by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
When Dorothy was chosen to be the August centerfold, Snider began to pressure her to marry him—before the issue appeared. Other movie and TV offers came in and Snider started talking of grandiose plans for posters and books and for a cosmetics and perfume company named after her. She was to be his main business. It did not take Dorothy long to see that Snider didn’t fit into the Hollywood scene. For her he had lost his charm and become just another guy on the make. Dorothy often found ram pathetic. But he had gotten her into the movies, as he had said he would. How could she turn against him now?
In L.A., after a heated argument with Snider, she wrote him:
When storms are past and gone,
Shall gentle love succeed?
I wish to ease a troubled mind—
Sleep is the thing we need.
With these few words I send my love.
You will in this a question find:
My question is without a doubt—
Love is the question—find it out.
'Shall gentle love succeed?' was the question, or perhaps 'Love is the question' itself. Still the optimism was there, the feeling that no matter how bad the 'storms' might be, Paul would eventually see the light, a hope not much rekindled by their first year in Los Angeles. Snider made obvious passes at other women behind Dorothy’s back and in front of her. He made several moves on Molly Bashler, a particularly strong one in the kitchen at a time when Dorothy was away. He held the back of Molly’s head and stared deeply into her eyes. Molly asked if he was trying to hypnotize her or something and Snider said yes. Was that what he had done with Dorothy? Molly asked, and Snider smiled. Molly continued to look into his eyes and said he was evil. She laughed: Was he an agent of the Devil?
On June 1, in Las Vegas, where he had pimped in past years, Paul Leslie Snider married Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten. She knew how unhappy her family would be, and had expressed her dilemma to Molly— should she marry Paul? If Dorothy had any doubts,
Molly advised, why do it? But Snider persuaded her. She felt sorry for him by then. And yet, Dorothy would tell Molly, she did not let Paul touch her for more than two weeks after the marriage. His touch revolted her, Dorothy said, she didn’t know why. The watchdog had extorted his reward: marriage, fifty/ fifty till death do us part. At the seedy wedding service in Las Vegas, Snider’s best man was Jake, his main drug connection. Another Snider friend gave away the bride. Dorothy didn’t tell her family until several weeks later.
If Dorothy thought of the marriage as an act of self-protection, there was an undeniable sense of having given up. Despite the TV and movie offers that came in, she felt her life was hopeless. By the end of August 1979, a year before her death, she wrote:
. . . I am lonely
With 100 people
Treating me
With the World’s
Best of everything . . .
When Snider gave her a small, live white rat, she adopted it as a sign of love, forgetting for the moment the meaning of the toy rat she had played with in the Canadian film: Wasn’t it sent by her captors only to torture her further? She had told Snider the plot, and didn’t want to think about the ominous implication of his gift. She called the rat Bebe, like the little dog she had loved and left behind with her family. Love Snider, love his rat; perhaps in return he wouldn’t insist on much sex. Before Dorothy and I met the second time, her romantic feelings for Snider had ceased entirely, and three or four weeks would pass before Snider insisted on making love. But he could tell she felt nothing.
Dorothy mistook Snider’s devotion during her illness for love, though he simply nursed his investment back to health so that she could continue her lucrative career. He knew this was only the beginning. The marriage gave him not only 50 percent of her income, but the right to stay in the U.S. as long as she did. When any or his other grand schemes didn’t pan out—the motorcycle jump by Evel Knievel, the male strip joint—his failure only made Dorothy feel sorrier for him. She couldn’t seem to find a way off the treadmill: the agent, recommended by a Playboy associate, who made passes; the lawyer, recommended by another Playboy associate, who tried to assault her in his office; the continuing daily pressures from Hefner’s organization. Maybe, she often thought, that was it. She was lost, she had lost— there was nothing to be done.
