by Jackie Ganiy
Though Dorothy now had a real part in a real movie, was carrying on with a famous director, and was about to be Playmate of the Month, she was still living with Paul in their sad freeway shack. Marilyn Grabowski, former photo editor for Playboy, said in her interview for the Biography Channel’s profile on Dorothy that she had given Dorothy a puppy, only to hear a week later that the puppy was dead. Grabowski said she just knew Paul had murdered the dog out of jealousy, after Dorothy had mentioned that Paul accused her of loving the dog more than him. Um, red flag much?
The August 1979 issue of Playboy hit the stands, with Dorothy on the cover, and suddenly the world knew who she was. It was the best selling issue of the year. Hefner began grooming his protégé for Playmate of the Year. The calendar turned from 1979 to 1980, the year Paul’s license plate promised a new star, and it looked like that promise might become reality. Dorothy jetted off to New York to shoot scenes on location for They All Laughed, leaving Paul to obsess about her back in LA, while she and Peter carried on their affair as if he did not even exist.
While Dorothy was away, Paul had another idea, and began feverishly working on it in the garage. It was to be a workout bench, with leather straps that could be adjusted to support all kinds of bizarre sexual positions. He hoped to sell his invention to The Pleasure Chest, a kinky sex and bondage shop on La Brea Avenue in West Hollywood (it’s still there), then mass produce it for the sex toy industry. The Pleasure Chest said thanks but no thanks. Apparently the device was too B.K.T., even for them. Another failed venture for Paul...Tick tock, tick tock. When Dorothy returned to LA, things went from bad to worse for her and Paul. He had her tailed by a private detective, who just confirmed what he already knew: she was in love with another man.
Hefner held a lunch in her honor, where he announced that she would be Playmate of the Year, attended by Dorothy and Paul. Dorothy, in a really ugly, brown, shapeless dress, went up to the podium to accept the honor. Her face radiant, her blonde hair a mass of gorgeous curls, she thanked Hefner and her photographer, but not Paul. Hint hint.
While in Vancouver on a publicity tour, Dorothy began to cut ties with her Paul. She closed their joint bank account, sent a formal request for a separation, and planned to leave him. Desperate and angry, Paul flew out to Vancouver, and went to Dorothy’s family’s house. He took her to a club, and put her on display while he collected a buck a piece for signed glossy photos. When they got back to LA, she was done, and moved into Bogdanovich’s Beverly Hills mansion. It’s a wonder Paul let her go. Oh that’s right! He didn’t have a gun yet.
Dorothy and Bogdanovich wrapped up the final scenes of They All Laughed in New York, over the summer of 1980, and returned home in late July. Paul bought a gun, and waited all night in the shrubbery of Bogdanovich’s yard for the couple to return, so that he could kill them both. Fortunately for Bogdanovich, Paul got the day wrong. That twist of fate saved Peter’s life, but it only delayed the inevitable for Dorothy.
On the morning of August 14, Dorothy told Peter that she was off to see her attorney, then go to a photo shoot at the mansion afterwards. Dorothy’s little sister Louise was visiting, and she wanted to tag along, so the two of them got into the car and left. In truth, Dorothy had agreed to meet Paul at the house they used to share, to make her break with the psycho final. She had a thousand dollars in an envelope and hoped it would buy her freedom from her tormentor. En route, she changed her mind about bringing Louise, and dropped her off at the beach instead. Would Paul have carried out his sick plan if Louise had been there? Would they be dead today? Would he just have waited for another time? We will never know.
Dorothy arrived at Paul’s house around 12 PM. Exactly what transpired in the next few hours will never be known, and detectives were only able to construct a likely scenario. At some point, Snider snapped, making her a hostage. He brutalized, beat, and raped her, repeatedly. He put the shotgun to her cheek and blew her face away, also taking the tip of her index finger as her hand rose defensively. No one knows if she was alive or dead when he strapped and taped her to his sex bench prototype, and proceeded to brutalize her in unspeakable ways. His bloody handprints were stamped on her buttocks. He tore out a hunk of her hair, which was still clutched in his fists when the bodies were found. He took her off the bench, tossed her onto the bed, and killed himself. He fell on the gun, and the bullet had left his right eye dangling from the socket. Dorothy Stratten was dead at the age of twenty.
