by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
Hefner said: 'Oh, God . . .'I asked, still casual, what was the matter. There was a short pause, and then I heard Hefner say: 'Dorothy’s dead.'
The phone receiver slipped out of my hand and clattered to the floor. Novak asked what had happened and Dilge stood up. I rose, but couldn’t make more than two or three steps before I fell on my knees near the closet. I cried out loudly. Dilge asked what it was. I mumbled: 'She’s dead.' Novak said: 'What?' And I screamed it: 'She’s dead!' On the floor I curled into a ball and clawed at the door of the closet.
***
That night, in Vancouver, when Nelly went to bed, still worried because she hadn’t heard from Dorothy, she noticed something that later would haunt her: Dorothy’s pugnacious little dog, whom she called Bebe, missed her so much that he always slept at the foot of the bed in Dorothy’s old room, whether Dorothy was there or not. He never spent the night anywhere else. And yet, that Thursday night, he had come into Nelly’s room and curled up on her bed instead, whining sadly. Nelly couldn’t understand what was the matter with him. He whined again as though he were sick. She wondered if Dorothy had received her last letter yet, the one she had sent to New York on July 10. No doubt Dorothy would call tomorrow and Nellv could ask.
But her daughter never received the letter. It was forwarded by the hotel to Bob Houston, and by the time he received it, Dorothy was dead and he didn’t know what to do with it. Nelly had written in ink on two sides of a piece of white paper, and even along the margins. The salutation was in Dutch; it meant Dearest Sweetheart.
Lieve Lieveling,
Thank you for your nice letter, Dorothy. I love you. I hope Paul leaves you with some money. Please Dorothy, if you are broke, I send you money. We will always be here to help you. You know, don’t you?
Listen good to your lawyer. Ask him questions. Because Paul has nothing to lose anymore. I know you are getting a lot more surprises, darling, and hurt feelings. He is going to ask you to support him yet. Ask your lawyer your rights, OK?
And also ask the lawyer what to expect from Paul, and how to stop him from draining you completely. Be strong darling, and I know you will come through with flying colours.
I told Louise that she could, come around the 10th of August. She is happy. I wished, darling, I could have stopped you from all that hurt. But I could not. God knows why. All I know is we all love you, and be here to help.
MUM!!
The following morning at 9:00, Nelly was in the kitchen when the Canadian Mountie came to her door. The murder had been reported in the early hours, but the Mounties had decided to wait until after breakfast to tell the mother. She was at the sink and saw the young man step out of his car and walk toward the house. She wondered if maybe Johnny had been up to something again. When she opened the door, the Mountie told her there had been an accident. To her son? Nelly asked. No, the Mountie said, to her daughter. Nelly wanted to eliminate the worst possibility, and asked in disbelief: Is she dead? The man nodded and said: Yes, her husband killed her yesterday afternoon. Dazed, Nelly asked the young man to come in. The Mountie entered and helped her dry the dishes. He told her in more detail what had happened. Nelly heard the words, but didn’t really believe any of it.
That same morning, my friends and the Playboy staff arranged to fly Louise back to Vancouver. Goldstein had called Polly in the middle of the night and told her what had happened. She called Antonia. I was upstairs under sedation. Nelly’s new husband took command and said that Louise must be with her own family when she heard the news. It was decided to tell her that Dorothy had had to go to New York, and that Louise would have to fly back to Vancouver, accompanied by a lady from Playboy. Linda spotted the story on the front page of the morning newspaper that was lying in the limousine, and asked the driver to hide it. The Playboy woman took the same precaution on the plane. Louise kept asking about Dorothy, and said she was very angry at her for not calling. After Louise had gone, Sashy was told the truth. She made no sound, but tears began to run from her eyes.
At the Vancouver airport, Nelly and the new husband met Louise, who chattered on about Dorothy and the unexpected trip to New York. Back at their house, when John came in and found several friends there, he was told about Dorothy and began to cry. When Louise arrived and handed him a couple of greeting cards he had asked Dorothy to buy for him, John threw them savagely into the fire. Louise was shocked. Nelly told her then, but Louise laughed and refused to believe it. She knew that Dorothy was in New York! Nelly pointed upward and said Dorothy’s New York was now in heaven. Louise shook her head: 'Oh, no, Mummy . . .'
