by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
Snider wanted Dorothy for life. Between him and the Playboy machine, she had been maneuvered into a net, and she was beginning to realize how tight it was. I tried to sound reasonable and said I thought her husband’s request for 50 percent was uncalled-for. Under most laws, he was already entitled to half of any earnings she might have during their marriage. But that was how she felt anyway, D.R. said. It wasn’t her money, it was theirs. She felt strange: It was as though Paul didn’t trust her, as though he thought she didn’t love him. That was certainly how it sounded, I said. A look of deep resentment came into her eyes, like a dark cloud over the sun. There was rage in it too, and bitterness, and a profound contempt that was chilling, as though I had confirmed her worst suspicions: that Snider was interested in her only for the money she could make, the power she gave him, that love never had been a real consideration.
When I suggested she visit her family for Christmas, despite her husband’s objections, she said she couldn’t because 'he would be so angry.' But I didn’t really know what Dorothy meant by 'angry,' and she never elaborated on the word, nor did she allow me ever to meet Snider, so that I could better understand. I hadn’t had much exposure to men who consistently browbeat women, much less terrorized them. But Dorothy had seen little else from men all her life. Snider was like most of them. And when they got angry, they could be dangerous. Molly Bashler said Dorothy often acted as though Snider was not much different from most men—that this was simply the way life was.
If Dorothy wanted to visit her family for Christmas, she ought to be able to—if he wanted to stay here, she wouldn’t mind, would she? Dorothy said, 'No,' and tried to make it sound as conventional as possible— how could she tell me the whole story? 'Paul says we can’t afford it. He hates his family and he doesn’t like my family, and my Mum doesn’t like him/’ She looked sad. 'I’d like to go home, though,' Dorothy said, and changed the subject again.
D.R. left for a couple of hours to attend an acting class. When she returned she was elated: Her teacher, Richard Brander, had said in class that she was doing very well indeed. Had she done a lot of scenes? No, mainly monologues. She had done Emily from Our Town—did I know it? Taking several speeches from the ending in the graveyard, Dorothy had put them together into a monologue. Several people told her she had made them cry.
Eleven days later, on the night before Christmas Eve, D.R. came over again. A few days earlier, she had sent me the biggest Christmas card I had ever received. Its cover featured a drunken reindeer too pickled to care about tomorrow; the greeting inside read 'Bingle Jells.' Above this, Dorothy had written 'Dear Peter,' and below, 'Forever my love, Dorothy,' exaggerating, for my benefit, the loops of both y’s: I had told her that in graphology large lower loops indicated a healthy sensuality. Reading it over, she wondered, perhaps, if her husband might ever see the card and then quickly, after 'Dear Peter,' she added '& Blaine.' I put the card near my desk so that I could see it every day.
I responded to her card with a serenade, the earliest form of courtship I had learned. Since my first girlfriend, I had always sung to the women I liked. I started with an old Sinatra standard, and looked at Dorothy as I sang:
You’re just too marvelous,
Too marvelous for words . . .
Dorothy knelt on the couch and beamed at me, looking both giddy and embarrassed; her face was flushed, making her teeth even whiter, and her eyes looked merry. She rose quietly and moved slowly until she was behind me. Now she could listen without my seeing her. It was the sweetest reaction I had ever seen, and only increased the feeling of the lyric.
. . . Looking for the light
Of a new love
To brighten up the night . . .
She had her elbows on the piano, her chin resting on cupped hands. The look between us meant only one thing. It was hard to believe that the vibrations I was getting from Dorothy’s side of the room were as strong as the ones I was sending. Then she was back on the couch, curled up as attentively as a cat, and when she recognized the words of the Love Story song, I could see in her eyes that she understood the gesture:
. . . How long does it last?
Can love be measured
By the hours in a day . . . ?
