by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
A kind of hygienically raunchy singing group called The Village People was doing a song called 'Ready for the ‘80s,' and Dorothy was onstage with them, weaving smoothly at the rhythm and improvising her moves around the musicians. She made the promise of the coming decade inherent in the lyrics a breathtaking reality. When she swayed or bowed a couple of times, there was an audible reaction from the crowd in the TV room. I looked over at Dorothy watching herself, still deadpan. When the tape ended, Hefner ejected the cassette, took it and Dorothy under his arm, and left the room quickly, followed by the same busy group with whom he had entered. I followed at a distance.
By the time I saw Hefner in the entrance hall accepting congratulations, Dorothy had left for home. I told Hefner the stuff looked good and he nodded agreement, took the pipe from his mouth, and sipped his Pepsi. 'It swings,' he said, and smacked his lips several times reflectively. Trying to sound detached and objective, I made a remark about 'the blond girl' who 'seemed interesting,' and Hefner again nodded, also with restrained enthusiasm. His tone was patronizing: There was something special there, he agreed, though he wasn’t sure exactly how much she could do. She would need a lot of help, he thought, but certainly there was something there. I brought up the possibility of a part for her in the new picture we were preparing, and Hefner pursed his lips, nodded again, and said he had heard about that. I had figured he might have been told. To not mention it would have made him think I was trying to do something behind his back, and therefore interested in Dorothy for other than professional reasons.
Of course I was, and so was he, but I knew the rules and understood that not even a breath of this could pass between us, no matter how strongly it was felt. So we stood on the marble floor and tried to sound like a couple of professionals discussing business. Wouldn’t it be interesting, I said, to have Dorothy play an extremely efficient secretary? One who could do five things at once—talk on two phones, file, write shorthand, and type? (She had told me of her secretarial skills.) 'Like Rosalind Russell—,' I started, and Hefner quickly jumped in with the title of the film I had been about to cite: His Girl Friday. We both grinned, and Hefner’s victorious look required a little flattery on the speed with which he had identified the reference. He said he saw what I meant: It 'might be a good idea to play against Dorothy’s obvious physical beauty and . . .' he nodded three times, thinking. I finished the sentence: ". . . . and emphasize her intelligence and ability.'
The next afternoon at Hefner’s I saw Dorothy several times, though I wasn’t certain she had seen me until one tense moment when we exchanged little more than two sentences. It was a warm Sunday and near the tennis courts a roller-skating rink had been improvised for the TV cameras. Loud music played through many speakers; soft drinks, beer, hot dogs, hamburgers, Eskimo Pies, and popcorn were available. There were several film and TV actors around; Hefner and Jim Brown were conspicuous among the skaters; columnist Max Lerner stood on the sidelines watching. The scene was dominated, of course, by a great many very attractive women in all sorts of summery, revealing outfits. But for me no one could begin to compare with Dorothy Stratten. There she was, over six feet tall in her orange roller skates, wearing a lime-green one-piece bathing suit and green leg warmers, gliding through the air, her expression as enigmatic as the Sphinx. Occasionally she smiled, but with no trace of girlishness. More often she appeared serenely unaware of the surroundings, as though her private world was somewhere far away.
At the edge of the rink, I stood next to Lerner and watched Dorothy. Hefner skated holding her hands; so did Brown. Max was telling me at some length about the brand-new young girlfriend who had changed his life. At one point, Hefner started a 'Bunny line,' placing Dorothy directly behind him. Brown latched on next, and then a score of others. The cameras caught it all.
I walked up the paved hill above the rink and watched the goings-on from there. After several minutes, Dorothy skated away from the others and spun to a stop directly below me. She faced away from me, her hand on her hip, chewing gum with her lips closed firmly. She stayed there for a few moments surrounded by the noisy music, looking off into the distance, independent, lovely, and strangely forlorn. Her face remained expressionless.
