by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
D.R. changed the subject to James Caan, the mansion’s resident movie star, who had also been difficult, and another source of pressure. He had asked her into his room for a drink. There she found one of the regular women waiting, and Caan immediately went at it with this girl. 'Which quite surprised me,' D.R. said. She got very angry and left the room. 'I was so mad at Jimmy—that he would . think I’d want to be involved in something like that. He was never very nice to me afterward.'
Then there was the lawyer Playboy recommended, who chased her around his desk and started to take his pants off. Her crying finally made him stop. And then the relative of a top Playboy executive who traveled with her on the early promotions and only booked one suite, then became drunk and abusive when she wouldn’t share his bed. She had lain awake all night on the couch in the living room, too terrified to sleep: He might sneak in and rape her. And there were others she had thought were gentlemen, who disappointed her: TV-star Vince Edwards acted as her friend and then turned on her when she refused his advances. That wasn’t friendship, Dorothy said. Patrick Curtis had been a gentleman, she told me— one of the only gentlemen.
Was Paul faithful to her? No, but she didn’t mind. It was a relief not to have to make love with him. 'All I think about is getting it over with. He goes to sleep right afterward and then I can read or write or watch a movie on TV.'
I remembered again the first time we had made love, not two months before, how modest she had been and still was—not only about showing her body, but in the way she behaved. When she got out of bed, she always wrapped a large white towel around her; and that lovely night in May, when I made a grab for the towel, she cried out sharply and ran to safety. When she returned and slipped back under the covers, I commented on how modest she was and wondered how on earth she had ever lived through all those photo sessions at Playboy. I asked jokingly, not expecting an answer. Dorothy gave one anyway: 'Hate.' I looked at her, my smile disappearing, and asked how she meant that. Dorothy spoke evenly, her eyes cook 'I mean that I hated all those men so much, and my hatred was so strong, it made a kind of invisible shield between them and me, and then I didn’t feel as naked anymore. The hate was protecting me.' I didn’t know at the time which affected me more, the remark itself or the lack of anger or self-pity in her manner. She was just giving me facts— answering a simple question.
Her Playboy companion, Elizabeth Norris, couldn’t fail to understand the meaning behind Dorothy’s excitement when she returned to Montreal in buoyant spirits, running along the hotel corridor calling Elizabeth’s name. She was so happy! She was in love! When Dorothy phoned me, she insisted I say hello to Elizabeth, who of course pretended she had no idea who I was. (Much later, long after Dorothy’s death, I would find among her things left at Snider’s house a packet of custom-printed matches from the Montreal hotel that were embossed: 'Dorothy & Peter.' Surely D.R. had not ordered these. Had Snider seen them?) I warned Dorothy that Norris’s loyalties might more likely be the source of her paycheck, but there was such exuberance in her voice, I couldn’t press the subject further.
On May 5, from Montreal, Dorothy wrote Snider a long letter asking for the freedom to be herself: 'I need some time to be me.' She felt 'manipulated, controlled, and smothered. . . . I just want to be my own person.' She quoted an old saying: 'If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours—if it doesn’t, it never was in the first place.' She mentioned the letter to me but never discussed the contents. 'I hope he understands,' she said. But Snider was infuriated by the letter and flew to Vancouver to meet Dorothy when she arrived for her mother’s wedding on May 10, turning a happy occasion into an unpleasant one for everybody.
D.R. quickly told me over the phone what had happened. They were in a hotel in Vancouver. Snider was downstairs; she could see him down at the pool. He had bullied her, she said, and threatened to leave, go to Hawaii and never speak to her again. Good, I said, let him go. But Dorothy was frightened, she said, she didn’t know why. She was afraid to let him leave in such anger. She wanted to be his friend; he had been responsible for her success. I said that was a ridiculous way to look at it. 'If I hadn’t done Playboy,' Dorothy said, 'I wouldn’t have met you, Peter. I didn’t say anything. 'Isn’t that true?