In the summer of 1979 I had begun a script called They All Laughed, with a character based on myself which I originally intended to play, although John Ritter would ultimately be cast in the role. In every draft until I met Dorothy again that October, the character went through the picture pining for the girl he had loved and lost because he wouldn’t commit himself to marriage and children. The Ritter character was as melancholy at the end as he had been at the beginning. A deal was struck with Time-Life Film Productions to finance this version, with shooting to start in New York after the first of the year. Cost: $7.5 million. But the script was weak, I decided—no better than my life. I didn’t like being sad, or melancholy. Like Dorothy, I was lost. All the women I had had affairs with couldn’t take the place of loving one woman and sharing a life with her. I was ready for the second meeting with Dorothy.
III - A Walk by the Ocean
The dissolution of a raindrop evolves
Into the creation of a rainbow—
The mystery of nature:
A seed giving birth to life,
A word giving birth to love.
—Dorothy Stratten Vancouver, 1978
A woman’s voice called out my first name. I turned and saw the unfamiliar bleached hair before I saw anything else. Then I noticed how tall she was: In high heels she was almost eye level with me. She quickly moved the last few steps, asking if I remembered that we had been introduced about a year ago. Up close her almond-shaped blue eyes were dreamy and sad, even though she was smiling. I remembered her, but didn’t recall her hair, the bright-red fingernails, and glossy lipstick. She told me her name again, and I asked immediately whether her hair had been different when we first met. Her face clouded over and she nodded. Then 9he turned casually to check the surroundings—we were in the entrance hall of the mansion. I followed her look: A few people were in the dining room and several more in the glassed-in room next door. But Hefner wasn’t in sight, and there was a kind of lull in the air. Dorothy led the way to the long, curving staircase that ended at Hefner’s private second floor, and we sat down on the third step, where she told me what had happened to her hair.
She wasn’t simply beautiful, I thought as I watched her talk—she was unbelievably exquisite, despite the gaudy makeup and dyed hair. Her eyes were gentle and soft, vulnerable and enchanting. Her lips were generously full, with the top lip protruding slightly over the bottom; in repose it made Dorothy look pensive. She was perfect from smile to body. 'Translucent,' Audrey Hepburn would later describe her: 'Dorothy looked the way they used to paint an angel.'
She told me she had made a movie in her native Canada—'not a very good one,' she said, called Autumn Born. There had been bit parts in a couple of Hollywood features: Skatetown, U.S.A. and Americathon, with John Ritter. She had done an episode for TV’s Fantasy Island, and would soon do a Buck Rogers show. She had an agent named David Wilder—aid I know him? Otherwise, the volume of fan mail had chosen her Playmate of the Year, but the decision wouldn’t be announced officially for another six months. She would soon begin another layout for Hefner, a history of blond movie goddesses—Dietrich, Harlow, Monroe, Bardot, Veronica Lake, and others—with herself made up as each of them, posing naked.
Just after she asked me to stay and have dinner with her, Hugh Hefner appeared with Sondra Theodore, his 'special lady.' He was in one of his countless pairs of silk pajamas, small Pepsi bottle in one hand, pipe in the other, as usual. Sondra had been a Sunday School teacher before her Playboy career. Her blond hair had also been bleached nearly white, and though she had done a few walk-ons in pictures and TV mainly she helped to run the private orgies for Hef, participating at whatever cost, to keep him happy. When I ha
d seen her lately, she looked very sad, and would soon be eased out of the mansion. Because I had failed to make an appearance for that weekend’s Playboy TV-special tapings, Hefner nodded coolly to me, peremptorily took Dorothy’s arm, and swept toward the dining room with her and Sondra. I phoned my house to say I would be staying longer than the twenty minutes I had planned to touch base with Hefner, and went back to find Dorothy.
She was waiting midway in the buffet line next to Rosanne Katon, a fine black actress who had posed for Playboy. Rosanne later would tell Colleen Camp that she had noticed immediately the strong vibrations between Dorothy and me. Dorothy’s look now was playful as she said: 'Changed your mind?' We grinned at each other and our eyes held for a moment. When I asked if she was staying for the movie, Dorothy said she would call home and if her husband wasn’t there, she would stay. Oh, I said, she was married?
