by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
David sat between Patti Hansen and Mrs. Susskind, who looked beautiful but pained. She kept glancing nervously at David’s drink, which he kept refilling. Patti flirted with him mercilessly, but ne seemed to like that. Then she would turn toward me and make faces.
After Patti slipped away there was an empty seat next to Susskind and, late in the evening, Dorothy went over and chatted briefly with Mrs. Susskind— trapped the whole night between her husband and Ben Gazzara, who looked like a caged animal all the while, smoking cigars and cigarettes in a chain, downing one drink after another.
Then, Dorothy squatted next to Susskind. He looked down at her, struck at close hand by her beauty, perhaps even slightly chastened by it. Dorothy looked up at him and said: 'You know, Mr. Susskind, I don’t think you’re half as mean a person as you pretend to be.'
David gazed down at her dimly, not sure where she was going, but he tried to smile, his eyes mellowing a bit. 'Oh, really?' he said. 'Why is that?'
Dorothy answered with great warmth: 'Because you couldn’t be and have such a very lovely wife as Mrs. Susskind.'
Mrs. Susskind became flushed and tried to smile, her eyelids fluttering helplessly. Susskind never moved his eyes from Dorothy—his smile frozen in a kind of sad glaze, more forlorn than I would have thought possible. 'Oh, I don’t know,' he said after a while, 'I’m pretty mean.'
If They All Laughed was going to be the way I wanted it to be, its characters would behave with politeness and good humor, there would be grace in their sadness, and stoicism in their dealings with life. Yet there would be a hope to better their own destinies. Against all odds, they would keep trying. And there would be little time for envy, jealousy, or hate. Earl Ball and Jo-El Sonnier had written a line in a song Colleen Camp was going to sing, and as the shooting went on, I realized that if the movie had a single point to make, their lyric said it:
. . . If you love someone,
You want what’s best for them . . .
Making a picture is a drug of sorts: You check out of the real world for several months, with no time to think about life’s problems. The world you are creating becomes reality, as well as both mission and obsession—at once the ultimate escape and the ultimate trap. And D.R. and I were surrounded by that fantasy world, and the problems of maintaining it, twenty-four hours a day.
***
Barely four weeks later, as we sat in the limousine taking Dorothy to the airport, a cassette played songs we had selected for the picture. Dorothy would be gone almost a month, to Canada and then to L. A., on a publicity tour for the forthcoming June issue of Playboy, in which she would be displayed over numerous pages as the Playmate of the Year. There would be a press conference with Hefner, interviews everywhere, on local and national TV and radio, including the Johnny Carson show. Dorothy would see her family and friends in Vancouver and attend her mother’s wedding. And she would see Paul. She still hoped she wouldn’t have to see him until Los Angeles, but he had said he was going to meet her in Vancouver, and she dreaded the encounter.
Dorothy’s shoulder rested against my chest, and our heads were together, leaning back against the seat. How little time we had really had. How much had happened! It seemed that only a day ago she had arrived. Then a few days later, my daughters had flown in. Then we had started filming, and for good luck I had made certain Dorothy was in the first shot.
D.R. had cast an extraordinary spell over my two daughters. Barely a week after they had arrived, the three acted as if they had known each other for years. What made the girls most fond of Dorothy, I think, was her ability to enter their world without patronizing them by acting either too childlike or too parental. She behaved as an equal. Without calculation, guile, or effort, she became one of them.
All the phones in the suite could ring at once, with the typewriter and doorbell going full blast, and fifteen people running in and out of the place, but if I could glance over at these three women on the floor by the windows, coloring a magic dragon together, I would know that nothing was wrong with the world, that everything would be all right. If I had to choose five moments in my life when I was most serenely happy and knew it, one of them would include those brief times I sat in the midst of a whirlwind of production and knew that, with the slightest movement of my head, I could see the three people dearest to me on earth.
