by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
Playboy and its kindred porno mills continue to grind up women and spit them out for the masturbatory pleasure of men the world over. But certainly, to a growing number of women, the magazine and what it represents have become a principal target for condemnation. More and more women, as well as a sizable body of men, are finding the Playboy philosophy at the core of many evils in our society. Gloria Steinem once remarked that leafing through Playboy reminded her of a Jew reading a Nazi manual.
D.R. was a small-town girl who tried, against her better instincts, to be a 'liberal, modem' woman. Neither she nor I had ever really dealt with the difference between the Old World culture of our parents and the ruthless American way we found outside the home. Yet the even newer world Dorothy grew up in was far more confusing and dangerous man mine, since many of the worst enemies of civilization cloaked themselves in respectability. There are imposters behind every post and lectern, and it is difficult to separate the false from the true. Everybody is pushing his own temple.
One of the last times I ever spoke to Hugh Hefner—when he tried to convince me that it was all right to print naked shots of Dorothy, and I objected—he said perhaps he had been doing the magazine for so long he had 'become jaded,' to him nudity was just natural. 'But this is all a part of the whole problem in the world, of sexual repression and morality,' he said. 'It’s a part of our Puritan background. We have to be more open in these matters.' Yet nudity as revealed in Playboy through the years has become anything but open or natural. It is not our inhibitions that are unnatural and unhealthy, but our obsessions, and the Puritans were obsessed with sex in a way that is not all that dissimilar from Hugh Hefner. Like them, Hefner’s magazine is finally neither respectful nor worshipful of women, but antagonistic to them. And the women themselves, trapped in the half-truths and promises of the sexual revolution as described and depicted by Hefner and his followers, have become its victims. This is evident not only in the myriad cases of manic depression, anorexia, and suicides of women trying to make these visions real, but in the increase of sordid and violent male crimes like the one which destroyed Dorothy. It is evident also in the ways in which these ideas have found general currency: The pervasive exploitation of the female body in a commercial sense—through television, advertisements, and movies—has done more subtle harm. All of this has been the result of Hefner’s great con.
The last time Hefner and I spoke, he made his comment that I had been 'in too much of a hurry'—a vastly understated way of describing his own behavior toward Dorothy Stratten, and his own barring of Paul Snider, two or the central actions that drove her to marriage and Snider to murder Was it any wonder that Hefner sought so desperately to conceal or disguise these two events? And to pass the blame as self-righteously as possible to others—Snider, Goldstein, Bogdanovich—even Dorothy, for not having 'come to him sooner'? How many others in the past three decades has the Playboy philosophy driven to an early grave?
***
On the evening of August 14, exactly three years after her murder, we visited Dorothy’s grave and found seven bouquets, her marble marker adorned all around with cut flowers. There were some notes, one written on a small piece of paper and signed 'A Faithful Admirer.' It read:
To Dorothy—
Wherever you may be—I cannot adequately express my sorrow over your being deceased for 3 years—the world needs people like you. . . . We are all very sorry that this happened to you and we hope that more people like you don’t suffer this fate. You may have left the physical plane 3 years ago, Dorothy, but we will never forget you.
Viva Dorothy Stratten!
We looked again at the inscription on the stone—a passage I had once pointed out to Dorothy from A Farewell to Arms:
. . . If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. . . . It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
At the bottom were the words: 'We love you, D.R.'
A year and a half after Dorothy’s death, Louise had a dream. The time was the present: Louise was standing in a large field of grass and Dorothy was with her, looking exactly the way she had in life. No one seemed to recognize her, or even to see her, except Louise. Many of the Playboy people went by— Grabowski, and Casilli, and Hefner among them, but they didn’t see Dorothy. They were all heading for the booths of a vast exhibit. More and more people passed the two sisters until finally Louise asked if they could go down and see what the attraction was. D.R. took her hand and they walked to the most crowded area where they found a giant photograph of Dorothy naked. The other booths advertised other naked women, but Dorothy’s was by far the most popular. Louise began to cry. Dorothy hugged her, crying too, and said: 'How can they do this?' Louise looked at all the Playboy people and saw that they had no feelings. She cried out, 'I miss her so much!' And Dorothy said, 'I do too.' Then she took Louise’s hand and they walked away.