'We would have met.' I spoke quietly. That wasn’t the point anyway; she did not owe him her life. She had done all the work; hadn’t he lived off her labors for two years? Dorothy’s tone changed abruptly: Snider might be coming. Didn’t she nave her own room? No, she said, Paul had moved into hers; he gave her no choice. She sounded confused and sad. Paul was heading for the elevator and she had to go. She didn’t know when we could speak again.
Several months later, Louise told me how sad her sister had been at that unlucky wedding, trying so hard to be gay for her mother, but ashamed of Paul and of what he had insisted she wear. It was the typical Las Vegas hooker’s outfit: gold plunging neckline, gold spike-heel shoes, too much makeup, hair overly curled. Nelly asked her to please wear a shawl over the front of the dress, at least for the ceremony. Dorothy was glad to wear it all the time; she hated the dress.
Snider made a practice of dressing her as lewdly as she would tolerate and taking her down to the nightclub district. Wherever they went, Snider had arranged to be paid by the club for bringing in the Playboy Playmate. He would march her in and parade her around for the boys to ogle, have a couple of drinks, talk loudly of his accomplishments with her, get his cash, and move on to the next spot. Now that D.R. was Playmate of the Year and starring in two forthcoming movies, one with Audrey Hepburn, John Ritter, and Ben Gazzara, Snider could demand more cash for her appearance. He neither gave Dorothy a dollar of this money nor declared it legally. It was like hooker money—why give the dame any of it? Hadn’t he made her? Wasn’t he entitled to the tips? Dorothy went along with it one last time. She thought maybe it would help to pacify Snider enough so that she could get back to New York without him and finish the picture. She couldn’t think beyond that right now. Maybe if she gave in to Snider, ne would leave her alone for the remainder of our time in New York—to have that, she would sacrifice almost everything—but again she would tell me nothing.
She wrote a poem expressing her terrors and showed it only to Nelly, who knew nothing about our love, but was worried by the anxious, confused words. Since Dorothy had asked for it back, Nelly copied the poem for herself. The original has never been found!:
A tornado of thought sweeping the mind . . .
Wanting to close your eyes
And open them again to a new beginning,
Or to start again on the right road . . .
Life is a mysterious path
Which no two travel alike.
And once the chosen path is taken,
There is no turning back.
Yet there is an alternative sometimes,
A crossroad somewhere in between
Which takes you on a different journey . . .
Will I be happy?
Yes.
For how long?
I don’t know.
The pressure on D.R. constantly increased from Vancouver to Los Angeles. The naked Playboy sessions began again with more promotional appearances; worries about me in New York and about her family in Vancouver; and Snider every morning and night. Dorothy had not liked or trusted her mother’s new husband, which only helped to increase her tensions.
Antonia had left behind in New York a shopping bag full of her things. Back in L.A., Dorothy made a date to take her out one afternoon and return the stuff. They stopped at Snider’s on the way to a movie and Dorothy introduced Toni to Paul as 'the director’s daughter.' Snider was sitting in the dining room wearing only a shirt and jockey shorts, rolling joints with a buddy. There were numerous exercise tables around that Snider had built, and Toni noticed that none of Dorothy’s suitcases had been unpacked. With a smirk, Snider offered Toni a joint and laughed when Dorothy gave him an angry look. She took Toni’s arm and they left. In the
shopping bag, Antonia noticed an eight-by-ten photo of me that I had inscribed to Dorothy; didn’t she want to keep it? D.R. asked Toni to hang on to the picture for her until they were both back in New York.
Snider insisted on coming along to the Carson show and made a nuisance of himself backstage, but D.R. managed not to allow him to affect her poise in front of the camera. Months later I heard that at her request, Snider and his friends had been banished from the NBC dressing room. John Ritter called and raved about her performance with Carson. She had even managed to score off Johnny—unheard of for a newcomer. And she had been so sweet, Ritter felt, and so charming. When Carson asked her which part of a man’s body she liked best, Dorothy paused one beat, and then said: 'Stand up.' It got a good laugh and caught Johnny by surprise, but he liked her for it. He’d stood up; then she picked the chest as her favorite, and Carson said he was insecure about his chest. Later I asked D.R. what prompted her to tell Johnny Carson to stand up. She said his question had made her angry. She thought he was leading her into one of those vulgar areas for cheap laughs, and the words just came out. Actually, she said, Johnny was very nice to her, very polite and funny.