We slowly walked out to her car. I had so wanted to kiss her, to take her in my arms and hold her close. When we stepped onto the driveway, Dorothy pointed upward suddenly. There was a full moon, dimmed by the mist or smog. The air was damp but pleasant, and there were small white clouds against the dark sky As we looked at the moon, a soft rainbow slowly appeared around it. A sign meant especially for us, it seemed: Didn’t lovers always take the weather personally? I said she ought to write a poem (not knowing that she often wrote poems), and Dorothy just smiled. We hoped to get together again 'about the movie,' we said. My daughters were staying with me, I told her, and since the three of them had barely done more than say hello in the entrance hall, I suggested she drop by while they were here. I wanted the girls to get to know her. On New Year’s Day, Dorothy came by for a short while with her eleven-and-a-half-year-old sister, Louise, but my kids had already gone home to their mother.
When we saw each other on January 20, Dorothy already had a bad start to the new year: Every day Snider became a bigger problem, and the Playboy sessions were exhausting her once more. On top of that, she had been bulldozed into Galaxina. When she protested to Wilder that she had decided against doing the picture, she was told that she was already committed to it. There was no other way—backing out would ruin her name in the business. But she had not agreed to it, Dorothy argued; how could he commit her? Well, he had. Besides, it was a good part; she would be crazy to turn it down.
For Dorothy, the decision forced on her was just another in a long line of compromises she had made for the sake of others. She didn’t complain much; she was tired. It made her sad, she told me over the phone, the way people smiled but didn’t mean it. Sometimes there was hate behind the smile, and sometimes there was only sadness.
She didn’t say anything more, and it wasn’t until two years later that several people in the crew and cast of Galaxina would tell me what a terrible time Snider had given Dorothy during the shooting of the picture. Almost every morning when she arrived, the makeup women told me, Dorothy would be crying. Several times Snider had strutted around the set behaving obnoxiously toward everyone. The producers had no trouble understanding why Dorothy was upset every day, or why she looked for excuses to stay late on the job. Without a request from her, they started sending a car to pick her up so that Snider would not drive her to work. But there were other times, later in the picture, in her dressing room and near the set, when Dorothy shouted angrily at Snider. She had a strangely deep, resonant voice when angry. I would hear it myself, and see her eyes flash darkly.
An actor on Galaxina, James David Hinton, who became very fond of Dorothy, tried to encourage Snider to go to work. Since Snider was very good at building exercise tables, Hinton said, why didn’t he sell them? But Snider’s interest never lasted very long. There were no friendly signs between Dorothy, and her husband, Hinton recalled. One time Snider leafed through his wife’s new Playboy spread with Hinton and commented: 'Didn’t she have great tits'?
A key sequence in Galaxina called for Dorothy to be spread-eagled against a cold water tower. The producers insisted she remain bound there for several hours, day and night. In one shot of the completed film, the tears she cried are real.
Before we saw each other again on that Sunday in January, Dorothy had written and mailed the suggested rainbow poem to me in New York. But I did not receive it until after our walk by the ocean, and its obvious hints were no longer necessary. She had wanted me to kiss her that night:
. . . The moon encircled
In a misty rainbow—
Those who do not see it
Do not know it is there;
And the answer
For those who do?
It’s personal
The poem was sign
ed: 'D.R.'
That Sunday afternoon the kids had called to say they were ice-skating. Why didn’t I bring Dorothy by so they could meet her again? We drove around Santa Monica looking for the rink, and despite our equally laughable senses of direction, the rink finally turned up. As we moved down the cement walk to the entrance, we held hands for the first time. Her hand was long and narrow and delicate.
Inside, the rink was dark, cold, and damp. Dorothy wobbled precariously on the high heels. Antonia, age twelve, saw us and yelled out; then nine-year-old Sashy waved and they skated over, followed by several friends. It was a sunken rink with a metal fence around the top; I had to squat to get a kiss. Dorothy couldn’t even do that because her skirt was too tight—another of those dresses insisted on by Snider, guaranteed to immobilize her.
D.R. smiled anxiously at the girls as I gave them each a quick kiss. Toni whispered: 'She’s very beautiful, Daddy.' Sashy echoed the sentiment, for which she received a withering glance from Antonia. The two of them gazed at Dorothy; they had seen me with many women over the past two years. Torn whispered: 'She’s the best one, Daddy, I can tell. She looks really nice.'