In mid-afternoon, out on the back lawn near the Jacuzzi grotto and pool, Dorothy and I had a brief exchange that would turn out to be the last words we ever shared at the mansion. I would make only one more visit there: nearly ten months later, two days before the murder. The television crew had moved on to a bathing-suit sequence. Dorothy and several of the other Playmates cavorted in arid out of the water, inside the grotto, and under the sun. The Chuck Mangione Band played while the guests lounged on huge, brightly-colored cushions that the houseboys had tossed all over the lawn.
Dorothy was standing alone between the band and the pool. I had been looking for an opportunity to approach her, but she had been constantly occupied. Coming up behind her, I said that if she felt like talking I would be over on the cushions with a couple of friends. Dorothy turned only halfway toward me; she seemed anxious and apprehensive. She was working, she said, and they really had her going, but she would try. I could now see dimly into the grotto, realized they were shooting and began to apologize, but the assistant director called out irritably for Dorothy, and she moved off quickly into the darkening waters.
One of Hefner’s closer pals, Nicky Blair, came over to where I stood. 'She’s quite something, isn’t she?' I turned and nodded agreement. She was very sweet, Blair went on, asking if I had spoken with her. A little bit, I said, and asked if she went with Hefner; I had been wanting to put the question to someone, and it came out almost before I realized it. Nicky shook his head slowly and said: 'Nah.' I looked at him closely to see if he was on the level and he grinned—a surprisingly soft, yet cynical look in his eye: 'Once in a while,' Blair said, 'one gets by him.'
I felt relieved as I looked back at Dorothy. They were telling her to pose higher up in the water, the better to see her torso, while Nicky said: 'But she’s married to a real prick.' I was beginning to wonder why all of a sudden Nicky Blair was volunteering this information to me. We had never discussed any other women, or Hefner. We never had more than a few pleasant, brief business conversations. He continued about Dorothy’s husband, how he came around the mansion in tank tops, flexing his muscles. 'I don’t know how she can stand him—she’s such a sweet person, a real sweetheart. Hef can’t stand the guy. He puts up with him because of Dorothy, but otherwise, no way. The guy is horrible.' I mentioned the possible role for Dorothy and explained that the script was still being rewritten. Blair said he would talk to her about me and 'put in a good word.' He phoned a day or so later and told me he had had a long talk with Dorothy: She was very much looking forward to meeting with me.
***
On the first of November, Dorothy walked into my house for the first time. She wore a frilly white cotton dress and a large, floppy straw hat. If the dress was almost transparent, the heels too high for anyone to walk smoothly, and the red nail polish inappropriate with the dress and hat, Dorothy nevertheless looked as though she had stepped out of the nineteenth century.
We took tea in my office, where she sat up in the tan leather armchair. I sat on the blue couch and we talked about the film. I explained to her the part of Amy, the efficient secretary who is secretly in love with her boss. The character, and the relationship, ended up considerably different by the time we started snooting (Linda MacEwen played it), but at this point I was planning to tailor the part for Dorothy. Later, I would rewrite the entire script, creating instead a major role for her that rivaled Audrey Hepburn’s in size and importance.
As we read Amy’s few scenes together, Dorothy asked questions and was extremely quick to catch on. It didn’t take more than a few minutes for me to realize she was a natural actress with a fine ear for nuance and a wry, simple delivery that always rang true. She also seemed to absorb thoroughly whatever she heard. I would find that, unlike most people, she never forgot
what was said. Perhaps because she herself never said anything superficially, she never listened superficially either.
We discussed her stage name: The Screen Actors Guild had another actress registered under the name Dorothy Stratton. Therefore, Dave Wilder had said, she would have to use her middle initial for billing— Dorothy R. Stratten; R. for Ruth. Her husband had suggested that she use a name he made up for her: Kristen Shields. (For a time, Snider had insisted that everyone, even Dorothy’s family, call her Kristen, and grew livid if her real name was used.) I suggested the possibility of D. R. Stratten, and later, when I called her by that nickname for the first time, her eyebrows rose in surprise, her eyes brightened, and she blushed and smiled.
