by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
On the grass to help her stand;
She looks around and sighs again,
And knows it will still be there.
That final weekend in New York, Dorothy brought out a medium-sized box, gift wrapped, a present for me. The box was much heavier than it looked, and, to indicate my surprise, I pretended to stumble. Dorothy grinned, her eyes sparkling. I smiled at her manner, like a kid who can’t wait for you to open a present. I felt as though I had outgrown presents. Maybe I was embarrassed too; she had given me so many gifts. But I never expected what was inside: a unicorn made of solid brass, nearly a foot high. Did I like it? she asked as I gingerly lifted the present out of its wrapping. The unicorn stood rearing up on its hind legs, attached to an irregularly shaped base of brass, like a tiny island, on which I saw that Dorothy had had an inscription engraved. In simple block lettering, it read:
TO PETER
'ONE DAY SINCE
YESTERDAY'
FOREVER,
DOROTHY
There was a shy smile on her face. She had found something so forthright and lovely. It was no small ornament, but an extraordinary prize, and it would mean more than a dozen Oscars.
***
We spent ten shimmering days and ten magical nights in London. In the distance dark clouds were forming, warnings we tried to ignore. Dorothy’s awareness of doom was far greater than mine. I would not understand until much later—long after the most tragic possibilities forecast in the signs had become horrible fact. We gave a reward to ourselves—the honeymoon we had both wanted. And it did become that in a way: a very brief and very beautiful period of borrowed time, in which we tried to let the world fall away.
I wanted to share with her a city I had come to know and a culture in which I sensed she would thrive, and she did. It was her first trip to Europe since she was four. We went to the theater almost every night, from plays by Pinter to Dario Fo, caught Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald, visited Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace, the National Gallery, and Trafalgar Square, and dined in restaurants all over town. Dorothy had never been to a museum, nor had she ever seen a performance of a play she had read. So we went to see Private Lives. That it was playing was a good omen, we both thought. Everything was going our way after all. But the name of the chauffeur who met us at Heathrow with a new Daimler froze our smiles: The pleasant-looking man introduced himself as Paul. D.R. and I avoided looking at each other. To her the name was a reminder of everything she wanted to forget.
We settled into a lovely kind of wedded life. D.R. was still modest with me, but less so. She allowed a dim light in the room when we made love; and when I showered, she sometimes stood at the bathroom mirror wrapped in a towel so that we could talk.
Late one night, in the middle of our stay, D.R. was curled up on the couch in the living room leafing through a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald stories she had just finished. She preferred his to Hemingway’s, she had decided: The writing seemed more natural, less self-conscious. She turned to the last page of 'Winter Dreams,' and recalled for me that Dexter’s friend, Devlin, is talking about the love of Dexter’s life: 'Lots of women fade just like that.' After Devlin leaves, Dexter looks out the window at the New York sunset and is overcome with a sense of loss. Dorothy began reading, without hesitation, and with all the understanding in the world:
The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. In a sort of panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring up a picture of the waters lapping on Sherry Island and the moonlit veranda, and gingham on the golf-links and the dry sun and the gold color of her neck’s soft down. And her mouth damp to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like new fine linen in the morning. Why, these things were no longer in the world. They had existed and they existed no longer. . . .
I suddenly realized I was crying. There were usually warning signs and I could control myself, but not this time. Dorothy continued:
For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. . . .
D.R. looked over—she had read the words of the title with such soft eloquence—and saw now that I was crying. She seemed a little surprised and smiled tenderly, moved closer, and put her arms around me.
We spent more than 240 hours together and the passing of each one made me yearn for another thousand to follow right away. When we saw Private Lives, we held each other’s hands tightly during the second act. Tears came to our eyes as the performers spoke the lines I had read to Dorothy in my office nearly eight months before. Suddenly they seemed to mean so much more:
AMANDA: What happens if one of us dies? Does the one that’s left still laugh?
