by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
Dorothy was not so different from most girls in North America, more sensitive and beautiful perhaps, more curious and kind. She stood out, but was by no means unique in her experiences and reactions to men. She was as insecure as most, as anxious to grow up and be a big girl, to do something with her life, and to find happiness. All the various life-style advertisements that bombarded Dorothy were as confusing to her as they were to most of us. Unlike many, however, she wanted to find answers, to help others to find them. For her friends Geraldine and Cheryl, she wrote:
. . . Remember the fine times of the past,
But bring forth finer times of the future,
And think not of what we are missing,
But what we are gaining . . .
Yet Dorothy often had nightmares; she would wake up sweating and crawl into her younger sister’s bed. Several poems revealed that she frequently had death on her mind:
A foot meets the pavement
for a moment.
The remains of a lowly earthworm
whose life was terminated in the
creation of a footprint
dries up slowly.
At its journey’s end a foot dries up
slowly in a coffin only to be
transformed into soil by a
lowly earthworm.
Late in 1977, Paul Leslie Snider entered the Dairy Queen where Dorothy was working and appraised her knowingly to see if she might be a good candidate for the streets, but quickly realized her pigtails and innocent smile were genuine. He was right—she would not be eighteen for another couple of months. But Snider was in no hurry; he figured this one had Playboy potential. During that New Year’s weekend, Dorothy broke up with her first boyfriend; she had been sleeping with him for a year and hating it. Later she wrote or him:
Sometimes we’d get along really well, and then he would . . . ruin everything by dragging me to the bedroom. I dreaded that so much, but felt I owed it to him. Sometimes I thought that was all he wanted from me because he used to get angry when I refused him. I thought sex was the most animalistic and beastly thing ever to be invented. Steve never pleased me. . . . I dreaded the end of the night when I had to give myself up to him. It was sort of like a game I kept losing and that was how I lost.
But she kept thinking there was something wrong with her—maybe she was frigid. When Steve maliciously destroyed the Christmas present it had taken her months to pay for, Dorothy ended the relationship. Shortly afterward, Snider called again at the Dairy Queen and began his attempts to win her.
It didn’t take long. The first boyfriend’s thoughtless, patronizing manner, their painful bedroom scenes, her mother’s unpleasant experiences with men, the boys and men on the streets who threatened or tormented her, or exposed themselves to her, her father’s desertion—all these had prepared Dorothy for the friendly, almost paternal approach from a man eight years older who seemed to be kind, considerate, and successful.
Snider also knew the right buttons to push romantically. When Dorothy felt an orgasm for the first time, she believed some part of herself would be forever in his debt. What she had discovered in her own body and heart she identified with Snider and dung to him as the source, not realizing she had really found it in herself. The explosion had awakened something powerful. Perhaps this was love, she thought, though she would write: 'If you don’t know what love is, how are you supposed to know if you’re in love?' Yet the lovely secret she shared with Paul couldn’t be explained to Louise or John or to her mother. This was so much closer to those stars you were supposed to see when love struck. Sleeping Beauty, after all, arose through the kiss of the Prince. It was a pervasive male fantasy: The beautiful, submissive Princess, awakened to the beauties of life and love through the gentle touch of a Prince. Sleeping Beauty, unlike Eve, lived happily ever after, but then Eve presumed to taste the fruit of wisdom. Learn the moral well, girls—don’t awaken on your own, wait for a man.
Dorothy thought she had fallen in love. Nelly tried to warn her about Snider, but then, Dorothy would have thought, her mother hadn’t had the best luck with men: Her first husband had run off, her second husband and boyfriends had often been unkind to the kids. One had broken Johnny’s arm and bloodied Dorothy’s nose. Dorothy would have better luck. At least Paul brought her presents. He was stern sometimes, but he never yelled—not at first. The repeated protests of her family and friends only helped to create a Romeo and Juliet fantasy that Snider inflamed and used to his own advantage.