I glanced down at the coffee table and noticed a paperback acting edition of Noel Coward’s Private Lives; I picked it up and began describing the play to Dorothy: A man and a woman who have been divorced from each other for five years turn up at the same hotel on the Riviera, both on honeymoons with new spouses. Their suites adjoin, of course, with their terraces side-by-side. After a while, inevitably, the two old lovers find themselves alone together, sharing a drink in the moonlight. The orchestra below plays the same old popular song, which naturally was their song:
Someday I’ll find you,
Moonlight behind you . . .
After a breathless silence, the woman looks out to sea and speaks tremulously: 'Extraordinary,' she says, 'how potent cheap music is.' Dorothy’s smile warmed the room, and I read her a couple of pages from the love scene in the second act:
AMANDA: Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious.
ELYOT (seriously): You mustn’t be serious, my dear one, it’s just what they want.
AMANDA: Who’s they?
ELYOT: All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant. Laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths. Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light. . . .
AMANDA: What happens if one of us dies? Does the one that’s left still laugh? . . .
Our tea long since finished, we had a couple of cigarettes. Her husband didn’t allow her to smoke, Dorothy said, but she sneaked them when he wasn’t around. I knew how she felt, I said. Officially, I wasn’t smoking either.
She had to leave for the Playboy studio, so I walked her to the olive-green ‘67 Cougar she drove. We shook hands and I said I would like to see her again to read over some other scenes. There were no other scenes yet, but I didn’t tell her that. We were both stalling. She drove away, and I went back into the house knowing I was hopelessly smitten by her.
We were both busy professionally, and nearly six weeks passed before we saw each other again. But I thought about her all the time, and we began talking on the phone. I called Dorothy one night in Dallas from New York. She told me about the Playboy fans, how sorry she felt for them. Although she was exhausted at the end of a long autographing session, she didn’t like to let any of them leave disappointed. She told me daily what had happened to her: She was getting another cold, she felt very run-down, her husband was rarely home so they kept missing each other’s calls, she was lonely, she had read Private Lives and loved it and was going to read it again.
Years later, I would near of the time in a Dallas nightclub when a fat, unattractive man asked each of the five Playmates on the tour to dance with him. Disgusted, they had all refused, except Dorothy. She took him as her partner and he turned out to be as good a dancer as she was; he had been a dance instructor. Dorothy and the fat man danced together most of the evening, making quite a hit, and she thanked him for a wonderful time.
Dorothy arrived at my house on the afternoon of Friday, December 7. I didn’t know her husband was watching outside my gates throughout the meeting. Eight months later he would be waiting again, but then he would be carrying a loaded .38 revolver. Although Dorothy would know, I would not.
That day we leafed through a curious book a friend had given me explaining an ancient occult science that related playing cards to one’s birthday. Born July 30, for example, I was a Jack of Hearts, the symbol for certain personality traits and life patterns developed from astrology, numerology, and metaphysics. It is a complicated procedure that I didn’t understand very well, I told Dorothy, but several things I had read had been amazingly accurate. Written by Arne Lein and privately printed in 1978, it is called What’s Your Card? As Dorothy looked over my shoulder, we looked up her birth date: February 28. She was a Ten of Clubs.
Flipping to the yearly charts at the back of the book, I held it open as Dorothy moved closer. In theory, the 'Life Spreads' could tell you, year by year, which people would most influence your life. I knew that the cards found on the same line as one’s own card represented important persons in one’s life. Looking up age forty, I explained that my card, the Jack of Hearts, never moved; the others revolved around it. Did she remember her card? The Ten of Clubs, Dorothy said. I looked at the chart and pointed in amazement. Her card was next to mine, on the left.
Where was Paul? asked Dorothy excitedly. His birthday was April 15: an Aries (like Hefner). Snider was a Six of Diamonds. I flipped back to the age forty chart and discovered that his card was also directly next to mine, on the right. Our three cards were all in a row on the same line, with mine in the middle. The revelation astonished me. Dorothy seemed delighted, so I continued and jumped to the age forty-one chart, where both Dorothy’s card and her husband’s suddenly were not next to mine. Feeling vaguely uneasy, I slammed the book shut.