Strange events followed Dorothy’s death. Bogdanovich had what they used to call a good old fashioned nervous breakdown. He still had to edit They All Laughed, and after spending months in the dark, alone with his dead Dorothy flickering onscreen, he pretty much lost it. He spent the next four years writing a book about it, The Killing of the Unicorn, where he laid the blame for her death squarely on the shoulders of his old friend, Hugh Hefner.
Sorry, but honestly, there was plenty of blame to go around. Hefner didn’t appreciate this, and did news conferences and interviews where he pointed out that it was Dorothy’s affair with Bogdanovich that pushed Snider over the edge, not her work with Playboy. He also called Bogdanovich out for seducing Louise Stratten, who was only sixteen at the time. All of this controversy helped book sales tremendously.
Dorothy’s mother and sister filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit against Hefner for libel, hotly denying there was anything between little sister and the bigshot director-turned-author. Hefner insisted that Bogdanovich was really behind the lawsuit. Everyone went to court, and lots of lawyers got rich. The charges were dropped, and Bogdanovich declared bankruptcy. Four years later, he and Louise were married.
This turn of events put most people off. It seemed that Peter was unable to move on from Dorothy, and just wanted to hang onto her in any sick way he could. No one gave the marriage more than a year, but they were wrong, it lasted eleven. Peter never regained the stature in Hollywood that he had enjoyed before Dorothy’s murder, and was divorced in 2001.
Dorothy’s final resting place is at Westwood Memorial Park, just across the lawn from another tragic blonde, Marilyn Monroe. A few months before her death, she told an interviewer who asked whether or not she was worried that her life would end as tragically as Monroe’s due to the nature of her business, “I just try to take life one day at a time.” Her epitaph, from the Earnest Hemingway novel, A Farewell to Arms, reads, “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 it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.” No special hurry indeed.
Dorothy’s epitaph is from the novel A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway.
Barbara Payton
The prostitute cruising for free drinks in the Sunset Boulevard dive was distinguished only in her complete lack of distinction; just another forty-dollar whore, willing to trade sex for a drink, and not very selective about with whom she bargained. Grossly overweight, she was in dire need of a bath, and her slurred speech often impossible to decipher. At the end of the bar, patron leaned in to another and whispered, “See that drunk prostitute over there? She used to be movie star.” The drunk prostitute was more than a movie star; she was an enchanting blonde vision, making ten grand a week, and playing her many drooling admirers for fools. Before she became the neighborhood pump, staggering up and down the Strip, looking for tricks and passing out on public benches, she was Barbara Payton: Queen of film noir. Her fall from grace was so darkly profound that it is not an exaggeration to say that she put the “Tragic” in Tragic Hollywood.
In 1927, she was born in Minnesota, but grew up poor in Odessa, Texas, spending her days dreaming of stardom in a darkened movie theater. Like many striking but obscure young women in small towns, she married the first boy who asked her, handsome Air Force pilot, John Payton, and they moved to Hollywood so she could try her hand at stardom. The year was 1943, and World W
ar II was raging in Europe. Barbara was too pretty and too restless to stay cooped up at home while her husband attended USC under the GI Bill. She began modeling, appearing in print ads for cars and fashionable clothes. Soon, she was a fixture in the clubs around town, and her husband began to grumble. They had a son by then, but Barbara seemed more interested in self-promotion than in being a wife and a mother. The marriage ended, and Barbara found herself a single mother on her own in Hollywood.
Soon Universal noticed her, and gave her a contract for a hundred dollars a week. Agent Phil Feldman described her as possessing “that blonde goddess shine that can’t be described as anything but a radiance that makes a movie star.” Her first film was Trapped, costarring Lloyd Bridges, for which she received decent reviews. Now the ultimate party girl had the money to party in style. She was known as the “Queen of the Night Clubs”, and when she wasn’t working, or sleeping, she was drinking and dancing her nights away. This became habit quickly, and Universal eventually dropped her contract.