He continually tried to cajole Dorothy into posing naked for Playboy—though the thought terrified her so that she cried each time. She did not know that he had been a pimp in various cities for over a decade, that he had worked in his father’s sweatshop as a leather cutter by day and worked the streets at night, learning from white and black pimps how to manipulate young women. He gave them marijuana, while he used cocaine. Those who could afford it rubbed coke on the penis which, serving as an anesthetic, prolongs an erection and delays orgasm. Inhaling it numbs the feelings as well, so that a man becomes a mindless battering ram in pursuit of senseless, destructive pleasure.
At the local nightspots, everybody knew Snider and treated him as a celebrity. Dorothy felt privileged to be with him. She didn’t know that on the streets Snider was called 'the Jewish pimp'; that he had for several years dealt in drugs and prostitution, not only in Vancouver, but in Seattle, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Nor that he had been arrested numerous times by the vice squad and that, to gain release, he would inform on other pimps and pushers.
To Dorothy, he was a promoter, a producer. He put on a couple of car shows that summer of 1978, but no one told her that he had been forced, on the last car show he had worked, to sell his share for cash to save his life. Snider had gotten involved with the girlfriend of a local mobster who was serving time in jail. He even used the mobster’s money to pay for plastic surgery on the girl’s breasts. When the man got out, he found Snider and held him by the ankles out a window thirty stories from the ground. Snider cried and pleaded and promised all his money. Afterward, he left town for nearly a year. He had just returned when he first spotted Dorothy.
As Dorothy celebrated her eighteenth birthday, Snider continued his calculated attentions to her: a lavish gift, retreat, another lavish gift, plenty of romantic dialogue. The talk of posing for Playboy increased monthly. As time was running out for the contest, Snider applied pressure weekly. Eventually, Dorothy’s mother inadvertently played into his hands by going to Europe for three weeks at the start of August.
First, Snider made a deal with Ewe Meyer, the local photographer who had taken Dorothy’s high-school graduation picture: If Meyer would help Snider convince Dorothy to strip for Playboy and they used the pictures, Snider would give him the one-thousand-dollar finder’s fee. The photos, Dorothy was told, were to be portraits of both her and Snider, but after a few of those were shot, the truth came out. She later would describe to actress Molly Bashler, her L.A. roommate, how Snider had stripped to his shorts and assumed his favorite muscleman poses. He lovingly collected them of himself from every era and angle. Meyer and Snider then tried to encourage Dorothy to take off her clothes too, and she cried. Snider began pleading. 'Do it for me, baby,' he begged softly. 'Please do it for me.' Eventually, she did. Snider would never give Meyer the finder’s fee, but Meyer’s photos would sell after Dorothy was killed. The Pulitzer Prize-winning article in The Village Voice used several.
The few acceptable partially naked pictures Meyer got of an obviously frightened girl with a breathtaking face and body were enough to interest Ken Honey, a Vancouver photographer who had already sent several Canadian women to Playboy. Because Dorothy was underage, Honey said he would need her mother’s or father’s signature on the application. Snider returned with Nelly’s signature forged on the document and the matter was dropped. Honey had taken one look at the photos and knew that he had found a girl in whom Hefner would be especially interested. So he agreed to break
precedent and shoot at Snider’s apartment instead of the usual session at his studio. To Dorothy, Snider spoke with great enthusiasm of Playboy’s interest and their high professional ethics: Today everybody did Playboy. She posed, but she cried throughout the session, and never for a moment stopped wishing it would end.
Honey sent the photographs overnight to Los Angeles, and Playboy V.P Marilyn Grabowski instantly recognized what she had. and immediately took the pictures to Hefner. He had despaired of finding the perfect Playmate. The contest was about over and although he had spent many pleasurable evenings appraising and sampling the contestants, he hadn’t found that special one. She had to be a blonde, with large breasts, a slim waist, and healthy buttocks, tall, with a beautiful but innocent-looking face. The title character in Little Annie Fanny, the magazine’s long-running cartoon serial, was Hefner’s ideal. Later, he would plan a feature film with Dorothy Stratten as Annie.