On that terrible night we learned of her death, Sean Ferrer drove through the darkness to L.A. in the Lincoln convertible that Dorothy had ridden in on the day of its purchase in New York, and—though the doors were secure and the wiring intact—the inside light kept going on and off. It never did that again.
A couple of days later, the three lights in my office blinked on and off twice while I was reading to John Ritter from Private Lives. The first time followed the line: 'Death’s very laughable, such a cunning little mystery. All done with mirrors.' Just as I closed the book it happened again. Five minutes later, after I made a remark to the effect that women are essentially superior to men, the lights went off and on a third time. They never did that again.
***
I made several trips to New York and to London, to return to places where Dorothy and I had been. I flew to Vancouver, and to Amsterdam to meet her maternal grandmother. I came to understand that a major part of me had died—that the only hope for survival was through knowledge. Perhaps there had once been a time when the good did not die young.
At the London Ritz, in the same suite D.R. and I had shared, the middle-aged chambermaid remembered me and asked happily: 'The lady come with you?' Not this time, I said. On the table was a new hotel ashtray—with a drawing of a unicorn and a lion.
Recalling D.R.’s last reference in London to Our Town, I bought a paperback copy and read again of eighteen-year-old Emily, who dies in childbirth, but whose spirit attends her own funeral—where she watches her weeping parents and the young husband who falls sobbing at the foot of her grave. Helpless,
Emily begs to return—just for a single day! She is warned not to try: Knowing the future as she lives the past is too painful. But Emily pleads for just one unimportant day—her twelfth birthday. The magic of the theater takes her back, but not for long. It is agonizing: Even the smallest detail breaks her heart, for in that day as they had all lived it, none of them had realized how truly precious the time was: 'I can’t,' Emily cries, 'I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.' She sobs, knowing she can never return again. 'Good-bye. Good-bye, world,' she says, and asks the Stage Manager: 'Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?' 'No,' he answers: 'The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.'
Sean accompanied me, and Audrey met us in London, to record some replacement lines of dialogue for the movie. She asked if I didn’t find it distressing to stay in the same rooms I had shared with Dorothy. No, it brought her presence closer, I said, and the memories were all happy. There were tears in Audrey’s eyes as she looked at me and said: 'It’s strange, I never really knew Dorothy, but it’s as though she just came down long enough to make this picture, and then she was gone.'
On the morning of my last day in the hotel, the wind blew the pages of a book of Coward’s plays past my mark, and I noticed that the two pages at which it had stopped contained references to the Serpentine. I went back to the river. There were very few people now, the weather cloudy and cold. The band was gone and there were no rowboats. I lay down in the same place near the old tree where we had laughed so deliriously. Could it have been only six weeks ago? Forty-two days? The sun broke through the clouds for the first time, and the sudden warmth brought Dorothy back.
At Heathrow, the airline’s computer screen malfunctioned. Although I had an aisle seat, on their TV diag
ram a light appeared indicating someone seated to my right. Yet the plane had no seat there. The attendant was puzzled and asked his supervisor to take a look. They agreed that nothing like this had ever happened before. Both scrutinized the tiny light, then punched several buttons, reprogrammed the computer, tried again, and found the light still there. Eventually I was told there was nothing to worry about. My seat was on the aisle and, no matter what the screen said, nobody could be seated in the aisle. It was comforting to know that the little dot of light stayed on throughout my trip home.
I remembered the book of cards D.R. and I had read together, and how Dorothy’s card, which was next to mine for 1980, had suddenly vanished from the row. Had it truly been 'in the cards'? When I returned to the book, however, and studied its formulas more carefully, I found that I had been mistaken. Our cards were closely aligned, one way or another, for the rest of my life.