She so impressed James Cagney that after her screen test for his new film, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, he immediately signed her with his own production company. The film was a huge success, and is still considered one of the best noir films ever made. Barbara plays Cagney’s moll/girlfriend, who ends up killing him after he betrays her with another woman. The Hollywood Reporter said of her performance, “Barbara Payton, in the difficult role of a basically good girl who turns to evil in spite of herself, makes a vivid appearance. She manages the subtle transition with polished artistry.” The world took notice of the blonde with legs to the moon, pouty full lips, and babydoll, blue eyes. Barbara was at the top of her game. Just ten years later, she would be working in a dry cleaners just to make ends meet, and that wouldn’t even be as bad as it got.
True to form, Hollywood did not realize the potential staring them in the face, and cast Barbara in a second-rate Gary Cooper film as a third lead. The film was titled Dallas, and Barbara played the villain’s girlfriend. The movie did nothing for her career, and rumors swirled of a romance between her and Cooper, who was a renowned skirt chaser. She also had a brief affair with notorious womanizer, Bob Hope, who set her up in an apartment as a “kept woman.” The deal ended when Barbara became too demanding, and Hope’s attention span ran out. A new man entered Barbara’s life, however, and he did not take no for answer.
Many who knew Franchot Tone thought him one of the most handsome men in film. He was suave, and exuded class and refinement, though he preferred the opposite in women. He was once married to volatile Joan Crawford, who was called many things, but classy was not one of them. He was often seen at the Hollywood supper clubs with one busty nobody or another as his escort. He became truly obsessed with gorgeous Barbara, following her on her Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye tour, and begging her to marry him. He sent her roses and champagne every day, and soon they were a fixture at all the chic Hollywood clubs.
Warners, together with Cagney Productions, owned Barbara’s contract, and they proceeded to kill her career by casting her in one bad western after another. She would have benefited from a better manager who believed in both her potential and her abilities. Instead, she was left to flounder in second- and third-rate parts in B-westerns that disappeared from theaters almost as quickly as they appeared. The only variation from this theme was the movie Only the Valiant, in which both Gregory Peck and Gig Young duked it out for the glamorous blonde’s affections. It was her last A-list film.
Barbara was subpoenaed to testify at the murder trial of bad boy extraordinaire, Stanley Adams, as it seemed she had been in his company the night a narcotics dealer found himself shot dead. Though she was not implicated in any wrongdoing, the press nonetheless had a field day with the story, and Warners’ was not amused. She was loaned to yet another substandard production, Drums in the Deep South, costarring Guy Madison, with whom she instantly began yet another affair. Three leading men, three affairs, but who’s counting? Well, Tone was. He had Barbara tailed by a private eye, and burst in on Madison and his wayward “fiancé”, catching them in the act. You know the one. He threatened to punch Madison out, saying, “I’m engaged to this girl and I’m going to marry her! Are you?” to which Madison replied, “No. I can’t. I’m already married.” Oops. Again, the press lapped it up, and more negative publicity swirled around Barbara, who was by now developing something of justified reputation as a drunken floozy.
Deer-in-the-headlights Barbara Payton.
Tone was called out of town for a few days, and as soon as his back was turned, Barbara hooked up with hunky B movie actor and fellow boozer, Tom Neal. She claimed it was love at first sight, after she encountered him and his ample charms at a Hollywood swim party. The feeling was mutual, and soon Neal and Barbara were messing up beds all over town. Tom was a jock, a former amateur boxing champ at Northwestern, and had pecs you could hang a side of beef from. He was the bad boy to Franchot Tone’s good guy, and Barbara began playing a dangerous game of hot and cool love between them. Neal was fond of Barbara, but Tone was impassioned and possessive of her. After all, they were technically engaged. It wasn’t hard to see an epic showdown on the horizon, with lovely Barbara cast as the bag of gold.
On the night of September 13, 1951, Tone confronted Neal outside Barbara’s home in Beverly Hills. He hit Neal in the jaw, and Neal responded by knocking him off his feet, leaping on his chest, and pummeling his face repeatedly. Shocked, Barbara tried to intervene, receiving a backhanded black eye from Neal for her trouble. The attack was so violent that neighbors cowered inside their homes, watching Neal pummel Tone for ten full minutes. When it was over, there was blood everywhere. Franchot Tone lay unconscious on the ground while Barbara screamed at Neal, “You’ve killed him!” Not quite. Tone was in a coma for eighteen hours, and hospitalized for another two weeks. He had a smashed cheekbone, a broken nose and a serious concussion.
