by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
Soon after, for Valentine’s Day, D.R. sent me another poem:
Looking at life through a window,
Watching the pain, the forced smiles,
A little bit of laughter . . .
And life goes on, leaving no time
To get off the world and rest—
Until the very end,
When time means nothing anymore,
Because then you have All the time in the world,
Forever and ever.
On February 15, I flew back to Los Angeles. D.R. and I had a date the next afternoon—Saturday. I gave her a copy of The Arabian Nights for Valentine’s Day and inscribed several pages in a code that spelled: EB. loves D.R. We went upstairs to play some tapes and I wanted to show Dorothy the master suite: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two dressing rooms. Cybill and I lived there together for five years, but I had never asked anyone else to share the place with me. I realized how much I wanted Dorothy there, anywhere, all the time. As the tape played, we sat on the edge of the bed and kissed; soon we were lying on the bed and it became difficult for us to stop kissing. Then D.R. stood up and walked out onto the balcony overlooking the fountain and courtyard. The sun was going down. I followed her, and we looked at each other for a long time.
We were thinking the same thing, and I could tell from the look in her eyes that she was afraid going any further would be wrong. I knew it myself, but the temptation was too strong to deny. She shook her head ever so slightly, and after a moment I nodded and said, 'I know.' The tension left her face. It would simply be too difficult, she said, to go back to her husband afterward; it was already difficult enough. We kissed and held each other. We had better get the tea now, I said, and D.R. smiled as she took my hand and we went down to the kitchen.
After dark, we lay by the fire in the living room. We wouldn’t see each other for more than a month, not until she came to New York for rehearsals toward the end of March. It was going to be a long month, we both knew. I told her it would be very difficult for us until she decided whether or not she was going to leave her husband, but that I didn’t want her to leave him for me: I wanted her to leave for her own sake, if she wasn’t happy with him. Dorothy said: 'But I wouldn’t leave my husband for anyone except you.' I looked at her closely. How could she say that? She couldn’t be that certain. She might meet someone next year. Dorothy shook her head slightly: 'No, I would leave only for you.' She was so determined it made me smile.
The room was dark, but I could still see her eyes, soft and sharp at once. Before she had met me, I said, she must have known there were problems in the marriage. 'I knew before we got married,' D.R. said. 'It was already different six months after we started going together.' Why had she married him? I asked. 'I didn’t want to have an argument.' That was a hell of a reason to get married, I said. But Paul had wanted to very badly, D.R. told me. 'My Playboy issue was coming out and I guess maybe he was getting insecure. I felt sorry for him and I loved him. I still love him. But it isn’t the same anymore. I don’t know what’s wrong. . . .' I told her it sounded as though she wasn’t in love with him anymore. 'But why? He’s good to me. He cooks. I come home, I’m exhausted, I’m cranky; I just go to bed. Most times, I don’t let him touch me. I just don’t like to do it with him anymore. Every so often I have to—every two or three weeks, when I run out of excuses.' How long had it been like that? A long time, but since last summer it had been worse: 'I feel so bad—I don’t know what’s wrong.' They had only been married early last summer, I remembered.
There wasn’t anything she could do about it, I said. When the feelings left, they were gone. That was what I’d meant before: If she had not met me, she would have met someone else. She certainly wasn’t happy. She looked at me. 'There would never be anyone but you.' The words were almost chilling in their sureness; for a moment she sounded like an oracle. She sat erect, with a bitter look: 'I can turn off my emotions, you know,' she said. 'I can be very hard. You wouldn’t believe how hard I can be. I can be indifferent. I can stay with Paul and that will be my life.' But why would she settle for so much less than she could have? I didn’t understand. 'Because I already had Steve, now Paul is my husband and then I get divorced and then it’s you and me, and after you someone else and then someone else.' She shook her head. 'No, I’m not going to go through that—I’ve seen what my mother’s gone through like that, and I’m not going to.'
She looked deep into my eyes: 'Peter, if this isn’t very important to you, please let’s not pursue it any further. Because it’s going to be difficult for me now, but it would be even more difficult later.' Every word struck clearly. It was very important, I said, it was the most important thing in my life. Dorothy asked me to make a promise. 'If you ever get tired of being with me, please don’t stay because you feel sorry for me. I wouldn’t want you to feel about being with me the way I feel about being with Paul.' I promised and said I hoped the same went for her feelings about me. She nodded. 'But I never would,' she said. We were saying our vows, I realized, as I hugged her close to me and said I never would either.
In the early hours of that morning, Dorothy wrote me a poem:
A thought in the night,
Lying awake in wonderment
At the simplicity of happiness,
And the complexities of foresights
Which may never be . . .
Because the present
Will slip into the past,
And then the future is now . . .
And the past will never be
Recaptured and spent
The way it should have been.
And the present is spent
By questioning the future.