More than a year after Dorothy’s death, my sister Anna finally explained to me the reason for her bizarre present of a bow and arrow on my forty-first birthday. It had been inspired by a strangely frightening experience Anna had had in late July, a little more than two weeks before the killing. A friend of hers had done a tarot-card reading on Anna and on me, and the key card that turned up for me had scared them both: The Tower Struck by Lightning. The card meant that something was going to happen to her brother, Anna’s friend told her, that would shake him to his roots, rock his foundation. He would survive, the woman said, and perhaps be stronger as a result, but the event would leave him profoundly changed. And so, fearing some unknown violence, Anna had unconsciously bought for me the only weapon she could afford or tolerate: a bow and arrow.
***
Wherever I went, memories of Dorothy flashed through my mind: the way she looked in the early morning light, after we had finished a long night of shooting and she had taken a short nap. I remembered her coming out of the brownstone on Tenth Street, wearing a white cotton shirt, blue jeans, and no makeup, her hair down. She was most beautiful then, at her most natural. Even with drowsiness in her eyes, she had the freshness of summer flowers and seemed to meld with the wind as she walked. We would grin foolishly at each other and climb into the station wagon for the ride back to the hotel, the sun appearing over the horizon before us. Or the time we sat on the bench by an old baseball diamond in Central Park and watched a woman trying to get her dog to return to her; the dog was off with a female in heat. D.R. smiled, sympathetic to both the woman and the dog, each of them equally desperate. My arm was around Dorothy, holding her shoulder tightly. We smiled at each other when the woman and her dog were finally reunited. How unbelievably peaceful and lovely the world had seemed.
I listened repeatedly to the tape of a Mozart clarinet concerto that Dorothy and I had bought in London. The key refrain suggested to me a profound yearning for the kind of transcendent romantic passion we had experienced together. It moved me to tears long before I discovered that the concerto was one of the last works Mozart completed before his death at the age of thirty-five, the death over which D.R. and I had cried in London.
I often recalled the moment Dorothy had noticed a framed French cartoon hanging near our bedroom at the house. It was a nineteenth-century drawing by Daumier of the Hapsburgs, the then-current Austrian royal family: King, Queen, Princess, and Crown Prince—-all four sketched as overgrown, retarded children playing house and war. Most people had appreciated the cartoon’s icy satiric brilliance and its artistic genius, but nobody I knew had reacted as Daumier would have wished—no one had ever laughed out loud, as Dorothy did. How much experience she had had with immature, adolescent behavior to have recognized the caricature so swiftly. Most of the men she had met had never left their teens emotionally.
On a visit to Nicola’s I went to the men’s room, the walls of which featured color photos of naked women. Glancing down to my left, I noticed a color picture of Dorothy: naked, half-reclining, her eyes sad beyond words. I looked deeply into them and saw how she had felt at that moment. I glanced up. Above the urinals were other naked pictures of Dorothy; I had never noticed them, but now I saw four. In each, she looks trapped, forlorn. The door opened, and Nicola walked in. When I told him he ought to take down all the pictures, his tone was apologetic. Yes, he knew. I remembered the photo in one of Dorothy’s layouts— she stood naked in the sun, a horse behind her, hands straight down by her side: There! the look had said, she was naked, but she could stand it—this would soon be over.
Had Dorothy been pregnant with our child when she was killed? A discarded sanitary napkin had been found on the floor of the murder room, but indications were that it contained no menstrual blood. Had D.R. put it on the morning of August 14, fearing that Snider might try something and hoping to use her period as an excuse? She said nothing to me of its having arrived. The coroner’s autopsy gave no indication of menstruation or pregnancy. There was no way to be certain then, one way or the other, and I feel confident Dorothy herself didn’t know when Snider murdered her.
Nine months after the killing, Earl Ball was up visiting from Nashville. At the piano one afternoon, we composed the music for a song called 'Unicom,' in which, though all the unicorns are killed ('The prettier the prize, the shorter is its life'), their spirits live on for those whose dreams are pure, and 'love their only care.' While we were working on the tune, a calico cat came in off the street. She was spotted white, reddish, and black, and she lounged around listening to the music. There was an odd-shaped marking by the right side of her nose, and I kept thinking she looked familiar. Then I realized why: For Easter 1980, Dorothy had given me a greeting card with a photo of a calico kitten. I looked at it more closely and saw that it was spotted white, reddish, and black, with an identical marking by the right side of its nose. Our visitor never left.