ELYOT: Yes, yes, with all his might.
AMANDA: (wistfully clutching his hand): That’s serious enough, isn’t it?
ELYOT: No, no, it isn’t. Death’s very laughable, such a cunning little mystery. All done with mirrors.
There was a strange moment when we left the National Theater after seeing Amadeus. We had been very moved by the production and play: the dreadful tale of how Mozart had been poisoned by the envy and hatred of the rival composer and pretended friend, Antonio Salieri. Paul Scofield’s performance as Salieri captured the essential meanness in mediocrity; the terrible pettiness and suppressed venom behind a polite, courtly manner was chilling. The drama had frightening implications and disturbed us both because the play was a love story too: Mozart and Constanze, his lusty wife and muse, were very much in love, and had an innocence and honesty unique among the play’s characters. Mozart’s downfall, then, caused partially by his irreverent, often tactless habit of telling the truth, was also the destruction of an inspiring and passionate love. As Dorothy and I left the theater, our eyes met. We suddenly glimpsed the death of each other. I clutched her hand tightly and we ran to the car. Only after we were riding along the wet streets did we dare to look at one another again.
One afternoon while we were shopping, Dorothy excused herself to go up the block and find some water. She was delayed and after a while, I went searching and couldn’t find her. I reacted as though she had been kidnapped. My heart was pounding by the time I finally spotted her on the crowded street. She shook her head when she saw that I was alarmed, and we embraced in the safety of the car as she said: 'Poor baby.' I didn’t ever want her out of my sight again, I said, and she grinned. Did she know now truly I meant what I’d said? Or realize that I would have been most content if we could have been together every hour of every day for the rest of our lives?
A few days later, Dorothy was lying on the bed while I sat beside her. Her mother, she said, was worried that Paul might try to harm her physically. I looked at Dorothy sharply, but she was smiling faintly. Did she agree with her mother? She shook her head no, and smiled again. 'I don’t think Paul would ever harm me.' Nelly later would tell me her own exact words: 'He could cut your face,' she had said, 'he could ruin your face.' But D.R. only smiled at my worried expression and repeated her belief that Paul would never hurt her. I thought then perhaps she had mentioned it because of my safety. Didn’t jealous husbands often go after the lover? Somehow for the first time, the idea seemed possible. But it didn’t worry me: I was certain that Snider could eventually be bought off. I also believed that he would never harm D.R. since the thought was inconceivable to me.
During one of our last days in London, Dorothy spoke about Hefner’s pursuit of two of her friends from Playboy, both of whom were actively disinterested. D.R. said that, despite her reluctance, one friend had been maneuvered into sex with Hefner. When I expressed
dismay, Dorothy was quick to defend her: I had no idea, she said, now difficult the pressures at Playboy were. The other friend, a future Playmate of the Year, had done everything she could to avoid Hefner, and Dorothy was saddened to have heard recently that she too had been forced through circumstances to capitulate to him. I didn’t realize at the time that D.R. was circling around the secret she most wanted to unburden to me, watching for my reactions to her friends’ misfortunes, the better to gauge my ability to deal with her own. But she was right, I had no idea. I only shook my head and said something about the women not having been as smart as she had been in avoiding the traps. Dorothy did not mention the subject again.
There were other warnings I did not understand. She walked out in the middle of the first act of Doctor Faustus, Marlowe’s play about the man who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for fortune, fame, and power. It was the last play she would see. Dorothy listened more and more intensely as the story unfolded. The student Faust, bored, cynical, and self-interested, reminded her all too well of the men she had just escaped. She had felt uneasy from the beginning, and sat forward. By the end of the fourth scene, it was clear that catastrophe was imminent. D.R. felt irrevocably implicated, and terrified.
