The

Killing of the
Unicorn
<<<:::>>>

Dorothy Stratten
(1960-1980)
by

PETER BOGDANOVICH
 COPYRIGHT

Front cover photo courtesy of Shaplro/Sygma

Copyright © 1984 by Peter Bogdanovich and the Estate of Dorothy

Stratten.

Excerpts from Dorothy Stratten's writings copyright © 1980 by the Esrate

of Dorothy Stratten.

Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to reprint:

Lyrlcs from the following songs:

"Someday I'll Find You" by Noel Coward. Copyright 1930 by Chappell &
Co., Ltd.

"Love Story" by Karl Sigman and Francis Lai. Copyright © 1970 and 1971
by Famous Music Corporation.

"Dancing in the Dark" by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. Copyright

1931 by Harms, Inc.

"Too Marvelous for Words" by Johnny Mercer and Richard A. Whiting.

Copyright 1937 by Harms, Inc.

"Cover Girl," words and music by Bryan Adams and Linsey Mitchell.
Copyright © 1980 by Irving Music, Inc. (BM!) and Adams
Communications, Inc., and Zoo Music (PROC).

"I Don't Think I Can Take You Back Again" by Earl Poole Bail and Jo-El
Sonnier. Copyrigllt © 1977 by Wail to Wall Music and Buttercreek Music.

"One Day Since Yesterday" by Earl Poole Bail and Peter Bogdanovich.
Copyright © 1980, 1981 by House of Cash and Moon Pictures Music.
"Unicom" by Earl Poole Bail and Peter Bogdanovich. Copyright © 1981 by
House of Cash and Moon Pictures Music.

Excerpts from the following works:

Private Lives by Noel Coward. Copyright 1933 by the Estate of Noel

Coward.

The quotation by F. Scott Fitzgerald from ''Winter Dreams" in All the Sad
Young Men is used with the permission of Charles Scribners Sons.
Copyright 1922 by Frances S. E. Lanahan, copyright renewed 1950.

The quotation by Ernest Hemingway from A Farewell to Arms is used with

the permission of Charles Scribners Sons. Copyright 1929 by Charles
Scribners Sons, copyright © renewed 1957 by Ernest Hemingway.

Our Town by Thornton Wtlder. Copyright 1938 by Thornton Wilder,

copyright © renewed 1957 by Thornton Wilder.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. Copyright 1927 by Albert
and Charles Boni, Inc., copyright © renewed 1955 by Thornton Wilder.
Reprinted by special permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., and the
Estate of Thornton Wilder.

From Reverence to Rape by Molly Haskell. Copyright © 1973, 1974 by

Molly Haskell. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
Publishers.

From pages 842-843 of The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by

Barbara G. Walker. Copyright © 1983 by Barbara G. Walker. Reprinted by
permission of Harper & Row, Publisliers, Inc.

Excerpts from the following film reviews:

Jack Kroll, Newsweek. Copyright © 1981 by Newsweek, Inc. All rights

reserved.
Carrie Rickey, The Village Voice. Reprinted by permission of the author and
The Village Voice. Copyright © 1981

Stephen Schaefer, Us magazine. Copyright © 1982 by Us magazine.

Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times. Copyright © 1981 by the Los Angeles
Times.

Excerpts from the Johnny Carson interview with Dorothy Stratten on The
Tonight Shaw, courtesy of Carson Productions, Inc. Copyright © 1980.
When people read of the death of Dorothy Stratten, they shook their heads
and talked about the eternal triangle. It’s the age-old story: Play with
explosives and they blow up. Even I believed it, as the only living member
of that triangle. But as I tried to find the truth, I discovered a fourth side to
the figure—hidden and dark. Eventually there would be no doubt in my
mind that if the playboy-side of the pyramid had never existed, Dorothy
would not have died. She could not handle the slick professional machinery
of the Playboy sex factory, nor the continual efforts of its founder to bring
her into his personal fold, no matter what she wanted.

—Peter Bogdanovich

In memory of all the Dorothys who have ever lived, under whatever name,
this work is dedicated to the ones who are living, and who will live: that
their lives may be better because of the life and sacrifice of Dorothy
Stratten.

This hope embraces most especially Nelly and Louise, Anna, Antonia and
Alexandra, Clementine, and Michelle.
 FOREWORD

It would not have been possible to write this book without the extraordinary
help and encouragement of several people, chief among them John Dodds,
who was the senior editor at Morrow when agreements to publish this
memoir were first struck in August 1981, a year after Dorothy Stratten was
killed. Most of the royalties are to go to the Stratten Estate and to Dorothy’s
family.

Shirley MacLaine recommended her agent, Lynn Nesbit, who was

tremendously encouraging about the earliest rough draft, and said
immediately that she thought the people at Morrow would be most
sympathetic to the project, especially John Dodds, and (then associate)
publisher Sherry Arden. Both Sherry and John had recently lost women
very dear to them, a daughter and a wife, and Lynn believed correctly that
they would appreciate my feelings and intentions. Sherry has been
remarkably supportive and dedicated, and so has Lynn; they both have my
deepest thanks. As dear Shirley does, too, for steering me at a crucial
moment in the right direction.

It was Dodds more than anyone who shaped the book that finally evolved;
his contribution has been invaluable and irreplaceable. Without his genius
as an editor, the work could never have been finished.

Even after leaving Morrow to become editor of the hardcover line at New
American Library, and then to found his own Belvedere Books imprint,
John continued on his own time to work closely with me on every phase of
the book’s development. Because of the painfully personal nature of the
material, John’s sensitive objectivity was essential. Many times he would
interpret back to me what he had read, and suddenly an entirely new light
would be thrown on the events. He was patient, tactful, and brilliant in his
handling of an unusually difficult circumstance, and has my undying
respect and gratitude.

Producer Patrick Curtis came forward courageously with personal

information that had extraordinary reverberations; for his real friendship to
Dorothy and her memory, he has the appreciation of all of us who loved her.
Patrick was also instrumental in contacting model Patti Laurman, a protégé
of Paul Snider, who was friendly toward Dorothy and who confirmed
several key points to me and offered her observations from a viewpoint very
close to the crime. I am very grateful to her. As I am to photographer Mario
Casilli who was also willing to speak of his own experiences with Dorothy,
and of what he witnessed in her battles with Playboy. Much thanks as well
to Molly Bashler, Dorothy’s good friend and roommate in Los Angeles, for
her valuable observations.

Writers John Riley and Laura Bernstein shared facts and insights with me
on the Stratten story they researched and wrote, but which never got
published; they invested a great deal of time, energy, and emotion, and
received for their effort no fulfillment or praise. Their legwork and help
(Riley’s went on for nearly three years) made an invaluable contribution to
this book. That Riley had at a young age lost a woman he loved in a plane
crash, contributed greatly to his understanding of Dorothy’s tragedy and our
loss. John proved to be more than a fine journalist, but a true colleague.

Toward L.A. police detective Richard DeAnda, whose compassion and

grace in dealing with me on the horrible details of the crime, and whose
personal indignation while handling the case went far beyond his duty, I
feel more than indebted. As I do to former F.B.I. agent, Frank Angell, one
of the most respected private investigators in the business, who became a
valuable and trusted associate as he helped me track down leads and
information for almost three years after the crime. I wanted to know as
much as possible, and Angell’s personal sense of commitment to the truth,
like DeAnda’s, is rare.

My warmest thanks to several members of the cast and crew of Galaxina

and They All Laughed, each of whom contributed their memories of
Dorothy and their own observations: Audrey Hepburn, John Ritter, Colleen
Camp, George Morfogen, Linda MacEwen, Sean Ferrer, Sheila Stodden,
Douglas Dilge, James David Hinton, Scott Rosenfelt, Teresa Austin, Sally
Doyle, Patty Bunch. Linda MacEwen also typed a good part of the earliest
drafts of the book which, considering her closeness to Dorothy and me, was
a heroic act. In addition, Morfogen, Ritter, Camp, and writer David Scott
Milton, four of my dearest friends, read sections from several drafts, as did
art critic Michael Peppiatt; their comments and encouragement were
important and extremely reassuring.

Thanks are due as well to Dorothy’s business manager, Robert Houston,

who loved her as a friend, and to her lawyer, Wayne Alexander; they both
cooperated with us fully and diligently and far beyond their jobs. As did
attorney Robert Powsner, who never met Dorothy, but was retained by her
estate and by me to deal with the seamy aftermath in the media, and who
became personally involved in a way much of the legal profession avoids.

To Iris Chester, who most conscientiously typed the great bulk of the
manuscript several times, and helped through all its phases not only with
suggestions, but with proofreading, wording and punctuation, a very special
thank you.

The initial and most extensive line editing of the book, which involved
considerable reshaping and reconstruction, was superbly done by Nancy
Houghtaling, whose suggestions and ideas were extremely valuable; both
John Dodds and I are most grateful to her. Morrow’s senior editor Laurie
Lister and her assistant Deborah Baker were particularly helpful and
constructive in their questions and evaluations during the book’s final
stages; the intelligence and sensitivity they have shown is remarkable.

A number of authors, composers, lyricists, critics (or their estates), and their
publishers have kindly granted permission to print excerpts from their work.
Though official recognition is given on the copyright page, I would
personally like to add my appreciation to them all. And in particular to
Graham Payn and Michael Imison of the Noel Coward Estate for allowing
excerpts from Private Lives.

Apart from my immediate family, there are several others who, though they
had little to do with the making of this book, nevertheless made
considerable contributions—in very different ways—toward keeping me
going over the three years of its writing; I will always be thankful for their
friendship: Stella Adler, Lori and Glenn Camp, Dorothy and Will Camp,
Frank Capra, John Cassavetes, Mike Crane, Trammell Crow, Jr., Maria
Currea, the late Allan Dwan, Ramon Farron, Dr. John Felice, Graeme Fife,
Steve and Dan Foley, Barbara Ford, Samuel Fuller, Charles Glenn, Barbara
and Cary Grant, Beryl, Lucia, Tomas, and Robert Graves, Susan and Sam
Grogg, Howard Hirdler, Tom Kobayashi, Larry McMurtry, Neil Malamuth,
William Peiffer, Dido Renoir, the late Douglas Robertson, Peggy
Robertson, Gena Rowlands, Ray Ruff, Cybill Shepherd, Barbara and Frank
Sinatra, Marianne Smith, Carlyle Strickland, Dr. Milton Uhley, and Eric
Weissmann.

To Dorothy’s beloved family—her mother, Nelly, who will probably never

read this book because the pain would be unbearable, her brother, John, and
her sister, Louise, the three who have suffered more than anyone else
because they knew Dorothy longer and therefore knew more profoundly
how much was lost—any expression of gratitude would be too little. Their
encouragement, loyalty, and love made it possible to survive the catastrophe
that changed all our lives. They gave me the greatest gift imaginable: They
took me into their family and taught me a kind of love as selfless as
Dorothy’s and, along with hers, unique in my experience.

Because this is their book as much as it is Dorothy’s, the choice of

photographs was made with their feelings in mind. Consequently, there are
no pictures of Dorothy from Playboy, or with Paul Snider, or with Hugh
Hefner. Those images, should the family happen to see them, would carry
too many of the darkest memories. The photos we have used are nearly all
family snapshots: candids taken by Dorothy herself, or by her relatives and
friends. A couple of months before she was murdered, Steve Schapiro took
the best professional photographs of her while she was in the happiest time
of her adult life. A number of these appear with his kind permission.

A small handful of names in the story have been changed to protect privacy,
since knowing the true identities of these people would add little to the
reader’s understanding. For Morrow’s fifth printing, and for the first
Bantam paperback edition in 1985, several minor corrections or alterations
have been made to the text. Two paragraphs were added below, and two
more to the end of the last chapter, in order to bring certain events up to the
date marked below.

Numerous women, and a few men, have written to me of their reaction to

Dorothy’s story, and each letter conveyed its own particular heartbreak. My
deepest thanks to them all for sharing their most intimate pain, for showing
me that Dorothy and I were by no means alone in our thoughts or feelings.

Two extraordinarily gifted feminists, the writer Andrea Dworkin and the
lawyer Catharine A. MacKinnon, were as troubled in 1979-80 as D.R. and I
were though we couldn’t quite put our finger on it. The two women did, and
drafted the revolutionary antipornography civil rights law which is referred
to at the end of chapter seven. Andrea and Kitty MacKinnon also wrote me
the two most beautiful letters about the book, for which I thank them again
—as well as for their passion, wisdom, and sacrifice to the cause of
women’s rights.

P.B.
Los Angeles, California
April, 1985

At this moment the Unicorn sauntered by . . . when his eye happened

to fall upon Alice. . . .
'What—is this—?' he said. . . .
'This is a child!' Haigha replied eagerly. . . .
'I always thought they were fabulous monsters!' said the Unicorn. . . .
Alice . . . began: 'Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were
fabulous monsters, too! I never saw one alive before!'
'Well, now that we have seen each other,' said the Unicorn, 'if you’ll
believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?'
'Yes, if you like,' said Alice.

—Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass, 1872

The shark is killed for its fin,

The rhino is killed for its horn,
The tiger is killed for its skin,
What price the unicorn?

      —Anonymous
 CHRONOLOGY

February 28, 1960 Dorothy Stratten, born Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten,

Vancouver, B.C.

October 10, 1961 Brother John Arthur born, Vancouver, B.C.

August, 1963 Goes with mother and brother to Holland; father deserts
family; divorce follows.

August, 1967 First odd jobs; mother Nelly remarries.

May 8, 1968 Sister Louise Beatrice born, Vancouver, B.C. Mother

eventually divorces stepfather for cruelty.

June, 1974 Starts Dairy Queen job in Vancouver; has begun to write poetry.

September, 1974 Begins high school.

October, 1976 Goes steady with first boyfriend.

October, 1977 Paul Snider enters Dairy Queen.

January, 1978 After a fight, breaks off with first boyfriend.

February, 1978 Begins affair with Snider.

June, 1978 Graduates high school, starts job at B.C. Telephone .

August, 1978 Submits to naked photos; is summoned to L.A. by Playboy;

incident with Hefner.

October, 1978 Meets P.B. for first time; Snider moves to L.A .

January, 1979 Works a s waitress a t Los Angeles Playboy Club .

June 1, 1979 Marries Snider in Las Vegas .

August, 1979 First Playboy layout published; stars in first film, Autumn
Born, shot in Winnipeg.

October, 1979 Meets P.B. for the second time.

November, 1979 Begins Playmate of the Year pictorial for Playboy.

January, 1980 Starts Galaxina.

February, 1980 Begins Sex Goddess pictorial for Playboy.

March 22, 1980 Flies to New York to begin They All Laughed; moves into
Plaza with P.B.

April, 1980 Begins three-week tour in Canada. and U.S. for Playboy

May, 1980 Attends marriage of mother in Vancouver; goes to L.A.; returns

to N. Y. to continue film.

June, 1980 Playmate of the Year pictorial published in Playboy.

July, 1980 Completes picture, flies to London with P.B.; returns to L.A.,
moves into his house.

August, 1980 Travels to Texas and Mojave Desert for Playboy.

August 14, 1980 Tortured and killed by Snider in L.A.

 
 I -The Last Day of the World
A tornado of thought sweeping the mind . . .
Wanting to close your eyes
And open them again to a new beginning,
Or to start again on the right road . . .
 
Life is a mysterious path 
Which no two travel alike.
And once the chosen path is taken,
There is no turning back . . .
—Dorothy Stratten
Vancouver, May 1980

On Thursday, August 14, 1980, between noon and 1:00 p.m. in the bedroom
of a West Los Angeles house, Dorothy Stratten, a twenty-year-old Canadian
film actress and Playboy magazine’s then-current Playmate of the Year, was
tortured and killed by her estranged husband, twenty-eight-year-old Paul
Snider. Before murdering Dorothy, Snider put her into a bondage machine
of his own design. He then raped and brutally sodomized her. After freeing
her, he fired a shotgun point-blank at the left side of her face. She was dead
before the sound reached her ears. The tip of her left forefinger had been
shot off in the explosion. So it was apparent that the last thing Dorothy did
was to raise her left hand to her face.

During the next hour, Snider moved the corpse across the room to the bed
and had intercourse with it at least once before writing a terse suicide note.
He then turned the shotgun on himself.

At 12:30 p.m., private detective Mark L. Goldstein, who had been hired by
Snider to follow Dorothy, called from his car phone and was told by Snider
that all was going well. Soon after 2 p.m., he called again, but received no
answer.

That evening, Patti Laurman and Dr. Steve Cushner, friends of Snider’s
who were living in his house, became concerned about his unanswered
ringing phone. Later, Goldstein called the doctor, again from his car phone,
and asked him to check Snider’s room while Goldstein held on. The doctor
and Patti went downstairs, found the door unlocked, and opened it.
Laurman, horrified, fled from the room, returned to the phone, and told
Goldstein what they had found. Goldstein said he would be right over.

The doctor went into the room. Snider was lying on the floor, his face
blasted away. There was an arc of his brains and blood splattered across one
wall and the entire ceiling. It was later ascertained that he had been on his
knees when he pulled the trigger, and the impact had ricocheted him
forward onto the floor with the weapon frozen in his hands.

Dorothy did not look dead. Her torso was draped over the end of the bed,
her hair hanging down, still vibrant. There were bloody fingermarks on her
buttocks and one shoulder. The coroner later found semen in her vagina and
rectum. The violent sodomy had disfigured her. Along black line of ants
and other insects led to her face, with a similar trail crawling toward
Snider’s head.

Goldstein arrived within minutes, before the police. Later, police detective
Richard DeAnda would say that if Goldstein knew of Snider’s mood over
the past weeks, knew of the drugs and sex perversions Snider had indulged
in, knew of his fury over being barred from the Playboy mansion five days
earlier, and knew of Snider’s attempts to secure a weapon. He should have
warned someone.

Goldstein reached Hugh M. Hefner by phone with the news that Stratten
and Snider were dead. 'Murder/suicide?' Hefner asked, to confirm his first
searing thought. The skin on Hefner’s body, his secretary would recall,
seemed to be moving as he spoke; all the blood had drained from his face.
Several of his staff had been trying desperately to reach Stratten for the past
twenty-four hours. The first call Hefner made was to me.

***

I had been worried about Dorothy ever since she left my house that
morning. Hefner told me a few days earlier that he had barred Snider from
his mansion, assuming I knew the impact this would have, but I had never
met Snider, and unfortunately knew little about him.

Surely Hefner knew precisely what Snider was like: He had often been to
the mansion in the past eighteen months. His vulgarity and strutting
machismo were contrary to the Hefner style, which was far more insidious
and subterranean. Snider’s sleazy taste and braggadocio were a little too
crass. Dime-store pimps like he was could sully the fine liberal name of
Playboy, and of Hugh Hefner, who had become a kind of Walt Disney of
pornography homogenized for the masses.

Although Snider wasn’t respectable, the girl he married was. Tall, blond,
blue-eyed, thin but voluptuous, Dorothy Stratten was the quintessential
American sweetheart, maybe a little too beautiful to be the girl-next-door.
She was an A — high-school graduate who was especially interested in law
and acting and who expressed herself best in poems. Kind, selfless, and
good-natured, Dorothy was an angel in the shape of Aphrodite. 'Her beauty,'
a friend of mine would say, 'had a kind of genius.'

I first met Dorothy Stratten at the Playboy mansion in late October of 1978,
at about the time that Snider made his initial appearance there for the annual
Halloween party. That was when Hefner told Dorothy that Snider looked
like a pimp. She laughed and said that was only his costume, but she knew
it was the way he normally dressed. Dorothy had had only one boyfriend
before Snider seduced her: an unhappy adolescent affair that lasted a year
and yielded few happy memories, none of them sexual. When Snider
walked into the Vancouver Dairy Queen where Dorothy was working in late
1977, he had been on the city streets since he was fourteen, and had
practiced his skills on women and lived off them for over a decade.

