by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
The photo and her obvious distaste for it was heightened by the setting: Here we were, thousands of miles from L. A. or New York or Vancouver, in one of the busiest international airports, and there were the most intimate parts of her body available to all the travelers of the globe. This was hardly the photographic art of the nude that she had been promised. This was plain old pornography. 'Isn’t that awful?' she said and flipped the magazine shut with contempt and returned it to the rack. It was the first time she had been blunt on the subject.
In New York the wait at the airport was anxious and unpleasant. The Playboy immigration lawyers had done nothing to get D.R.’s work permit extension stamped, so here at the end of July their Playmate Queen was trying to reenter the United States with a visa that expired August 1 in the year of her reign. The fellows from Customs had given her a rough going-over, delighting in the harassment of a beautiful woman. I saw them making a scene with Dorothy and went over to ask what the problem was. The two men looked up as though startled, and both gave me a look that said they were doing their all-American duty to make sure nobody gets into the United States illegally. But Snider, his visitor’s visa having expired, had managed to stay illegally in the country for some time.
'It’s OK, Peter,' Dorothy said. I backed off, forced to watch from a distance as they instructed D.R. to go through each of her suitcases, and made a big deal about the expiring visa in her passport. She placed a long-distance call to Playboy’s immigration lawyer, but did not have enough change and charged the call to Snider’s number in L.A. Flustered and upset by the Customs officials, she hadn’t thought of the consequences, but now Snider would know she was back in America. The lawyer, of course, would report her precise whereabouts to the world of Playboy.
When the phone company called Snider for approval of the charges, he knew she was flying back without letting him know. Snider had already been in touch with a lawyer in Vancouver on an alienation-of-affections suit against me. It was not difficult to track us down. If we were missed at the airport, we could be caught entering the gates to my place. Snider had also borrowed a gun.
That same afternoon, Hefner’s people told him that Dorothy had cleared Customs in New York, and was headed for Los Angeles. That meant his Playmate of the Year could be videotaped attending his Annual Midsummer Night’s Dream Party. But D.R. and I had agreed in London that neither of us would go this year. Would Hefner take her absence personally? Probably he reasoned as well as Snider did that Dorothy and I were having an affair. If he wasn’t certain, it would be difficult to keep the truth from him for very long. She herself would have to tell Paul, Dorothy said, but she couldn’t face telling Hefner. I agreed to do that. She was committed to Playboy for a week of various promotions in Texas, the Mojave Desert, and then, a week later, in New York. And they were talking about sending her to Chile.
On the plane west, Dorothy became anxious about her phone call, but said nothing to me. Paul could behave violently. What if he came to the airport? She started visualizing scenes—an argument, a fight. The children were going to be there. Peter’s friends, Blaine and Doug, might help, but they were no match for Paul if he was angry or had a gun. She felt certain that someone had been following her in New York, but then it could have been Playboy.
When the last plane we would ever fly together began its long descent into Los Angeles, Dorothy took my arm and said she was scared. She began to cry. I held her hands and moved closer. She shook her head and said it again: 'I’m scared, I don’t know why.' Both of us would have preferred, if we had had any choice, to stay in Europe or to have the jet fly right on to the Orient, to anywhere but Los Angeles, the center of all of our responsibilities and problems. At the airport, where the kids met us with Novak and Dilge, Dorothy acted strangely quiet and apprehensive. She seemed to slouch into herself, and her eyes were dark.
Once in the house, in her new room, there was an odd desperation in her efforts to open one of the new suitcases. The lock had jammed, and D.R. knelt on the floor of her room upstairs and tugged at the lock and battered the case as though her life depended on opening it. She seemed frantic. I tried to calm her down and took over for a few moments before she insisted on resuming the struggle herself. Finally the lock sprang loose. We were relieved. The suitcase had suddenly become a bad omen we had to vanquish.
That first evening, she stood at the upstairs doorway, crying again. She was sorry, she said, it was just difficult. We had been alone together and now there were so many people. I took her in my arms and tried to console her. It would be easier soon. We just had to make it through August, I said, quoting a previous conversation, and D.R. smiled slightly.