By the time I had my plate filled, Dorothy was seated at Hef s table—next to Jim Brown at the far end from Hefner and James Caan—but there were no vacant chairs in the room and I had to eat in an adjoining alcove. I finished quickly and went back to the foyer, where Dorothy joined me. After we resumed. our places on the staircase, I asked if she was happily married and, for an instant, Dorothy gave me a very direct look, then turned away and said that she was having a few problems but these were not her husband’s fault. Had she had many boyfriends before she was married? Dorothy shook her head. There had been only one—Steve. After nearly a year with him, she had seen a ring she was sure he would like and began to save up the earnings from her Dairy Queen job. She told no one of her plans (and did not mention to me the fifteen weekly visits she made to the store to pay off the gift). For Christmas 1977, she presented the ring to Steve, but little more than a week later—jealous of other men’s attentions to Dorothy—he stopped the car one night, got a wrench from the trunk, took off the ring, violently bent it out of shape, and smashed the stone. It was the end of their relationship.
Dorothy told the story dispassionately, and with such innocence that I was stunned. My heart went out to her: The ring seemed to represent a great deal more than one boy’s boorishness or brutality. How could her charm and beauty, I thought, be capable of evoking such violence? Why, in our first conversation, had she told me such a savage story? I immediately associated the incident with her marriage. But her answers were so bland and evasive, I could only sense that she wasn’t happily married. Some hidden turmoil was unmistakable.
I was doing a movie in New York, I told her before we parted, and maybe she would read for me. She said she would love to, and when I told her I had very much enjoyed talking with her, I was amazed to see her eyebrows go up and her face suddenly redden. She smiled softly and said she had enjoyed herself too. We shook hands, her grasp gentle but strong, her skin smooth and moist as a flower. We moved apart, and I glanced back to watch her disappear into the living room. She waved.
Through the rest of October, through November, December, and most of January, 1980, neither Dorothy nor I suspected that we felt the same way about each other, that we thought of each other all the time and wondered how we could become closer. Finally, one Sunday early in the new year, we walked by the ocean and it was no longer possible to hold back our feelings; we clung to each other as two people might who find themselves the only couple left on earth. 'One day since yesterday,' she would call those magical hours, a phrase which came to represent so much more than I could possibly have imagined.
She arrived that special Sunday around one in the afternoon, wearing high-heeled shoes and a white cotton dress with a tight skirt that clung to her body. She was a little nervous, I could see, but the tension didn’t make her any less beautiful or kind. While the water for tea was heating in the kitchen, Dorothy sat on a wooden stool near a doll that was suspended from the chandelier: an ugly witch in green, riding a wooden broom. Dorothy blew on the string, swung it to make the witch fly in a tiny half-moon arc, jerked the string to make her hop around. She laughed, petted the witch sympathetically, and looked at me.
I leaned over and kissed her quickly and lightly on the lips for the first time, and then backed away, apologizing. Dorothy reddened but she didn’t say anything. Suddenly I decided we should take a ride down to the beach. There would be no people at this time of the year and we could take a walk. We could have our tea later. Dorothy jumped off the stool, delighted at the idea.
It was January 20—only the sixth visit we had since our talk on the mansion stairs: One was on New Year’s, the first day of the eighties and a fresh beginning for both of us—our decade. Every time I saw her I thought in tens of years, but all we had had until then were hours. Yet the closer we became, the more it seemed as though we had known each other all our lives.
***
The first thing I had done was to call Dorothy’s agent, trying to set up a meeting for the three of us. David Wilder was an ambitious, hustling young man who seemed anxious to please, perhaps to the disadvantage of his clients. Although Playboy had pointed several young Playmates toward Wilder’s agency, both companies discouraged talk of any official connection between them and often appeared to disagree, but it seemed as though Wilder’s allegiance at the time was to his main source of talent and entertainment. He and Hefner had a pretty believable good-guy/bad-guy routine going, not exactly unusual in show business, where ultrapersonal pressure tactics are a fine art.