She looked beautiful in her white dress, so excited. She handled herself with both the natural ingenuousness of a newcomer and the self-assurance of a trouper. She even managed, in the most extraordinary way, to tell the truth, but in such an offhand, guileless manner that only a close inspection would reveal its significance—like evidence after a murder. Even as she was carefully alert to Playboy’s image, Dorothy nevertheless backed directly into an admission of her real feelings. Johnny got her to reveal herself by first asking what reaction she thought women had to seeing pictures of naked men. Dorothy answered:
Speaking for myself, I think a male is sexier showing a little bit or some—in a bikini or trunks—rather than fully nude.
The studio audience applauded and Dorothy smiled. Carson closed in:
JOHNNY: I suppose that’s true with men really, you know—the imagination plays a great part.
DOROTHY: I think so.
JOHNNY: And yet you appear here sans everything, right?
Dorothy realized she had been caught off guard, and stumbled for the only moment on the show:
Well, um—there’s a difference, I think—other magazines leave definitely nothing to the imagination.
At the close of the program, Dorothy mentioned the picture she was shooting in New York, and when she said my name, her eyes sparkled. D.R. told Johnny she had just graduated from high school when she was approached by Playboy—she had been working for the telephone company as a clerk-typist. Carson was visibly taken aback. She was putting him on, he said. 'No,' said D.R., 'I worked there just six weeks before they carried me away. . . .'
More than two years later, I saw a videotape of an edited version of the Playboy press conference that officially announced Dorothy as Playmate of 1980; Hefner did the honors. He himself told me on the phone in New York that she had been trembling during the proceedings, and Dorothy confirmed her nervousness and tension. To me, Hefner dismissed her anxieties as youthful stage fright, and Dorothy seemed to echo that interpretation, but a great deal was left unspoken on both sides. Neither of them mentioned their recent blowup when Dorothy refused to strike a Hefner-demanded pose for one of the pictures in his Screen Goddess pictorial. The photo was to be an imitation of Marlene Dietrich straddling a kitchen chair in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. Marlene, however, was fully dressed. Dorothy would be naked, and the pose would be explicit. She exploded into angry tears and refused to make the shot. She never told Mario any of the truth about Hefner. Casilli later said to me that Dorothy was the least talkative, most close-mouthed woman he had photographed in twenty years of girly shots; she never revealed much about her personal life.
At the videotaped press conference, Snider was on the sidelines scowling at Dorothy—while Hefner stood beside her and tried to appear as familiar as possible while still being respectful. He looked a bit anxious and ill at ease, but years of experience helped to conceal his awkwardness. Dorothy was clearly not at ease. Her smiles looked forced, the several glances she threw at her boss were politically friendly, but not genuine: There was an edge of fear in her eyes. Hadn’t D.R. told me as much as she could when she said Hefner always made her feel uncomfortable?
Dorothy returned to New York the third week of May. On the first night, I told her there had been several times while she was gone that I thought she might have changed her mind about us. She started to cry and said that if that was how I felt, she really didn’t know what to do. She was terribly hurt. She had told me how she felt. She had come all the way back from Canada to tell me. She then described how abusive Paul had been, how he tried to make love to her, and how her flesh crawled, she said, whenever he touched her. She particularly couldn’t bear for him to touch her breasts. Dorothy’s eyes filled with a kind of sad terror: 'I had to do it a couple of times, but I’ll never do it again. I felt the way a prostitute must feel.' I took her in my arms and said it was my own insecurities, not a lack of trust.
As the days went by, Dorothy became certain that she was being observed and followed. One day, a man drove alongside her in his car and asked her to meet him later because he needed to talk to her, but Dorothy refused to speak to him. Over several nights of location shooting, I felt a cold gloom on the streets—an angry/dangerous atmosphere I could not pin down. There was the chilly feeling that we were being watched with hostility.