Around midnight, long after Dorothy left, I had a strange vision. It was so sharp I felt as though I had actually seen across the city and into her bedroom. Something terrible had happened to her. I could see Dorothy quite clearly, lying on her back, a dark male shape above her. Only her face was illuminated, the rest of her in blackness. She was staring directly into my eyes as the man moved on her, and the look on her face was one of pure horror. I blinked, but the picture stayed there. The horror in her eyes increased. It was as vivid as a nightmare, but I was wide awake. To make certain, I glanced around the room. And then looked back. Dorothy was gone.
IV - The Serpentine Laugh
The Serpentine Laugh
Alone, just you and I,
Talking softly, laughing—
Each moment bringing us closer.
A soft kiss, a warm embrace, a song,
And then we talk a little more,
And laugh again,
And the moon peeks through an open window.
Then—in what seems only one moment—
The rays of the sun Are slowly shining brighter.
The evening will be forever—
Yet time was not enough.
—Dorothy Stratten New York, June 1980
By the exit gate at Kennedy, I stood watching nervously as the passengers began to come out. We had flown Dorothy first class, so I expected her among the earliest arrivals. But she was not. Nor was she among the second wave, the third, or the fourth. A 747 carries a lot of people and this one was full. I watched them all come out, but Dorothy was nowhere to be seen. The last few passengers straggled out, the stewardess and the pilots already long gone. No Dorothy. I felt terrible; she must have missed the plane. But why didn’t she call? She had at least four hours to reach me. It didn’t make sense.
I backed away from the exit, turning to ask the whereabouts of Information, and fumbled for the typed piece of paper: American Flight 32 from L.A., arriving 9:02 p.m., Saturday, March 22. I started off along the corridor, walked twenty or thirty paces, and then, for some reason, thought better of it and headed back to weird the gate and the plane. As I turned the comer, a woman was just coming through the doors at the far end. At first I wasn’t sure, but then I knew: It was Dorothy, all right, and she was a mess.
As I think of her now, she l
ooked adorable coming toward me, high heels clomping along, the skirt too tight, shortening her steps. She was trying to walk quickly, carrying two suitcases, a purse, and a shopping bag, her hair going every which way. She looked most of all like a teenaged kid who had just run away from home carrying everything she owned. I was so relieved to see her, I started laughing and she laughed with me.
I grabbed the suitcases, both heavy, and we bumped down the escalator to the baggage carousels, where we eventually picked up another four bags. She had brought virtually all of her clothes and books. It was funny, she said, it felt as though she was moving out; even Paul had commented on it.
She was very talkative and bright and excited. I spent the time trying to look busy with the luggage, just to avoid staring at her dumbly. She chatted on about the last few weeks at Playboy. The only thing that had kept her going was knowing each day brought her closer to New York. Although Dorothy hadn’t really told me that before, she said it matter-of-factly. But it was difficult sometimes to keep up with the importance of what she appeared to say so lightly. D.R. veiled the truth to protect the listener. Yet when she trusted someone, she spoke frankly. She wasn’t coy and she wasn’t a flirt. But she was often shy, which made her quiet. Dorothy believed everyone else’s life and opinions were more important than her own. When she was hurt, it usually went unspoken. She understood and was quick to forgive.
I would never know exactly what Dorothy had gone through to prevent Snider from coming to New York. The Galaxina experience, among many others, would have already made D.R. fully aware of how much more difficult her work would always be if Snider was nearby, and both of us knew his presence in Manhattan would make things impossible for our relationship, yet we never spoke of this except by implication. A couple of times she mentioned that her husband wanted to accompany her for the shooting and asked my position. I told her it would be a closed set and no visitors were permitted. Later she said she had explained this to Snider, but that he still wanted to come with her. I said this was a difficult role for her and that the picture would suffer if she was upset emotionally. Knowing his nature far better now than I did then, I realize what an extraordinary accomplishment it was keeping Paul Snider out of New York. She had made her choice, and this was the first victory she had won for us.
We stopped at the Wyndham Hotel on Fifty-eighth Street. It was better for her to check in alone and get settled, so I went back to my room at the Plaza to wait for her. Not very much later, bathed and changed, she was at my door. She walked in and we kissed for a long time. Then we toured the suite. She loved it. We could see all of Central Park up to Harlem, bordered by Fifth Avenue and Central Park West. We could watch the sun rise and set. It was like living on the most extraordinary set with perfect lighting. The truly beautiful days of spring, just after the equinox, coincided with Dorothy’s arrival.
On our first evening together, as a kind of romantic farewell to winter in Manhattan, it snowed, just enough to make a pretty picture: a gentle snowfall for Dorothy, who had never been to New York and was delighted. At Nicola’s restaurant uptown we sat at a small, round table between the main rooms. Everyone who went by, without exception, looked at Dorothy. It was either terrifying or funny. But D.R. wasn’t amused, though she said they were looking at me. Dorothy could be both polite and naive.