VII - The Spelling God
. . . The pictures I see
Are not blue,
Or green or brown,
But a shade
Of which the color
Has not been invented,
And a shape
Which cannot be imagined.
How can people be satisfied
By accepting someone
Without exploring them?
Is the connection
Only physical?
—Dorothy Stratten
Vancouver, 1978
Dorothy would give me something to live for, but she didn’t live. She didn’t know that she did not have to protect me at the cost of her own life. But Dorothy had for some time lived in fear of her own death or the death of those she loved. She felt trapped in a hopeless situation and saw her own sacrifice as the only way out. This was her mistake— but one that many women have been taught to make.
As friends and lovers, Dorothy and I had only ten months—little more than three hundred days and nights. Yet even before the murder, I had started to think of my life as Before and After Dorothy. Her death, therefore, was either the end of Life, or somehow had to be turned into the most profound kind of comprehension, from which a new beginning might emerge. If only for D.R. Hadn’t her life been sacrificed so that the people she most loved could live? Didn’t we owe her, at the very least, the living out of useful and productive lives?
For me, the conflict between reason and emotion was bitter. And the road from one to the other is desperately long and hazardous. To reach an understanding meant experiencing shock and horror, grief and guilt, rage, sorrow, despair—and nothingness.
Hadn’t D.R. passed bravely through each of these? Her death spun me into areas of investigation far beyond the promises I had made to myself for years, but had never really expected to fulfill. Now, however, the search was for Dorothy. I felt that her life was the key to an understanding that would help me survive her loss.
Was there ever a time when women had not only the respect, but also the supremacy which their better characters and more refined and complicated bodies and minds justified? This was the time in history I had to uncover: Wouldn’t I find Dorothy there? I discovered myself on a path marked by Robert Graves: 'We must retrace our steps or perish.'
***
In the mid-seventies, Cybill Shepherd had read Graves’s extraordinary 'historical collection of poetic myth,' The White Goddess, along with his collection of The Greek Myths, and one evening mentioned to me the essential premise of both books: that the earliest known civilizations had been matriarchal, that in the original 'Beginning,' Goddess, not God, had created Heaven and Earth. I remember laughing with a kind of cynical glee at the time: Having already learned by then that fame, success, money, and love were not as advertised by the established order, I didn’t even find it particularly surprising that the accepted foundations of civilization were originally quite different too, a
nd that God had once been called by a female name.
After Dorothy’s death, I read those Graves books and several others of his, along with the many more I had been saving for some rainy day. All the days had become rainy now, and everything I had once taken for granted had to be weighed and examined. I went looking for clues anywhere and everywhere. I flew to Majorca to meet Robert Graves and his family, and discussed with them the mythological resonances in Dorothy’s story, as they were illuminated by his studies of the White (and the Black) Goddess. I studied works of archaeology and anthropology, of ancient calendar systems and ancient mythology, trying to find clues to the meaning of Dorothy’s life and of her sacrifice. I read Bacon’s essays, and Sophocles, Jung vs. Freud, G. B. Shaw and the Classical Greeks, studies of early Christianity, the Bible, and books on feminism; I read Virginia Woolf and the poetry of the Sumerian Moon-priestess Enheduanna, born circa 2300 B.C. I was searching and am still searching.