The next scene began with a frenzied rape staged behind a scrim, and accompanied by the screaming sound track from the shower murder in Hitchcock’s Psycho. The young actress—the first woman in the play thus far—arched her torso and threw back her head in agony. As Faust and Mephisto had their way with her, the piercing, horrifying cries from the sound track seemed to come from the woman’s silent open mouth. The walls of the theater closed in on D.R. The actress’s silent scream became a shriek in Dorothy’s mind, her own muffled cry of pain.
As the rape went on, the flashbacks continued: perhaps the dark, gloomy scent of the Playboy studio, the men sweating from behind their cameras as she walked around naked for them to fondle or rape in their imaginations. She had sinned as much as they, hadn’t she, in the eyes of God? Wasn’t that what this play was saying to her? That people still sold their souls to the Devil for fame and fortune, and that others could be thrown into the bargain?
D.R. moved slightly in her chair. I thought she was going to close her eyes or put her hands to her face, but instead she leaned over and said, flatly: 'I’m not going to watch this.' She was past me and up the aisle and through the door before I could even figure out what she had said. I got up and left as quietly as possible.
It was drizzling slightly, but D.R. was pacing up and down the wet sidewalk in front of the theater. She looked lovely, resolute, and a little angry. It was a relief to be out of the theater. She hated the play, she said. The idea that a man would actually sell his soul to the Devil! She spoke as though she had been personally insulted. But wasn’t it a metaphor? I asked. Didn’t a lot of people sell themselves for money or power? But not consciously to the Devil, Dorothy said seriously. That was absurd. I could stay and see the rest of the play if I wanted, but she would prefer not to speak of it any further.
Back in the suite, I pressed for answers on why the show had bothered her. She began to cry, and there was a touch of hysteria in her voice that I had never heard before. Please! she pleaded, sitting on the bed in her room, all the new clothes I had bought her packed neatly in suitcases, ready to go home. Tears rolled down her cheeks. 'Please don’t make me talk about it anymore! I have a right not to talk about something, don’t I!?'
The real problem was that Dorothy understood me far better than I ever understood her until it was too late. She knew certain things would be difficult to tell me, and she wanted to protect our relationship above all, to shield me from the unpleasantness in her own life. She felt it was not my problem, that I had enough troubles with my career and family. In many ways I didn’t really understand D.R. until after she was killed—some things were not clear until almost two years later, and I continued to find out horrors she had never told me about. I had believed that she was revealing all of her innermost secrets because I told her most of mine and would have told them all if we had had the time. There was so little time. D.R. and I had just begun to live, but there were fears and terrors locked in her heart that I never suspected.
I felt so sorry that I had pressed her, that I hadn’t been quick enough to tread carefully. But Dorothy could put on a mask that was absolutely blank, that couldn’t be penetrated. She had learned to deal with men, and a deadpan expression was a hint for a man to disappear. She had learned that to smile shyly only encouraged men. So many didn’t know the difference between politeness and invitation; they were arrogant enough to believe that if a woman smiled or looked kind, she wanted to bed them. But why would Dorothy, I thought, feel akin to a fallen angel?
On our last morning in England, two weeks before she was murdered, when Dorothy asked me if I had ever wanted to make a sad love story, it never entered my mind that she was thinking of us. I knew a little of the sadness she had been through, but I couldn’t even guess how worried she was that our life together might be destroyed. The hell into which she had fallen was known to her in ways I never suspected, and when we fell in love, to Dorothy I became her only way out—the one hope she had to be free of the nightmare world she had been lured into while still a child. It was that same morning she asked again if I had read Our Town.
***
During that week we had wanted to go somewhere romantic, away from people, someplace outside in the rare London sun. The Serpentine, we were told, an area on the far side of the Thames River, where people just liked to walk, would fit the bill perfectly. As we rode toward the river, Dorothy asked the driver about the Serpentine like an excited child on an outing who wants to know everything that’s going to happen. After the car pulled into a parking area down near the riverside, we took each other’s hands and walked up onto the paved road that ran along the shore as far as we could see. There were rowboats and children, women in hats and dresses, men in suits or sporting clothes, and lots of dogs. It was wonderfully fresh and unspoiled: open fields of grass, large trees, and the quiet waters of the ancient river. Every moment was special during those two brief hours on the Thames. There was magic in the country air.
