by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
That night, after the three kids had been tucked in, Dorothy lay down on the bed, still fully dressed, ready to hear about the new picture I was preparing. I began to elaborate on what was actually my own way of expressing my love for her. The story of an orchestra conductor and a Dutch girl was transparently about us, but made into a farce. The marriage in the plot was another way of proposing. But as it became clearer to Dorothy where the story was heading, her expression darkened and her eyes grew sad. I was too involved to think it was anything but concentration until I got to the main point. She would play the leading woman. A tremor went through Dorothy’s body, her eyes welled with tears, and a wail escaped her lips: 'No-o-o . . .'
I said her name in surprise. Why had she responded like that? Didn’t she like the story? She nodded. Didn’t she like the part? Did she think she couldn’t play it? She shook her head lightly and asked me to go on with the story, she liked it very much. But her outcry had stopped me. It had frightened me. D.R. pressed me again to go on with the story. She was smiling now and seemed interested, her hands and feet still crossed, so I continued. I didn’t tell the rest very well. As the hour struck the beginning of Wednesday, August 13, we began to kiss. Outside, there was a thin crescent moon.
After a while, D.R. asked if I minded her taking a shower. She hadn’t had a chance. Would I join her? And so, in the early hours of Dorothy’s last Wednesday, we took our first and only shower together. We kissed passionately under the hot spray and made love. I again sensed a resistance, a certain reserve, despite the open circumstances, that had not been there since we had started sleeping together five months before. Was she doing this just to please me?
At around 7:30 that morning, I awakened to find that D.R. was already up and out of bed, and my mood sank. She had said something about a lot of appointments that day, but I had hoped she would cancel a couple at the last minute and stay close to the house and me. I called out her name, and she walked back from her room into the bedroom. She was wearing a terry-cloth robe we had gotten at the Ritz. I asked if she couldn’t come back to bed for a little while, and she said it was getting late if we were going to have our morning swim. Hadn’t I been saying we should both swim every morning? She leaned down over the bed and kissed me, but it was clear that she was in no mood for romance. I got up and we went down for the swim.
Louise came out by the pool in her nightgown and called Dorothy, who stopped swimming and went over to talk to her. We continued our laps and then she got out and lay in the sun for a while. After a hurried breakfast and several phone calls, Dorothy and Louise left for the day. I tried not to think about my anxieties. She was just busy.
Before they left, Dorothy and I had another brief conversation on the staircase. She mentioned that her period was late. Her look into my eyes was penetrating. I asked how late she was. A little over two weeks, she said, and continued to look at me. I didn’t look away. That wasn’t very long, I said. She nodded and said, 'We’ll worry about it in a couple of weeks.' I agreed and we went our separate ways. As I turned the comer I wished I had said how much I wanted children with her, how much I loved her.
When Dorothy and Louise saw Marilyn Grabowski at the Playboy offices in the early afternoon of August 13, it had been exactly two years since the day they had met. Their second anniversary, Marilyn joked., perhaps remembering for a moment the frightened, shaking teenager who had stepped out of the limousine in an elegant jumpsuit, and had tried to act so much older than her years. Marilyn couldn’t help noticing how tanned Dorothy was, but she didn’t mention it. This was a political meeting for both of them, and they knew it. It was an anniversary for Hefner too. Wasn’t he sentimental about dates? •Didn’t he keep track of them through his scrapbook? Hadn’t it been two years since he had been in the Jacuzzi with Dorothy?
Goldstein would have been happy to report Stratten’s first and second stops today: the Playboy offices, and then lunch at Le Dome with senior V.P. (and close Hefner associate) 'Mo' Grabowski. Marilyn had been an extremely loyal Hefner employee for years.
At one point during the lunch, Louise began to talk about the new house they were staying at, but a cold glance from D.R. stopped her. Dorothy explained about the apartment she was sharing with Linda. A short while later, Grabowski had to excuse herself to use the powder room, and Dorothy leaned over and reminded Louise of her warning not to say anything to Marilyn about Peter. Louise said she was sorry, she had forgotten. If Marilyn asked her about Paul, Dorothy said, Louise was to say only that everything was fine; Paul was fine; he and Dorothy were good friends. It was the same story Dorothy had earlier told Marilyn. Toward the end of the meal, when Dorothy went to the powder room, Marilyn brought the conversation around to Peter, but Louise only looked at her dumbly. When Marilyn asked about Paul, Louise said Paul was fine. Even though he and Dorothy weren’t living together, they were still good friends.