***
If Dorothy’s life had ended, the exploitation of her had not. Her fame and notoriety had just begun. The law allows 'public figures' to be portrayed in any medium. Dead public figures, unless they have made legal arrangements about their 'right of publicity,' have no rights whatsoever, nor do their heirs have much recourse to fight the exploitation. After the murder, private detective Mark L. Goldstein would try to peddle what he knew or had access to. Goldstein possessed personal letters, the aborted memoir, and Dorothy’s poems and letters. The police, Playboy, and New West (now California) magazines would have copies of this material several weeks before the Stratten Estate or her family were even informed of its existence.
Two months after the murder, Teresa Carpenter of the Village Voice, the first journalist to write a major news article on the tragedy, sent me a short list of questions, which I ignored. Being in no shape to conduct a personal inquiry at the time, I hired a former F.B.L-man-turned-private-detective, H. Frank Angell, to investigate Dorothy’s death for me. New West assigned a major article on the story to be written by John Riley and Laura Bernstein. Playboy made plans to publish a mammoth Stratten Memorial Tribute.
Elizabeth Norris, from Playboy, called Nelly in Canada and told her a journalist named Richard Rhodes who, she said, wrote for Quest magazine, had requested an interview. She asked if Nelly would, as a favor to Elizabeth, break her silence and see Rhodes. Remembering Norris only as a friend of Dorothy’s, Nelly agreed. Rhodes arrived, had several long sessions, and eventually told Nelly that his article would be appearing not in Quest magazine, but in Playboy. Mr. Hefner himself was supervising, and only 'nice' photographs would be used. There would be a single rose across the first page. Playboy, through personal calls from Hefner and several of his staff, was also able to solicit family photos before Nelly realized that by cooperating with the Playboy article, she appeared to endorse and support Hefner’s magazine and life-style, though in fact this was not true: Nelly had never set eyes on a single page of Playboy.
Richard Rhodes called me to request an interview. I asked if it was true that the Playboy article would carry no naked pictures of Dorothy. Rhodes said this was not his department,
but understood that only 'tasteful shots' were being used, probably just 'breasts shots.' I refused the interview.
Hefner called me; it was the first time we had spoken since the funeral. He overrode my objections to the naked pictures of Dorothy: 'After all, Peter, she was Playmate of the Year.'
Dorothy’s lawyer, Wayne Alexander, informed Playboy by letter that they were not to use any of Dorothy’s writings, all of which had been copyrighted by the Estate of Dorothy Stratten and were now legally controlled and owned by her mother. I eventually acquired the rights to this material. We made arrangements with Dorothy’s first boyfriend and several members of the Snider family. Nelly was given a weekly stipend as consultant for the book. After expenses, the bulk of the royalties would go to the Stratten Estate.
Goldstein was paid a substantial sum for the TV-movie rights to The Life of Dorothy Stratten. Playboy objected to the TV movie at first but, when the magazine and Hefner were treated sympathetically in the script, he gave his approval and support to the production.
A popular Canadian singing group named Prism, whose five members had met Dorothy only once, recorded an emotional rock song about her:
. . . Cover Girl, it’s such a damn waste!
You were more than just a pretty face!
I never thought I’d never see you again . . .
In November, Galaxina opened on the West Coast of the United States and Canada with two large plugs for Playboy in all ads. There was a flurry of letters to editors protesting the exploitation of Stratten’s body in the ads. Except for unanimously glowing comments on Dorothy’s presence and performance, the reviews were resoundingly poor. The film did not reach the East Coast until March, 1981, where it elicited a similar reaction. Business was tepid. In her Village Voice review, Carrie Rickey wrote:
Stratten . . . radiates an other-worldly presence that makes everything else . . .look like negative space. . . . Her radiant remoteness serves as armor against the leering desires of her co-stars. The Stratten aura is generally called star quality. . . . Dietrich had it, so did Marilyn Monroe. . . . Part of the quality lies in . . . the projection of two contradictory effects: invincibility and fragility.