The girls and Dorothy established a bond that proved very strong. Antonia was just at the age when she wanted to be older by eight years, and D.R. had a way of making her feel older, which gave her an air of maturity. But Dorothy made Toni laugh too, which was not that easy. She made us all laugh—her own had such joy, it was irresistible. Her face would flush, her eyes tear, and she would bring her hands to her cheeks with delight, like a small child. Or she’d throw back her head and laugh with such abandon, you were swept along and realized with surprise that you were laughing yourself.
Dorothy’s acting was like that too. She couldn’t make a wrong move. Most of the time she looked unruffled, and this apparent casualness gave her amazing power. She learned faster than anyone I had known, absorbed everything instantly, and never slipped backward. She was a born star, the epitome of the blond beauty. True picture stars are not only unique, but a dream of perfection. Movie stars can be manufactured through staging tricks and photography; but Dorothy was, on every level, the real thing. It was impossible to take your eyes off her.
D.R. had an extraordinary ability in dealing with people’s temperamental side, especially mine. She usually managed to make me laugh at myself. Once, during a production meeting, when she sensed the beginning of an unnecessary upset, Dorothy leaned over to me and whispered, 'Your heart, darling, your heart,' with a tiny smile in her eyes and a grave note of concern in her voice. It made me laugh out loud the first time, and D.R. used the line at equally appropriate moments ever after. She never failed to get at least a grin from me.
The 'director’s girlfriend' is a difficult role to play in the picture community—a glass house with all the lights on. Dorothy was married; we were adulterers. We tried to be discreet when the cars dropped us off at the end of the day; Dorothy went to the Wyndham and I to the Plaza. She would come over to my suite within the hour, usually as soon as the production people had gone and we could be alone. Since we had to be up by 6:00, we couldn’t go to sleep too late; though of course we did, all the time, and never felt tired. There is nothing like being in love to make you feel alive; you know the beginning and end of all things and times—it can’t be spoken in words, but it can be seen in the farthest depth of your lover’s eyes.
She wrote me a poem and left it by the bed one morning when she went out:
Holding each other, our bodies perspire . . .
I want to say so many things
That hopefully my eyes portray in silence.
Your hands so slender,
I feel them, as a blind man
Carefully touching every part of me
As if it will be for the last time.
I close my eyes and feel the room
So full of emotion. . .
And we sleep contentedly
In each other’s arms
Knowing the morning will bring
A new day of love.
A midnight walk to Doubleday’s bookstore was dear to us, we knew then; and dinner at Nicola’s, or at Lenge’s Japanese place on Columbus Avenue, or room service at the Plaza, or breakfast in the Edwardian Room. On weekends I would cut the picture in the suite while D.R. went to a play or a movie. When she came back—I always stayed at the cutting table longer than I said I would—she brought me plates of cookies, and never made me feel pressured.
On her third night in the city, we went to the bookshop together for the first time. Dorothy was like an enthusiastic college student, picking out paperbacks for the new year. I kept forgetting she was just college age. By nature D.R. was scholarly, so I wasn’t surprised to learn she had been a whiz at school, finishing in the top third of her class. She had done a hi
gh-school essay once, she told me, on homosexuality. I asked why she had chosen that subject. She was just interested, she said, didn’t know anything about it and thought she would find out a little. Had she? Yes—it was OK, but it wasn’t for her. More than once she mentioned that she had thought of studying law. For a week she worked as a court stenographer in Vancouver, but the evidence and photographs she had to see had shocked her. Robbery, rape, murder— those were things on TV or in the movies, she said, but seeing them almost firsthand was too terrifying.
The kids and I had the best Easter of our lives. Dorothy staged an elaborate Easter egg hunt in the living room of our suite. She hid candies and chocolates all over the place, and as soon as one of the girls got close, Dorothy shouted: 'Nothing near there!' When the kids found them, she would scream. The three were laughing so much it took quite a while to find all the sweets. Toni found most of them, but Dorothy made sure that Sashy found the one real egg and won the prize: a beanbag dog. The girls had picked out a large, disgruntled stuffed rabbit to represent me, and a small white rabbit as Dorothy.