By the time Dorothy turned eighteen the following February 28, Snider had
launched his campaign and managed to convince her that she was in love.
He thought that the extraordinary sensation of a first orgasm would enslave
a naive, romantic young girl like Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten. He figured he
would be able to get her to do whatever he wanted for a while, and what he
wanted most was for her to strip for Playboy’s Twenty-fifth Anniversary
Playmate Contest, which would close in August 1978, half a year before
Dorothy would turn nineteen, the legal age of consent in Canada.
But Dorothy refused to pose nude. She begged Snider not to bring up the
subject again. She could barely stand to take off her clothes at school, or
even in front of her mother. But he persisted: Playboy was the only way to
get into the movies. Hadn’t he been around the big world of show biz?
Wasn’t he a successful promoter, experienced in the ways of Las Vegas and
Hollywood? Wasn’t Playboy now sold in stores all over the land? This was
the age of liberation for men and women. All. the movie stars were showing
their bodies freely. Hadn’t she heard of the sexual revolution?

It took Snider six months of constant pressure, and then he still had to trick
Dorothy into a situation with a photographer she knew and trusted—
because he had taken her high-school pictures. When she cried, Snider said,
'Do it for me, baby—do it for me.' Within days after she finally posed,
Snider made Playboy aware of Dorothy Stratten. Within two weeks, she
was in Hollywood. During her first days at the Playboy mansion, she was
propositioned by numerous men, several of them famous, and then 'seduced'
by Hugh Hefner. Two years later almost to the day, she was tortured, raped,
and murdered.

***

When the phone finally rang in the last quarter hour of August 14, I was
certain it was Dorothy calling to say that everything was all right. But the
voice on the other end of the line wasn’t Dorothy’s. It was Hugh Hefner,
and I heard him say: 'Dorothy’s dead.' I could hear in his terrified voice that
he wasn’t mistaken or trying in some dreadful way to be funny. The phone
receiver slipped from my hand and fell to the floor and Hefner’s words
echoed through me. Dorothy dead? Why not say the world had blown up
and all of us were dead? Everything that had ever happened to me in my
life, everything in which I had ever believed, had been proved in one
blinding explosion to be conclusively wrong. If Dorothy was dead, life was
a terrible joke.

I was in the video room with Blaine Novak and Douglas Dilge, two
associates from They All Laughed (the picture we had all just completed in
New York), and I could hear Novak trying to console me and felt his arms
on my shoulders. I wanted to shrug him off violently and run through the
house and out to the car. Dilge was on the phone with Hefner, who gave as
few of the details as he felt necessary, and Doug was reluctant to repeat
even those. I had to plead before he would speak. Shotgun, he said. Shot
himself too. They were dead together. It would be more than a week before
I heard a hint of the torture Dorothy had been put through before the
murder, more than a month before the details became horribly clear. A
sound went through me—a growl that became a shriek.

Then suddenly I remembered the movie Dorothy and I had made. It had
been killed as well, its two hours a moving photo album of our days
together. But the comedy had turned to tragedy.

***

Eight days later, the ashes of Dorothy Stratten’s body were buried in an oak
casket less than a ten-minute drive from the homes of the three men who
had most influenced her life and death, less than a few yards from the
remains of the last great love goddess of the screen, Marilyn Monroe.
Monroe was born the same year as Hugh Hefner, founder of a magazine and
proselytizer of a life-style that had helped to destroy both women.
Dorothy’s mother, Nelly Schaap, in her grief allowed her new husband to
make the decision regarding the body of the stepdaughter he had met only
once. It was burned to a few handfuls of ashes.

Most of the people responsible for the event were at the funeral. The only
exception, besides the Snider lawyer and the Snider private eye, was the
man who pulled the trigger. His body was returned to Canada for burial.

Nelly made the decision to bury her eldest child in Los Angeles because she
would be 'close to the people she loved.' Dorothy’s younger sister, Louise,
had finally told Nelly about Dorothy and me, and Nelly said she had flown
to the States partly to meet 'the only man who ever made Dorothy happy.'
Her daughter, she said, had not had much happiness in her life.

Dorothy asked her mother less than four months earlier to come to New
York to talk about her problems. But Nelly had just met the man she would
marry, and he did not want her to leave. She would never forgive him for
that, or herself, for not going.
Hugh Hefner was at the funeral. As was his chief photographer, Mario
Casilli, who quit Playboy shortly after Dorothy’s murder. Though he had
worked for that magazine for twenty years, since then he has refused print
assignments that involve nudity. Dorothy’s new young lawyer, whom she
had met only once, a day before the killing, was there, too; and the young
business manager who had genuinely cared for her and tried to help, who
had known what trouble Snider was for her.

Dorothy’s father was there too. Simon Hoogstraten had neither contributed
to her welfare, seen, nor contacted her since she was four. Though he didn’t
respond to Dorothy’s invitation to her high-school graduation, he somehow
felt obliged to appear at her funeral. His eyes looked haunted, his
expression frozen in shock. He had the look of a man who could not allow
himself to think of the terrible mistakes he had made. The more he heard
about the lost daughter, the more he must have realized that Dorothy would
have loved him beyond devotion if she had been given even the smallest
chance. He was the one who could have thrown Snider out the first time he
appeared in pimp’s furs to take the eldest daughter on a date. A girl needed
a father to warn her of the evils of men. Less than three months earlier, in
New York, Dorothy had told me that she didn’t like her father.

Nelly would not go near the grave. She stayed in front of the chapel while
the others went to stand under the large tree near the mound of freshly dug
earth. Her face remained tightly closed off, beyond grief. A large part of her
had died with the child she had loved the longest, for nearly half her life.
Her new husband would never understand, and Nelly would be separated
from him permanently before the end of the year.

My oldest daughter, Antonia, held back her tears, as did Dorothy’s sister,
Louise. Her brother, John, wept openly, and so did my younger daughter,
Alexandra. I looked out at the sun breaking through the leaves onto the
grass under the tree and imagined Dorothy dancing there, free and happy.

Because her ashes were the only weight in the coffin, it took a long time to
descend into the grave. As the casket clanked downward, Hefner stood,
white and shaken, next to Casilli. I remembered his words a few days
earlier when he told me that he would 'never get over what happened.'
Certainly the last thing Hefner wanted was for Dorothy to die. The shock
and fear in his eyes was genuine, impossible to hide or feign. He looked
truly humbled, desperate for this day to end. Was he sharing with me
similar feelings of guilt and remorse? A desperate ache to turn back time
and do things differently? Would he share the relentless series of
confrontations with himself about his culpability in the tragedy? Will the
words echo endlessly for both of us: If only we had known.

The remains of the body that Casilli had photographed so intimately for
Hefner, and for the boys of the world, passed them. Was Casilli
remembering how Dorothy had cried when she first posed naked? Was
Hefner thinking of their secret time in the Jacuzzi?

Dorothy might forgive them, of course. She might even forgive Snider. But
I could not. Not him, not Hefner, not myself. If I had known more, I could
have saved her—it was not only my lack of specific information and of
other people’s motives but a fatal lack of intuitive awareness about people’s
duplicity: All this cost me the most cherished love of my life. As the
months and years of investigation went on and I found out more and more
about Hefner’s role in the events, my rage toward him grew. If I had to
confront my own responsibility, there could be no way to ignore his.

Perhaps the case I have built against Hefner in my mind and heart may be
viewed by others as a way out of my own agony. But revealing the truth
about his actions does not alter my own, nor lessen the awful awareness that
if I had done certain things differently, understood more quickly, Dorothy
would still be alive. None of the extenuating circumstances, nor the guilts
that Hefner must bear, nor the mistakes so many others made, can ever
change that terrible knowledge for me.

When people read of the death of Dorothy Stratten, they shook their heads
and talked about the eternal triangle. It was the age-old story: Play with
explosives and they blow up. Even I believed it, as the only living member
of that triangle. But as I tried to find the truth, I discovered a fourth side to
the figure— hidden and dark. Eventually there would be no doubt in my
mind that if the shadowy Hefner-side of the pyramid had never existed,
Dorothy would not have died. She could have dealt with Paul Snider, a
small-town pimp who first spotted and sold her, but she could not handle
the slick professional machinery of the Playboy sex factory, nor the
continual efforts of its founder to bring her into his personal fold, no matter
what she wanted.

***

The minister read the words:

. . . Yea, though I walk through

the valley of the shadow of
death, Thou art with me . . .

And I thought: What good is any of that now to Dorothy? Where was God
when she was alive? How could a woman so full of grace and talent be
senselessly murdered in her twenty-first summer?

Her voice was in my ear, in the soft wind through the trees: 'Throw the rose
on the coffin, Peter, it’s time, they’ve suffered enough.' And I took three
steps forward, looked down into the grave at the coffin, and let the pink
flower fall. John and the girls did the same, and Hefner and Mario, and we
all walked away.

***

On the last full day we would ever have alone together, in London, Dorothy
had asked me if I would make 'a sad love story' for her, and we both smiled,
remembering the popular novel and movie she liked. I grinned and asked
what kind of sad love story she had in mind: One in which there was a
death at the end? And she nodded a barely perceptible yes. Our smiles
faded and we looked at each other for a long moment. I touched her cheek
and promised that I would, and she smiled softly.

The love story Dorothy requested turned out to be our own, as she had
feared and as I could never have imagined. To tell that story now I would
have to understand how all of us ended up there, standing in the blazing
August sun, under an old, sheltering tree, to bury the mortal remains of this
dazzling, brilliant woman.

Thornton Wilder wrote:

 . . . There is a land of the living and a
land of the dead and the bridge is
love, the only survival, the only meaning.

And so, for Dorothy, because she was the noblest person I ever met, the
gentlest and the bravest, how better could I serve her memory, or keep her
love and spirit alive, than to honor her with the whole truth and nothing but,
until death do us join? This, then, is for you, D.R. The one you asked for in
London, a little more than two weeks before you were murdered.
 II - The Base of the Pyramid
It’s here, everything—
Everything anyone ever
Dreamed of, and more.
 
But love is lost:
The only sacrifice
To live in this heaven,
This Disneyland
Where people are the games.
—Dorothy Stratten

Los Angeles, August 1978 The fourth wall of the pyramid was begun
before Dorothy was born, when Hefner, an enterprising twenty-seven-year-
old Midwesterner, came up with an idea: Take masturbation out of the
bathroom and put it on the newsstands. In late 1953, when the first issue of
Playboy appeared, it was revolutionary in its obvious approach to men’s
fantasies. But it gained a measure of respectability as the years went by
when the Supreme Court ruled, by implication, that Playboy articles were of
'redeeming social value.' In its first year, the magazine’s circulation grew
from 70,000 to 175,000; in twenty years Playboy sold more than 6 million
copies monthly.

An extremely shy young man from a strict Methodist family, young Hugh
was a virgin through military service and into his twenties. And then there
was a tremendous setback in his romantic life: His boyhood sweetheart, his
first real-life pinup, made him a cuckold. Earlier in the same year Dorothy
was killed, a book was published, Thy Neighbor’s Wife by Gay Talese,
which told most or the story: Hefner himself (and the ex-Mrs. Hefner) had
given Talese all the details of the one great disappointment of his life. The
book reported how Mildred, the girl he had always planned to marry, his
one and only love, had broken down during a movie they were attending—
its crime story seemed to parallel hers—and confessed soon after that for
more than a year she had been having an affair with another man. Mildred
had told young Hefner that of course she understood why he wouldn’t want
to marry her now.

But young Hef did marry Mildred; he forgave her. Also, he told Talese, for
a time, having been alarmed by the competition, he wanted Mildred more
than ever. She bore him two children, a girl and a boy, yet the relationship
didn’t survive. Although he was still married, Hefner roamed about, lost.
He continued to read sex books and any pornography he could find, and
masturbated regularly. His favorite dream was to strip and seduce
everybody’s girl-next-door, the one who had broken his heart.

Until Playboy arrived, pornography was not easily accessible to the average
man. And it was embarrassing to buy. Then, in 1951, Marilyn Monroe’s
nude calendar photograph scandalized the country. Marilyn had done the
photo two years before, but her subsequent popularity in movies brought it
to light. She apologized to the public. The calendar sold out and secured her
stardom. The interest in Marilyn’s nude picture did not escape the notice of
Hugh Marston Hefner.

He put up six hundred dollars of his own money, borrowed more from his
parents, among others, and set up shop in the kitchen of his small
apartment. He paid his secretaries a little extra to strip and pose, and created
the first mass-circulation magazine to openly encourage male masturbatory
fantasies. And the increasingly impressive by-lines on Playboy articles gave
it a patina of respectability. To the men and boys of the world, Hefner
became the great emancipator, a swinger who shared the wealth, a liberal
thinker who rode the crest of a revolution that changed the nation.

The concept of mass-publishing pictures of female physical perfection did

not originate with Hefner. In the 1940s, Esquire started printing a monthly
foldout Varga drawing of a slightly naughty, but dreamily hygienic
showgirl. The work had a certain wit, an awareness on the part of the
models and artist of the purpose of the drawing. It was a kind of fancified
Art Deco erotica, in which Varga and his anonymous girls were
collaborators. The not-so-subtle smirk in the drawings gave each woman
the look of an experienced hooker.
Hefner removed the smirk and the artist, replaced the showgirl with the girl-
next-door, and used glamorous color photography, aided by all the tricks of
the trade: lenses, filters, makeup, touch-up. The profound difference to the
reader was that Hefner’s model purported to be real: There was no artistic
license to consider. Weren’t these, then, photographs of the perfect woman?

Three years after Monroe’s calendar story broke, and five years after she
posed, the cover of the rather tame first issue of Playboy featured a poor
wire-service photo of Marilyn waving, accompanied by the blurb:

FIRST TIME
in any magazine
FULL COLOR
the famous
MARILYN MONROE NUDE

Marilyn had no control over the picture and received no money, but the
issue sold. By the time Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten was born in a Salvation
Army hospital in Vancouver six years later, Playboy’s circulation was 1.1
million. And the legend persisted that the first woman to pose naked for the
magazine was Marilyn Monroe. Hefner and his organization did as much as
they could over the years to encourage that misconception. In 1984 they
would headline THE LAST NUDE PHOTO OF MARILYN MONROE.

When Playboy celebrated its tenth anniversary, Dorothy was four and her
father had already deserted her and her mother and brother. Somehow Nelly
managed to make enough money cleaning other people’s homes to feed the
two children. At the age of seven, Dorothy began doing odd jobs to help out
while Nelly studied practical nursing.

Meanwhile, as Playboy turned thirteen, Hefner was reportedly well past

Don Giovanni’s thousand and three conquests. In those days, all the action
was still at the Chicago mansion. Dominated by an indoor swimming pool
with a glassed-in ceiling, round-the-clock kitchen staff and waiters, plenty
of new or would-be Playmates in residence, Hefner’s home for young
women virtually advertised sexual satisfaction guaranteed. The sixties were
Hefner’s golden decade: The magazine and the Playboy Clubs around the
country were thriving. Now what did Mildred think of her cuckolded ex-
husband? Had he shown her sufficiently what she had given up—the hero
of millions? He had made it easy for her: If she wanted to see by whom she
had been replaced, she had only to open the latest issue—a catalogue of her
ex-husband’s victories easily available across the nation. It was the
cuckold’s ultimate revenge.

***

By the end of the sixties, I had reached thirty, had made only one
(unsuccessful) film, had a very lovely daughter but was beginning to realize
I had married too young, hardly knowing myself very well, much less my
wife. By the early seventies, my life had been changed completely. A
second beautiful daughter had been born but the marriage had ended, and
another long-term relationship had begun; my father had died; and three
consecutive films of mine (The Last Picture Show; What’s Up, Doc? and
Paper Moon) had become critical and popular successes. I was suddenly a
wealthy, famous young man. But I was still a long way from understanding
myself, the woman I lived with, or the world around us.

In 1972, Playboy invaded my life. Its editors had, without permission,

extracted from Picture Show two frames of Cybill Shepherd naked, and
printed them. (Shepherd and I were then living together.) While moviegoers
had seen less than seven seconds of her nude—and in constant motion—
Playboy readers could gaze endlessly at the poorly reproduced photographs.
Moreover, her appearance in the magazine would seem to have been with
her approval, even though she had expressly forbidden any still shots of
those brief sequences. The following year, Cybill sued Playboy, and Hugh
Hefner personally, for nine million dollars.

The seventies were far less secure than the sixties for the Playboy empire.
The Shepherd lawsuit and others like it took their toll. And there were drug
problems as well. One of Hefner’s private secretaries, Bobbie Amstein,
became involved in a cocaine connection, and subsequently committed
suicide. Anti-Hefner rumors in Chicago were rampant. But the Mansion
West had been opened and he had begun to spend most of his time in
Southern California. He was forty-seven and living mainly with dark-haired
Barbi Benton. He also had committed himself to regular orgies. It was this
predilection that finally, he would tell me, drove Barbi away.
Also in 1973, Willy Rey, a woman of twenty-three, died of a drug overdose
in Canada. It had been exactly two years since she left her native
Vancouver, changed her name from Wilhelmina Rheitvald, posed for, and
appeared in, Playboy. Mario Casilli took all her pictures. For a time, Willy
had been a mansion regular. The story never received much publicity, and
Playboy pretended it had never happened. They told Dorothy Stratten that
she was the first Canadian to appear in the magazine.

By the end of the seventies, things looked bad for me. Although Cybill had
two successes on her own (The Heartbreak Kid and Taxi Driver), two films
we had done together (Daisy Miller and At Long Last Love) had failed at
the box office. Another of mine (Nickelodeon) had also fallen below
expectations critically and with the public. The Shepherd lawsuit was
settled by the payment to her of all legal fees and half the movie rights to a
book Playboy owned and would produce if I directed. This picture, Saint
Jack (which they did not finally produce, though Hefner’s name appeared
on it), eventually became a succes d’estime out not a financial winner. The
enforced separations Cybill and I endured because of studio resistance to
our working together eventually helped to break up our relationship. Cybill
married a home-town man and almost immediately had the child she had
wanted to share with me. I felt adrift and rudderless. A great many women
entered my life—too many to do me any permanent good. When my mother
died of cancer, my daughters and younger sister looked to me as head of the
family. But I was not able to help anyone.

I had few male friends. My closest relationships were always with women. I
had been married faithfully to Polly Platt, with whom I had two daughters,
for almost nine years, and Cybill and I had a marriage in all but name for
the next eight years. There followed more than a year of devastating
promiscuity, which left me exhausted and miserable, hoping for an enduring
bond that would never lose its strength or magic.

***

By 1978, Hefner and his associates were in the midst of their most
expensive promotional campaign: the international search for Playboy’s
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Playmate. Hefner personally told me of the quest
for a quarter-century centerfold and ran a short promotional film for me at
the mansion. The Shepherd lawsuit had been settled amicably after Hefner
himself came to my house to discuss the terms. The four-minute journey
had been one of the conditions, and Hefner had borne the indignity with
only a touch of irritation. His retribution was always covert: He invited
Cybill and me to become regulars at mansion weekends and parties and said
he would see that our names were placed on the 'gang list,' which meant
either of us could drop over anytime. Our greatest enemy had somehow
become a friendly acquaintance, anxious to be more.

When Hefner took Cybill and me on a tour of his upstairs quarters, a lot of
Barbi Benton’s things were still there. The two were then in the process of
their final split; she had become fed up with Hefner and his weekly sex
parties. We had heard rumors about the private games at the mansion, but
details at the time were scarce. The implications behind the special Hefner
tour of his bedrooms and bath were not difficult to read, most obvious being
the moment when he hinted broadly that we 'join' him sometime for a little
Jacuzzi. The raised eyebrows of hope and the sideways smile did it for
Cybill—she told me later that she had felt nauseated.