After dinner we went back to the Plaza, and then took a ride through the park in a horse-drawn carriage. Dorothy picked a particularly sweet-looking palomino. The driver asked if we wanted the short tour or the long tour, and I looked at D.R. She mouthed, 'the long one.' It was like a ride on a magic carpet; the horse seemed to float. When Dorothy got cold I gave her my jacket, but we warmed quickly in each other’s arms, riding along the winding roads of the park, a light snow still falling. When we reached the Wyndham, her suite was warm and flowery. She showed me where she had put all her things, gracing the most ordinary acts with enchantment. As I leaned out the window to show her the Plaza entrance again, Dorothy squeezed my arm and told me once more how very happy she was that it had snowed. Didn’t everything look beautiful?
D.R. was going to sleep in her own room tonight. She was clear on that point. But she liked the idea of having a late drink at my place, so we walked up the wet street. It had stopped snowing. On the bed in my room, we kissed for a long time. The overwhelming force was almost impossible to resist. Late in the evening, I played her a rough tape that pianist-composer Earl Poole Ball and I had made of a new song we had written. Earl didn’t know until much later where the idea had come from, nor that the title, One Day Since Yesterday, had not been mine at all. Only D.R. knew the meaning behind the lyric about a clandestine meeting on a sunlit beach:
. . . Like two lovers in those stories,
Walking slowly hand in hand;
Just a dream that really happened . . .
When Dorothy realized what the song was about— somewhere in the middle of the first stanza—she smiled a private smile. She was lying on her back, with her head propped up slightly on a pillow, her hands folded on her stomach and her feet crossed. She would often lie that way, and she seemed the most relaxed at those moments: Her energy was suspended like a profound calm on the sea.
. . . We were lovers in the sunlight—
When can we be that way again?
Was it just one day since yesterday When it all began?
Her eyes were moist when she finally looked over at me.
Early Sunday afternoon the weather was beyond compare, so Dorothy and I, like a lot of other people, took a stroll through Central Park. The only difference between us and everybody else was that no one looked like Dorothy, which was why everyone looked at her. She was carrying a white stuffed unicorn that I had just bought for her at Rumpelmayer’s. The unicorn pin had been lost, she told me. Since it was uncharacteristic of D.R. to lose things, and since (I would discover much later) a unicorn figurine Mario Casilli gave her for her birthday—Dorothy had told a makeup girl at Playboy that she 'loved unicorns'— also was never found, it is reasonable to assume that Snider uncovered both gifts, figured them to be special love tokens from me, and disposed of them both in anger.
Dorothy moved briskly and stared ahead most of the time. I kept up with her and tried to look both formidable and oblivious. Men would stop in their tracks, turn, and stare. Women looked too, but without hostility. No one knew who she was. D.R. just kept moving, and eventually we cut into a side lane and managed to remain fairly secluded after that. But since both of us were nearsighted, we had no idea how conspicuous we really were: Soon afterward a William Morris agent asked Dorothy if she and I were having an affair—he had seen us mooning around in Central Park.
On that afternoon, in the park and back at my suite, when Dorothy and I finally made love, we found what we had been searching for all our lives. We truly made love: creating it again for each other, discovering it together for the first time. We floated dreamlike through the night. The lights were always off and the shades drawn when we made love, because Dorothy wanted it that way. She was extremely modest. Every moment it became clearer that we seemed to fit each other’s forms, like two halves of a finely broken shell. It was the purest experience I had ever had, and as natural as breathing.
It was the brightest time of our lives. I would wake up and watch her lying asleep beside me, and I could hardly believe she was there, that she really existed, that she wasn’t a dream. There was something miraculous about Dorothy Stratten, something not altogether of this world. I knew it even then.
She had to leave early on Monday morning; too quickly, she was dressed and gone. About an hour later, I got up and looked out at the park. The trees were growing green again. The sun was behind Fifth Avenue, bathing Central Park West in gold. I walked into the bathroom and found a message from Dorothy. Using a bar of soap, she had drawn on the mirror a huge heart with an arrow up through the center. The drawing stayed there for well over two months.
***
David Susskind, originall
y the executive producer on They All Laughed, had suffered sleepless nights worrying about the wisdom of my casting mainly unknown players. What made me think any of these people could act? Weren’t they all just friends of mine? To make Susskind feel less pessimistic, we gave a party for him to get to know the cast. I got there late. Audrey Hepburn hadn’t come to New York yet, Gazzara was late, and so were John and Nancy Ritter. When Susskind arrived with his wife, therefore, he was confronted with a sea of unknown faces and, having had a couple of drinks on the way over, David was not in a tactful mood: He let the kids have it, both barrels. He had been saving it for me, but gave it to them.
When I arrived, Dorothy whispered to me that Susskind had said terrible things to everyone. He had made Colleen Camp cry. Could she sing? he had demanded. Could she act? Dorothy was particularly indignant about that, considering all the pictures Colleen had done. I moved quickly over to Susskind and tried to salvage the situation, but there was no hope. Later Ritter said, accurately: 'Susskind pulled us all together. Before that party, we were just a bunch of actors, but after the party, we had something in common—we all hated Susskind.'