We then drove to the ocean and parked near a deserted beach. Dorothy took off her shoes and we stepped down the incline onto the sand. The sun was still high and very bright. I took her hand again and we walked for a time in silence. We moved closer to each other. I tucked my left arm around her back, and she rested her right hand lightly at my waist. We walked that way for a while, both looking down. I glanced at Dorothy. She was snuggled against me, gazing straight ahead. Each step became more difficult as the sand got deeper, and we sank down further and further. The sunlight poured over us for all the world to see, yet it was as though we were protected by an invisible, shrinking cocoon that both shielded us and brought us closer every moment. Finally my legs were too heavy to move another step. As I turned to Dorothy and gathered her in my arms, she was trembling. Then I realized that I was too.
For several moments we embraced, neither of us moving. I could feel her everywhere. Our bodies seemed to absorb one another right through our clothes. We looked at each other, and she brought her arms up in front of her, hands below her chin. Her face was in shadow, her hair rimmed in gold by the sun. I held her close, her arms pressing against my chest, and I moved closer and kissed her. She drew her eyebrows tightly together, closed her eyes, and kissed me back. I don’t know how long the kiss went on; I had never experienced anything like it. Love, it is said, is like an addiction, and nothing had ever seemed more true. Her mouth was so sweet, it would be impossible to ever get enough. Then we locked arms and continued to walk along the beach in silence. We didn’t have to speak. We both knew that what had happened hadn’t happened to either of us before.
The world came slowly back into view, and I noticed that in the distance someone was taking pictures of us. I stopped and turned us away sharply. When I glanced back, the photographer had veered toward the ocean, as though he were snapping the beach or the waves. How long had he been there? He now moved casually toward a woman trailing behind him. Amateur photographers? Another pair of lovers? Someone from Playboy? How could they have known we would be on the beach? For some reason it didn’t occur to me that Dorothy might easily have been followed to my house, and then to the beach. At that moment, I dismissed the thought.
We sat down on a piece of driftwood and I put my arms around Dorothy. The man with the camera was even farther away. He probably recognized you, Dorothy said. He had probably recognized her, I said. But I wondered then if there was a chance we had been followed, if someone had been instructed to snap pictures of us, someone who thought they might be useful. Maybe Playboy or Snider was already on to us. But then I told myself I was being paranoid and melodramatic. We kissed again; with the sun hot on our faces, our lips burned together. It felt as though we were drifting slowly down a peaceful river, with everything serene and in place, on the first day of the world.
That evening I caught a plane back to New York, and next morning, with my L. A. street number as the return address, Dorothy mailed to me at the Plaza a greeting card with a color photo of an ocean beach at sunset. Against sky and sea was the dark silhouette of a woman leaping for joy. Inside she had written:
Mon. Jan. 21, 80
Dear Peter,
One day since yesterday . . .
Luv
Dorothy
xoxo
On Saturday, February 2, Dorothy was able to get away, and I flew back to Los Angeles for the weekend. That evening I started a fire in the living room and turned on the music. Lying on cushions by the hearth, we kissed and clasped each other, each embrace more intense than the last. Dorothy was tender, but careful. When my hand rested lightly on her breast for a moment, she removed it, and we continued to kiss. She was right: The kisses were enough. After a half hour, the kissing had reached such a peak that I felt we had made love to climax three or four times.
Dorothy was sitting up, the fire reflected in her eyes. The light flickered, and her beauty was like an extraordinary mirage, too glorious to be real. She reminded me of a unicorn, I told her, as the image flashed into my mind. She was unique, certainty, with the purity and grace symbolic of a unicorn. Dorothy asked what it was, and I remembered that the kids and I had bought little plastic pins on the boardwalk in Venice and among them was a white unicorn head. I got it from the desk drawer and gave it to D.R. She looked at the pin curiously: So this was a unicorn. She had seen them around, but hadn’t known what they were. Had they ever existed? I didn’t know for certain, I said, though it seemed to me that nothing was ever really made lip.