The first insider to speak candidly to me about the Hefner orgies was
Patrick Curtis—a year and a half after the murder. Curtis had a show biz
head start on most of us, having played Melanie’s newborn baby in Gone
With the Wina. Subsequently he had acted for years on TV and in pictures
before becoming a producer. It was he who brought Raquel Welch to the
screen, and they were married for several years. When they broke up and a
later romance ended badly, Curtis took to going to Hefner’s. He was
chagrined that he had participated in some of the orgies, and decided he
would just as soon not go back.

The rules of the orgy, Curtis explained, were easy: anything went—or
anyone. He mentioned 'the hundreds of times' one of Hefner’s women had
gone downstairs and invited the new girl from Iowa, or Missouri, or
Montana. Suddenly the girl found herself 'in a situation she would never
have tolerated' back home—but this was Hollywood, the young women
would think. This was the modern world— didn’t everybody do it this way?
These girls were passed among several men and women in one night.
Everybody who wanted to watched; and the spectator/participant list
included many famous names, including the king of Playboy. 'The girls end
up just lying there,' Curtis said: 'Anyone who wants to get on is OK.'

Most of my visits to the mansion were innocent: a game or two of pinball,

chitchat and a sandwich, a movie, a fight on closed-circuit TV. My first
experience as a single guest at a Playboy party was strangely prophetic: The
nineteen-year-old with whom I struck up a conversation turned out to be
Hefner’s date for the late-evening orgy that night. Call her Tammy. The first
thing she said to me was that we were 'being watched,' but I was far too
naive about the Playboy scene to take the words seriously, though I
followed her into a deserted room so that we could talk more privately.
Tammy said that everyone had been telling her she ought to pose for
Playboy, but she didn’t know if she should or not. They said it was a good
way to break into the movies. I told her it was about the worst way and
eventually convinced her to agree to take a ride to my house, where we
could talk unobserved. I promised to bring her back whenever she wanted,
and meant it. She was far more innocent than she looked or tried to act, I
realized, and hoped first to make her trust me, and then talk her out of the
Playboy idea, knowing that no one in Hollywood considered the Playmates
anything more than glorified call girls. Playmates were usually gone in
thirty days, as soon as the next issue appeared.

Yet I never got to say all that to Tammy. She had been right—we were
being observed and followed. A mansion regular arrived to break up our
conversation, and then, when Tammy came out front to join me at my car,
Hefner appeared, flanked by several angry-looking buddies. He said he had
a date with the lady after the party. It had been planned for some time. We
were simply taking a ride, I said, and would return within an hour, but as I
spoke I could see Tammy being maneuvered backward into the house by the
regulars. She looked frightened. Hefner was smiling solicitously and
explaining that he and Tammy had arranged this date several days ago.
Since I was there for the first time, I felt that I had broken a cardinal rule.

I caught a glimpse of the top of Tammy’s head as she was being swallowed
up among the crowd, and tried to joke with Hefner, saying, 'I thought I was
the guest here, Hef . . .' But he had the ready answer for that one: 'I’m not
that good a host.' His place, I said, was like the greatest boys’ camp ever
built, and Hefner’s smile faded. After a couple of Playboy years, I heard
much later, Tammy had become a high-priced call girl in Paris. None of the
other Playboy girls I would come to know ended up much better.

The regular weekday Monopoly games were almost always played by an

all-male cast. The occasional women were spoken-for observers, or one of
Hefner’s private secretaries. His 'special lady' of the moment (Sondra
Theodore then) sometimes joined us. It was a custom-made Monopoly set,
and each of the regulars had a playing token specifically molded in his
image. I was left to choose one of the remaining tokens and always picked
the anonymous Playboy Bunny to represent me. This never failed to get a
laugh and discussion from the players, who thought I was being either
ironic or perverse. The truth is I genuinely empathized far more with the
Playboy women than with the Playboy men and, therefore, had more
sympathy for them as well.

Often the same regulars would congregate in the game house, a few yards
away from the main building, where they would play pinball, pool, and
other penny-arcade games while the jukebox cranked out hits from the
thirties and forties—Hefner’s youth. His eyes would tear at the sentimental
love songs of Sinatra and Nat King Cole. Hefner was always pointedly
warm and solicitous, kidding around and treating me like a son or younger
brother. In the Monopoly games, he made a show of giving me what
seemed like fair advice, because I was not a regular player and therefore at
a disadvantage. It didn’t matter—I always lost.

Hefner and I got into a couple of serious conversations about my troubled

career and my indecision as to what to do next. His advice seemed well
meant and genuine, though of course it all added up to my directing the
picture he and Cybill now owned. When I spoke of my love for Cybill, his
eyes misted over and his smile looked sad. He said he didn’t think he could
ever be faithful to one woman again. No single woman could satisfy him
now. And I would contradict him and say that if the right woman came
along, he could fall in love and be happy with her, but Hefner shook his
head and said he doubted it.

I bought Hefner’s generally affable and admiring personal attitude and

found him likable in short doses. I quickly tired of the Monopoly games,
though the last time I played—just before leaving for Singapore to direct
the movie Playboy co-owned—I won. Hefner had been more than helpful in
his assistance, and later I began to wonder if there hadn’t been a fix.

There were often film and TV celebrities at the mansion: Warren Beatty,
Ryan O’Neal, and others less easily recognizable. I thought of those times I
had seen one of the most notorious movie-star studs with Hefner at the
mansion, the two of them sharing an easy familiarity. There were frequent
macho innuendos in the banter between them, especially the time they
strolled around a new toy Hefner had just purchased. They called it a 'fuck
chair.' It looked more like an old shoeshine stand—there were so many
different places to put hands, feet, knees, and rear. The men were chuckling
as they circled the contraption, exchanging ideas on how many different
sexual positions could be assumed. They were discussing their knowledge
of the secrets of the bedroom wars, the technique of the great lovers: hold
off; make love so that the woman has several orgasms before the man; then
thrust home, a hero every time. How long a man could hold out, therefore,
was part of the test of cocksmanship, and most of their references were to
that ability. What they extolled wasn’t pleasure for both men and women,
but men’s exercise of power over women.

Early in 1980, a new book came out that revealed a little more of Hefner,
though I didn’t read it until over two years later. Mike McGrady had written
the Linda Lovelace best seller, Ordeal, in which some Hefner orgies were
described. The most chilling story dealt with Hefner’s desire to see a dog
screw Linda—or any other woman. It wasn’t Lovelace he was interested in,
it was watching bestiality. He owned several stag reels of similar events, but
had never actually seen the live action. Linda’s husband/promoter/manager
had been threatening for years to kill her if she wouldn’t do precisely as she
was told, so she consented to let Hefner and other regulars watch while she
supposedly attempted to get the dog to make it with her. She was, in truth,
subtly doing the opposite, and the dog refused to perform. Hefner was
disappointed, but philosophical. On another occasion, in the Jacuzzi during
one of the regular orgies, Hefner sodomized Linda Lovelace.

If, in his most private moments, Hefner had any thought that it might be
possible to pull himself back to the romantic idealism of his youth, there
was a way: find and create a star. As Playboy, his alter ego, neared its
twenty-fifth birthday, he needed that movie star: his own Garbo, Dietrich,
or Harlow. He knew that Monroe connection was fake and wanted a real sex
goddess to emerge from the pages of Playboy. Without that, it would be too
easy to write off his women as one-month wonders, of no further interest
(even to their readers) after the usual four weeks of masturbatory guilts and
pleasures.

The great Twenty-fifth Anniversary Playmate Hunt was conceived as a

quick way to spread a vast dragnet to find the Silver Star for Hefner to
expose and possess: an enduring sex goddess of talent and beauty who
would gain the respect and admiration of the world. The grand validation.
In the meantime, as friend to the famous, he plied the picture people with
drinks and food and entertainment and women, and used their names to
make his establishment all the more respectable. Some people even
believed that Jimmy Carter’s candid interview in Playboy just before the
election had supplied the winning margin. In twenty-five years, Hefner had
gone from porn King to kingmaker. But without a star, what did it all add
up to? A desire for bestiality? Sodomy with the heroine of Deep Throat?
Hefner’s fervent, unspoken, prayers centered on the greatest dreamgirl of all
time.

***

When Dorothy Hoogstraten turned thirteen, the usual adolescent

unhappiness that accompanies that age didn’t push her out into the world of
her peers as it does with most. She retreated into herself, stayed in her
room, started smoking. By the time she was sixteen she had developed an
ulcer. Dorothy began to write poems as a way of thinking to herself, and of
communicating with others. She wrote on scraps of paper, envelopes,
school assignments; she gave many away to friends. At fourteen, she began
a part-time job in a Dairy Queen: 'It was great to get work that young,' she
would write, 'but I turned fifteen, and sixteen and seventeen, and at eighteen
I was still working there, wearing a little red uniform with my hair in
pigtails. . . .'

Dorothy was not so different from most girls in North America, more
sensitive and beautiful perhaps, more curious and kind. She stood out, but
was by no means unique in her experiences and reactions to men. She was
as insecure as most, as anxious to grow up and be a big girl, to do
something with her life, and to find happiness. All the various life-style
advertisements that bombarded Dorothy were as confusing to her as they
were to most of us. Unlike many, however, she wanted to find answers, to
help others to find them. For her friends Geraldine and Cheryl, she wrote:

. . . Remember the fine times of the past,

But bring forth finer times of the future,
And think not of what we are missing,
But what we are gaining . . .

Yet Dorothy often had nightmares; she would wake up sweating and crawl
into her younger sister’s bed. Several poems revealed that she frequently
had death on her mind:

A foot meets the pavement

for a moment.
The remains of a lowly earthworm
whose life was terminated in the
creation of a footprint
dries up slowly.
At its journey’s end a foot dries up
slowly in a coffin only to be
transformed into soil by a
lowly earthworm.

Late in 1977, Paul Leslie Snider entered the Dairy Queen where Dorothy
was working and appraised her knowingly to see if she might be a good
candidate for the streets, but quickly realized her pigtails and innocent smile
were genuine. He was right—she would not be eighteen for another couple
of months. But Snider was in no hurry; he figured this one had Playboy
potential. During that New Year’s weekend, Dorothy broke up with her first
boyfriend; she had been sleeping with him for a year and hating it. Later she
wrote or him:

Sometimes we’d get along really well, and then he would . . . ruin
everything by dragging me to the bedroom. I dreaded that so much, but
 felt I owed it to him. Sometimes I thought that was all he wanted from
me because he used to get angry when I refused him. I thought sex was
the most animalistic and beastly thing ever to be invented. Steve never
pleased me. . . . I dreaded the end of the night when I had to give
myself up to him. It was sort of like a game I kept losing and that was
how I lost.

But she kept thinking there was something wrong with her—maybe she was
frigid. When Steve maliciously destroyed the Christmas present it had taken
her months to pay for, Dorothy ended the relationship. Shortly afterward,
Snider called again at the Dairy Queen and began his attempts to win her.

It didn’t take long. The first boyfriend’s thoughtless, patronizing manner,

their painful bedroom scenes, her mother’s unpleasant experiences with
men, the boys and men on the streets who threatened or tormented her, or
exposed themselves to her, her father’s desertion—all these had prepared
Dorothy for the friendly, almost paternal approach from a man eight years
older who seemed to be kind, considerate, and successful.

Snider also knew the right buttons to push romantically. When Dorothy felt
an orgasm for the first time, she believed some part of herself would be
forever in his debt. What she had discovered in her own body and heart she
identified with Snider and dung to him as the source, not realizing she had
really found it in herself. The explosion had awakened something powerful.
Perhaps this was love, she thought, though she would write: 'If you don’t
know what love is, how are you supposed to know if you’re in love?' Yet
the lovely secret she shared with Paul couldn’t be explained to Louise or
John or to her mother. This was so much closer to those stars you were
supposed to see when love struck. Sleeping Beauty, after all, arose through
the kiss of the Prince. It was a pervasive male fantasy: The beautiful,
submissive Princess, awakened to the beauties of life and love through the
gentle touch of a Prince. Sleeping Beauty, unlike Eve, lived happily ever
after, but then Eve presumed to taste the fruit of wisdom. Learn the moral
well, girls—don’t awaken on your own, wait for a man.

Dorothy thought she had fallen in love. Nelly tried to warn her about
Snider, but then, Dorothy would have thought, her mother hadn’t had the
best luck with men: Her first husband had run off, her second husband and
boyfriends had often been unkind to the kids. One had broken Johnny’s arm
and bloodied Dorothy’s nose. Dorothy would have better luck. At least Paul
brought her presents. He was stern sometimes, but he never yelled—not at
first. The repeated protests of her family and friends only helped to create a
Romeo and Juliet fantasy that Snider inflamed and used to his own
advantage.

He continually tried to cajole Dorothy into posing naked for Playboy—

though the thought terrified her so that she cried each time. She did not
know that he had been a pimp in various cities for over a decade, that he
had worked in his father’s sweatshop as a leather cutter by day and worked
the streets at night, learning from white and black pimps how to manipulate
young women. He gave them marijuana, while he used cocaine. Those who
could afford it rubbed coke on the penis which, serving as an anesthetic,
prolongs an erection and delays orgasm. Inhaling it numbs the feelings as
well, so that a man becomes a mindless battering ram in pursuit of
senseless, destructive pleasure.

At the local nightspots, everybody knew Snider and treated him as a

celebrity. Dorothy felt privileged to be with him. She didn’t know that on
the streets Snider was called 'the Jewish pimp'; that he had for several years
dealt in drugs and prostitution, not only in Vancouver, but in Seattle, Las
Vegas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Nor that he had been arrested
numerous times by the vice squad and that, to gain release, he would inform
on other pimps and pushers.

To Dorothy, he was a promoter, a producer. He put on a couple of car shows

that summer of 1978, but no one told her that he had been forced, on the
last car show he had worked, to sell his share for cash to save his life.
Snider had gotten involved with the girlfriend of a local mobster who was
serving time in jail. He even used the mobster’s money to pay for plastic
surgery on the girl’s breasts. When the man got out, he found Snider and
held him by the ankles out a window thirty stories from the ground. Snider
cried and pleaded and promised all his money. Afterward, he left town for
nearly a year. He had just returned when he first spotted Dorothy.

As Dorothy celebrated her eighteenth birthday, Snider continued his

calculated attentions to her: a lavish gift, retreat, another lavish gift, plenty
of romantic dialogue. The talk of posing for Playboy increased monthly. As
time was running out for the contest, Snider applied pressure weekly.
Eventually, Dorothy’s mother inadvertently played into his hands by going
to Europe for three weeks at the start of August.

First, Snider made a deal with Ewe Meyer, the local photographer who had
taken Dorothy’s high-school graduation picture: If Meyer would help
Snider convince Dorothy to strip for Playboy and they used the pictures,
Snider would give him the one-thousand-dollar finder’s fee. The photos,
Dorothy was told, were to be portraits of both her and Snider, but after a
few of those were shot, the truth came out. She later would describe to
actress Molly Bashler, her L.A. roommate, how Snider had stripped to his
shorts and assumed his favorite muscleman poses. He lovingly collected
them of himself from every era and angle. Meyer and Snider then tried to
encourage Dorothy to take off her clothes too, and she cried. Snider began
pleading. 'Do it for me, baby,' he begged softly. 'Please do it for me.'
Eventually, she did. Snider would never give Meyer the finder’s fee, but
Meyer’s photos would sell after Dorothy was killed. The Pulitzer Prize-
winning article in The Village Voice used several.

The few acceptable partially naked pictures Meyer got of an obviously

frightened girl with a breathtaking face and body were enough to interest
Ken Honey, a Vancouver photographer who had already sent several
Canadian women to Playboy. Because Dorothy was underage, Honey said
he would need her mother’s or father’s signature on the application. Snider
returned with Nelly’s signature forged on the document and the matter was
dropped. Honey had taken one look at the photos and knew that he had
found a girl in whom Hefner would be especially interested. So he agreed to
break precedent and shoot at Snider’s apartment instead of the usual session
at his studio. To Dorothy, Snider spoke with great enthusiasm of Playboy’s
interest and their high professional ethics: Today everybody did Playboy.
She posed, but she cried throughout the session, and never for a moment
stopped wishing it would end.

Honey sent the photographs overnight to Los Angeles, and Playboy V.P
Marilyn Grabowski instantly recognized what she had. and immediately
took the pictures to Hefner. He had despaired of finding the perfect
Playmate. The contest was about over and although he had spent many
pleasurable evenings appraising and sampling the contestants, he hadn’t
found that special one. She had to be a blonde, with large breasts, a slim
waist, and healthy buttocks, tall, with a beautiful but innocent-looking face.
The title character in Little Annie Fanny, the magazine’s long-running
cartoon serial, was Hefner’s ideal. Later, he would plan a feature film with
Dorothy Stratten as Annie.

Although no woman possessed all of Hefner’s requirements, Candy Loving

from Oklahoma led the race. But she was a brunette, married, and in her
mid-twenties, hardly perfect for Hefner, who wanted the anniversary winner
not only in his magazine but also for himself—the Silver Star would be his
'new lady.' When he saw Dorothy’s photographs, he realized without a
doubt that she was the girl of a million Playboy fantasies.

Less than two days after Hefner saw her photos, Dorothy arrived at his
house. Honey had been instructed to get her there as soon as possible.
Snider objected when he heard there was only one round-trip ticket, but
didn’t suggest she refuse to go. He used the speed of Playboy’s response to
emphasize to Dorothy how right he was about her potential and the best
way to exploit it. He instructed her to tell her brother she had a modeling
job, and her supervisor at B.C. Telephone, where she had begun to work in
June, that a family emergency had arisen and she had to be gone for a
couple of days.

On August 13, 1978, Dorothy took an airplane for the first time in her life
and, from L.A. International, her first limousine: to the Playboy building on
the Sunset Strip. Marilyn Grabowski, who welcomed her, would later recall
how Dorothy had tried to act older than her years. Grabowski led the way to
the Playboy studio, where their veteran centerfold photographer, Mario
Casilli, was waiting. His Italian Santa Claus looks were reassuring, and he
of course was used to nervous young women. Dorothy was given a glass or
two of white wine to relax her, and Casilli got as much as he needed.
Afterward, Grabowski rode in the limousine with her to the mansion.
Dorothy tried to put out of her mind one of the last things Snider had said to
her: that she might have to sleep with Hefner to win the contest, but that
Snider would understand as long as she came back to him (just as he had
learned to say from all the pimps).

A few months later, Snider pressured Stratten to write a quick

autobiography, the revelations of a Playmate. After considerable badgering,
she produced two brief chapters—thirty handwritten pages—before she
quit. In New York, when I too suggested she make note of some of her
experiences, Dorothy said: 'I’m not going to write it.' I didn’t learn of her
efforts until a few months after the murder. When I read them, I discovered
why she had stopped. Dorothy had begun to realize that the things she could
tell were now outweighed by what she could not let Paul or anyone else
read. The story was becoming a continuous series of omissions and half-
truths, which wasn’t Dorothy’s style. She had stopped her book with the
first clear sign of trouble in her relationship with Paul Snider. She had
written: 'He still couldn’t figure out why I talked so little and why I had
such a hard time telling him something or answering his questions.' Yet in
the words she chose, she revealed her vulnerability, and her willingness to
look for the good in everyone. She had described her initial meeting with
Hefner and with Patrick Curtis, as many a wide-eyed and terrified teenager
might, on meeting her first celebrity: 'I thought my knees were going to go
out from under me. . . .

Long after Dorothy was killed, Curtis would recall: 'She was shaking like a
leaf, but when she walked into the mansion and out to the yard, people were
just stunned. Dorothy wouldn’t have known if it had come up and hit her on
the nose—she was in a catatonic state almost.'