Although no woman possessed all of Hefner’s requirements, Candy Loving from Oklahoma led the race. But she was a brunette, married, and in her mid-twenties, hardly perfect for Hefner, who wanted the anniversary winner not only in his magazine but also for himself—the Silver Star would be his 'new lady.' When he saw Dorothy’s photographs, he realized without a doubt that she was the girl of a million Playboy fantasies.
Less than two days after Hefner saw her photos, Dorothy arrived at his house. Honey had been instructed to get her there as soon as possible. Snider objected when he heard there was only one round-trip ticket, but didn’t suggest she refuse to go. He used the speed of Playboy’s response to emphasize to Dorothy how right he was about her potential and the best way to exploit it. He instructed her to tell her brother she had a modeling job, and her supervisor at B.C. Telephone, where she had begun to work in June, that a family emergency had arisen and she had to be gone for a couple of days.
On August 13, 1978, Dorothy took an airplane for the first time in her life and, from L.A. International, her first limousine: to the Playboy building on the Sunset Strip. Marilyn Grabowski, who welcomed her, would later recall how Dorothy had tried to act older than her years. Grabowski led the way to the Playboy studio, where their veteran centerfold photographer, Mario Casilli, was waiting. His Italian Santa Claus looks were reassuring, and he of course was used to nervous young women. Dorothy was given a glass or two of white wine to relax her, and Casilli got as much as he needed. Afterward, Grabowski rode in the limousine with her to the mansion. Dorothy tried to put out of her mind one of the last things Snider had said to her: that she might have to sleep with Hefner to win the contest, but that Snider would understand as long as she came back to him (just as he had learned to say from all the pimps).
A few months later, Snider pressured Stratten to write a quick autobiography, the revelations of a Playmate. After considerable badgering, she produced two brief chapters—thirty handwritten pages—before she quit. In New York, when I too suggested she make note of some of her experiences, Dorothy said: 'I’m not going to write it.' I didn’t learn of her efforts until a few months after the murder. When I read them, I discovered why she had stopped. Dorothy had begun to realize that the things she could tell were now outweighed by what she could not let Paul or anyone else read. The story was becoming a continuous series of omissions and half-truths, which wasn’t Dorothy’s style. She had stopped her book with the first clear sign of trouble in her relationship with Paul Snider. She had written: 'He still couldn’t figure out why I talked so little and why I had such a hard time telling him something or answering his questions.' Yet in the words she chose, she revealed her vulnerability, and her willingness to look for the good in everyone. She had described her initial meeting with Hefner and with Patrick Curtis, as many a wide-eyed and terrified teenager might, on meeting her first celebrity: 'I thought my knees were going to go out from under me. . . .
Long after Dorothy was killed, Curtis would recall: 'She was shaking like a leaf, but when she walked into the mansion and out to the yard, people were just stunned. Dorothy wouldn’t have known if it had come up and hit her on the nose—she was in a catatonic state almost.'
She had described all this carefully in the aborted memoir. Goldstein had a number of Stratten’s papers in his possession which he claimed were given to him by Snider. Goldstein turned over the materials, to the police who made a copy available to Riley. Hefner got wind of the existence of a Stratten journal, diary, or memoir and, according to reports, became extremely agitated and most anxious to see the writings. Playboy demanded a copy from the police. They complied. Riley informed his lawyer, who was also Dorothy’s lawyer; and the Stratten Estate, the legal owner of her writings, demanded all the originals and received only photocopies.
Eventually, there was considerable speculation over which of the men at the mansion had made the one simple pass she mentioned in her memoir. In the posthumous Playboy tribute, Hefner would write (with a small rap on the knuckles) that the man had been Patrick Curtis, but Hefner had been covering not only for himself but for a much closer (and more famous) buddy, film star James Caan. Certainly Curtis had made it clear in a polite way that he found Dorothy attractive and desirable, but after she told him about the boyfriend in Vancouver whom she loved and planned to marry, Curtis backed off and eventually became a good friend. With Caan, however, it was a different situation. Though he was a good actor, Dorothy thought, she certainly wasn’t attracted to him, and became embarrassed by his overt attentions. Then in the midst of a sticky divorce, Caan was living full time at the mansion, and later would put even more pressure on Stratten.