Truth has often been pictured as a naked woman, but the Hefners of the world have turned the truth into the ugliest graffiti and the Sniders have tried to kill the truth: that one Dorothy was more precious than ten million Sniders-Hefners-Bogdanoviches, and that if the world must protect anyone, it has to be the Dorothy s. Snider knew the truth—the remarkable power Dorothy had over him—the superiority of her instincts and talent. Why else would he belittle her at every opportunity (as most men will do with women they feel inferior to)? Ridicule her appearance, her sense of direction, her business acumen, and taste in pictures? Keep her out-of-focus (knowing she was nearsighted and never suggesting corrective lenses)? Tell her she was frigid? Immobilize her in high heels and tight skirts? Kill her because she wouldn’t submit? The man had to prevail through whatever means, at whatever cost.
And yet, when the best seller comes out, the TV movie, or film, the sympathy and understanding is rarely with the victims we have created, but with the executioners. In our age of tolerance and popular psychology, even the worst criminal has to be understood, analyzed, and pitied. We identify not with the victim but with the assailant.
If I had seen little of the sort of attitude and behavior toward women which Snider exemplified, I had heard stories from other women, and certainly knew long before D.R. was killed that the picture business had become worse for women than it had ever been. Although American women gained the right to vote at the start of the twenties, and won more and more equality in the succeeding decades, they seemed to have progressively lost power on the screen. In her unique and brilliant study of women in movies, From Reverence to Rape (published in 1974), Molly Haskell wrote:
Women have figured more prominently in film than in any other art, industry or profession (and film is all three) dominated by men. . . . The women in movies had a mystical, quasi-religious connection with the public. . . . And women, in the early and middle ages of film, dominated. It is only recently that men have come to monopolize the popularity polls. . . . Here we are today, with an unparalleled freedom of expression and a record number of women performing, achieving, choosing to fulfill themselves, and we are insulted with the worst—the most abused, neglected, and dehumanized—screen heroines in film history.
Among the central reasons, Ms. Haskell cites:
. . . The current availability of sex at every street corner and candy store . . . On the screen, sex has been demystified—the mystery, the 'goddess,' has been removed . . .
Where are we now without our goddesses?
***
In the winter of 1981, Dorothy’s family and mine were in New York together and we all went to visit the Cloisters for the first time, and to see its famous fifteenth-century French unicorn tapestries. The series traces the hunt, capture, torture, and killing of the unicorn. The tapestries were far too tragic in their implications to keep us there long: For I had learned by then that the first known reference to the unicorn, written in the fifth century B.C. by the Greek historian Ctesias, describes the colors of its horn as white, red, and black, which are also the colors of the earliest known European deity, the many-titled Mother Goddess of the great pagan civilizations (pagan originally meant country): white for innocence, red for death, black for wisdom. The same colors as the calico cat who came to visit while we were composing our unicorn song.
The original unicorn was not zoological, but appears to have been a composite creature used as a calendar symbol for the course of the Sun, still a female power, through the five seasons of the year, each represented by an animal particularly sacred to Mother Earth or Mother Nature: the feet of an elephant for Spring, the tail of a lion for Summer, the horn of a rhinoceros for Autumn, the head of a deer for Winter, the body of a horse for the New Year. The unicorn’s number, five, marks not only the five senses (there is a famous series of unicorn tapestries illustrating this; and the sixth sense, intuition, is still a notably feminine characteristic), but also the four quarters of the earth and the zenith. The V-shaped Roman numeral for five, the upside-down triangle, which distinguishes the female pubic hair, is also the most ancient symbol for Woman. The killing of the unicorn, then, is the symbolic murder of all women.
***
As a kind of condolence, many people said that Dorothy’s story would always have ended the way it did, that its outcome was somehow inevitable. Others blamed Dorothy’s death on the life-style she had chosen—as though she had chosen it or created the world she found; as though Snider had. And if Hefner had not founded Playboy; perhaps a year or so later someone else would have, because there must be a need in the land—which he discovered the best way to fulfill: porn from a hygienic super-pimp. But what is this need precisely? Is it perhaps a terrible poison eating away at our collective soul?