She had described all this carefully in the aborted memoir. Goldstein had a
number of Stratten’s papers in his possession which he claimed were given
to him by Snider. Goldstein turned over the materials, to the police who
made a copy available to Riley. Hefner got wind of the existence of a
Stratten journal, diary, or memoir and, according to reports, became
extremely agitated and most anxious to see the writings. Playboy demanded
a copy from the police. They complied. Riley informed his lawyer, who was
also Dorothy’s lawyer; and the Stratten Estate, the legal owner of her
writings, demanded all the originals and received only photocopies.
Eventually, there was considerable speculation over which of the men at the
mansion had made the one simple pass she mentioned in her memoir. In the
posthumous Playboy tribute, Hefner would write (with a small rap on the
knuckles) that the man had been Patrick Curtis, but Hefner had been
covering not only for himself but for a much closer (and more famous)
buddy, film star James Caan. Certainly Curtis had made it clear in a polite
way that he found Dorothy attractive and desirable, but after she told him
about the boyfriend in Vancouver whom she loved and planned to marry,
Curtis backed off and eventually became a good friend. With Caan,
however, it was a different situation. Though he was a good actor, Dorothy
thought, she certainly wasn’t attracted to him, and became embarrassed by
his overt attentions. Then in the midst of a sticky divorce, Caan was living
full time at the mansion, and later would put even more pressure on
Stratten.

What really happened on the first visit Dorothy made to the Playboy
mansion exactly two years before Snider killed her? It would be three-and-
one-half years—and Dorothy would be dead—before I would be told the
full story.

Curtis and one of the regular women talked her into a naked swim in the
dark waters of the Jacuzzi grotto by telling her that everyone swam there
without bathing suits. Indeed, the swim passed innocently enough, but it
would lead to her undoing. The three of them put on the house’s white
terry-cloth robes and Curtis led the two women to the game house; again he
and the woman said everybody went around the mansion in towels and
robes. But Dorothy’s arrival in the game house, after midnight, did not pass
without notice. Significant looks were exchanged between Hefner and
several of the regulars.

Everyone at Playboy already spoke of how much Hefner liked and wanted
Dorothy. Wasn’t she the perfect candidate they’d been seeking to celebrate
his past twenty-five years? Caan’s interest might have worried Hefner, but
Dorothy’s innocence would probably require a little pressure to break her
in. Her sudden entrance with Curtis upset him. That Curtis, of all people,
should have won not only Dorothy’s confidence, but her body first,
infuriated Hefner. Perhaps it embarrassed him in front of his friends. 'Hef
made an assumption that was inaccurate,' Curtis would say later. He never
would have gone swimming with her alone, Patrick said, but with the other
woman along, he thought it would be all right—forgetting for a moment
that to Hefner and his mansion pals one man and two women were less than
the usual number of participants. 'I really feel badly about that,' Curtis
would tell me, 'because I feel that to some extent I’m responsible. . . .'

At 1:30 in the morning, Dorothy was back in her room in a guesthouse by

the tennis court when a phone call came from one of Hefner’s private
secretaries: Could she please join Mr. Hefner for a little swim in the
Jacuzzi? Dorothy was frightened, but more afraid to say no. Wouldn’t it be
an insult to refuse the employer and hose what had not been denied to
another guest? Dorothy wandered nervously around the deserted grounds
before finding the grotto. She wrapped herself in a towel and waited for
Hefner in the steamy darkness.

An hour or two later, Curtis’s phone rang. He had given Dorothy the
number and told her to call if she needed anything. She was sobbing
bitterly. Curtis had to ask what was the matter several times before she told
him what had happened with Hefner in the Jacuzzi. She said that Hefner
had told her afterward that he assumed she and Curtis had made love and
that his 'ego was hurt.' Dorothy, wretched and angry, wanted to know what
she was supposed to do now. 'Is that part of the program? Is that what’s
expected of a Playmate?'

Curtis assured her at length that what had happened in the Jacuzzi had
nothing to do with her becoming the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Playmate.
He told her how much Hefner genuinely liked her, how really important she
was to him, 'so that she would feel a bit better about herself—rather than
like another piece of cheese.' Curtis would recall: ‘There was no question—
she did not want it to happen again. She was trying to minimize the reality
and look toward tomorrow, to find out how she could extricate herself from
a situation she didn’t want to put herself in again.'

If Dorothy’s anger and indignation did not move her to speak about the
incident with anyone but Curtis, and later with Snider, it was no doubt
because she quickly realized how unbelievable her story would sound.
Asked down to the Jacuzzi late at night? What did she think would happen?
How could anyone be so naive? But knowing Dorothy, she was naive, and
did think that Hefner, like Curtis, only wanted a swim.

In 1982, Ms. magazine would run a cover piece that discussed the
prevalence in our society of these forced 'seductions,' and of the women’s
problems in dealing not only with the often violent scenes, but with the
guilt and complicity involved in the aftermath: The men acting as though
this is what the women were asking for—any outrage expressed by the
women, therefore, was dismissable as hypocrisy. What had happened was
the woman’s own fault.

Dorothy herself, at the age of eighteen, probably would not have spoken of
the Jacuzzi encounter in these terms, but knowing the circumstances and the
principles involved, it is difficult to call her experience anything else. Soon
after, Dorothy wrote a poem about the mansion, a place where everything
was available but love: 'This Disneyland,' she called it, 'where people are
the games.'

***

After the initial weekend, Dorothy went back to Vancouver and tried
unsuccessfully to save her B.C. Telephone job by saying she needed a
couple of weeks off for urgent family problems. She told her brother and
sister (her mother was still in Europe) that she had received a modeling job
in Los Angeles, and returned immediately. Playboy had said she was
needed for three or four days, but after a week, they told her another few
days would be necessary. In her careful memoir, she wrote,

. . . My visit extended to three weeks. Paul was getting more and more
nervous every day. He would call the photographer in Vancouver and yell at
him. He would call the photographer in L. A. and ask him questions. He
called the studio, and he called the mansion three or four times a day. He
couldn’t figure out why I was staying so long.

It was at this time that Dorothy often used the key Patrick Curtis had given
her to his house: Whenever the pressure from Hefner or Caan or any of the
others became too strong. She left this kindness of Curtis’s out of her
memoir because it would lead to questions about the mansion she dared not
touch: Patrick would understand, as one of only a handful of people who
knew the real reason why Dorothy needed refuge and protection. Dorothy
wrote of these circumstances:

. . . Sometimes I cried before I went to sleep. A lot of men were entering my

life all of a sudden and a lot of them wanted me. No one was ever pushy or
forceful—but talk can be very powerful—especially to a mixed-up little girl.
And I was getting confused. . . . I was getting lonely and I was getting
depressed!

One night there was a huge pajama party.. . . I got drunk and danced and
ate and had a good time, and the next day I was in bed sick. Paul called me
in the morning about ten o’clock. I told him I had to see him and that it was
so important that he fly down. He understood. I met him at five p.m. at the
airport and we stayed at a hotel for the weekend.

I knew I had to see Paul because I felt something was starting to go wrong.
. . . I knew I could only be strong for a certain amount of time and I was
getting too depressed. In trying to get over my depression I had to think of
Paul less and start enjoying myself with other people. I knew eventually that
wouldn’t work either.

With those words, she broke off her memoir and never resumed.

For Dorothy to call for help, the sexual pressure must have been intense.
She needed an outlet for the guilt and outrage caused by the encounter in
the Jacuzzi, and she no doubt poured out her heart to Snider, telling him
everything that had happened. He was probably paternal and understanding
that weekend, and encouraged her to stay at Patrick’s if she felt safer there.
He would soon wrap things up in Vancouver and fly down to stay with her
permanently and make sure no one ever bothered her again. He would also
tell her not to alienate Hefner. No matter what he had done, he was still
their bread and butter. Eventually, Dorothy moved in with Curtis, and
Patrick became the platonic watchdog.

By the end of October, Dorothy and I had been introduced, and Snider had
moved permanently to Los Angeles. He took Dorothy to Playboy’s
Halloween costume party. Hefner and Curtis, and everyone else at the
mansion, hated him on sight, though they spoke pleasantly enough to his
face. The dress and manner of the street pimp conflicted harshly with the
mansion’s classier-looking clientele. Snider was as out of place as a carnival
barker at the ballet. In the photographs taken that night, posed between
Stratten and Snider, Hefner looked older than I had ever seen, and more
dispirited. His efforts had failed. He had given her his best shot, and lost
Dorothy to a sleazy pimp from Canada—his dreamgirl preferred a petty
racketeer from the streets. The mansion’s sex orgies continued, along with
Hefner’s requests for more naked footage of Stratten. Hefner customarily
projected this material on the giant TV screens of his bedroom.

When Molly Bashler met Dorothy, soon after Snider’s arrival, she could tell
almost immediately that Dorothy was not happy in the relationship. While
Dorothy worked long and exhausting hours at the Playboy Club, and still
rose for an exercise class with Molly (she had moved in by December
1978), Snider slept late and stayed around the tiny Westwood apartment
watching television all day. Soon Molly noticed that Dorothy would look
for excuses to get away from the apartment and Snider. She had been
reticent at first to tell Molly that she had posed for Playboy: Molly had
made her position on me magazine clear—she had little more than contempt
for it. Later, Molly and Snider would have several heated arguments on the
subject. He wanted Molly to pose too.

Eventually, Dorothy told Molly how Snider had pressured her into the
Playboy business. Though Dorothy rarely complained, Molly would
remember how angry with herself Dorothy had been on a number of
occasions for having done the Playboy photos. She had tried to get straight
modeling jobs and was turned down repeatedly because she had posed
nude.

When Molly asked why she stayed with Paul if she wasn’t happy, Dorothy
had difficulty expressing herself. She felt she owed Paul something, though
Molly didn’t agree: Snider clearly was living off her. But Molly didn’t
know what had happened with Hefner, or of Snider’s solicitude at that time,
though eventually he would begin to use the information over Dorothy in
order to make her feel guilty, responsible for the encounter. It was just
something else he could tell her she owed him: If the Hefner incident had
only sickened and humiliated Dorothy, as she claimed, didn’t she owe it to
Snider to prove her abiding gratitude for his help and guidance? to return
the love and attention he had showered on her?

Yet Dorothy found excuses to be away from him and the apartment. She
would take Molly with her to the mansion for a few pinball games or dinner
and a movie, an afternoon swim or lunch. Dorothy never went alone and
they always left early. Also, they usually kept their visits a secret from
Snider, who would have insisted on going along. With Molly now as
guardian and friend, Dorothy used the mansion’s facilities to get away from
the watchdog she had married to protect her from the mansion’s men. It
didn’t take her very long to realize she was caught in a vicious cycle that
seemed to have no escape, except in men who were not much of an
improvement on Paul Snider.

Though Dorothy never mentioned to Molly the pressures she had suffered
from men at Playboy, Dorothy did tell her that a number of women at the
mansion had made passes at her. It was another reason why she never went
there alone.

After nearly a year with Dorothy and Paul, Molly moved out. She was fed
up with Snider and the situation, from her viewpoint and Dorothy’s. It was
during this period that Dorothy called out to me in the mansion foyer and
we met a second time.

***

Hefner’s pressure on Dorothy continued. Beginning with her, Playboy made

color movies of all Playmates for their cable and videocassette operations.
So Hefner asked his photographers and cameramen for more shots and
footage of more explicit poses. Dorothy would break down and cry, and
Mario Casilli would feel badly, she later told me, but he was just doing his
job. Hefner continued to admonish his staff to get 'sexier' stuff from Stratten
—more raunchy, indecent poses. Maybe he thought she would eventually
come to him for help. The secretaries and assistants spoke repeatedly of
how much Hef cared about her and how he even wanted her to be his 'new
lady.' But then Dorothy had seen photos of a spread-eagled Sondra
Theodore. The magazine’s contest staff confided that her lack of
cooperation could lose her both the Twenty-fifth Anniversary prize and the
chance for Playmate of the Year. And the insiders kept whispering kindly:
Speak to Hef.

When he discovered that Dorothy had moved into Patrick Curtis’s house,
one of Hefner’s personal secretaries, Mary O’Connor, was dispatched to
express the boss’s dismay. Curtis was summoned to the mansion and asked
of his intentions toward Dorothy.

She and Patrick were just friends, he explained. Then why was she staying
at Patrick’s house? Because she had no money and needed a place to stay.
But she was welcome at the mansion. She didn’t want to stay at the
mansion, Curtis told Mary. Would Hef prefer Dorothy to stay at a cheap
motel? Yes, he was told, if she didn’t want to stay at the mansion, Hef
would prefer she live in a cheap motel.

Like many aspiring models and actresses who arrive in Los Angeles
courtesy of Playboy, Dorothy’s own resources and contacts were few. This
was even more apparent in her case because, being an alien, she was only
allowed to work in the U.S. for Playboy, and required their assistance in
contracting for any other employment. She had lost her job at the Canadian
phone company and had been advised to stay in Los Angeles to pursue
modeling and film possibilities. As if to emphasize her lack of cooperation
with Hefner and his photographers, and the degree of her dependence on
Playboy, Dorothy was given a morale-breaking job at the L. A. Playboy
Club. Here she could wait on tables in six-inch heels and a humiliating
costume, breasts and buttocks halfexposed, bunny ears flopping with every
painful step. And endure with a smile the endless passes. She met Dr. Steve
Cushner there—he had won a night at the club on TV’s Dating Game—and
he made the usual moves. Later, Cushner was to become a lodger at the
house Dorothy shared with Snider, and a confidant of Snider’s.

Two months after Dorothy’s arrival at the mansion, shortly before the
Halloween party, she and I met for the first time. I had returned from
Singapore and, after the breakup of my eight-year relationship with Cybill
Shepherd, had embarked on a series of brief, meaningless affairs. By that
Sunday at the mansion, at age thirty-nine, I had become fair game for nearly
anything. But I was profoundly unhappy, all the more so because I loathed
the cynicism I began to feel for almost everything I had once held sacred. It
was this world-weariness that stopped me from following my instincts
when I saw Dorothy that first time, and immediately realized she was one
of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. I was just leaving the mansion
when one of Hefner’s live-in pals introduced us. He said she was from
Vancouver, and I could tell by her quick, strikingly open smile that she was
quite young, though I would have guessed twenty rather than eighteen. The
woman with her was Candy Loving, and though she was a rangy, attractive
brunette, I glanced at her only occasionally so as not to stare at the blond
beauty.

Obvious attention to any woman at the mansion, I knew by then, was

carefully monitored and reported to the chief. Clearly, both Dorothy and
Candy were physically too stunning not to be deeply enmeshed in the
Playboy machinery. Hefner’s buddy mentioned that Candy had won the
magazine’s Twenty-fifth Anniversary Contest, and that Dorothy was the
only runner-up and would be a centerfold next year. My choice would have
been different, I thought, as we chatted amiably for a few moments. I was
trying to figure out how best to signal my interest in Dorothy without
appearing ridiculous. After two years of dropping by, I had learned that the
most beautiful women either were spoken for or soon would be, unless
considerable time off the grounds could be devoted to the pursuit. And time
was something I didn’t have much of in those days. Nor did Dorothy.
Events were crowding in on top of us without a moment to pause for
reflection. We were too busy trying to survive.

Only the most routine signal seemed a good idea under the circumstances,
so I wrote my name and phone number on a piece of Playboy note paper
and handed it to her. I said we were casting a picture—no doubt the oldest
line in the business. Candy’s smile was far more knowing than Dorothy’s,
and I could sense that Candy hadn’t been insulted by my obvious preference
for Dorothy. If anything, she seemed relieved, even pleased—as though she
agreed that Dorothy was lovely—which made me like her immediately.
Dorothy’s own smile was so radiant at that moment that I couldn’t look at
her for more than a few seconds. Her freshness gave me, ironically, a
certain respect for Playboy: If such an obviously charming, intelligent
woman could work with them, maybe they weren’t so bad after all.
Long after Dorothy was killed, I heard that she had asked about me. When
Laura Bernstein interviewed Molly Bashler after the murder, Molly
remembered telling Dorothy that night a version of the Cybill/Peter story.
Anyone around the mansion could have reiterated. a similar version of the
tale: He broke up his marriage with a loyal wife and two kids; made a
couple of flop pictures with Shepherd and ruined both their careers; she left
him for a hometown man younger than she; he hadn’t had a hit in five
years, his new movie was a cheapie shot in Singapore. Dorothy decided she
wouldn’t call me (though she made note of the number). When Molly had
finished talking, Dorothy said: 'I bet he’s a fake.' And I thought she was
taken. We were both half-right.

At the same time Dorothy was dealing with the deadly trap into which she
had fallen, and trying to find a way out, I was looking for something too.
We were searching for each other, it would turn out, but the year we lost
could never be recaptured, nor did the wounds we suffered during those
months heal sufficiently not to affect our time together. Though I had a
series of affairs, I was not using the women as a form of revenge against the
one who had caused me pain. I understood why Cybill had left. Going from
one woman to another, having concurrent affairs and trying to remain
friends by giving them all a good time with no strings attached, was in truth
a search for one woman, played out with the constant ache of loneliness and
the overriding desire to find both true love and continuity. With two
women, Colleen Camp and Patti Hansen, I had tried for a permanent
relationship but failed miserably.

Although my nature is essentially monogamous, I nevertheless found

myself on the kind of sexual merry-go-round that very much caught the
beat of the time: The commitmentless, shallow gratification of profound
needs and desires. But I genuinely felt sympathetic with each woman, and
found it impossible to be completely casual. There were perhaps a score of
women in that year, only two of whom I met at the mansion. The women’s
situations touched and troubled me; the majority of them, I discovered,
rarely experienced much pleasure from their lovers. Yet wasn’t the Playboy
mansion the most elaborate temple of sexual promiscuity in the western
world? Why would anyone go there in search of a love that could last
forever? The terrible irony was that not only did I find her there, but that I
found her almost immediately and was too muddled to realize it until a year
later.

Even then, Dorothy recognized the truth before I did—though, long

afterward I would learn that in ancient courting customs, it was the woman
who pursued the man. Hadn’t the Hefners of the world reversed the natural
order of things to such a degree that our roles and impulses were confused?

Why else did I go to the mansion? Curiosity, information, and a certain

undeniable fascination with its popular and expensive bad taste. Hefner,
Playboy, the mansion, the Bunnies, the Clubs, the whole setup, were
grotesque fifties kitsch. This cultural phenomenon was part of a world I
knew I could never belong to or be comfortable in, but one I wanted to
understand more than superficially.

Rather quickly, however, the boys’ camp atmosphere began to bore me.
There was more beneath the surface, I knew. But to discover the layers
meant joining in sexually, and group sex held a special repugnance for me.
Once, I was tricked into a compromising situation at the mansion Jacuzzi by
a Hefner buddy using a young woman as bait; the incident sickened and
estranged me further. I had also come to realize that the men of Playboy
pursued women only for sex and rarely even had conversations with them.
My visits to the mansion became briefer and more infrequent. By the time I
first met Dorothy, I had already tired of the routine. Ironically, my
disenchantment helped to keep us apart for a year.

Dorothy’s diminishing feelings for Snider frightened her, even as his

presence gave her a sense of protection. But she felt caged, exhausted, lost:
She collapsed and lost twenty pounds. Her body would never recover its
youthful bloom. Hefner saw the results in subsequent photo sessions and
became anxious: What had happened to Dorothy?