What really happened on the first visit Dorothy made to the Playboy mansion exactly two years before Snider killed her? It would be three-and-one-half years—and Dorothy would be dead—before I would be told the full story.
Curtis and one of the regular women talked her into a naked swim in the dark waters of the Jacuzzi grotto by telling her that everyone swam there without bathing suits. Indeed, the swim passed innocently enough, but it would lead to her undoing. The three of them put on the house’s white terry-cloth robes and Curtis led the two women to the game house; again he and the woman said everybody went around the mansion in towels and robes. But Dorothy’s arrival in the game house, after midnight, did not pass without notice. Significant looks were exchanged between Hefner and several of the regulars.
Everyone at Playboy already spoke of how much Hefner liked and wanted Dorothy. Wasn’t she the perfect candidate they’d been seeking to celebrate his past twenty-five years? Caan’s interest might have worried Hefner, but Dorothy’s innocence would probably require a little pressure to break her in. Her sudden entrance with Curtis upset him. That Curtis, of all people, should have won not only Dorothy’s confidence, but her body first, infuriated Hefner. Perhaps it embarrassed him in front of his friends. 'Hef made an assumption that was inaccurate,' Curtis would say later. He never would have gone swimming with her alone, Patrick said, but with the other woman along, he thought it would be all right—forgetting for a moment that to Hefner and his mansion pals one man and two women were less than the usual number of participants. 'I really feel badly about that,' Curtis would tell me, 'because I feel that to some extent I’m responsible. . . .'
At 1:30 in the morning, Dorothy was back in her room in a guesthouse by the tennis court when a phone call came from one of Hefner’s private secretaries: Could she please join Mr. Hefner for a little swim in the Jacuzzi? Dorothy was frightened, but more afraid to say no. Wouldn’t it be an insult to refuse the employer and hose what had not been denied to another guest? Dorothy wandered nervously around the deserted grounds before finding the grotto. She wrapped herself in a towel and waited for Hefner in the steamy darkness.
An hour or two later, Curtis’s phone rang. He had given Dorothy the number and told her to call if she needed anything. She was sobbing bitterly. Curtis had to ask what was the matter several times before she told him what had happened with Hefner in the Jacuzzi. She said that Hefner had t
old her afterward that he assumed she and Curtis had made love and that his 'ego was hurt.' Dorothy, wretched and angry, wanted to know what she was supposed to do now. 'Is that part of the program? Is that what’s expected of a Playmate?'
Curtis assured her at length that what had happened in the Jacuzzi had nothing to do with her becoming the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Playmate. He told her how much Hefner genuinely liked her, how really important she was to him, 'so that she would feel a bit better about herself—rather than like another piece of cheese.' Curtis would recall: ‘There was no question—she did not want it to happen again. She was trying to minimize the reality and look toward tomorrow, to find out how she could extricate herself from a situation she didn’t want to put herself in again.'
If Dorothy’s anger and indignation did not move her to speak about the incident with anyone but Curtis, and later with Snider, it was no doubt because she quickly realized how unbelievable her story would sound. Asked down to the Jacuzzi late at night? What did she think would happen? How could anyone be so naive? But knowing Dorothy, she was naive, and did think that Hefner, like Curtis, only wanted a swim.
In 1982, Ms. magazine would run a cover piece that discussed the prevalence in our society of these forced 'seductions,' and of the women’s problems in dealing not only with the often violent scenes, but with the guilt and complicity involved in the aftermath: The men acting as though this is what the women were asking for—any outrage expressed by the women, therefore, was dismissable as hypocrisy. What had happened was the woman’s own fault.