As I walked D.R. to the front door, I took a quick look at her palm, which was dry and crisscrossed with a remarkable number of lines, an indication that she had been here before, I said. She had an old soul. Dorothy smiled as though she had heard that before. At this point she mentioned that her husband was waiting for her in the car. She thanked me and left hurriedly.
Five days later, Dorothy came over alone. She wore a gymsuit and sneakers that late afternoon, and made little attempt to cover the fact that she was exhausted, worried, and very unhappy. The sky had turned gray as we took our tea to the living room. Dorothy had asked me to look at a script that Snider, Wilder, and Playboy were all trying to get her to do: the title role in Galaxina, a science-fiction comedy. She did not think much of it, she said, but maybe she was wrong. Since it seemed to be her main concern, I started leafing through her scenes, and Dorothy turned away toward the window. I glanced over and asked if she was OK. She nodded silently, without turning, but I leaned forward and saw that she was crying. I said her name softly, but it startled her.
She shook her head, wiped her face, and said she was sorry. What was it? I asked. Could I help? Dorothy tried to hold back a sob, but it came out anyway. She turned her face into my chest and cried quietly. After a moment, I put my arms around her. If I had known then how close to my own feelings Dorothy’s were, I would have done as I wanted— tilted her face up to mine and kissed her so there would be no doubt about how much she meant to me, how much I wanted to help her never to cry again.
When her tears had stopped, Dorothy laughed: 'It’s OK, don’t worry—I cry all the time. . . .' I was falling madly in love with her, I knew, but why should she believe me? And D.R. was thinking (she later would tell me): Because I hadn’t made even a little pass, maybe I only liked her as a friend.
We discussed Galaxina, and then Dorothy told me about the Buck Rogers episode she had done, playing Miss Cosmos, the most physically perfect woman in the galaxy. The producers had said her voice was too soft and her line readings inadequate; they wanted her to redo all of them. I offered to help and wasn’t surprised she had had difficulty; I said it was dialogue for robots. Later Dorothy would tell me that the producers insisted on dubbing her voice with another actress.
She then talked of her problems with Snider. He was demanding papers that would give him 50 percent of her services for life. Playboy, as well as Dorothy’s agents, lawyers, and business managers were all dead set against any sort of deal giving Snider half inte
rest in Dorothy. But he was her manager. Managers normally got 15 percent maximum, everyone had told her. Wilder had mentioned to me that Snider was trying to bulldoze Dorothy into a company they would control jointly. D.R. said she felt caught in the middle. She wasn’t sure what to do because, after all, Paul had discovered her, hadn’t he? If it hadn’t been for him, she never would have appeared in Playboy.
Maybe that would have been better, I said to her for the first time. Certainly she could have been equally successful with Vogue or Glamour. Her face, hands, feet, height, and shape were perfect for the fashion and commercial world; and there was her great potential as an actress. The Ford Model agency, D.R. said, had asked to send her out, and she was surprised because that kind of agency didn’t normally hire girls who had posed for Playboy. Had she signed with Ford? No, said Dorothy, because Mr. Hefner had been upset about the idea, wanting her to sign instead with Playboy’s model agency, which she did. So Hefner wouldn’t let her go, I thought, naked or dressed, not if it didn’t help him or his empire. As though Playboy’s new agency—the old Chicago-based agency, I would learn, had been disbanded because of numerous incidents of prostitution—could do the same for its clients in the international fashion world as the long-established and highly regarded Ford’s. This had been the chance for a Playmate to alter her image—but of course Hefner wouldn’t look at it that way.
Based on what I knew of models’ fees, Playboy didn’t pay its own very well. The five-hundred-dollar daily fee covered days that often went to twelve, fourteen, or sixteen hours, longer still on deadlines, with no overtime pay. Playboy only recently had given the girls a raise to the five hundred dollars, D.R. said, which meant they were now being slightly less than thrice underpaid. A high-class call girl could earn twice that much in one hour, and the Playboy girls often had to throw in the sex for nothing. The magazine that paid extravagant sums to its writers paid, relatively, a pittance to the women for whose pictures it was bought. The writers brought the magazine respectability; the women were a dime a dozen.