It took her several months to regain her strength. Playboy had decided she
didn’t have enough experience with the press to be the Twenty-fifth
Anniversary Playmate, and scheduled her instead for the August ‘79
centerfold. The Playmate of 1980 was a possibility, but she would have to
be more cooperative in the photo sessions and pay more attention to Hefner;
he could help her in so many ways.
Soon after Dorothy’s illness, an offer came from Winnipeg to star in the
leading role of a small Canadian film to be called Autumn Born. The story’s
basic theme is a metaphor for her own emotional state at the time: A strong-
willed young woman is kidnapped by an institution practicing mind control.
Brainwashed for hours, she is alternately beaten, humiliated, starved, and
raped by men and women. When she finally submits, she is fondled, then
beaten and tortured again. Dorothy, worried about the many scenes
requiring nudity, asked Curtis to read the script for her. He suggested she do
the picture; she would be able to control the nudity, and it would be easier
and more gratifying than Playboy. At least it was a lead role in a movie—
how bad could it be?

I didn’t see the picture until four years after she made it, nearly three years
after she was killed. I once asked her if it was any good, and she said: 'I
wouldn’t think so. We spent most of the time in a big house. None of the
people involved behaved as though they had ever made a movie before.'
She was right: The picture is hopelessly amateurish on every level. Yet
Dorothy is considerably more than believable, and lovely beyond measure.
Her hair had already been destroyed by a Playboy-recommended
hairdresser; it was now bleached nearly white, just the way Hefner had
wanted it. When she had cried and threatened to sue, she was told it was an
accident. She was much thinner than she was when we met the first two
times, with her ribs protruding from her chest and back. Filmed six months
after her nineteenth birthday, Dorothy’s skinny body makes her look years
younger.

Her performance is never off-key; it is clear she could identify with the
situation. Though the scenes of her torture are meant to be titillating, the
intensity of her feelings makes them touching, even heartbreaking. When
she plays happily with the toy rat her jailers send her, her behavior is
extraordinarily realistic. The other players seem to treat her with a
deference that veers from the plot—they can get past neither her star quality
nor her innocence. The sex scenes are shot as though she is a visiting
celebrity. Yet Dorothy’s acting is so pure and clean that the suffering of the
character merges with her own.
When Dorothy was chosen to be the August centerfold, Snider began to
pressure her to marry him—before the issue appeared. Other movie and TV
offers came in and Snider started talking of grandiose plans for posters and
books and for a cosmetics and perfume company named after her. She was
to be his main business. It did not take Dorothy long to see that Snider
didn’t fit into the Hollywood scene. For her he had lost his charm and
become just another guy on the make. Dorothy often found ram pathetic.
But he had gotten her into the movies, as he had said he would. How could
she turn against him now?

In L.A., after a heated argument with Snider, she wrote him:

When storms are past and gone,

Shall gentle love succeed?
I wish to ease a troubled mind—
Sleep is the thing we need.
With these few words I send my love.
You will in this a question find:
My question is without a doubt—
Love is the question—find it out.

'Shall gentle love succeed?' was the question, or perhaps 'Love is the
question' itself. Still the optimism was there, the feeling that no matter how
bad the 'storms' might be, Paul would eventually see the light, a hope not
much rekindled by their first year in Los Angeles. Snider made obvious
passes at other women behind Dorothy’s back and in front of her. He made
several moves on Molly Bashler, a particularly strong one in the kitchen at a
time when Dorothy was away. He held the back of Molly’s head and stared
deeply into her eyes. Molly asked if he was trying to hypnotize her or
something and Snider said yes. Was that what he had done with Dorothy?
Molly asked, and Snider smiled. Molly continued to look into his eyes and
said he was evil. She laughed: Was he an agent of the Devil?

On June 1, in Las Vegas, where he had pimped in past years, Paul Leslie
Snider married Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten. She knew how unhappy her
family would be, and had expressed her dilemma to Molly— should she
marry Paul? If Dorothy had any doubts,
Molly advised, why do it? But Snider persuaded her. She felt sorry for him
by then. And yet, Dorothy would tell Molly, she did not let Paul touch her
for more than two weeks after the marriage. His touch revolted her, Dorothy
said, she didn’t know why. The watchdog had extorted his reward:
marriage, fifty/ fifty till death do us part. At the seedy wedding service in
Las Vegas, Snider’s best man was Jake, his main drug connection. Another
Snider friend gave away the bride. Dorothy didn’t tell her family until
several weeks later.

If Dorothy thought of the marriage as an act of self-protection, there was an

undeniable sense of having given up. Despite the TV and movie offers that
came in, she felt her life was hopeless. By the end of August 1979, a year
before her death, she wrote:

. . . I am lonely
With 100 people
Treating me
With the World’s
Best of everything . . .

When Snider gave her a small, live white rat, she adopted it as a sign of
love, forgetting for the moment the meaning of the toy rat she had played
with in the Canadian film: Wasn’t it sent by her captors only to torture her
further? She had told Snider the plot, and didn’t want to think about the
ominous implication of his gift. She called the rat Bebe, like the little dog
she had loved and left behind with her family. Love Snider, love his rat;
perhaps in return he wouldn’t insist on much sex. Before Dorothy and I met
the second time, her romantic feelings for Snider had ceased entirely, and
three or four weeks would pass before Snider insisted on making love. But
he could tell she felt nothing.

Dorothy mistook Snider’s devotion during her illness for love, though he
simply nursed his investment back to health so that she could continue her
lucrative career. He knew this was only the beginning. The marriage gave
him not only 50 percent of her income, but the right to stay in the U.S. as
long as she did. When any or his other grand schemes didn’t pan out—the
motorcycle jump by Evel Knievel, the male strip joint—his failure only
made Dorothy feel sorrier for him. She couldn’t seem to find a way off the
treadmill: the agent, recommended by a Playboy associate, who made
passes; the lawyer, recommended by another Playboy associate, who tried
to assault her in his office; the continuing daily pressures from Hefner’s
organization. Maybe, she often thought, that was it. She was lost, she had
lost— there was nothing to be done.

In the summer of 1979 I had begun a script called They All Laughed, with a
character based on myself which I originally intended to play, although
John Ritter would ultimately be cast in the role. In every draft until I met
Dorothy again that October, the character went through the picture pining
for the girl he had loved and lost because he wouldn’t commit himself to
marriage and children. The Ritter character was as melancholy at the end as
he had been at the beginning. A deal was struck with Time-Life Film
Productions to finance this version, with shooting to start in New York after
the first of the year. Cost: $7.5 million. But the script was weak, I decided
—no better than my life. I didn’t like being sad, or melancholy. Like
Dorothy, I was lost. All the women I had had affairs with couldn’t take the
place of loving one woman and sharing a life with her. I was ready for the
second meeting with Dorothy.
 III - A Walk by the Ocean
The dissolution of a raindrop evolves
Into the creation of a rainbow—
The mystery of nature:
A seed giving birth to life,
A word giving birth to love.
—Dorothy Stratten Vancouver, 1978

A woman’s voice called out my first name. I turned and saw the unfamiliar
bleached hair before I saw anything else. Then I noticed how tall she was:
In high heels she was almost eye level with me. She quickly moved the last
few steps, asking if I remembered that we had been introduced about a year
ago. Up close her almond-shaped blue eyes were dreamy and sad, even
though she was smiling. I remembered her, but didn’t recall her hair, the
bright-red fingernails, and glossy lipstick. She told me her name again, and
I asked immediately whether her hair had been different when we first met.
Her face clouded over and she nodded. Then 9he turned casually to check
the surroundings—we were in the entrance hall of the mansion. I followed
her look: A few people were in the dining room and several more in the
glassed-in room next door. But Hefner wasn’t in sight, and there was a kind
of lull in the air. Dorothy led the way to the long, curving staircase that
ended at Hefner’s private second floor, and we sat down on the third step,
where she told me what had happened to her hair.

She wasn’t simply beautiful, I thought as I watched her talk—she was

unbelievably exquisite, despite the gaudy makeup and dyed hair. Her eyes
were gentle and soft, vulnerable and enchanting. Her lips were generously
full, with the top lip protruding slightly over the bottom; in repose it made
Dorothy look pensive. She was perfect from smile to body. 'Translucent,'
Audrey Hepburn would later describe her: 'Dorothy looked the way they
used to paint an angel.'

She told me she had made a movie in her native Canada—'not a very good
one,' she said, called Autumn Born. There had been bit parts in a couple of
Hollywood features: Skatetown, U.S.A. and Americathon, with John Ritter.
She had done an episode for TV’s Fantasy Island, and would soon do a
Buck Rogers show. She had an agent named David Wilder—aid I know
him? Otherwise, the volume of fan mail had chosen her Playmate of the
Year, but the decision wouldn’t be announced officially for another six
months. She would soon begin another layout for Hefner, a history of blond
movie goddesses—Dietrich, Harlow, Monroe, Bardot, Veronica Lake, and
others—with herself made up as each of them, posing naked.

Just after she asked me to stay and have dinner with her, Hugh Hefner
appeared with Sondra Theodore, his 'special lady.' He was in one of his
countless pairs of silk pajamas, small Pepsi bottle in one hand, pipe in the
other, as usual. Sondra had been a Sunday School teacher before her
Playboy career. Her blond hair had also been bleached nearly white, and
though she had done a few walk-ons in pictures and TV mainly she helped
to run the private orgies for Hef, participating at whatever cost, to keep him
happy. When I had seen her lately, she looked very sad, and would soon be
eased out of the mansion. Because I had failed to make an appearance for
that weekend’s Playboy TV-special tapings, Hefner nodded coolly to me,
peremptorily took Dorothy’s arm, and swept toward the dining room with
her and Sondra. I phoned my house to say I would be staying longer than
the twenty minutes I had planned to touch base with Hefner, and went back
to find Dorothy.

She was waiting midway in the buffet line next to Rosanne Katon, a fine
black actress who had posed for Playboy. Rosanne later would tell Colleen
Camp that she had noticed immediately the strong vibrations between
Dorothy and me. Dorothy’s look now was playful as she said: 'Changed
your mind?' We grinned at each other and our eyes held for a moment.
When I asked if she was staying for the movie, Dorothy said she would call
home and if her husband wasn’t there, she would stay. Oh, I said, she was
married?

By the time I had my plate filled, Dorothy was seated at Hef s table—next
to Jim Brown at the far end from Hefner and James Caan—but there were
no vacant chairs in the room and I had to eat in an adjoining alcove. I
finished quickly and went back to the foyer, where Dorothy joined me.
After we resumed. our places on the staircase, I asked if she was happily
married and, for an instant, Dorothy gave me a very direct look, then turned
away and said that she was having a few problems but these were not her
husband’s fault. Had she had many boyfriends before she was married?
Dorothy shook her head. There had been only one—Steve. After nearly a
year with him, she had seen a ring she was sure he would like and began to
save up the earnings from her Dairy Queen job. She told no one of her plans
(and did not mention to me the fifteen weekly visits she made to the store to
pay off the gift). For Christmas 1977, she presented the ring to Steve, but
little more than a week later—jealous of other men’s attentions to Dorothy
—he stopped the car one night, got a wrench from the trunk, took off the
ring, violently bent it out of shape, and smashed the stone. It was the end of
their relationship.

Dorothy told the story dispassionately, and with such innocence that I was
stunned. My heart went out to her: The ring seemed to represent a great deal
more than one boy’s boorishness or brutality. How could her charm and
beauty, I thought, be capable of evoking such violence? Why, in our first
conversation, had she told me such a savage story? I immediately
associated the incident with her marriage. But her answers were so bland
and evasive, I could only sense that she wasn’t happily married. Some
hidden turmoil was unmistakable.

I was doing a movie in New York, I told her before we parted, and maybe
she would read for me. She said she would love to, and when I told her I
had very much enjoyed talking with her, I was amazed to see her eyebrows
go up and her face suddenly redden. She smiled softly and said she had
enjoyed herself too. We shook hands, her grasp gentle but strong, her skin
smooth and moist as a flower. We moved apart, and I glanced back to watch
her disappear into the living room. She waved.

Through the rest of October, through November, December, and most of

January, 1980, neither Dorothy nor I suspected that we felt the same way
about each other, that we thought of each other all the time and wondered
how we could become closer. Finally, one Sunday early in the new year, we
walked by the ocean and it was no longer possible to hold back our
feelings; we clung to each other as two people might who find themselves
the only couple left on earth. 'One day since yesterday,' she would call those
magical hours, a phrase which came to represent so much more than I could
possibly have imagined.

She arrived that special Sunday around one in the afternoon, wearing high-
heeled shoes and a white cotton dress with a tight skirt that clung to her
body. She was a little nervous, I could see, but the tension didn’t make her
any less beautiful or kind. While the water for tea was heating in the
kitchen, Dorothy sat on a wooden stool near a doll that was suspended from
the chandelier: an ugly witch in green, riding a wooden broom. Dorothy
blew on the string, swung it to make the witch fly in a tiny half-moon arc,
jerked the string to make her hop around. She laughed, petted the witch
sympathetically, and looked at me.

I leaned over and kissed her quickly and lightly on the lips for the first time,
and then backed away, apologizing. Dorothy reddened but she didn’t say
anything. Suddenly I decided we should take a ride down to the beach.
There would be no people at this time of the year and we could take a walk.
We could have our tea later. Dorothy jumped off the stool, delighted at the
idea.

It was January 20—only the sixth visit we had since our talk on the
mansion stairs: One was on New Year’s, the first day of the eighties and a
fresh beginning for both of us—our decade. Every time I saw her I thought
in tens of years, but all we had had until then were hours. Yet the closer we
became, the more it seemed as though we had known each other all our
lives.

***

The first thing I had done was to call Dorothy’s agent, trying to set up a
meeting for the three of us. David Wilder was an ambitious, hustling young
man who seemed anxious to please, perhaps to the disadvantage of his
clients. Although Playboy had pointed several young Playmates toward
Wilder’s agency, both companies discouraged talk of any official
connection between them and often appeared to disagree, but it seemed as
though Wilder’s allegiance at the time was to his main source of talent and
entertainment. He and Hefner had a pretty believable good-guy/bad-guy
routine going, not exactly unusual in show business, where ultrapersonal
pressure tactics are a fine art.

As a go-getter, Wilder knew at least one thing about my career: I had been
most successful discovering or directing women, among them Ellen
Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, Eileen Brennan, Madeline Kahn, Tatum O’Neal,
and Cybill Shepherd. Cybill was tall, blond, blue-eyed, and no longer in my
life. Could similar lightning strike again? Wasn’t Dorothy tall, blond, blue-
eyed, and almost twenty? Nearly the same age as Shepherd when I had met
her. On the phone the first time, Wilder was not even subtle. What Dorothy
needed, he said, was someone to take her under his wing and guide her on
the right path. She had a lot of talent, but she was new, shy, and not yet a
professional actress. Hefner, added Wilder, thought she definitely had
something unique; he quoted Hef: 'A very special lady.'

When I mentioned that Dorothy seemed extremely sensitive, Wilder

exploded: Sensitive!? She was too sensitive! What I had meant, I said, was
that somehow I would hate to make her cry. Wilder dropped his voice and
said he knew exactly what I was saying, because he had seen her cry. 'It
goddamn breaks your heart,' he said. I asked, a touch sarcastically, what she
had been crying about, and Wilder reacted with a guilty-sounding 'Huh?'
followed by a quick laugh devoid of humor. Dorothy later told me that,
except on one occasion (when she had cried), Wilder had behaved himself
with her.

Wilder spoke of Snider with unconcealed hostility: He was 'a pain in the ass
. . . a real creep,' who stuck his nose in everything, Wilder said. Snider
would call up and yell over the phone. Dorothy never said anything bad
about this guy, but Wilder knew she wasn’t happy. 'Don’t say I said
anything, but that marriage is not going to last. I don’t know how she can
stand him.' I wondered why Wilder had decided to reveal so much of
Dorothy’s situation. What were his real motives? And Hefner’s?

Dorothy was often naive about people’s intentions.

She believed the things people said, and although I warned her several
times not to judge another’s motives by her own, it was difficult for her to
learn. She always presumed that everyone’s intentions were as pure as hers,
and even if they were not, perhaps they were not as bad as they seemed. She
looked tor the positive qualities in even the most obvious villain. It’s no
coincidence that Beauty and the Beast was written by a woman.

***

Although ten days passed between the talk on the stairs and Dorothy’s first
visit to my house, I saw her twice more, briefly, at the mansion. I had gone
there hoping to speak with her, but that proved impossible. Hefner had
called personally to ask if I would appear in some additional shots for the
pajama-party section of their TV special, which meant being photographed
dancing in pajamas and robe. A year before, I had gone to one of these and
pretended to have a great time, though resolving never to go again. But
Dorothy had changed everything, and I arrived that night in sleeping attire
as the party was winding down.

Hefner was marching Dorothy into the television/ Monopoly room, along
with a large group of serious-looking network people. He snapped a cassette
of the previous week’s party footage into the video player and everybody
watched it. As the tape rolled, Dorothy sat studiously on the edge of a chair,
her hands folded in her lap. Hefner hovered directly beside her, occasionally
explaining things, seemingly to the room but mainly to Dorothy. I wondered
if they were having an affair. Certainly Hefner was indicating a proprietary
interest in her. She nodded once or twice and appeared to be absorbed in the
footage. But she neither smiled nor frowned; her expression remained set.

It was the first time I had seen any kind of photographic image of Dorothy
Stratten. She might be one out of hundreds dancing, but when the camera
caught sight of her, whether far away or close up, it seemed to be
photographing only Dorothy. Her presence cast an almost hypnotic spell.
Most uncanny was how subtly different she looked every second. Each time
I looked at Dorothy during the months I knew her, she looked different
from the way she had looked the moment before. I would keep trying to
decide which Dorothy she really was, but she turned out to be all of them,
flickering the way the moon does on the sea. Even on Hefner’s monitor that
night, in passable documentary footage, this shimmering, intangible quality
was unmistakable.
A kind of hygienically raunchy singing group called The Village People
was doing a song called 'Ready for the ‘80s,' and Dorothy was onstage with
them, weaving smoothly at the rhythm and improvising her moves around
the musicians. She made the promise of the coming decade inherent in the
lyrics a breathtaking reality. When she swayed or bowed a couple of times,
there was an audible reaction from the crowd in the TV room. I looked over
at Dorothy watching herself, still deadpan. When the tape ended, Hefner
ejected the cassette, took it and Dorothy under his arm, and left the room
quickly, followed by the same busy group with whom he had entered. I
followed at a distance.

By the time I saw Hefner in the entrance hall accepting congratulations,

Dorothy had left for home. I told Hefner the stuff looked good and he
nodded agreement, took the pipe from his mouth, and sipped his Pepsi. 'It
swings,' he said, and smacked his lips several times reflectively. Trying to
sound detached and objective, I made a remark about 'the blond girl' who
'seemed interesting,' and Hefner again nodded, also with restrained
enthusiasm. His tone was patronizing: There was something special there,
he agreed, though he wasn’t sure exactly how much she could do. She
would need a lot of help, he thought, but certainly there was something
there. I brought up the possibility of a part for her in the new picture we
were preparing, and Hefner pursed his lips, nodded again, and said he had
heard about that. I had figured he might have been told. To not mention it
would have made him think I was trying to do something behind his back,
and therefore interested in Dorothy for other than professional reasons.

Of course I was, and so was he, but I knew the rules and understood that not
even a breath of this could pass between us, no matter how strongly it was
felt. So we stood on the marble floor and tried to sound like a couple of
professionals discussing business. Wouldn’t it be interesting, I said, to have
Dorothy play an extremely efficient secretary? One who could do five
things at once—talk on two phones, file, write shorthand, and type? (She
had told me of her secretarial skills.) 'Like Rosalind Russell—,' I started,
and Hefner quickly jumped in with the title of the film I had been about to
cite: His Girl Friday. We both grinned, and Hefner’s victorious look
required a little flattery on the speed with which he had identified the
reference. He said he saw what I meant: It 'might be a good idea to play
against Dorothy’s obvious physical beauty and . . .' he nodded three times,
thinking. I finished the sentence: ". . . . and emphasize her intelligence and
ability.'