Paul Snider had spent an hour or so that day with his lawyer, Mike Kelly. They spoke of the legalities involved in his divorce from Dorothy Stratten, his alienation-of-affections suit against me, and his anger at Playboy for barring him from the mansion without his wife, his own discovery. And what was their next move? Would they try to deport him? Try to kill him?
Wouldn’t he have to buy a gun to protect himself? Kelly* tried to calm him down, but it would have been difficult to miss the contained frenzy in Snider’s manner, the anger under the legal talk. Kelly knew Snider wasn’t going to get much more than half of Stratten’s current worth, if that. He drew up a legal letter from Snider to Stratten, as well as a personal management agreement, which Snider was to get Dorothy to sign if he could.
Snider would have figured, accurately or not, that Kelly had easy access to Hefner, Kelly being married to a former Playmate. Maybe Kelly would mention Snider’s frame of mind to Hefner and the chief would reconsider his ban. Snider was looking for all the options. Hadn’t he always?
Before the end of the day, Hefner or one of his personal assistants might well have spoken with Kelly and Valerie Cragin, the head of Playboy’s model agency, and with Marilyn Grabowski, and would have heard from them: Monday, a fight with her husband overheard by the crew; Tuesday, her new boyfriend tells Hefner they’re on cloud nine; Wednesday, the lady herself denies anything but friendship with both men. Had there been any word of Dorothy’s going to see her husband or anything like that? Wouldn’t Kelly have repeated Snider’s bragging that Dorothy had agreed to see him when she returned from Mojave? Perhaps they all tried to figure out a way to reach Dorothy without Hefner himself having to make the call. Valerie Cragin would have been the obvious choice since the overheard argument—the only hard evidence they could discuss with Dorothy—had happened while she was under the model agency’s aegis. Calling my house would have been to betray my confidences to Hefner.
For whatever reason, on the doorstep of the apartment at Spalding that early evening of the thirteenth of August, a messenger left a note from Playboy. It asked only that Dorothy please call Valerie immediately. The word 'Important' had been underlined.
After the lunch with Marilyn, Dorothy took Louise to the offices of Pollock, Bloom and Dekom, where she met her new lawyer for the first time (I had recommended him for his integrity). The two sisters sat with Wayne Alexander in his office for almost an hour. Dorothy wanted a clearer idea of her financial situation: What did she have? How much would Paul receive when they divorced? Alexander asked her how long it had been since the two of them had lived together as man and wife. Since long before January, Dorothy replied, but they had been Jiving apart only since March.
Alexander said that legally she might take the position that they had actually been separated at least since January, which might make it possible for Dorothy not to be forced to split her monies from They All Laughed. No, Dorothy said, she didn’t want to cut Paul out of that. Alexander tried at length to dissuade her. Hadn’t Snider stolen from her during the summer, after the official separation letter? Dorothy maintained her p
osition: No, she did not want to exclude him from half of They All Laughed. Alexander eventually decided to bring it up again at another time. Did she wish to go ahead now with the formal divorce proceedings? 'Not yet,' Dorothy said. 'Give him a little time. . . .' Alexander would never see Dorothy again.
It was in the late afternoon of August 13 that Snider had his rendezvous at a construction site with the owner of the shotgun. They haggled over price and Snider paid with cash. When he requested a demonstration of how the weapon was to be loaded and fired, the owner instructed him carefully. It had cost Snider less than two hundred dollars. He was quite pleased with the purchase.
Dorothy took her sister into a drugstore to buy her a new hairbrush. Next they drove to a shoe store, where she bought Louise a pair of Capezios. Then she drove back to Copa de Oro. Did Dorothy notice a familiar car or driver in her rearview mirror?
