model purported to be real: There was no artistic license to consider. Weren’t these, then, photographs of the perfect woman?
Three years after Monroe’s calendar story broke, and five years after she posed, the cover of the rather tame first issue of Playboy featured a poor wire-service photo of Marilyn waving, accompanied by the blurb:
FIRST TIME
in any magazine
FULL COLOR
the famous
MARILYN MONROE NUDE
Marilyn had no control over the picture and received no money, but the issue sold. By the time Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten was born in a Salvation Army hospital in Vancouver six years later, Playboy’s circulation was 1.1 million. And the legend persisted that the first woman to pose naked for the magazine was Marilyn Monroe. Hefner and his organization did as much as they could over the years to encourage that misconception. In 1984 they would headline THE LAST NUDE PHOTO OF MARILYN MONROE.
When Playboy celebrated its tenth anniversary, Dorothy was four and her father had already deserted her and her mother and brother. Somehow Nelly managed to make enough money cleaning other people’s homes to feed the two children. At the age of seven, Dorothy began doing odd jobs to help out while Nelly studied practical nursing.
Meanwhile, as Playboy turned thirteen, Hefner was reportedly well past Don Giovanni’s thousand and three conquests. In those days, all the action was still at the Chicago mansion. Dominated by an indoor swimming pool with a glassed-in ceiling, round-the-clock kitchen staff and waiters, plenty of new or would-be Playmates in residence, Hefner’s home for young women virtually advertised sexual satisfaction guaranteed. The sixties were Hefner’s golden decade: The magazine and the Playboy Clubs around the country were thriving. Now what did Mildred think of her cuckolded ex-husband? Had he shown her sufficiently what she had given up—the hero of millions? He had made it easy for her: If she wanted to see by whom she had been replaced, she had only to open the latest issue—a catalogue of her ex-husband’s victories easily available across the nation. It was the cuckold’s ultimate revenge.
***
By the end of the sixties, I had reached thirty, had made only one (unsuccessful) film, had a very lovely daughter but was beginning to realize I had married too young, hardly knowing myself very well, much less my wife. By the early seventies, my life had been changed completely. A second beautiful daughter had been born but the marriage had ended, and another long-term relationship had begun; my father had died; and three consecutive films of mine (The Last Picture Show; What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon) had become critical and popular successes. I was suddenly a wealthy, famous young man. But I was still a long way from understanding myself, the woman I lived with, or the world around us.
In 1972, Playboy invaded my life. Its editors had, without permission, extracted from Picture Show two frames of Cybill Shepherd naked, and printed them. (Shepherd and I were then living together.) While moviegoers had seen less than seven seconds of her nude—and in constant motion—Playboy readers could gaze endlessly at the poorly reproduced photographs. Moreover, her appearance in the magazine would seem to have been with her approval, even though she had expressly forbidden any still shots of those brief sequences. The following year, Cybill sued Playboy, and Hugh Hefner personally, for nine million dollars.
The seventies were far less secure than the sixties for the Playboy empire. The Shepherd lawsuit and others like it took their toll. And there were drug problems as well. One of Hefner’s private secretaries, Bobbie Amstein, became involved in a cocaine connection, and subsequently committed suicide. Anti-Hefner rumors in Chicago were rampant. But the Mansion West had been opened and he had begun to spend most of his time in Southern California. He was forty-seven and living mainly with dark-haired Barbi Benton. He also had committed himself to regular orgies. It was this predilection that finally, he would tell me, drove Barbi away.
Also in 1973, Willy Rey, a woman of twenty-three, died of a drug overdose in Canada. It had been exactly two years since she left her native Vancouver, changed her name from Wilhelmina Rheitvald, posed for, and appeared in, Playboy. Mario Casilli took all her pictures. For a time, Willy had been a mansion regular. The story never received much publicity, and Playboy pretended it had never happened. They told Dorothy Stratten that she was the first Canadian to appear in the magazine.
By the end of the seventies, things looked bad for me. Although Cybill had two successes on her own (The Heartbreak Kid and Taxi Driver), two films we had done together (Daisy Miller and At Long Last Love) had failed at the box office. Another of mine (Nickelodeon) had also fallen below expectations critically and with the public. The Shepherd lawsuit was settled by the payment to her of all legal fees and half the movie rights to a book Playboy owned and would produce if I directed. This picture, Saint Jack (which they did not finally produce, though Hefner’s name appeared on it), eventually became a succes d’estime out not a financial winner. The enforced separations Cybill and I endured because of studio resistance to our working together eventually helped to break up our relationship. Cybill married a home-town man and almost immediately had the child she had wanted to share with me. I felt adrift and rudderless. A great many women entered my life—too many to do me any permanent good. When my mother died of cancer, my daughters and younger sister looked to me as head of the family. But I was not able to help anyone.
I had few male friends. My closest relationships were always with women. I had been married faithfully to Polly Platt, with whom I had two daughters, for almost nine years, and Cybill and I had a marriage in all but name for the next eight years. There followed more than a year of devastating promiscuity, which left me exhausted and miserable, hoping for an enduring bond that would never lose its strength or magic.