The next afternoon at Hefner’s I saw Dorothy several times, though I

wasn’t certain she had seen me until one tense moment when we exchanged
little more than two sentences. It was a warm Sunday and near the tennis
courts a roller-skating rink had been improvised for the TV cameras. Loud
music played through many speakers; soft drinks, beer, hot dogs,
hamburgers, Eskimo Pies, and popcorn were available. There were several
film and TV actors around; Hefner and Jim Brown were conspicuous
among the skaters; columnist Max Lerner stood on the sidelines watching.
The scene was dominated, of course, by a great many very attractive
women in all sorts of summery, revealing outfits. But for me no one could
begin to compare with Dorothy Stratten. There she was, over six feet tall in
her orange roller skates, wearing a lime-green one-piece bathing suit and
green leg warmers, gliding through the air, her expression as enigmatic as
the Sphinx. Occasionally she smiled, but with no trace of girlishness. More
often she appeared serenely unaware of the surroundings, as though her
private world was somewhere far away.

At the edge of the rink, I stood next to Lerner and watched Dorothy. Hefner
skated holding her hands; so did Brown. Max was telling me at some length
about the brand-new young girlfriend who had changed his life. At one
point, Hefner started a 'Bunny line,' placing Dorothy directly behind him.
Brown latched on next, and then a score of others. The cameras caught it
all.

I walked up the paved hill above the rink and watched the goings-on from
there. After several minutes, Dorothy skated away from the others and spun
to a stop directly below me. She faced away from me, her hand on her hip,
chewing gum with her lips closed firmly. She stayed there for a few
moments surrounded by the noisy music, looking off into the distance,
independent, lovely, and strangely forlorn. Her face remained
expressionless.

In mid-afternoon, out on the back lawn near the Jacuzzi grotto and pool,
Dorothy and I had a brief exchange that would turn out to be the last words
we ever shared at the mansion. I would make only one more visit there:
nearly ten months later, two days before the murder. The television crew
had moved on to a bathing-suit sequence. Dorothy and several of the other
Playmates cavorted in arid out of the water, inside the grotto, and under the
sun. The Chuck Mangione Band played while the guests lounged on huge,
brightly-colored cushions that the houseboys had tossed all over the lawn.

Dorothy was standing alone between the band and the pool. I had been
looking for an opportunity to approach her, but she had been constantly
occupied. Coming up behind her, I said that if she felt like talking I would
be over on the cushions with a couple of friends. Dorothy turned only
halfway toward me; she seemed anxious and apprehensive. She was
working, she said, and they really had her going, but she would try. I could
now see dimly into the grotto, realized they were shooting and began to
apologize, but the assistant director called out irritably for Dorothy, and she
moved off quickly into the darkening waters.

One of Hefner’s closer pals, Nicky Blair, came over to where I stood. 'She’s
quite something, isn’t she?' I turned and nodded agreement. She was very
sweet, Blair went on, asking if I had spoken with her. A little bit, I said, and
asked if she went with Hefner; I had been wanting to put the question to
someone, and it came out almost before I realized it. Nicky shook his head
slowly and said: 'Nah.' I looked at him closely to see if he was on the level
and he grinned—a surprisingly soft, yet cynical look in his eye: 'Once in a
while,' Blair said, 'one gets by him.'

I felt relieved as I looked back at Dorothy. They were telling her to pose
higher up in the water, the better to see her torso, while Nicky said: 'But
she’s married to a real prick.' I was beginning to wonder why all of a
sudden Nicky Blair was volunteering this information to me. We had never
discussed any other women, or Hefner. We never had more than a few
pleasant, brief business conversations. He continued about Dorothy’s
husband, how he came around the mansion in tank tops, flexing his
muscles. 'I don’t know how she can stand him—she’s such a sweet person,
a real sweetheart. Hef can’t stand the guy. He puts up with him because of
Dorothy, but otherwise, no way. The guy is horrible.' I mentioned the
possible role for Dorothy and explained that the script was still being
rewritten. Blair said he would talk to her about me and 'put in a good word.'
He phoned a day or so later and told me he had had a long talk with
Dorothy: She was very much looking forward to meeting with me.

***

On the first of November, Dorothy walked into my house for the first time.
She wore a frilly white cotton dress and a large, floppy straw hat. If the
dress was almost transparent, the heels too high for anyone to walk
smoothly, and the red nail polish inappropriate with the dress and hat,
Dorothy nevertheless looked as though she had stepped out of the
nineteenth century.

We took tea in my office, where she sat up in the tan leather armchair. I sat
on the blue couch and we talked about the film. I explained to her the part
of Amy, the efficient secretary who is secretly in love with her boss. The
character, and the relationship, ended up considerably different by the time
we started snooting (Linda MacEwen played it), but at this point I was
planning to tailor the part for Dorothy. Later, I would rewrite the entire
script, creating instead a major role for her that rivaled Audrey Hepburn’s in
size and importance.

As we read Amy’s few scenes together, Dorothy asked questions and was
extremely quick to catch on. It didn’t take more than a few minutes for me
to realize she was a natural actress with a fine ear for nuance and a wry,
simple delivery that always rang true. She also seemed to absorb thoroughly
whatever she heard. I would find that, unlike most people, she never forgot
what was said. Perhaps because she herself never said anything
superficially, she never listened superficially either.

We discussed her stage name: The Screen Actors Guild had another actress
registered under the name Dorothy Stratton. Therefore, Dave Wilder had
said, she would have to use her middle initial for billing— Dorothy R.
Stratten; R. for Ruth. Her husband had suggested that she use a name he
made up for her: Kristen Shields. (For a time, Snider had insisted that
everyone, even Dorothy’s family, call her Kristen, and grew livid if her real
name was used.) I suggested the possibility of D. R. Stratten, and later,
when I called her by that nickname for the first time, her eyebrows rose in
surprise, her eyes brightened, and she blushed and smiled.

I glanced down at the coffee table and noticed a paperback acting edition of
Noel Coward’s Private Lives; I picked it up and began describing the play
to Dorothy: A man and a woman who have been divorced from each other
for five years turn up at the same hotel on the Riviera, both on honeymoons
with new spouses. Their suites adjoin, of course, with their terraces side-by-
side. After a while, inevitably, the two old lovers find themselves alone
together, sharing a drink in the moonlight. The orchestra below plays the
same old popular song, which naturally was their song:

Someday I’ll find you,

Moonlight behind you . . .

After a breathless silence, the woman looks out to sea and speaks
tremulously: 'Extraordinary,' she says, 'how potent cheap music is.'
Dorothy’s smile warmed the room, and I read her a couple of pages from
the love scene in the second act:

AMANDA: Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious.

ELYOT (seriously): You mustn’t be serious, my dear one, it’s just what they
want.
AMANDA: Who’s they?
ELYOT: All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at
them. Be flippant. Laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths.
Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light. . . .
AMANDA: What happens if one of us dies? Does the one that’s left still
laugh? . . .

Our tea long since finished, we had a couple of cigarettes. Her husband
didn’t allow her to smoke, Dorothy said, but she sneaked them when he
wasn’t around. I knew how she felt, I said. Officially, I wasn’t smoking
either.

She had to leave for the Playboy studio, so I walked her to the olive-green
‘67 Cougar she drove. We shook hands and I said I would like to see her
again to read over some other scenes. There were no other scenes yet, but I
didn’t tell her that. We were both stalling. She drove away, and I went back
into the house knowing I was hopelessly smitten by her.

We were both busy professionally, and nearly six weeks passed before we
saw each other again. But I thought about her all the time, and we began
talking on the phone. I called Dorothy one night in Dallas from New York.
She told me about the Playboy fans, how sorry she felt for them. Although
she was exhausted at the end of a long autographing session, she didn’t like
to let any of them leave disappointed. She told me daily what had happened
to her: She was getting another cold, she felt very run-down, her husband
was rarely home so they kept missing each other’s calls, she was lonely, she
had read Private Lives and loved it and was going to read it again.

Years later, I would near of the time in a Dallas nightclub when a fat,
unattractive man asked each of the five Playmates on the tour to dance with
him. Disgusted, they had all refused, except Dorothy. She took him as her
partner and he turned out to be as good a dancer as she was; he had been a
dance instructor. Dorothy and the fat man danced together most of the
evening, making quite a hit, and she thanked him for a wonderful time.

Dorothy arrived at my house on the afternoon of Friday, December 7. I

didn’t know her husband was watching outside my gates throughout the
meeting. Eight months later he would be waiting again, but then he would
be carrying a loaded .38 revolver. Although Dorothy would know, I would
not.

That day we leafed through a curious book a friend had given me

explaining an ancient occult science that related playing cards to one’s
birthday. Born July 30, for example, I was a Jack of Hearts, the symbol for
certain personality traits and life patterns developed from astrology,
numerology, and metaphysics. It is a complicated procedure that I didn’t
understand very well, I told Dorothy, but several things I had read had been
amazingly accurate. Written by Arne Lein and privately printed in 1978, it
is called What’s Your Card? As Dorothy looked over my shoulder, we
looked up her birth date: February 28. She was a Ten of Clubs.

Flipping to the yearly charts at the back of the book, I held it open as
Dorothy moved closer. In theory, the 'Life Spreads' could tell you, year by
year, which people would most influence your life. I knew that the cards
found on the same line as one’s own card represented important persons in
one’s life. Looking up age forty, I explained that my card, the Jack of
Hearts, never moved; the others revolved around it. Did she remember her
card? The Ten of Clubs, Dorothy said. I looked at the chart and pointed in
amazement. Her card was next to mine, on the left.

Where was Paul? asked Dorothy excitedly. His birthday was April 15: an
Aries (like Hefner). Snider was a Six of Diamonds. I flipped back to the age
forty chart and discovered that his card was also directly next to mine, on
the right. Our three cards were all in a row on the same line, with mine in
the middle. The revelation astonished me. Dorothy seemed delighted, so I
continued and jumped to the age forty-one chart, where both Dorothy’s card
and her husband’s suddenly were not next to mine. Feeling vaguely uneasy,
I slammed the book shut.

As I walked D.R. to the front door, I took a quick look at her palm, which
was dry and crisscrossed with a remarkable number of lines, an indication
that she had been here before, I said. She had an old soul. Dorothy smiled
as though she had heard that before. At this point she mentioned that her
husband was waiting for her in the car. She thanked me and left hurriedly.

Five days later, Dorothy came over alone. She wore a gymsuit and sneakers
that late afternoon, and made little attempt to cover the fact that she was
exhausted, worried, and very unhappy. The sky had turned gray as we took
our tea to the living room. Dorothy had asked me to look at a script that
Snider, Wilder, and Playboy were all trying to get her to do: the title role in
Galaxina, a science-fiction comedy. She did not think much of it, she said,
but maybe she was wrong. Since it seemed to be her main concern, I started
leafing through her scenes, and Dorothy turned away toward the window. I
glanced over and asked if she was OK. She nodded silently, without
turning, but I leaned forward and saw that she was crying. I said her name
softly, but it startled her.

She shook her head, wiped her face, and said she was sorry. What was it? I
asked. Could I help? Dorothy tried to hold back a sob, but it came out
anyway. She turned her face into my chest and cried quietly. After a
moment, I put my arms around her. If I had known then how close to my
own feelings Dorothy’s were, I would have done as I wanted— tilted her
face up to mine and kissed her so there would be no doubt about how much
she meant to me, how much I wanted to help her never to cry again.

When her tears had stopped, Dorothy laughed: 'It’s OK, don’t worry—I cry
all the time. . . .' I was falling madly in love with her, I knew, but why
should she believe me? And D.R. was thinking (she later would tell me):
Because I hadn’t made even a little pass, maybe I only liked her as a friend.

We discussed Galaxina, and then Dorothy told me about the Buck Rogers
episode she had done, playing Miss Cosmos, the most physically perfect
woman in the galaxy. The producers had said her voice was too soft and her
line readings inadequate; they wanted her to redo all of them. I offered to
help and wasn’t surprised she had had difficulty; I said it was dialogue for
robots. Later Dorothy would tell me that the producers insisted on dubbing
her voice with another actress.

She then talked of her problems with Snider. He was demanding papers that
would give him 50 percent of her services for life. Playboy, as well as
Dorothy’s agents, lawyers, and business managers were all dead set against
any sort of deal giving Snider half interest in Dorothy. But he was her
manager. Managers normally got 15 percent maximum, everyone had told
her. Wilder had mentioned to me that Snider was trying to bulldoze Dorothy
into a company they would control jointly. D.R. said she felt caught in the
middle. She wasn’t sure what to do because, after all, Paul had discovered
her, hadn’t he? If it hadn’t been for him, she never would have appeared in
Playboy.

Maybe that would have been better, I said to her for the first time. Certainly
she could have been equally successful with Vogue or Glamour. Her face,
hands, feet, height, and shape were perfect for the fashion and commercial
world; and there was her great potential as an actress. The Ford Model
agency, D.R. said, had asked to send her out, and she was surprised because
that kind of agency didn’t normally hire girls who had posed for Playboy.
Had she signed with Ford? No, said Dorothy, because Mr. Hefner had been
upset about the idea, wanting her to sign instead with Playboy’s model
agency, which she did. So Hefner wouldn’t let her go, I thought, naked or
dressed, not if it didn’t help him or his empire. As though Playboy’s new
agency—the old Chicago-based agency, I would learn, had been disbanded
because of numerous incidents of prostitution—could do the same for its
clients in the international fashion world as the long-established and highly
regarded Ford’s. This had been the chance for a Playmate to alter her image
—but of course Hefner wouldn’t look at it that way.

Based on what I knew of models’ fees, Playboy didn’t pay its own very
well. The five-hundred-dollar daily fee covered days that often went to
twelve, fourteen, or sixteen hours, longer still on deadlines, with no
overtime pay. Playboy only recently had given the girls a raise to the five
hundred dollars, D.R. said, which meant they were now being slightly less
than thrice underpaid. A high-class call girl could earn twice that much in
one hour, and the Playboy girls often had to throw in the sex for nothing.
The magazine that paid extravagant sums to its writers paid, relatively, a
pittance to the women for whose pictures it was bought. The writers
brought the magazine respectability; the women were a dime a dozen.

Snider wanted Dorothy for life. Between him and the Playboy machine, she
had been maneuvered into a net, and she was beginning to realize how tight
it was. I tried to sound reasonable and said I thought her husband’s request
for 50 percent was uncalled-for. Under most laws, he was already entitled to
half of any earnings she might have during their marriage. But that was how
she felt anyway, D.R. said. It wasn’t her money, it was theirs. She felt
strange: It was as though Paul didn’t trust her, as though he thought she
didn’t love him. That was certainly how it sounded, I said. A look of deep
resentment came into her eyes, like a dark cloud over the sun. There was
rage in it too, and bitterness, and a profound contempt that was chilling, as
though I had confirmed her worst suspicions: that Snider was interested in
her only for the money she could make, the power she gave him, that love
never had been a real consideration.

When I suggested she visit her family for Christmas, despite her husband’s
objections, she said she couldn’t because 'he would be so angry.' But I
didn’t really know what Dorothy meant by 'angry,' and she never elaborated
on the word, nor did she allow me ever to meet Snider, so that I could better
understand. I hadn’t had much exposure to men who consistently browbeat
women, much less terrorized them. But Dorothy had seen little else from
men all her life. Snider was like most of them. And when they got angry,
they could be dangerous. Molly Bashler said Dorothy often acted as though
Snider was not much different from most men—that this was simply the
way life was.

If Dorothy wanted to visit her family for Christmas, she ought to be able to
—if he wanted to stay here, she wouldn’t mind, would she? Dorothy said,
'No,' and tried to make it sound as conventional as possible— how could
she tell me the whole story? 'Paul says we can’t afford it. He hates his
family and he doesn’t like my family, and my Mum doesn’t like him/’ She
looked sad. 'I’d like to go home, though,' Dorothy said, and changed the
subject again.

D.R. left for a couple of hours to attend an acting class. When she returned
she was elated: Her teacher, Richard Brander, had said in class that she was
doing very well indeed. Had she done a lot of scenes? No, mainly
monologues. She had done Emily from Our Town—did I know it? Taking
several speeches from the ending in the graveyard, Dorothy had put them
together into a monologue. Several people told her she had made them cry.

Eleven days later, on the night before Christmas Eve, D.R. came over again.
A few days earlier, she had sent me the biggest Christmas card I had ever
received. Its cover featured a drunken reindeer too pickled to care about
tomorrow; the greeting inside read 'Bingle Jells.' Above this, Dorothy had
written 'Dear Peter,' and below, 'Forever my love, Dorothy,' exaggerating,
for my benefit, the loops of both y’s: I had told her that in graphology large
lower loops indicated a healthy sensuality. Reading it over, she wondered,
perhaps, if her husband might ever see the card and then quickly, after 'Dear
Peter,' she added '& Blaine.' I put the card near my desk so that I could see
it every day.

I responded to her card with a serenade, the earliest form of courtship I had
learned. Since my first girlfriend, I had always sung to the women I liked. I
started with an old Sinatra standard, and looked at Dorothy as I sang:

You’re just too marvelous,

Too marvelous for words . . .
Dorothy knelt on the couch and beamed at me, looking both giddy and
embarrassed; her face was flushed, making her teeth even whiter, and her
eyes looked merry. She rose quietly and moved slowly until she was behind
me. Now she could listen without my seeing her. It was the sweetest
reaction I had ever seen, and only increased the feeling of the lyric.

. . . Looking for the light

Of a new love
To brighten up the night . . .

She had her elbows on the piano, her chin resting on cupped hands. The
look between us meant only one thing. It was hard to believe that the
vibrations I was getting from Dorothy’s side of the room were as strong as
the ones I was sending. Then she was back on the couch, curled up as
attentively as a cat, and when she recognized the words of the Love Story
song, I could see in her eyes that she understood the gesture:

. . . How long does it last?

Can love be measured
By the hours in a day . . . ?

We slowly walked out to her car. I had so wanted to kiss her, to take her in
my arms and hold her close. When we stepped onto the driveway, Dorothy
pointed upward suddenly. There was a full moon, dimmed by the mist or
smog. The air was damp but pleasant, and there were small white clouds
against the dark sky As we looked at the moon, a soft rainbow slowly
appeared around it. A sign meant especially for us, it seemed: Didn’t lovers
always take the weather personally? I said she ought to write a poem (not
knowing that she often wrote poems), and Dorothy just smiled. We hoped to
get together again 'about the movie,' we said. My daughters were staying
with me, I told her, and since the three of them had barely done more than
say hello in the entrance hall, I suggested she drop by while they were here.
I wanted the girls to get to know her. On New Year’s Day, Dorothy came by
for a short while with her eleven-and-a-half-year-old sister, Louise, but my
kids had already gone home to their mother.

When we saw each other on January 20, Dorothy already had a bad start to
the new year: Every day Snider became a bigger problem, and the Playboy
sessions were exhausting her once more. On top of that, she had been
bulldozed into Galaxina. When she protested to Wilder that she had decided
against doing the picture, she was told that she was already committed to it.
There was no other way—backing out would ruin her name in the business.
But she had not agreed to it, Dorothy argued; how could he commit her?
Well, he had. Besides, it was a good part; she would be crazy to turn it
down.

For Dorothy, the decision forced on her was just another in a long line of
compromises she had made for the sake of others. She didn’t complain
much; she was tired. It made her sad, she told me over the phone, the way
people smiled but didn’t mean it. Sometimes there was hate behind the
smile, and sometimes there was only sadness.