The first professional stage production Dorothy ever saw was the Broadway version of The Elephant Man, a drama about the nineteenth-century 'freak,' John Merrick; she went alone to a matinee one afternoon while I was working. She had been fascinated by the story, and a few days later near midnight in Doubleday’s, she picked up a factual study of Merrick and began leafing through it avidly. She didn’t blanch at the naked photographs of Merrick’s grotesquely shaped body. Five paces away, my eye couldn’t stay on the pages she was studying so closely. D.R. bought the book and read it with keen interest.
One month after her death, I would see the play I realized then the reason D.R. had felt such empathy with 'elephant man' John Merrick. Her outward appearance, like his, concealed and distracted from her true identity. His grotesque form masked a pure and loving spirit. For most people it was equally impossible to see beyond the dazzle of Dorothy s beauty.
D.R. took the kids places; she took Antonia to the park, where they sat on a large rock and Dorothy read while Toni colored for hours. It was unusual for Antonia to be so easily amused, but she loved being with D.R.—she felt privileged. Several of the drawings in the coloring book were marked 'By Antonia and Dorothy' or 'By Dorothy and Antonia,' and one D.R. signed and dated 'ANTONIA & DOROTHY MARCH 31, 1980.' The funny thing was that Toni had little regard for possessions. She lost everything, including watches, clothes, jewelry. But she managed to keep the Tales of Great Dragons, with its multicolored murders of ancient dragons by horsebacked knights of old for the honor of queens and maidens fair.
In the midst of those idyllic days, the shadow of Snider was always with us. He phoned her constantly, and daily left messages at the Wyndham: 'Say that her husband called.' D.R. would phone him back, with increasingly strange looks from the desk clerks and elevator men, who knew she never slept there. I could see the suppressed smiles when I went upstairs with her once or twice. By the end of shooting, she had come to associate Snider with the room at the Wyndham, and told me several times that she couldn’t bear to go there anymore.
After one long phone conversation with him, Dorothy told me: 'Paul wants to move into a house so we can start having children.' She made a face and shook her head. 'I’ll buy him a house,' she said, 'but I’m not going to have children with him.' At the time, it was almost funny to me: the code of the eighties. I thought I knew what she meant. Certainly the house was a way of repaying whatever she thought she owed him, but everyone she knew advised her against buying it. Her business managers, lawyers, and agents, her Playboy associates, and her mother thought it was foolish. They told Dorothy that Snider was just trying to get his hands on some American property before there were any more problems in their marriage—as he knew there were. A divorce might not yield enough cash after the fifty/ fifty split to pay for a new house. But now, with the 100 percent still intact, Snider could use all of his wife s money. But it was their money, Dorothy said, even though she had earned it; they were married— just as it had been 'their' Mercedes, though only Snider drove it.
***
For the weekend of May 2, Dorothy planned an elaborate surprise for me that she pulled off splendidly— at considerable cost, inconvenience, and risk. She flew down from Montreal on Friday, landed at Newark, took a cab to the Plaza, and just before midnight pushed the doorbell of Suite 1001. She had enlisted the help of Audrey Hepburn’s nineteen-year-old son, Sean Ferrer, and asked him not to tell me, but Sean unwittingly told Blaine Novak, who spoiled the surprise by revealing her plans to me. Yet I fell asleep that evening, and when the bell awakened me and I opened the door to find Dorothy standing there, she seemed to have appeared like the vision of a long-remembered dream of Paradise. She looked so beautiful that it took my breath away. I forgot that I was pretending to be surprised, and I was. She was so happy, she said later. She wasn’t used to happiness.
She had come to New York to confirm that we were very much in love with each other and that to pretend anything else was useless. She was going to have to do something about her marriage because—neither of us said it, but it was implicit—we wanted to be together, live together, travel together, have children together.
She had brought along an advance copy of the Playmate of the Year issue, with her photo on the cover. It was terrible. The contrast between the first layout she had done and this one was striking. In these pictures she looked profoundly unhappy. A fixed smile was on the cover, with her eyes masking any emotion: There was something cow-like in the pose they had told her to assume in the low-cut dress, so the boys could see a sufficient amount of breast. One of the most strikingly beautiful faces of our time wasn’t enough. But D.R. had managed to remove any eroticism from her expression—there was a desperation behind her eyes. Masquerading as a mannequin, she became a human wax figure for the kiddies. The photos inside the magazine were all like that, but the one on the cover was the most frightening. It didn’t even look like the Dorothy I knew.