When Hefner was told Dorothy was arriving from London, he instructed his people to make certain Paul Snider was not to come to the Midsummer Night’s Dream Party, unless he came with Dorothy. The call went out. They were terribly sorry, but understood there were problems in the marriage, and since Dorothy was Playmate of the Year, it was important for her to feel free to attend this important event.
That night, under a large waning moon, Snider parked his Mercedes across Sunset from Bel Air and walked quickly the two or three short blocks to the gates of my house. The loaded .38 pressed into him. He found a place in the bushes from where he could see both the entrance and exit. Hiding there, he waited for Dorothy or me to come out. He would show us how he dealt with betrayal. No one went in or came out for several hours. Finally Snider walked back to his car, drove up to Mulholland Drive, and thought about killing himself, he later told a girlfriend. He held the borrowed revolver up to the sky and fired twice. Then he returned to the house on Clarkson.
In most Hollywood circles of the late seventies and early eighties, someone who didn’t take cocaine regularly was the exception rather than the rule. Snider had been using it more and more. Dorothy didn’t know how much, or what effect it was having on him. Cocaine gives an icy-cold high that freezes your heart and makes you believe you are all-powerful, invincible, and righteously correct in all of your appetites and impulses. It is the most self-deceiving of drugs, and the most insidious, quietly turning every frequent user into a Mr. Hyde. It grass is the drug of peace, cocaine is the drug of war.
By late evening, Dorothy had calmed down considerably. Her new lawyer, Wayne Alexander, had left a message assuring her that he had checked on the Immigration business personally and that everything would be all right. The permit would be renewed for another six months. That gave them plenty of time to work on a permanent visa. Once she was divorced and could marry me, these problems would disappear.
At my house we were being pulled in several directions at once: The kids and the production people all wanted time with me; Linda and a new woman accountant, who were working in the pool-house offices, needed questions answered; Playboy was pressing about whether I was going to be at the Dream Party, but I put off an answer.
When Dorothy and I were finally alone for the night, she took my hand and led me into the octagonally shaped room she had adopted. It had French windows at one end and French doors at the other, opening out onto a small balcony overlooking the front yard. There were six built-in closets around the walls, three with full-length mirrors, a wicker desk, a table and two chairs, and a white wall-to-wall carpet with a large Persian rug over it. Dorothy had unpacked and she took great delight in showing me where she put everything, as she had at the Wyndham.
That night, she wore one of the nightgowns we had bought in London: brushed white cotton. She moved swiftly across the room, got into bed, leaned over, and kissed me for a long time. She pressed hard against my lips; hers were so full they could cover mine. After what seemed like hours, D.R. leaned on her arm and, a slight twinkle in her eye, looked at me with an aura of mock-masculinity. She leaned in close and kissed me again. A Mozart concerto played in the background. She undid the buttons on my pajama top while her lips kissed mine. Then she leaned back, and with one flick of her wrist, flung open the top. I smiled faintly. She flicked
the other side of the shirt off my chest, rubbed her hand in its hair, and looked at me. Then she stuck out her jaw and clenched her teeth slightly, which mean that I was about to be in a lot of trouble. We laughed, she fell on top of me, and we kissed for a long time. She continued her seduction, having decided to take the lead tonight. No woman ever had a more willing victim.
When D.R. made love to me that way—though it was a parody of the usual male role—her manner was light, and she was extraordinarily sexy. She had stopped being so troubled about the difference in the size of her breasts because I had told her honestly that they suited the two sides of her face: The right side, which matched the larger breast, was slightly older, more sensual, wittier. The more delicate, virginal left breast was appropriate to the softer, more innocent side. Fifteen days later, Paul Snider would blast away that side of Dorothy’s face and finally destroy what he had never been able to possess.