The press went wild. Headlines screamed “Tom Neal Knocks Out Tone In Love Fight,” and the public took sides, mostly against Neal and Barbara. No one cared that Barbara thought she loved Neal, or that Tone had actually thrown the first punch. It was all about that two-timing blonde slag and her lowlife bully of a boyfriend ganging up on that nice fellow, Franchot Tone, who was obviously much too good for Payton. Barbara knew she’d be finished in Hollywood if she didn’t make it right with her bruised and battered fiancé. Upon his release from the hospital, she married Tone in the town where she was born: Cloquet, Minnesota. She said that this marriage was forever, but added later that “forever was just a weekend or so.” That sounds about right.
Fifty-three days, one suicide attempt (by Barbara), and several ugly arguments later, forever was over. Barbara just couldn’t forget Tom Neal, who soaked his sorrows in booze, lamenting the loss of his love. Years later, in a futile attempt to rescue Barbara from total self-destruction, Tone offered to marry her again, “I’ll be young for you again. I’ll become a boy again.” Barbara was far too gone by then. It never happened.
Neal and Barbara got back together, also teaming up for another forgettable western, The Great Jesse James Raid, wherein a bloated, pathetic Barbara attempted to keep it together as a torch singer in a saloon. Blessedly, the film was quickly forgotten. Unable to get film work, they began touring the country in a stage production of The Postman Always Rings Twice. How appropriate. Two actors, fresh off an adulterous love triangle that turned violent, tour in a play about adultery and violence. The problem was, Barbara no longer looked the part of the sexual temptress, and Neal had never been a great actor. When it became clear that the terrible reviews of Postman were not going to turn around, Payton crossed the pond to England to make even more bad movies.
Of her time there, she said, “I was a smash hit. It paid loads of money. Countless lords begged me to be their little pussy wussy. I gave a couple of them a thrill or two but when Tom came over to London, they all looked like shadows instead of men. That Tom rocked my haunches every time I looked at him.” With such a
strong foundation at the heart of their relationship, it’s not surprising that Payton and Neal split up four years after their international love affair began. Neal went on to marry twice more, though he never again deemed Barbara worthy of another proposal. He was eventually tried and convicted of shooting and killing his last wife in her sleep, and spent six years in prison. He died of a heart attack in 1971, six months after he was paroled. Barbara didn’t even make it that far.
Back in Hollywood, during the early ‘60s, Barbara found herself unable to provide for her own basic needs or feeding her appetite for alcohol. What’s a girl to do? She tried legitimate jobs, but would get herself fired every single time by showing up drunk. It’s hard to blame her. How hard it must have been, working as a hostess at a fancy restaurant and seating her former celebrity friends, who would then spend the rest of the evening laughing behind her back and rubbing it in. She wrote bad checks to buy booze, getting fined and lectured by unsympathetic judges who criticized her for wasting the opportunities she had, yet never offered help. Barbara enjoyed a brief respite in the late ‘50s, when she spent some time living with a fisherman on his boat off the coast of Mexico, but the ever-restless Barbara just had to return to Hollywood for one last shot at the big time. She should have stayed on that fishing boat.
By 1962, she was working as a three hundred dollar a night prostitute, living hand-to-mouth on the Sunset Strip. Three hundred became one hundred, then forty. She was arrested for vagrancy repeatedly, and for being passed out on bus stop bench wearing only a bathing suit and a sweater, and for dancing naked in front of an open window, and for being drunk and disorderly. In 1963, she was rushed to the hospital having been stabbed by a john, scoring thirty-eight stitches. In February of 1967, she was found unconscious, under a pile of garbage by a dumpster, barely alive, covered in bruises, and missing several teeth. She was estimated to be around sixty, she was thirty-nine. She’d slept there for days. Someone offered to take her to a detox center, but she shook her head: “I’d rather drink and die.” Doesn’t get much more self-destructive, does it? The hospital kept her a few days, then sent her to her parents house, where she died of heart and liver failure three months later.