'My body looks so much older too,' she said objectively, with only a trace of regret for the youth she had seen so briefly and enjoyed so little. I didn’t want to look at the pictures too closely, but Dorothy insisted on going over each page carefully. She wanted my opinion. She had been worried about several of the photos, about how her breasts appeared, and about the awful one with the dog who had died.
In March, the first time we slept together, I noticed that her left breast was smaller than her right. The change had occurred early in 1979, right after the first few Playboy jobs. 'I just got worn out and I got really sick. I had to go to bed for two weeks and I lost a lot of weight. My left breast got smaller than my right. There always was a little difference, but after I lost all that weight it became much more noticeable—-one full bra-size different.' She looked very unhappy. Maybe, I thought for a moment, the change was her body’s way of trying to disqualify itself from the job that made her so sick; but I didn’t say anything.
As we looked at the pictures, I saw the editors had managed to conceal the difference, but I knew the fuss required to take even the simplest pictures, and thought again what a terrible strain the whole thing must have been on her. I said only that it must have been difficult, and D.R. said: 'It was—you know?' The last word rose plaintively, still a note of surprise that the world could be so cruel.
We stopped at the photo of Dorothy and the little dog they had given her with Hefner’s middle name. She had already told me about this picture: They had caught her unaware, her legs in such a position that Casuli could snap a good view of her vagina. Knowing Dorothy’s stand about that kind of shot, and with continued pressure from Hefner, someone had suggested a dog to distract her. 'It’s not even a good picture,' she said. The photo was over-lighted and in incredibly bad taste. Dorothy’s face was lit up like a joyful ten-year-old with a new puppy on Christmas, her guard down just long enough to flash her genitals to the waiting multitudes. I tried to make as little of the picture
as possible, but there was no question that it depressed me.
Afterward, there was always amusement in her face when she told people, Peter doesn’t like my layout.' She looked pleased about that, and I asked her if she liked it. 'I’m not a hypocrite,' Dorothy said. 'I did it, didn’t I?' But under what pressure? 'I still did it. I’m not going to go around saying I don’t like what they’ve done to me in Playboy.' That didn’t mean she had to go on endorsing the magazine and promoting it. 'But I do. That’s what it says in my contract; it’s a three-year contract, with more than a year to go: nude pictures, nude movies, and promotions—anytime they want.' What would happen if she refused? Well, she had said no to a lot of promotions and pictures. They weren’t being so bad about that now; things definitely had improved. 'They could have said they wouldn’t let me do this movie—they could have insisted. I am their Playmate of the Year. They’re giving me $250,000 in gifts.' Which would be treated as income, I said, so the taxes would be heavy. D.R. nodded, 'About $80,000.' She added: 'I don’t really want any of that stuff—maybe the camera and the watch—that’s about it.' The 'gifts' were highly overpriced and she would have to sell most of them just to pay the taxes.
Many months later it would break my heart to remember the protective way she had described her Jacuzzi encounter with Hugh Hefner—a version she could only wish were true. After everyone on his staff and all his friends had told her repeatedly how impressed he was with her, and how interested in her career, Dorothy said, he had surprised her in the Jacuzzi late one night and made an obvious pass. She told him that she was 'getting married, and wanted to be a good girl.' And Hefner said she was a good girl, and left her alone. On that weekend in May, D.R. added only that Hefner had become considerably more insistent after that night in the Jacuzzi. One time he banged on her door until she finally had to open it and tell him to please leave her alone, that she had a boyfriend and planned to be married. He had gotten angry that time, she said. He was even angrier, I later realized when I knew the truth: The rejection had been much stronger. Hefner had miscalculated and moved too fast. His best game hadn’t been good enough to overcome his misjudgment of Dorothy’s character. Of course Hefner would be angry—he had stolen a single round and lost everything to Snider, a local boy just this side of a bum.