***
Dorothy was born under the sign of Pisces, the Fish, and this was never more evident than when I saw her for the first time in my pool, swimming around with the playful, natural ease of a dolphin, combined with the magical beauty of a mermaid come to life. The water was clearly her domain. At one point she began to laugh—that wonderful laugh of exhilaration I had heard barely a week before on the grass of the Serpentine. Just as had happened then, her laughter in the pool came without warning or provocation. The girls were amazed and reacted the way I had— they started laughing too. What was she laughing at? Toni asked, and I said: Nothing. D.R. nodded and laughed even more, splashing down to the side as she did. Antonia and Sashy and I howled together. I had never seen them laugh with greater abandon or with fewer defenses. It was the finest laughter of children: a celebration of being alive. Could we be heard laughing on the side street nearby? Would Snider be told?
The next afternoon, Dorothy and I saw one of the first Galaxina ads in the trade papers. Her billing read:
INTRODUCING
DOROTHY R. STRATTEN
PLAYBOY PLAYMATE OF THE YEAR
AS GALAXINA
I asked D.R. if she had known they would run the Playboy logo along with her name, but she just looked at the page intently. There was another plug for Playboy in the ad copy. After several minutes, Dorothy said in a low voice: 'The bastards.' Then she shook her head and repeated the words more quietly.
That same evening, Goldstein wandered the grounds of the mansion during the grand 1980 Midsummer Night’s Dream Party. Goldstein had met Hefner—he had been to the mansion before. And nobody went to Hefner’s unless the boss had personally approved the name. The security was tight as a drum. Hefner didn’t like surprises.
Snider’s latest find, seventeen-year-old Patti Laurman, moved into the Clarkson house that evening. She brought her waterbed, her saddle shoes, records, and her cheerleader outfit. Snider would have liked to see her in those high-school clothes. Later, Patti told me that Paul would insinuate more intimacy with her in public than she would have liked, but otherwise he treated her pretty well. If Snider heard from Goldstein that neither Dorothy nor I had shown up that night, he would have thought: At least we weren’t at the mansion making a fool out of him.
We spent the night at home together. We had only seven more nights to sleep in each other’s arms.
The next morning, Saturday, August 2, Dorothy and the kids and I had breakfast in the kitchen. D.R. suggested we send away to the Kellogg Company for the cup and dish advertised on the back of the Raisin Bran box. She cut out the coupon, filled it in, enclosed the cash, and put the envelope in the mailbox outside. The plastic prizes didn’t arrive until nearly two months after she was killed. Painted on each was a sun with ten starlike rays.
After breakfast, she went to Patrick Curtis’s house to pick up her things. She still had the key Curtis had given her two years before, just after the Jacuzzi incident at the mansion. Their final hour together wasn’t anything remarkable, Patrick would remember later—just two friends talking. They sat around the kitchen, as in the old days. Patrick was her only real friend in Los Angeles. She could tell him the truth. In April, Dorothy called Curtis from New York and told him what had happened between us. And later, in May, they had lunch together at a restaurant in Beverly Hills and she told Patrick that it was over with Paul, but that she was trying to end it as kindly as possible. After that, she called him again from Manhattan to say how well the picture was going and what a great time she was having.
Patrick remembered the first day he had met her, two years before. How he had hoped she might fall in love with him. Yet she had done the next best thing— she had come to trust him as a friend. He remembered the way she had taken him into the kitchen once while she was living at his home, and told him he did not have to tell all his friends that there was nothing going on between the two of them. It was nobody’s business. If some people wanted to believe they were having an affair, let them. They would probably think it no matter what either of them said.
Curtis carried the box out to the trunk of her car. Must be books, he thought, because it was quite heavy. He kissed her; Dorothy thanked him again for everything and waved as she drove off. Patrick waved and walked back inside. He grinned, thinking of Hefner’s reaction to the news of our affair. Hefner had blown his chances that first time; he had never understood Dorothy. She hadn’t gone to the Dream Party last night; yet she had time to drop in on Patrick.