D.R. was delighted with the pin and made it hop through the air, as a child might. She looked like one just then, and I realized how young she was, not twenty until the end of the month. She couldn’t pin the unicorn to her blouse, she said, because her husband would wonder where it had come from, so she put the pin carefully into her purse. I never would see it again. We talked and kissed again, but soon she had to leave. It seemed as though she had just arrived.
The next day Blaine Novak and I had an argument about Dorothy, about her role in the picture and in my personal life. He was convinced that Playboy had maneuvered Dorothy into the movie, that I was being set up romantically: It was no secret that I had a weakness for blondes, and no secret that Hefner wanted a movie star for Playboy. Nicky Blair, David Wilder, and Hefner himself were all putting down Dorothy’s husband, and bending over backward to throw her and me together. Novak was afraid I was going to get hurt. Here I was necking with the girl for a couple of hours and then she went home to her husband. Did he have to draw me a picture?
If there was a plot of some kind, I said angrily, Dorothy certainly was not involved in it. Novak couldn’t be sure, but he doubted that too—although from the way he said it, I knew he didn’t trust Dorothy at all. Hefner was no dope, he went on. If old Hef himself, he conjectured, was interested in Dorothy—and why would he not be?—there was obviously a better chance if her marriage was over. I might have her in the picture, but Hefner had her under contract for another couple of years. 'And don’t forget,' Novak concluded, 'Hef can be pretty vindictive.'
I was in turmoil. The intention had been not to become romantically involved until Dorothy left her husband, but she gave little indication of any such plan. Novak had worked on my own worst fears. Although I knew he trusted women much less than I did, his worries about the film were justified. Anyway I looked at it, the circumstances were very tricky.
So when D.R. called that Sunday, I was feeling desperate. She was at the Playboy studio shooting with Casilli and had no time off. I couldn’t handle the situation, I told her; I was going crazy. It was important for her to be in the picture and I didn’t want our personal relationship to jeopardize that. She was married; there was no getting around it, and she would have to decide what she wanted. Until she did, we would have to keep things between us strictly professional. Dorothy was flustered. She wasn’
t sure what I was really saying: My tone was anguished, but the words were terse. I would be working all day, I said, and flying back to New York the next day. I would call her from there. It was not my finest hour.
Much later, D.R. told me she had cried after we hung up. Casilli assumed Snider had upset her again and was furious: She had cried often over the last three months. After my call, she had not been able to work any more that day. She thought it was over between us.
Our first argument (we had only two) had been sparked by Novak’s ostensible concern, and when I called Dorothy from New York, I apologized for my outburst. I had been confused and frustrated and had taken it out on her. No, Dorothy said, I was right: The situation wasn’t fair to me. But it was difficult for both of us, I said, and I told her Novak’s theory: that it was possible Playboy and Wilder had tried to manipulate us into a relationship to get her a better part and a better deal (I didn’t mention specifically Hefner’s possible involvement or ulterior motives). She agreed. But did I think she herself was involved in any such plot? No, I did not, I thought that she and I had fooled them: We had fallen in love. Dorothy asked if Blaine had said that he thought she was involved in a conspiracy. I told her he was suspicious by nature and very worried about the picture. Dorothy understood that his attitude would, of course, make our situation even more difficult.
Several times in the past few weeks D.R. had not been sure she was going to make it at all, especially during the incident with the puppy that Playboy gave her in Hefner’s name—quite literally: They named it Marston, the boss’s middle name. Dorothy was so excited that she phoned me in New York the day she received the present. Marilyn Grabowski had told her Hef picked it out himself, and D.R. played with the puppy during photography sessions. A few days later, Dorothy called in tears: The puppy had died. She hadn’t even had a chance to take the dog home, she told me. The people at the Playboy studio said they would take care of it, but they hadn’t: 'They didn’t even feed it,' she said. That was not the true story, however. For reasons I wouldn’t know until two years later, Dorothy had lied so as not to alarm me about her personal safety. She gave false accounts to others for the same reason, confiding the truth only to a makeup woman on Galaxina. Because Paul Snider had been responsible for the death of the puppy. He had poisoned it.