A short while later, at 6:30 that evening, a second note from Playboy was left for Dorothy at the door of the apartment on Spalding. It too requested her to call Valerie as soon as possible. The word 'Urgent' was underlined.
At Copa de Oro, Linda was staying late because I had asked the whole troupe out for a Japanese dinner. D.R. and I had barely had a chance to speak since she and Louise had returned, but when I walked into the kitchen to join the others, I noticed that Dorothy seemed nervous. Her eyes looked frightened as she placed a pie on the table and told me the kids had made it.
The last thing in the world Dorothy would have wanted that night, of course, was for the whole family to go out to a restaurant. The three children and Peter would be exposed, and Linda, and the boys, and their girlfriends. Any or all of them could get hurt if Paul really meant what he had been screaming over the phone two days before. She had been nervous all afternoon with Louise, especially when they were in the car or walking the streets. But she had tried to hide her feelings so as not to upset her sister or anyone else. Paul was her problem.
We piled into three cars and the caravan drove through the gates, past U.C.L.A. to Westwood, and over to Pico Blvd. Dorothy kept to herself any thoughts about the easy target we presented. And we were so easy to follow. It was the last third of another sixteen-hour day for Mark Goldstein. He would have parked to watch us cross the boulevard and enter a large Japanese restaurant. During the meal Dorothy was extremely anxious and distracted. Several times I saw her glance nervously at the front of the restaurant, but when I followed her look, I saw nothing suspicious. Was something wrong? I asked her. No, she answered coolly.
That same evening, Paul Snider talked to his two photographer friends, Bill and Susan, about the shotgun he had purchased that afternoon. He spoke of Playmates who had died or been killed, actresses who had died before their films came out.
The ride back to Bel Air was endless to Dorothy. Paul’s vicious words echoed in her mind. Back home, she relaxed somewhat. The kids wanted to go swimming and Dorothy joined them.
Linda usually checked the Spalding apartment before going to sleep at Sean’s place (they had fallen in love on the film, but he was out of town). However, Sean’s apartment was closer and since she was tired, Linda drove straight there. The two urgent messages from Playboy remained unread that night.
As she came out of the pool, D.R. still seemed agitated. It was a warm night and there was a moon in the sky. I motioned toward it and Dorothy looked up. It was the fourth night of the ninth moon of the year—the last one Dorothy would see.
We kissed. D.R. asked if I would like to take a Jacuzzi with her tonight—just in case, she thought, things did not end happily tomorrow with Paul. She knew she would have to see him or he might kill somebody, possibly himself. She would never forgive herself for not trying to save him one last time. Paul was not much worse than a lot of men, Dorothy knew. He was simply not as good at concealing his worst characteristics.
Certainly if she didn’t go to see him, something terrible would happen, and Peter or the children might get hurt. Hefner was unlikely to be injured, with all his fortification and security. Could she jeopardize the people she loved for another day? Anything was better than the one she’d just gone through. If she went to the police, Paul would be deported immediately to Vancouver, especially if he was found with a gun. He would believe even more strongly that she had deceived him. Would he hurt her mother, or Louise when she went back, or John? Would he ever rest before exacting his vengeance?
That night in the upstairs bathroom, I ran the water into the large, almost square sunken bathtub, tiled in blue and white. It had been equipped with Jacuzzi jets, and against the back wall was a large mirror surrounded by tile. There were four or five red glasses with candles inside, which I lit. A far cry from Hefner’s artificial lake and grotto, it was big enough for two.
I gave D.R. one of my undershirts to make her feel less self-conscious. Maybe it was the glib way I offered it that prompted Dorothy to say, very lightly—with only, I thought, the slightest edge: 'Oh, you’ve done this before, have you?' I told her the truth, and said I thought it took away some of the romance to just get naked into a tub. But now I felt certain that Dorothy did not really want to take a Jacuzzi and was only doing it for me. We changed in different rooms and I called out to ask if she still wanted to do this; she answered, sure, and said she was already going to climb in. I joined her a few minutes later in a pair of boxer shorts. She smiled at me as I stepped in. She was sitting crosswise in the tub, next to the faucet. The water beat down beside her. She had pulled the undershirt down to her knees. I had put some bubble-bath gel in and there was a thin layer of white foam. The Jacuzzi jets couldn’t be turned on until the water level was much higher. I sat down beside Dorothy and kissed her.