Snider must have known from Goldstein of Dorothy’s visit to Curtis. Maybe for these past two years she had been playing him for a patsy, when all the time Snider thought he had been manipulating her. She was smart, Snider knew, smarter than he was. But he was cunning, and he could fool her easily by playing on her sympathies. And she was frightened of yelling, of any kind of violence. If he could just get to her, he could always break her down.
Later that afternoon, D.R. asked me if I thought she should call her husband right away. I said it was up to her. She said she was dreading the call and preferred to wait a little longer.
My daughters prevailed on D.R. and me to drive them down to an ice cream parlor for cones. As we arrived, Antonia noticed that the side street opposite entrance was called Dorothy Street. Dorothy’s joyful shriek was mixed with relief at spotting a lucky omen. Her reaction was so spontaneous that the kids and I roared with laughter, and then Dorothy did too.
Was anyone watching us as we piled out of the car, still laughing? And as Dorothy ran over to look at the street sign? The kids dashed after her, and the three of them gazed at the sign and laughed. They walked back toward me, one on either side of Dorothy, holding her hands. Was Snider told how happy the four of us looked as we crossed the street and went into the shop? How evil did we seem in his eyes? And how sinful would it appear in photographs, Stratten and Bogdanovich and his two daughters having ice cream cones on a bright sunny afternoon?
That evening, D.R. and the girls and I were in the kitchen when a large dog suddenly trotted in. His reddish-tan coat was long, and he looked like a cross between a collie and a German shepherd. As he came through the door the children saw him first. They cried out in surprise and tried to catch the dog by the collar. Wagging his tail excitedly, and with a definite sense of purpose, the dog moved directly toward Dorothy. She spoke to him as though they were old friends: 'Hello there, boy.' He came right up to her and put his front paws onto her chest. She grabbed the paws, lifted them to her shoulders, and moved her face up to him. As the dog licked her nose, Dorothy laughed and so did the girls. I hadn’t moved. Was he safe? I asked. Dorothy said: 'Oh, sure, he’s a good boy,' and squeezed his nose. Then she patted back his ears.
It was almost as though the dog wanted to tell her something—his paws on her shoulders, mouth open, panting, making sounds between a cry and a bark. 'What is it, Bebe?' D.R. said, and the children laughed merrily. The dog became more excited than ever and barked twice. Dorothy petted him and put his paws down to check the name tag on the collar. His name was Prince and there was a phone number. 'He lo
ves Dorothy,' Sashy said. Why had he run away? Antonia wondered, and Sashy said, 'Because he wanted to see Dorothy.'
The owners of the dog were called, and we were all sorry when they answered. The girls petted Prince and talked to him. He was pleasant to them, but he had eyes only for Dorothy. Wherever she went he followed.
The gate bell rang; the dog’s owners arrived. Antonia buzzed the gates open and the three women took Prince out to the driveway while I waited in the kitchen. They all returned looking unhappy. The owners had been awful. There were three people in the car and they had pulled Prince in roughly. As the car drove off, the dog was being beaten. D.R. went over to the sink and the girls followed. No wonder he ran away, Antonia said. People could be so awful, Said Dorothy.
Just before midnight, D.R. and I finished getting the kids to sleep, went upstairs, and got under the covers. Before we noticed the time again, it was three in the morning. A limousine was arriving at eleven-thirty to take her to the airport for her trip to Houston. She curled into my arms in the dark, her head on my shoulder, and I hugged her warm body close to mine, trying not to think about her going. Maybe a miracle would happen and she wouldn’t have to leave.
The next four days were a blur of phone calls and business meetings. The cutting had yet to be completed on They All Laughed. On Monday morning, August 4, Dorothy drove over to her new apartment on Spalding in Beverly Hills, where she was sharing the rent, though not the space, with Linda MacEwen. She needed a separate mailing address and we both knew that having a place where one can be alone was important. The limousine took her to LAX, where a non-stop flight brought her to the Houston airport. She was greeted with open arms by Elizabeth Norris, and then scooted off to a series of interviews, photo sessions, and personal appearances—all the while extolling the glories of the Playboy world.