The grand sexual revolution that began in the fifties was in truth a male uprising against women, under the guise of liberalism and equality: Its true purpose was to make things easier for the men to get laid. The women who have survived have great scars to show. The macho platform of the typical playboy was a promise of unlimited sexual pleasure; but for whom? The women didn’t have a much better time, but the men were in a demi-heaven: If a girl said no he could pull out his liberal/modern flag and wave it, and if she still didn’t bow to his wishes, he could always use a little bit of force to give her what he had been taught, 'they all want anyway.' The big male fantasy is that women like to be raped. The several women I’ve known who have been raped were traumatized by the experience, and have had severe problems as a result in dealing with men and life. The truth is that men like to fantasize about raping women, and the fifties’ revolution has been a great boon for that urge. Didn’t they used to say that the 'sex mags' were good because they would 'cut down on rape'? But rapes have increased at an alarming rate—to an all-time high, especially in America. Also: wife abuse, child abuse, drug abuse, and murder of women by men.
In 1983, Harper & Row published an impressive Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths & Secrets, compiled by Barbara G. Walker; the four-page entry on 'Rape' reports:
True rape was not common in the ancient world. Like the males of all other mammalian species, the ancients believed sexual activity should be initiated by the female. The modern conventional description of a rapist as an 'animal' is a slur on the animal kingdom; animals do not rape. Only man forces sexual attention on an unwilling female.
. . . The Romans and Saxons punished rapists by death. Normans cut off a rapist’s testicles and gouged his eyes out. The gypsies’ Oriental heritage demandea the death penalty for a rapist. Hindu law said a rapist must be killed, even if his victim was of the lowest caste, an Untouchable; and his soul should 'never be pardoned.' The Byzantine Code decreed that rapists must die and their property must be given to the victim, even if she was no better than a slave woman . . .
So the world today is an upside-down, backward place, and the only way to deal with it is to emulate what Lewis Carroll’s Alice was told by the White Queen—the one who cried before she hurt herself because she knew what was going to happen. No one
told us in school that the Alice books are metaphors for daily life.
What gives Dorothy Stratten’s story a universal meaning is her kinship with all women. Like so many others, she was a tragic casualty of the unequal war between the sexes, born into a world where the holy had become profane, and the profane had become holy; where, finally, a rape was reported every six minutes—and countless more were unreported or unnamed; where the innocent and good would lie brutally killed at the feet of an evil philosophy’s most loyal son. Will the ones who understand tell the ones they love, before it is too late for them? As it was for our beloved Dorothy Ruth—born into a world where all the roles are scrambled, and all of nature confused. The tale of a woman in the Year of Our Lord 1980. Would it have been otherwise if, dating from the first civilizations of the Stone Age, the date had been known as 11,980 in the Year of Our Lady?
***
There were a few of us who knew that Dorothy’s spirit was with us still, that there would hardly be an hour when she wasn’t on our minds, when we didn’t wonder, before making a decision, what she would think; when we didn’t wish we could see her again, hear her laugh, touch her arm, breathe her freshness, seek her comfort. She was for us the best friend we ever had, and if we achieve anything worthwhile in our lives it will be for her memory, the glow of which can never fade. Dorothy said it best. Less than three months before she was killed, D.R. had written in a poem to me the most eloquent summation of our love story, the sad love story she had asked for in London:
. . . The evening will be forever—
Yet time was not enough.
***
Just before midnight on February 28, 1985—precisely Dorothy’s 25th birthday—her Estate filed a legal brief in support of a new civil rights law. It is an ordinance passed in Indianapolis (after being passed but vetoed in Minneapolis), that would allow women to sue pornographers for maneuvering them into pornography against their will, or for trafficking in materials that make their lives dangerous and their status pervasively second class. Countless other cities, counties, states, the federal government, and several other countries have said they want this law. Legal experts agree that it will reach the U.S. Supreme Court within two years—and many say it will win. It is expected to pass in Los Angeles County this spring.