***
By 1978, Hefner and his associates were in the midst of their most expensive promotional campaign: the international search for Playboy’s Twenty-fifth Anniversary Playmate. Hefner personally told me of the quest for a quarter-century centerfold and ran a short promotional film for me at the mansion. The Shepherd lawsuit had been settled amicably after Hefner himself came to my house to discuss the terms. The four-minute journey had been one of the conditions, and Hefner had borne the indignity with only a touch of irritation. His retribution was always covert: He invited Cybill and me to become regulars at mansion weekends and parties and said he would see that our names were placed on the 'gang list,' which meant either of us could drop over anytime. Our greatest enemy had somehow become a friendly acquaintance, anxious to be more.
When Hefner took Cybill and me on a tour of his upstairs quarters, a lot of Barbi Benton’s things were still there. The two were then in the process of their final split; she had becom
e fed up with Hefner and his weekly sex parties. We had heard rumors about the private games at the mansion, but details at the time were scarce. The implications behind the special Hefner tour of his bedrooms and bath were not difficult to read, most obvious being the moment when he hinted broadly that we 'join' him sometime for a little Jacuzzi. The raised eyebrows of hope and the sideways smile did it for Cybill—she told me later that she had felt nauseated.
The first insider to speak candidly to me about the Hefner orgies was Patrick Curtis—a year and a half after the murder. Curtis had a show biz head start on most of us, having played Melanie’s newborn baby in Gone With the Wina. Subsequently he had acted for years on TV and in pictures before becoming a producer. It was he who brought Raquel Welch to the screen, and they were married for several years. When they broke up and a later romance ended badly, Curtis took to going to Hefner’s. He was chagrined that he had participated in some of the orgies, and decided he would just as soon not go back.
The rules of the orgy, Curtis explained, were easy: anything went—or anyone. He mentioned 'the hundreds of times' one of Hefner’s women had gone downstairs and invited the new girl from Iowa, or Missouri, or Montana. Suddenly the girl found herself 'in a situation she would never have tolerated' back home—but this was Hollywood, the young women would think. This was the modern world— didn’t everybody do it this way? These girls were passed among several men and women in one night. Everybody who wanted to watched; and the spectator/participant list included many famous names, including the king of Playboy. 'The girls end up just lying there,' Curtis said: 'Anyone who wants to get on is OK.'
Most of my visits to the mansion were innocent: a game or two of pinball, chitchat and a sandwich, a movie, a fight on closed-circuit TV. My first experience as a single guest at a Playboy party was strangely prophetic: The nineteen-year-old with whom I struck up a conversation turned out to be Hefner’s date for the late-evening orgy that night. Call her Tammy. The first thing she said to me was that we were 'being watched,' but I was far too naive about the Playboy scene to take the words seriously, though I followed her into a deserted room so that we could talk more privately. Tammy said that everyone had been telling her she ought to pose for Playboy, but she didn’t know if she should or not. They said it was a good way to break into the movies. I told her it was about the worst way and eventually convinced her to agree to take a ride to my house, where we could talk unobserved. I promised to bring her back whenever she wanted, and meant it. She was far more innocent than she looked or tried to act, I realized, and hoped first to make her trust me, and then talk her out of the Playboy idea, knowing that no one in Hollywood considered the Playmates anything more than glorified call girls. Playmates were usually gone in thirty days, as soon as the next issue appeared.
Yet I never got to say all that to Tammy. She had been right—we were being observed and followed. A mansion regular arrived to break up our conversation, and then, when Tammy came out front to join me at my car, Hefner appeared, flanked by several angry-looking buddies. He said he had a date with the lady after the party. It had been planned for some time. We were simply taking a ride, I said, and would return within an hour, but as I spoke I could see Tammy being maneuvered backward into the house by the regulars. She looked frightened. Hefner was smiling solicitously and explaining that he and Tammy had arranged this date several days ago. Since I was there for the first time, I felt that I had broken a cardinal rule.
I caught a glimpse of the top of Tammy’s head as she was being swallowed up among the crowd, and tried to joke with Hefner, saying, 'I thought I was the guest here, Hef . . .' But he had the ready answer for that one: 'I’m not that good a host.' His place, I said, was like the greatest boys’ camp ever built, and Hefner’s smile faded. After a couple of Playboy years, I heard much later, Tammy had become a high-priced call girl in Paris. None of the other Playboy girls I would come to know ended up much better.
The regular weekday Monopoly games were almost always played by an all-male cast. The occasional women were spoken-for observers, or one of Hefner’s private secretaries. His 'special lady' of the moment (Sondra Theodore then) sometimes joined us. It was a custom-made Monopoly set, and each of the regulars had a playing token specifically molded in his image. I was left to choose one of the remaining tokens and always picked the anonymous Playboy Bunny to represent me. This never failed to get a laugh and discussion from the players, who thought I was being either ironic or perverse. The truth is I genuinely empathized far more with the Playboy women than with the Playboy men and, therefore, had more sympathy for them as well.