D.R.’s business managers and the new lawyers I had recommended advised her to allow them to send an official letter of separation to Snider, but she preferred something less cold. Wasn’t there another way to make it legal? Attorney Wayne Alexander told her that all she really had to do was to write Snider a letter specifically stating her intention to get a separate place to stay upon her return to Los Angeles. That fact in writing was sufficient under the law to effect a legal separation. She wrote and mailed the letter, her last to Snider, on June 26: 'Don’t make me afraid of you. . . . A sickness only gets worse if it’s not discovered and treated in time.'
A short while after he received the letter, Snider went to their bank with another woman and tried to convince the officers that she was his wife, Dorothy Stratten. He wanted to get into her personal account, having already cleaned out nearly $15,000 from their joint account. The bank refused. What was he buying with all the money? Clothes and jewelry for himself, Dorothy was told, but there was more to it that none of us knew. Wasn’t Snider heavily into cocaine, which was very expensive? Weren’t friendly doctors helpful, for good money, in obtaining the best grade of coke— and many other drugs? Didn’t Snider have a regular drug connection? Snider tried to get Patti Laurman, his new, blond, seventeen-year-old Stratten look-alike, to take a joint and some cocaine, but she refused. Although their relationship remained platonic, Snider held her hand in public so people would believe otherwise. Hadn’t Snider also used Dorothy’s earnings to hire detectives in L.A. and in New York to keep an eye on his wife? The plot was almost identical to the one I had written for the picture. The irony was horrifying.
I suggested to Dorothy that perhaps I should offer her husband $50,000 or $100,000 to start his own talent agency since he seemed to want to run a business. D.R. said that was a possibility, but after hearing of the attempted theft and of how much he had already taken—-all the money she had been planning to put down on a house for him—she told me she would ask her lawyers to go forward with plans for a divorce. Snider would get half of everything she still had left, everything she made from Playboy or any other deal concluded during their marriage, but Dorothy was satisfied. She just wanted to be nee, whatever the cost.
***
In June, with another six weeks of shooting left, Dorothy and I started talking about a trip together, as soon as the filming was completed: A four-to-six-week vacation all over Europe. I wanted to take her to Paris and London and Rome and Venice, to see everything again for th
e first time with Dorothy, to whom the world was new. Her immigration status would come up for renewal on August 1. Officially she was working exclusively for Playboy; and required their full cooperation to be employed and to remain in the United States.
One night we went over to the Colony record store on Broadway, where a young salesclerk recognized Dorothy and asked if she was indeed the Playmate of the Year. D.R. was looking at some tapes, a light blush and smile on her face. There was barely a pause before she answered with a definite 'Nooooo-wah . . .'as though she were politely tired of being asked the question. Afterward she said: ‘‘Wasn’t that embarrassing?' She would be relieved, she said, when her Playboy issue was off the stands.
Dorothy revealed herself more and more as an expert picture actress. She understood lighting, timing, and the nuances of expression. She always made things look natural and easy. And she worked so quickly that sometimes I couldn’t believe my eyes, so I would ask for a second take. The first was often perfect and the second nearly as good. She was never less than believable, with an honest simplicity that was artless. Everybody who saw the rushes (overnight prints of each day’s filming) was impressed by her beauty and her skill. And her behavior on the set was letter perfect: little rehearsal, few takes, no temperament problems, always early and prepared.
At the start, there had been a minor accident with a propman over a pair of glasses D.R. wanted to wear off the set. He refused to give them to her and she complained to me, causing friction between the crewman and myself. I knew situations like that were dangerous and was trying to find a moment to explain, but she brought it up the very next evening. She was sorry, she said, for coming to me that way. 'I shouldn’t have done that.' She had arrived at a conclusion that had taken me many years to figure out. Dorothy never did this again throughout the shooting. I would come to wish that she had troubled me more with her problems.