She didn’t say anything more, and it wasn’t until two years later that several
people in the crew and cast of Galaxina would tell me what a terrible time
Snider had given Dorothy during the shooting of the picture. Almost every
morning when she arrived, the makeup women told me, Dorothy would be
crying. Several times Snider had strutted around the set behaving
obnoxiously toward everyone. The producers had no trouble understanding
why Dorothy was upset every day, or why she looked for excuses to stay
late on the job. Without a request from her, they started sending a car to
pick her up so that Snider would not drive her to work. But there were other
times, later in the picture, in her dressing room and near the set, when
Dorothy shouted angrily at Snider. She had a strangely deep, resonant voice
when angry. I would hear it myself, and see her eyes flash darkly.

An actor on Galaxina, James David Hinton, who became very fond of

Dorothy, tried to encourage Snider to go to work. Since Snider was very
good at building exercise tables, Hinton said, why didn’t he sell them? But
Snider’s interest never lasted very long. There were no friendly signs
between Dorothy, and her husband, Hinton recalled. One time Snider leafed
through his wife’s new Playboy spread with Hinton and commented: 'Didn’t
she have great tits'?

A key sequence in Galaxina called for Dorothy to be spread-eagled against

a cold water tower. The producers insisted she remain bound there for
several hours, day and night. In one shot of the completed film, the tears she
cried are real.

Before we saw each other again on that Sunday in January, Dorothy had
written and mailed the suggested rainbow poem to me in New York. But I
did not receive it until after our walk by the ocean, and its obvious hints
were no longer necessary. She had wanted me to kiss her that night:

. . . The moon encircled

In a misty rainbow—
Those who do not see it
Do not know it is there;
And the answer
For those who do?
It’s personal

The poem was signed: 'D.R.'

That Sunday afternoon the kids had called to say they were ice-skating.
Why didn’t I bring Dorothy by so they could meet her again? We drove
around Santa Monica looking for the rink, and despite our equally
laughable senses of direction, the rink finally turned up. As we moved
down the cement walk to the entrance, we held hands for the first time. Her
hand was long and narrow and delicate.

Inside, the rink was dark, cold, and damp. Dorothy wobbled precariously on
the high heels. Antonia, age twelve, saw us and yelled out; then nine-year-
old Sashy waved and they skated over, followed by several friends. It was a
sunken rink with a metal fence around the top; I had to squat to get a kiss.
Dorothy couldn’t even do that because her skirt was too tight—another of
those dresses insisted on by Snider, guaranteed to immobilize her.

D.R. smiled anxiously at the girls as I gave them each a quick kiss. Toni
whispered: 'She’s very beautiful, Daddy.' Sashy echoed the sentiment, for
which she received a withering glance from Antonia. The two of them
gazed at Dorothy; they had seen me with many women over the past two
years. Torn whispered: 'She’s the best one, Daddy, I can tell. She looks
really nice.'
We then drove to the ocean and parked near a deserted beach. Dorothy took
off her shoes and we stepped down the incline onto the sand. The sun was
still high and very bright. I took her hand again and we walked for a time in
silence. We moved closer to each other. I tucked my left arm around her
back, and she rested her right hand lightly at my waist. We walked that way
for a while, both looking down. I glanced at Dorothy. She was snuggled
against me, gazing straight ahead. Each step became more difficult as the
sand got deeper, and we sank down further and further. The sunlight poured
over us for all the world to see, yet it was as though we were protected by
an invisible, shrinking cocoon that both shielded us and brought us closer
every moment. Finally my legs were too heavy to move another step. As I
turned to Dorothy and gathered her in my arms, she was trembling. Then I
realized that I was too.

For several moments we embraced, neither of us moving. I could feel her

everywhere. Our bodies seemed to absorb one another right through our
clothes. We looked at each other, and she brought her arms up in front of
her, hands below her chin. Her face was in shadow, her hair rimmed in gold
by the sun. I held her close, her arms pressing against my chest, and I
moved closer and kissed her. She drew her eyebrows tightly together, closed
her eyes, and kissed me back. I don’t know how long the kiss went on; I had
never experienced anything like it. Love, it is said, is like an addiction, and
nothing had ever seemed more true. Her mouth was so sweet, it would be
impossible to ever get enough. Then we locked arms and continued to walk
along the beach in silence. We didn’t have to speak. We both knew that
what had happened hadn’t happened to either of us before.

The world came slowly back into view, and I noticed that in the distance
someone was taking pictures of us. I stopped and turned us away sharply.
When I glanced back, the photographer had veered toward the ocean, as
though he were snapping the beach or the waves. How long had he been
there? He now moved casually toward a woman trailing behind him.
Amateur photographers? Another pair of lovers? Someone from Playboy?
How could they have known we would be on the beach? For some reason it
didn’t occur to me that Dorothy might easily have been followed to my
house, and then to the beach. At that moment, I dismissed the thought.
We sat down on a piece of driftwood and I put my arms around Dorothy.
The man with the camera was even farther away. He probably recognized
you, Dorothy said. He had probably recognized her, I said. But I wondered
then if there was a chance we had been followed, if someone had been
instructed to snap pictures of us, someone who thought they might be
useful. Maybe Playboy or Snider was already on to us. But then I told
myself I was being paranoid and melodramatic. We kissed again; with the
sun hot on our faces, our lips burned together. It felt as though we were
drifting slowly down a peaceful river, with everything serene and in place,
on the first day of the world.

That evening I caught a plane back to New York, and next morning, with
my L. A. street number as the return address, Dorothy mailed to me at the
Plaza a greeting card with a color photo of an ocean beach at sunset.
Against sky and sea was the dark silhouette of a woman leaping for joy.
Inside she had written:

Mon. Jan. 21, 80

Dear Peter,

One day since yesterday . . .

Luv

Dorothy
xoxo

On Saturday, February 2, Dorothy was able to get away, and I flew back to
Los Angeles for the weekend. That evening I started a fire in the living
room and turned on the music. Lying on cushions by the hearth, we kissed
and clasped each other, each embrace more intense than the last. Dorothy
was tender, but careful. When my hand rested lightly on her breast for a
moment, she removed it, and we continued to kiss. She was right: The
kisses were enough. After a half hour, the kissing had reached such a peak
that I felt we had made love to climax three or four times.
Dorothy was sitting up, the fire reflected in her eyes. The light flickered,
and her beauty was like an extraordinary mirage, too glorious to be real.
She reminded me of a unicorn, I told her, as the image flashed into my
mind. She was unique, certainty, with the purity and grace symbolic of a
unicorn. Dorothy asked what it was, and I remembered that the kids and I
had bought little plastic pins on the boardwalk in Venice and among them
was a white unicorn head. I got it from the desk drawer and gave it to D.R.
She looked at the pin curiously: So this was a unicorn. She had seen them
around, but hadn’t known what they were. Had they ever existed? I didn’t
know for certain, I said, though it seemed to me that nothing was ever really
made lip.

D.R. was delighted with the pin and made it hop through the air, as a child
might. She looked like one just then, and I realized how young she was, not
twenty until the end of the month. She couldn’t pin the unicorn to her
blouse, she said, because her husband would wonder where it had come
from, so she put the pin carefully into her purse. I never would see it again.
We talked and kissed again, but soon she had to leave. It seemed as though
she had just arrived.

The next day Blaine Novak and I had an argument about Dorothy, about her
role in the picture and in my personal life. He was convinced that Playboy
had maneuvered Dorothy into the movie, that I was being set up
romantically: It was no secret that I had a weakness for blondes, and no
secret that Hefner wanted a movie star for Playboy. Nicky Blair, David
Wilder, and Hefner himself were all putting down Dorothy’s husband, and
bending over backward to throw her and me together. Novak was afraid I
was going to get hurt. Here I was necking with the girl for a couple of hours
and then she went home to her husband. Did he have to draw me a picture?

If there was a plot of some kind, I said angrily, Dorothy certainly was not
involved in it. Novak couldn’t be sure, but he doubted that too—although
from the way he said it, I knew he didn’t trust Dorothy at all. Hefner was no
dope, he went on. If old Hef himself, he conjectured, was interested in
Dorothy—and why would he not be?—there was obviously a better chance
if her marriage was over. I might have her in the picture, but Hefner had her
under contract for another couple of years. 'And don’t forget,' Novak
concluded, 'Hef can be pretty vindictive.'

I was in turmoil. The intention had been not to become romantically

involved until Dorothy left her husband, but she gave little indication of any
such plan. Novak had worked on my own worst fears. Although I knew he
trusted women much less than I did, his worries about the film were
justified. Anyway I looked at it, the circumstances were very tricky.

So when D.R. called that Sunday, I was feeling desperate. She was at the
Playboy studio shooting with Casilli and had no time off. I couldn’t handle
the situation, I told her; I was going crazy. It was important for her to be in
the picture and I didn’t want our personal relationship to jeopardize that.
She was married; there was no getting around it, and she would have to
decide what she wanted. Until she did, we would have to keep things
between us strictly professional. Dorothy was flustered. She wasn’t sure
what I was really saying: My tone was anguished, but the words were terse.
I would be working all day, I said, and flying back to New York the next
day. I would call her from there. It was not my finest hour.

Much later, D.R. told me she had cried after we hung up. Casilli assumed
Snider had upset her again and was furious: She had cried often over the
last three months. After my call, she had not been able to work any more
that day. She thought it was over between us.

Our first argument (we had only two) had been sparked by Novak’s
ostensible concern, and when I called Dorothy from New York, I
apologized for my outburst. I had been confused and frustrated and had
taken it out on her. No, Dorothy said, I was right: The situation wasn’t fair
to me. But it was difficult for both of us, I said, and I told her Novak’s
theory: that it was possible Playboy and Wilder had tried to manipulate us
into a relationship to get her a better part and a better deal (I didn’t mention
specifically Hefner’s possible involvement or ulterior motives). She agreed.
But did I think she herself was involved in any such plot? No, I did not, I
thought that she and I had fooled them: We had fallen in love. Dorothy
asked if Blaine had said that he thought she was involved in a conspiracy. I
told her he was suspicious by nature and very worried about the picture.
Dorothy understood that his attitude would, of course, make our situation
even more difficult.

Several times in the past few weeks D.R. had not been sure she was going
to make it at all, especially during the incident with the puppy that Playboy
gave her in Hefner’s name—quite literally: They named it Marston, the
boss’s middle name. Dorothy was so excited that she phoned me in New
York the day she received the present. Marilyn Grabowski had told her Hef
picked it out himself, and D.R. played with the puppy during photography
sessions. A few days later, Dorothy called in tears: The puppy had died. She
hadn’t even had a chance to take the dog home, she told me. The people at
the Playboy studio said they would take care of it, but they hadn’t: 'They
didn’t even feed it,' she said. That was not the true story, however. For
reasons I wouldn’t know until two years later, Dorothy had lied so as not to
alarm me about her personal safety. She gave false accounts to others for
the same reason, confiding the truth only to a makeup woman on Galaxina.
Because Paul Snider had been responsible for the death of the puppy. He
had poisoned it.

Soon after, for Valentine’s Day, D.R. sent me another poem:

Looking at life through a window,

Watching the pain, the forced smiles,
A little bit of laughter . . .
And life goes on, leaving no time 
To get off the world and rest—
Until the very end,
When time means nothing anymore,
Because then you have All the time in the world,
Forever and ever.

On February 15, I flew back to Los Angeles. D.R. and I had a date the next
afternoon—Saturday. I gave her a copy of The Arabian Nights for
Valentine’s Day and inscribed several pages in a code that spelled: EB.
loves D.R. We went upstairs to play some tapes and I wanted to show
Dorothy the master suite: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two dressing
rooms. Cybill and I lived there together for five years, but I had never asked
anyone else to share the place with me. I realized how much I wanted
Dorothy there, anywhere, all the time. As the tape played, we sat on the
edge of the bed and kissed; soon we were lying on the bed and it became
difficult for us to stop kissing. Then D.R. stood up and walked out onto the
balcony overlooking the fountain and courtyard. The sun was going down. I
followed her, and we looked at each other for a long time.

We were thinking the same thing, and I could tell from the look in her eyes
that she was afraid going any further would be wrong. I knew it myself, but
the temptation was too strong to deny. She shook her head ever so slightly,
and after a moment I nodded and said, 'I know.' The tension left her face. It
would simply be too difficult, she said, to go back to her husband afterward;
it was already difficult enough. We kissed and held each other. We had
better get the tea now, I said, and D.R. smiled as she took my hand and we
went down to the kitchen.

After dark, we lay by the fire in the living room. We wouldn’t see each
other for more than a month, not until she came to New York for rehearsals
toward the end of March. It was going to be a long month, we both knew. I
told her it would be very difficult for us until she decided whether or not
she was going to leave her husband, but that I didn’t want her to leave him
for me: I wanted her to leave for her own sake, if she wasn’t happy with
him. Dorothy said: 'But I wouldn’t leave my husband for anyone except
you.' I looked at her closely. How could she say that? She couldn’t be that
certain. She might meet someone next year. Dorothy shook her head
slightly: 'No, I would leave only for you.' She was so determined it made
me smile.

The room was dark, but I could still see her eyes, soft and sharp at once.
Before she had met me, I said, she must have known there were problems in
the marriage. 'I knew before we got married,' D.R. said. 'It was already
different six months after we started going together.' Why had she married
him? I asked. 'I didn’t want to have an argument.' That was a hell of a
reason to get married, I said. But Paul had wanted to very badly, D.R. told
me. 'My Playboy issue was coming out and I guess maybe he was getting
insecure. I felt sorry for him and I loved him. I still love him. But it isn’t the
same anymore. I don’t know what’s wrong. . . .' I told her it sounded as
though she wasn’t in love with him anymore. 'But why? He’s good to me.
He cooks. I come home, I’m exhausted, I’m cranky; I just go to bed. Most
times, I don’t let him touch me. I just don’t like to do it with him anymore.
Every so often I have to—every two or three weeks, when I run out of
excuses.' How long had it been like that? A long time, but since last
summer it had been worse: 'I feel so bad—I don’t know what’s wrong.'
They had only been married early last summer, I remembered.

There wasn’t anything she could do about it, I said. When the feelings left,
they were gone. That was what I’d meant before: If she had not met me, she
would have met someone else. She certainly wasn’t happy. She looked at
me. 'There would never be anyone but you.' The words were almost chilling
in their sureness; for a moment she sounded like an oracle. She sat erect,
with a bitter look: 'I can turn off my emotions, you know,' she said. 'I can be
very hard. You wouldn’t believe how hard I can be. I can be indifferent. I
can stay with Paul and that will be my life.' But why would she settle for so
much less than she could have? I didn’t understand. 'Because I already had
Steve, now Paul is my husband and then I get divorced and then it’s you
and me, and after you someone else and then someone else.' She shook her
head. 'No, I’m not going to go through that—I’ve seen what my mother’s
gone through like that, and I’m not going to.'

She looked deep into my eyes: 'Peter, if this isn’t very important to you,
please let’s not pursue it any further. Because it’s going to be difficult for
me now, but it would be even more difficult later.' Every word struck
clearly. It was very important, I said, it was the most important thing in my
life. Dorothy asked me to make a promise. 'If you ever get tired of being
with me, please don’t stay because you feel sorry for me. I wouldn’t want
you to feel about being with me the way I feel about being with Paul.' I
promised and said I hoped the same went for her feelings about me. She
nodded. 'But I never would,' she said. We were saying our vows, I realized,
as I hugged her close to me and said I never would either.

In the early hours of that morning, Dorothy wrote me a poem:

A thought in the night,

Lying awake in wonderment
At the simplicity of happiness,
And the complexities of foresights
 Which may never be . . .
Because the present
Will slip into the past,
And then the future is now . . .
And the past will never be
Recaptured and spent
The way it should have been.
And the present is spent
By questioning the future.
 

Around midnight, long after Dorothy left, I had a strange vision. It was so
sharp I felt as though I had actually seen across the city and into her
bedroom. Something terrible had happened to her. I could see Dorothy quite
clearly, lying on her back, a dark male shape above her. Only her face was
illuminated, the rest of her in blackness. She was staring directly into my
eyes as the man moved on her, and the look on her face was one of pure
horror. I blinked, but the picture stayed there. The horror in her eyes
increased. It was as vivid as a nightmare, but I was wide awake. To make
certain, I glanced around the room. And then looked back. Dorothy was
gone.
 IV - The Serpentine Laugh
The Serpentine Laugh
Alone, just you and I,
Talking softly, laughing—
Each moment bringing us closer.
A soft kiss, a warm embrace, a song,
And then we talk a little more,
And laugh again,
And the moon peeks through an open window.
Then—in what seems only one moment—
The rays of the sun Are slowly shining brighter.
The evening will be forever—
Yet time was not enough.
—Dorothy Stratten New York, June 1980

By the exit gate at Kennedy, I stood watching nervously as the passengers

began to come out. We had flown Dorothy first class, so I expected her
among the earliest arrivals. But she was not. Nor was she among the second
wave, the third, or the fourth. A 747 carries a lot of people and this one was
full. I watched them all come out, but Dorothy was nowhere to be seen. The
last few passengers straggled out, the stewardess and the pilots already long
gone. No Dorothy. I felt terrible; she must have missed the plane. But why
didn’t she call? She had at least four hours to reach me. It didn’t make
sense.

I backed away from the exit, turning to ask the whereabouts of Information,
and fumbled for the typed piece of paper: American Flight 32 from L.A.,
arriving 9:02 p.m., Saturday, March 22. I started off along the corridor,
walked twenty or thirty paces, and then, for some reason, thought better of
it and headed back to weird the gate and the plane. As I turned the comer, a
woman was just coming through the doors at the far end. At first I wasn’t
sure, but then I knew: It was Dorothy, all right, and she was a mess.

As I think of her now, she looked adorable coming toward me, high heels
clomping along, the skirt too tight, shortening her steps. She was trying to
walk quickly, carrying two suitcases, a purse, and a shopping bag, her hair
going every which way. She looked most of all like a teenaged kid who had
just run away from home carrying everything she owned. I was so relieved
to see her, I started laughing and she laughed with me.

I grabbed the suitcases, both heavy, and we bumped down the escalator to
the baggage carousels, where we eventually picked up another four bags.
She had brought virtually all of her clothes and books. It was funny, she
said, it felt as though she was moving out; even Paul had commented on it.

She was very talkative and bright and excited. I spent the time trying to
look busy with the luggage, just to avoid staring at her dumbly. She chatted
on about the last few weeks at Playboy. The only thing that had kept her
going was knowing each day brought her closer to New York. Although
Dorothy hadn’t really told me that before, she said it matter-of-factly. But it
was difficult sometimes to keep up with the importance of what she
appeared to say so lightly. D.R. veiled the truth to protect the listener. Yet
when she trusted someone, she spoke frankly. She wasn’t coy and she
wasn’t a flirt. But she was often shy, which made her quiet. Dorothy
believed everyone else’s life and opinions were more important than her
own. When she was hurt, it usually went unspoken. She understood and was
quick to forgive.

I would never know exactly what Dorothy had gone through to prevent
Snider from coming to New York. The Galaxina experience, among many
others, would have already made D.R. fully aware of how much more
difficult her work would always be if Snider was nearby, and both of us
knew his presence in Manhattan would make things impossible for our
relationship, yet we never spoke of this except by implication. A couple of
times she mentioned that her husband wanted to accompany her for the
shooting and asked my position. I told her it would be a closed set and no
visitors were permitted. Later she said she had explained this to Snider, but
that he still wanted to come with her. I said this was a difficult role for her
and that the picture would suffer if she was upset emotionally. Knowing his
nature far better now than I did then, I realize what an extraordinary
accomplishment it was keeping Paul Snider out of New York. She had made
her choice, and this was the first victory she had won for us.
We stopped at the Wyndham Hotel on Fifty-eighth Street. It was better for
her to check in alone and get settled, so I went back to my room at the Plaza
to wait for her. Not very much later, bathed and changed, she was at my
door. She walked in and we kissed for a long time. Then we toured the
suite. She loved it. We could see all of Central Park up to Harlem, bordered
by Fifth Avenue and Central Park West. We could watch the sun rise and
set. It was like living on the most extraordinary set with perfect lighting.
The truly beautiful days of spring, just after the equinox, coincided with
Dorothy’s arrival.