For time to time Dorothy had a faraway look that I didn’t understand, and when I asked, she would say: Nothing, she hadn’t been thinking of anything special. Perhaps she felt as I did that we had touched the heavens, and she was afraid to speak lest the holy thing we had together be taken away from us. Perhaps there was something wrong with her: Hadn’t every joy been followed by the darkest fall? Hadn’t she sensed and seen danger from men since her youngest days? The stem father who deserted her, the boys who chased her, spit at her, knocked her down, kicked her, exposed themselves to her, her first lover’s fury toward her, her husband’s violent tirades against her, and the traumatic mansion incident. Dorothy’s tentative look masked a kind of watchfulness. Yet only moments before, we had acknowledged the strength of our devotion to each other.
D.R. had found a spot in the sun a few yards off the walkway and she sat on the grass. I joined her as she leaned back on her arm and we looked at each other, smiling. It seemed as though we had been transported into one of those vivid but tranquil landscapes we had seen at the National Gallery. A rare moment when two people were indescribably happy at the same time, in the same place, together on a cloud of perfect understanding. Dorothy started to laugh. I didn’t know why, but her laughter was so infectious that I laughed too. I asked what was funny, but she was laughing so hard, it took a few seconds for her to get the answer out. She shrugged her shoulders slightly and said: 'Nothing!' Then she laughed even louder. Now I had trouble speaking myself. Finally, I repeated the word: 'Nothing?' Dorothy nodded, and then shrieked with laughter, so strong and full it echoed off the skies. I had never heard anyone laugh that way—with total abandon. I joined her in body-shaking silent laughter, my sides aching. Tears streamed down our cheeks as she pointed at me and laughed even more. We were convulsed with l
aughter and there wasn’t any way to stop it. We would simmer down for a moment, trying to speak, and then one of us would be off again, with the other following. What we must have looked like under those trees, howling, we didn’t think or care about. Dorothy’s laughter that day had the joy of the ages, and I felt that it would ring through time forever.
V - The Ninth Moon
. . . Racing
To catch up with time,
But, when out of breath,
Time still races on
And laughs.
Yet now
There is no need to race,
But time to rest,
And let time’s silly game
Be played by someone else.
—Dorothy Stratten Vancouver, 1976-77
Aren’t there always hunters in pursuit of the unicorn, and others who stand by and watch or weep? The most brilliant detective in the world, who might solve to the tiniest detail each possible aspect of the crime, could not give back to Dorothy one second more of life; nor could he give to the ones who loved her an extra moment of her radiance. Hefner, the master of the chase, set in motion the frenzy of Snider’s egomania by banning him from the mansion. Five days after Snider found out, Dorothy’s future was gone.
The killer, by committing suicide, made the most humane gesture of his life. Hefner tried to hide his own culpability, to cover up the trail of clues in public statements and at length in his own magazine.
On July 30, my forty-first birthday, Dorothy and I had our longest day together, gaining back the nine hours we had lost flying to New York and Europe. At London’s Heathrow Airport, we had just begun to look through the bookstalls in the waiting area when she said, 'I want to show you something,' and walked over to the men’s magazines. She pulled down one of the Playboy’s special all-photo editions, The Playboy Girls of This or That, and came back, flipping quickly through the pictures. She held the magazine open for me and I moved behind her slightly to take a better look. It was a full-page color shot of Dorothy sitting on a rug, stark naked, legs brought up under her, smiling at someone at the right, and clearly unaware of what was visible from the left angle of Playboy’s ever-vigilant cameras. Someone had perhaps made a funny remark, and while she was off guard they caught what they wanted.