Often the same regulars would congregate in the game house, a few yards away from the main building, where they would play pinball, pool, and other penny-arcade games while the jukebox cranked out hits from the thirties and forties—Hefner’s youth. His eyes would tear at the sentimental love songs of Sinatra and Nat King Cole. Hefner was always pointedly warm and solicitous, kidding around and treating me like a son or younger brother. In the Monopoly games, he made a show of giving me what seemed like fair advice, because I was not a regular player and therefore at a disadvantage. It didn’t matter—I always lost.
Hefner and I got into a couple of serious conversations about my troubled career and my indecision as to what to do next. His advice seemed well meant and genuine, though of course it all added up to my directing the picture he and Cybill now owned. When I spoke of my love for Cybill, his eyes misted over and his smile looked sad. He said he didn’t think he could ever be faithful to one woman again. No single woman could satisfy him now. And I would contradict him and say that if the right woman came along, he could fall in love and be happy with her, but Hefner shook his head and said he doubted it.
I bought Hefner’s generally affable and admiring personal attitude and found him likable in short doses. I quickly tired of the Monopoly games, though the last time I played—just before leaving for Singapore to direct the movie Playboy co-owned—I won. Hefner had been more than helpful in his assistance, and later I began to wonder if there hadn’t been a fix.
There were often film and TV celebrities at the mansion: Warren Beatty, Ryan O’Neal, and others less easily recognizable. I thought of those times I had seen one of the most notorious movie-star studs with Hefner at the mansion, the two of them sharing an easy familiarity. There were frequent macho innuendos in the banter between them, especially the time they strolled around a new toy Hefner had just purchased. They called it a 'fuck chair.' It looked more like an old shoeshine stand—there were so many different places to put hands, feet, knees, and rear. The men were chuckling as they circled the contraption, exchanging ideas on how many different sexual positions could be assumed. They were discussing their knowledge of the secrets of the bedroom wars, the technique of the great lovers: hold off; make love so that the woman has several orgasms before the man; then thrust home, a hero every time. How long a man could hold out, therefore, was part of the test of cocksmanship, and most of their references were to that ability. What they extolled wasn’t pleasure for both men and women, but men’s exercise of power over women.
Early in 1980, a new book came out that revealed a little more of Hefner, though I didn’t read it until over two years later. Mike McGrady had written the Linda Lovelace best seller, Ordeal, in which some Hefner orgies were described. The most chilling story dealt with Hefner’s desire to see a dog screw Linda—or any other woman. It wasn’t Lovelace he was interested in, it was watching bestiality. He owned several stag reels of similar events, but had never actually seen the live action. Linda’s husband/promoter/manager had been threatening for years to kill her if she wouldn’t do precisely as she was told, so she consented to let Hefner and other regulars watch while she supposedly attempted to get the dog to make it with her. She was, in truth, subtly doing the opposite, and the dog refused to perform. Hefner was disappointed, but philosophical. On another occasion, in the Jacuzzi during one of the regular orgies, Hefner sodomized L
inda Lovelace.
If, in his most private moments, Hefner had any thought that it might be possible to pull himself back to the romantic idealism of his youth, there was a way: find and create a star. As Playboy, his alter ego, neared its twenty-fifth birthday, he needed that movie star: his own Garbo, Dietrich, or Harlow. He knew that Monroe connection was fake and wanted a real sex goddess to emerge from the pages of Playboy. Without that, it would be too easy to write off his women as one-month wonders, of no further interest (even to their readers) after the usual four weeks of masturbatory guilts and pleasures.
The great Twenty-fifth Anniversary Playmate Hunt was conceived as a quick way to spread a vast dragnet to find the Silver Star for Hefner to expose and possess: an enduring sex goddess of talent and beauty who would gain the respect and admiration of the world. The grand validation. In the meantime, as friend to the famous, he plied the picture people with drinks and food and entertainment and women, and used their names to make his establishment all the more respectable. Some people even believed that Jimmy Carter’s candid interview in Playboy just before the election had supplied the winning margin. In twenty-five years, Hefner had gone from porn King to kingmaker. But without a star, what did it all add up to? A desire for bestiality? Sodomy with the heroine of Deep Throat? Hefner’s fervent, unspoken, prayers centered on the greatest dreamgirl of all time.
***
When Dorothy Hoogstraten turned thirteen, the usual adolescent unhappiness that accompanies that age didn’t push her out into the world of her peers as it does with most. She retreated into herself, stayed in her room, started smoking. By the time she was sixteen she had developed an ulcer. Dorothy began to write poems as a way of thinking to herself, and of communicating with others. She wrote on scraps of paper, envelopes, school assignments; she gave many away to friends. At fourteen, she began a part-time job in a Dairy Queen: 'It was great to get work that young,' she would write, 'but I turned fifteen, and sixteen and seventeen, and at eighteen I was still working there, wearing a little red uniform with my hair in pigtails. . . .'