I could tell that something was wrong: She was not comfortable and her eyes seemed oddly dark. I turned the water up faster and asked if she was all right. She nodded. If we turned on the Jacuzzi for more than three or four minutes, I said, it would exhaust us. D.R. said she felt tired now. She suggested we make love on the carpets beside the tub and then get back in. I agreed, and stepped out to get the bathrobes. Dorothy took off the wet undershirt and stood up into the white robe I was holding and pulled it around herself; I put on a robe. The water ran while we lay down on bathmats and carpet, our robes half-opened, and began to make love. When Dorothy looked up at me, I caught in her eyes a sad desperation that frightened me. I suggested we get up and turn off the water and go to bed; she agreed immediately.
I got into bed beside her, her warm skin next to mine. We embraced gently and began to kiss again. Even here, in the dimmest light, under the covers, she was not enjoying the lovemaking as she always had before. This was the second day in a row that things did not seem right, and tonight they seemed worse. When Dorothy’s eyes opened, she looked sad. I stopped moving, kissed her quietly for a long while, rolled slowly to the side, and lay close to her.
After a few minutes, D.R. rolled me over and moved easily on top of me. She sat up straight, eyes pressed shut. She looked so beautiful and sad, in such inner turmoil. Was she torn between her love for me and her love for Paul? I wondered. Had his words destroyed something between us? Did she now believe I was less than she had thought? Yet hadn’t she been all right after seeing him last week? What had happened in Mojave? Or was it me? Did she feel sorry for Paul and me?
Her eyes were still closed. She would have had to concentrate very hard to block out the terrible fear that we might never be able to do this again. She looked at me lying on the pillow, submitting to what I knew she liked, and she would have known that I was worried
As the clock turned toward midnight, there was a kind of desperation in Dorothy’s movement above me. She leaned over and moved her breasts from side to side on my chest, and I had to press my eyes closed for a few moments. When she bent down against me for a minute, I could feel her heart beating rapidly. I held her tightly and kissed her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids. After a few moments, she sat up straight and looked at me, her eyes soft, but unhappy. Then she continue
d to move and I closed my eyes.
When I looked again, Dorothy’s eyes were tightly shut and I could tell that she was about to reach a climax. She moved more and more slowly until at last, eyes still closed, a sound of both relief and woe escaped her throat. I let myself go and Dorothy fell forward, clasped me tightly, and I held her. Both our hearts were beating fast and our breathing was heavy. Neither of us moved for a long time.
She fell asleep on my chest and I rolled her over slightly and went to sleep in that position. By the time we moved again, it was two hours into Thursday morning. From the last kiss we shared that night, Dorothy had less than eleven hours to live. After we awakened the next morning, she had less than six.
When Doug Dilge, came in the kitchen door at Copa de Oro early Thursday, August 14, he was surprised to find Dorothy seated there, leaning forward over the telephone on the desk. She heard him, looked up, and signaled quickly, finger to mouth, for him to be quiet. As Doug crossed the room on tiptoe and went out the door toward the living room, he glanced once more at D.R. She nodded, smiled slightly, and again put her finger to her lips. Dilge later said he took the gesture to mean that the phone call should not be mentioned to Peter. Obviously, she wanted it private or she wouldn’t have used the kitchen. Dilge figured Dorothy had placed the call to a man—probably her husband.
My mood was good when I got up, but as soon as Dorothy reminded me that she had a couple of early appointments, it turned gloomy. There was no time to lie around in bed for even half an hour, she said, because we had planned a daily swim and she wanted to sunbathe for a while. It was like a repetition of the day before, except that when I complained, Dorothy’s response was more desperate: Hadn’t I said I wanted to swim every morning? Yes, I said, but why didn’t she postpone the appointments so that we could have time at least to talk? One was her business manager, she said, the other was a Playboy sitting. She couldn’t really postpone either of them now. We took our last swim together, and the kids came out to watch. D.R. stretched out on a towel on the grass to sunbathe. I went to take a shower.