As a go-getter, Wilder knew at least one thing about my career: I had been most successful discovering or directing women, among them Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, Eileen Brennan, Madeline Kahn, Tatum O’Neal, and Cybill Shepherd. Cybill was tall, blond, blue-eyed, and no longer in my life. Could similar lightning strike again? Wasn’t Dorothy tall, blond, blue-eyed, and almost twenty? Nearly the same age as Shepherd when I had met her. On the phone the first time, Wilder was not even subtle. What Dorothy needed, he said, was someone to take her under his wing and guide her on the right path. She had a lot of talent, but she was new, shy, and not yet a professional actress. Hefner, added Wilder, thought she definitely had something unique; he quoted Hef: 'A very special lady.'
When I mentioned that Dorothy seemed extremely sensitive, Wilder exploded: Sensitive!? She was too sensitive! What I had meant, I said, was that somehow I would hate to make her cry. Wilder dropped his voice and said he knew exactly what I was saying, because he had seen her cry. 'It goddamn breaks your heart,' he said. I asked, a touch sarcastically, what she had been crying about, and Wilder reacted with a guilty-sounding 'Huh?' followed by a quick laugh devoid of humor. Dorothy later told me that, except on one occasion (when she had cried), Wilder had behaved himself with her.
Wilder spoke of Snider with unconcealed hostility: He was 'a pain in the ass . . . a real creep,' who stuck his nose in everything, Wilder said. Snider would call up and yell over the phone. Dorothy never said anything bad about this guy, but Wilder knew she wasn’t happy. 'Don’t say I said anything, but that marriage is not going to last. I don’t know how she can stand him.' I wondered why Wilder had decided to reveal so much of Dorothy’s situation. What were his real motives? And Hefner’s?
Dorothy was often naive about people’s intentions.
She believed the things people said, and although I warned her several times not to judge another’s motives by her own, it was difficult for her to learn. She always presumed that everyone’s intentions were as pure as hers, and even if they were not, perhaps they were not as bad as they seemed. She looked tor the positive qualities in even the most obvious villain. It’s no coincidence that Beauty and the Beast was written by a woman.
***
Although ten days passed between the talk on the stairs and Dorothy’s first visit to my house, I saw her twice more, briefly, at the mansion. I had gone there hoping to speak with her, but that proved impossible. Hefner had called personally to ask if I would appear in some additional shots for the pajama-party section of their TV special, which meant being photographed dancing in pajamas and robe. A year befo
re, I had gone to one of these and pretended to have a great time, though resolving never to go again. But Dorothy had changed everything, and I arrived that night in sleeping attire as the party was winding down.
Hefner was marching Dorothy into the television/ Monopoly room, along with a large group of serious-looking network people. He snapped a cassette of the previous week’s party footage into the video player and everybody watched it. As the tape rolled, Dorothy sat studiously on the edge of a chair, her hands folded in her lap. Hefner hovered directly beside her, occasionally explaining things, seemingly to the room but mainly to Dorothy. I wondered if they were having an affair. Certainly Hefner was indicating a proprietary interest in her. She nodded once or twice and appeared to be absorbed in the footage. But she neither smiled nor frowned; her expression remained set.
It was the first time I had seen any kind of photographic image of Dorothy Stratten. She might be one out of hundreds dancing, but when the camera caught sight of her, whether far away or close up, it seemed to be photographing only Dorothy. Her presence cast an almost hypnotic spell. Most uncanny was how subtly different she looked every second. Each time I looked at Dorothy during the months I knew her, she looked different from the way she had looked the moment before. I would keep trying to decide which Dorothy she really was, but she turned out to be all of them, flickering the way the moon does on the sea. Even on Hefner’s monitor that night, in passable documentary footage, this shimmering, intangible quality was unmistakable.