On our first evening together, as a kind of romantic farewell to winter in

Manhattan, it snowed, just enough to make a pretty picture: a gentle
snowfall for Dorothy, who had never been to New York and was delighted.
At Nicola’s restaurant uptown we sat at a small, round table between the
main rooms. Everyone who went by, without exception, looked at Dorothy.
It was either terrifying or funny. But D.R. wasn’t amused, though she said
they were looking at me. Dorothy could be both polite and naive.

After dinner we went back to the Plaza, and then took a ride through the
park in a horse-drawn carriage. Dorothy picked a particularly sweet-looking
palomino. The driver asked if we wanted the short tour or the long tour, and
I looked at D.R. She mouthed, 'the long one.' It was like a ride on a magic
carpet; the horse seemed to float. When Dorothy got cold I gave her my
jacket, but we warmed quickly in each other’s arms, riding along the
winding roads of the park, a light snow still falling. When we reached the
Wyndham, her suite was warm and flowery. She showed me where she had
put all her things, gracing the most ordinary acts with enchantment. As I
leaned out the window to show her the Plaza entrance again, Dorothy
squeezed my arm and told me once more how very happy she was that it
had snowed. Didn’t everything look beautiful?

D.R. was going to sleep in her own room tonight. She was clear on that
point. But she liked the idea of having a late drink at my place, so we
walked up the wet street. It had stopped snowing. On the bed in my room,
we kissed for a long time. The overwhelming force was almost impossible
to resist. Late in the evening, I played her a rough tape that pianist-
composer Earl Poole Ball and I had made of a new song we had written.
Earl didn’t know until much later where the idea had come from, nor that
the title, One Day Since Yesterday, had not been mine at all. Only D.R.
knew the meaning behind the lyric about a clandestine meeting on a sunlit
beach:

. . . Like two lovers in those stories,

Walking slowly hand in hand;
Just a dream that really happened . . .

When Dorothy realized what the song was about— somewhere in the
middle of the first stanza—she smiled a private smile. She was lying on her
back, with her head propped up slightly on a pillow, her hands folded on her
stomach and her feet crossed. She would often lie that way, and she seemed
the most relaxed at those moments: Her energy was suspended like a
profound calm on the sea.

. . . We were lovers in the sunlight—

When can we be that way again?
Was it just one day since yesterday When it all began?
Her eyes were moist when she finally looked over at me.

Early Sunday afternoon the weather was beyond compare, so Dorothy and
I, like a lot of other people, took a stroll through Central Park. The only
difference between us and everybody else was that no one looked like
Dorothy, which was why everyone looked at her. She was carrying a white
stuffed unicorn that I had just bought for her at Rumpelmayer’s. The
unicorn pin had been lost, she told me. Since it was uncharacteristic of D.R.
to lose things, and since (I would discover much later) a unicorn figurine
Mario Casilli gave her for her birthday—Dorothy had told a makeup girl at
Playboy that she 'loved unicorns'— also was never found, it is reasonable to
assume that Snider uncovered both gifts, figured them to be special love
tokens from me, and disposed of them both in anger.

Dorothy moved briskly and stared ahead most of the time. I kept up with
her and tried to look both formidable and oblivious. Men would stop in
their tracks, turn, and stare. Women looked too, but without hostility. No
one knew who she was. D.R. just kept moving, and eventually we cut into a
side lane and managed to remain fairly secluded after that. But since both of
us were nearsighted, we had no idea how conspicuous we really were: Soon
afterward a William Morris agent asked Dorothy if she and I were having
an affair—he had seen us mooning around in Central Park.

On that afternoon, in the park and back at my suite, when Dorothy and I
finally made love, we found what we had been searching for all our lives.
We truly made love: creating it again for each other, discovering it together
for the first time. We floated dreamlike through the night. The lights were
always off and the shades drawn when we made love, because Dorothy
wanted it that way. She was extremely modest. Every moment it became
clearer that we seemed to fit each other’s forms, like two halves of a finely
broken shell. It was the purest experience I had ever had, and as natural as
breathing.

It was the brightest time of our lives. I would wake up and watch her lying
asleep beside me, and I could hardly believe she was there, that she really
existed, that she wasn’t a dream. There was something miraculous about
Dorothy Stratten, something not altogether of this world. I knew it even
then.

She had to leave early on Monday morning; too quickly, she was dressed
and gone. About an hour later, I got up and looked out at the park. The trees
were growing green again. The sun was behind Fifth Avenue, bathing
Central Park West in gold. I walked into the bathroom and found a message
from Dorothy. Using a bar of soap, she had drawn on the mirror a huge
heart with an arrow up through the center. The drawing stayed there for
well over two months.

***

David Susskind, originally the executive producer on They All Laughed,

had suffered sleepless nights worrying about the wisdom of my casting
mainly unknown players. What made me think any of these people could
act? Weren’t they all just friends of mine? To make Susskind feel less
pessimistic, we gave a party for him to get to know the cast. I got there late.
Audrey Hepburn hadn’t come to New York yet, Gazzara was late, and so
were John and Nancy Ritter. When Susskind arrived with his wife,
therefore, he was confronted with a sea of unknown faces and, having had a
couple of drinks on the way over, David was not in a tactful mood: He let
the kids have it, both barrels. He had been saving it for me, but gave it to
them.

When I arrived, Dorothy whispered to me that Susskind had said terrible

things to everyone. He had made Colleen Camp cry. Could she sing? he had
demanded. Could she act? Dorothy was particularly indignant about that,
considering all the pictures Colleen had done. I moved quickly over to
Susskind and tried to salvage the situation, but there was no hope. Later
Ritter said, accurately: 'Susskind pulled us all together. Before that party,
we were just a bunch of actors, but after the party, we had something in
common—we all hated Susskind.'

David sat between Patti Hansen and Mrs. Susskind, who looked beautiful
but pained. She kept glancing nervously at David’s drink, which he kept
refilling. Patti flirted with him mercilessly, but ne seemed to like that. Then
she would turn toward me and make faces.

After Patti slipped away there was an empty seat next to Susskind and, late
in the evening, Dorothy went over and chatted briefly with Mrs. Susskind—
trapped the whole night between her husband and Ben Gazzara, who looked
like a caged animal all the while, smoking cigars and cigarettes in a chain,
downing one drink after another.

Then, Dorothy squatted next to Susskind. He looked down at her, struck at

close hand by her beauty, perhaps even slightly chastened by it. Dorothy
looked up at him and said: 'You know, Mr. Susskind, I don’t think you’re
half as mean a person as you pretend to be.'

David gazed down at her dimly, not sure where she was going, but he tried
to smile, his eyes mellowing a bit. 'Oh, really?' he said. 'Why is that?'

Dorothy answered with great warmth: 'Because you couldn’t be and have
such a very lovely wife as Mrs. Susskind.'

Mrs. Susskind became flushed and tried to smile, her eyelids fluttering
helplessly. Susskind never moved his eyes from Dorothy—his smile frozen
in a kind of sad glaze, more forlorn than I would have thought possible. 'Oh,
I don’t know,' he said after a while, 'I’m pretty mean.'

If They All Laughed was going to be the way I wanted it to be, its characters
would behave with politeness and good humor, there would be grace in
their sadness, and stoicism in their dealings with life. Yet there would be a
hope to better their own destinies. Against all odds, they would keep trying.
And there would be little time for envy, jealousy, or hate. Earl Ball and Jo-
El Sonnier had written a line in a song Colleen Camp was going to sing,
and as the shooting went on, I realized that if the movie had a single point
to make, their lyric said it:

. . . If you love someone,

You want what’s best for them . . .

Making a picture is a drug of sorts: You check out of the real world for
several months, with no time to think about life’s problems. The world you
are creating becomes reality, as well as both mission and obsession—at
once the ultimate escape and the ultimate trap. And D.R. and I were
surrounded by that fantasy world, and the problems of maintaining it,
twenty-four hours a day.

***

Barely four weeks later, as we sat in the limousine taking Dorothy to the
airport, a cassette played songs we had selected for the picture. Dorothy
would be gone almost a month, to Canada and then to L. A., on a publicity
tour for the forthcoming June issue of Playboy, in which she would be
displayed over numerous pages as the Playmate of the Year. There would be
a press conference with Hefner, interviews everywhere, on local and
national TV and radio, including the Johnny Carson show. Dorothy would
see her family and friends in Vancouver and attend her mother’s wedding.
And she would see Paul. She still hoped she wouldn’t have to see him until
Los Angeles, but he had said he was going to meet her in Vancouver, and
she dreaded the encounter.

Dorothy’s shoulder rested against my chest, and our heads were together,
leaning back against the seat. How little time we had really had. How much
had happened! It seemed that only a day ago she had arrived. Then a few
days later, my daughters had flown in. Then we had started filming, and for
good luck I had made certain Dorothy was in the first shot.

D.R. had cast an extraordinary spell over my two daughters. Barely a week
after they had arrived, the three acted as if they had known each other for
years. What made the girls most fond of Dorothy, I think, was her ability to
enter their world without patronizing them by acting either too childlike or
too parental. She behaved as an equal. Without calculation, guile, or effort,
she became one of them.

All the phones in the suite could ring at once, with the typewriter and
doorbell going full blast, and fifteen people running in and out of the place,
but if I could glance over at these three women on the floor by the
windows, coloring a magic dragon together, I would know that nothing was
wrong with the world, that everything would be all right. If I had to choose
five moments in my life when I was most serenely happy and knew it, one
of them would include those brief times I sat in the midst of a whirlwind of
production and knew that, with the slightest movement of my head, I could
see the three people dearest to me on earth.

The girls and Dorothy established a bond that proved very strong. Antonia
was just at the age when she wanted to be older by eight years, and D.R.
had a way of making her feel older, which gave her an air of maturity. But
Dorothy made Toni laugh too, which was not that easy. She made us all
laugh—her own had such joy, it was irresistible. Her face would flush, her
eyes tear, and she would bring her hands to her cheeks with delight, like a
small child. Or she’d throw back her head and laugh with such abandon,
you were swept along and realized with surprise that you were laughing
yourself.

Dorothy’s acting was like that too. She couldn’t make a wrong move. Most
of the time she looked unruffled, and this apparent casualness gave her
amazing power. She learned faster than anyone I had known, absorbed
everything instantly, and never slipped backward. She was a born star, the
epitome of the blond beauty. True picture stars are not only unique, but a
dream of perfection. Movie stars can be manufactured through staging
tricks and photography; but Dorothy was, on every level, the real thing. It
was impossible to take your eyes off her.

D.R. had an extraordinary ability in dealing with people’s temperamental

side, especially mine. She usually managed to make me laugh at myself.
Once, during a production meeting, when she sensed the beginning of an
unnecessary upset, Dorothy leaned over to me and whispered, 'Your heart,
darling, your heart,' with a tiny smile in her eyes and a grave note of
concern in her voice. It made me laugh out loud the first time, and D.R.
used the line at equally appropriate moments ever after. She never failed to
get at least a grin from me.

The 'director’s girlfriend' is a difficult role to play in the picture community

—a glass house with all the lights on. Dorothy was married; we were
adulterers. We tried to be discreet when the cars dropped us off at the end of
the day; Dorothy went to the Wyndham and I to the Plaza. She would come
over to my suite within the hour, usually as soon as the production people
had gone and we could be alone. Since we had to be up by 6:00, we
couldn’t go to sleep too late; though of course we did, all the time, and
never felt tired. There is nothing like being in love to make you feel alive;
you know the beginning and end of all things and times—it can’t be spoken
in words, but it can be seen in the farthest depth of your lover’s eyes.

She wrote me a poem and left it by the bed one morning when she went out:

Holding each other, our bodies perspire . . .

I want to say so many things
That hopefully my eyes portray in silence.
Your hands so slender,
I feel them, as a blind man
Carefully touching every part of me
As if it will be for the last time.
I close my eyes and feel the room
So full of emotion. . .
And we sleep contentedly
In each other’s arms
Knowing the morning will bring
A new day of love.
A midnight walk to Doubleday’s bookstore was dear to us, we knew then;
and dinner at Nicola’s, or at Lenge’s Japanese place on Columbus Avenue,
or room service at the Plaza, or breakfast in the Edwardian Room. On
weekends I would cut the picture in the suite while D.R. went to a play or a
movie. When she came back—I always stayed at the cutting table longer
than I said I would—she brought me plates of cookies, and never made me
feel pressured.

On her third night in the city, we went to the bookshop together for the first
time. Dorothy was like an enthusiastic college student, picking out
paperbacks for the new year. I kept forgetting she was just college age. By
nature D.R. was scholarly, so I wasn’t surprised to learn she had been a
whiz at school, finishing in the top third of her class. She had done a high-
school essay once, she told me, on homosexuality. I asked why she had
chosen that subject. She was just interested, she said, didn’t know anything
about it and thought she would find out a little. Had she? Yes—it was OK,
but it wasn’t for her. More than once she mentioned that she had thought of
studying law. For a week she worked as a court stenographer in Vancouver,
but the evidence and photographs she had to see had shocked her. Robbery,
rape, murder— those were things on TV or in the movies, she said, but
seeing them almost firsthand was too terrifying.

The kids and I had the best Easter of our lives. Dorothy staged an elaborate
Easter egg hunt in the living room of our suite. She hid candies and
chocolates all over the place, and as soon as one of the girls got close,
Dorothy shouted: 'Nothing near there!' When the kids found them, she
would scream. The three were laughing so much it took quite a while to
find all the sweets. Toni found most of them, but Dorothy made sure that
Sashy found the one real egg and won the prize: a beanbag dog. The girls
had picked out a large, disgruntled stuffed rabbit to represent me, and a
small white rabbit as Dorothy.

The first professional stage production Dorothy ever saw was the Broadway
version of The Elephant Man, a drama about the nineteenth-century 'freak,'
John Merrick; she went alone to a matinee one afternoon while I was
working. She had been fascinated by the story, and a few days later near
midnight in Doubleday’s, she picked up a factual study of Merrick and
began leafing through it avidly. She didn’t blanch at the naked photographs
of Merrick’s grotesquely shaped body. Five paces away, my eye couldn’t
stay on the pages she was studying so closely. D.R. bought the book and
read it with keen interest.

One month after her death, I would see the play I realized then the reason
D.R. had felt such empathy with 'elephant man' John Merrick. Her outward
appearance, like his, concealed and distracted from her true identity. His
grotesque form masked a pure and loving spirit. For most people it was
equally impossible to see beyond the dazzle of Dorothy s beauty.

D.R. took the kids places; she took Antonia to the park, where they sat on a
large rock and Dorothy read while Toni colored for hours. It was unusual
for Antonia to be so easily amused, but she loved being with D.R.—she felt
privileged. Several of the drawings in the coloring book were marked 'By
Antonia and Dorothy' or 'By Dorothy and Antonia,' and one D.R. signed
and dated 'ANTONIA & DOROTHY MARCH 31, 1980.' The funny thing
was that Toni had little regard for possessions. She lost everything,
including watches, clothes, jewelry. But she managed to keep the Tales of
Great Dragons, with its multicolored murders of ancient dragons by
horsebacked knights of old for the honor of queens and maidens fair.

In the midst of those idyllic days, the shadow of Snider was always with us.
He phoned her constantly, and daily left messages at the Wyndham: 'Say
that her husband called.' D.R. would phone him back, with increasingly
strange looks from the desk clerks and elevator men, who knew she never
slept there. I could see the suppressed smiles when I went upstairs with her
once or twice. By the end of shooting, she had come to associate Snider
with the room at the Wyndham, and told me several times that she couldn’t
bear to go there anymore.

After one long phone conversation with him, Dorothy told me: 'Paul wants
to move into a house so we can start having children.' She made a face and
shook her head. 'I’ll buy him a house,' she said, 'but I’m not going to have
children with him.' At the time, it was almost funny to me: the code of the
eighties. I thought I knew what she meant. Certainly the house was a way of
repaying whatever she thought she owed him, but everyone she knew
advised her against buying it. Her business managers, lawyers, and agents,
her Playboy associates, and her mother thought it was foolish. They told
Dorothy that Snider was just trying to get his hands on some American
property before there were any more problems in their marriage—as he
knew there were. A divorce might not yield enough cash after the fifty/ fifty
split to pay for a new house. But now, with the 100 percent still intact,
Snider could use all of his wife s money. But it was their money, Dorothy
said, even though she had earned it; they were married— just as it had been
'their' Mercedes, though only Snider drove it.

***

For the weekend of May 2, Dorothy planned an elaborate surprise for me

that she pulled off splendidly— at considerable cost, inconvenience, and
risk. She flew down from Montreal on Friday, landed at Newark, took a cab
to the Plaza, and just before midnight pushed the doorbell of Suite 1001.
She had enlisted the help of Audrey Hepburn’s nineteen-year-old son, Sean
Ferrer, and asked him not to tell me, but Sean unwittingly told Blaine
Novak, who spoiled the surprise by revealing her plans to me. Yet I fell
asleep that evening, and when the bell awakened me and I opened the door
to find Dorothy standing there, she seemed to have appeared like the vision
of a long-remembered dream of Paradise. She looked so beautiful that it
took my breath away. I forgot that I was pretending to be surprised, and I
was. She was so happy, she said later. She wasn’t used to happiness.

She had come to New York to confirm that we were very much in love with
each other and that to pretend anything else was useless. She was going to
have to do something about her marriage because—neither of us said it, but
it was implicit—we wanted to be together, live together, travel together,
have children together.

She had brought along an advance copy of the Playmate of the Year issue,
with her photo on the cover. It was terrible. The contrast between the first
layout she had done and this one was striking. In these pictures she looked
profoundly unhappy. A fixed smile was on the cover, with her eyes masking
any emotion: There was something cow-like in the pose they had told her to
assume in the low-cut dress, so the boys could see a sufficient amount of
breast. One of the most strikingly beautiful faces of our time wasn’t enough.
But D.R. had managed to remove any eroticism from her expression—there
was a desperation behind her eyes. Masquerading as a mannequin, she
became a human wax figure for the kiddies. The photos inside the magazine
were all like that, but the one on the cover was the most frightening. It
didn’t even look like the Dorothy I knew.

'My body looks so much older too,' she said objectively, with only a trace of
regret for the youth she had seen so briefly and enjoyed so little. I didn’t
want to look at the pictures too closely, but Dorothy insisted on going over
each page carefully. She wanted my opinion. She had been worried about
several of the photos, about how her breasts appeared, and about the awful
one with the dog who had died.

In March, the first time we slept together, I noticed that her left breast was
smaller than her right. The change had occurred early in 1979, right after
the first few Playboy jobs. 'I just got worn out and I got really sick. I had to
go to bed for two weeks and I lost a lot of weight. My left breast got smaller
than my right. There always was a little difference, but after I lost all that
weight it became much more noticeable—-one full bra-size different.' She
looked very unhappy. Maybe, I thought for a moment, the change was her
body’s way of trying to disqualify itself from the job that made her so sick;
but I didn’t say anything.

As we looked at the pictures, I saw the editors had managed to conceal the
difference, but I knew the fuss required to take even the simplest pictures,
and thought again what a terrible strain the whole thing must have been on
her. I said only that it must have been difficult, and D.R. said: 'It was—you
know?' The last word rose plaintively, still a note of surprise that the world
could be so cruel.

We stopped at the photo of Dorothy and the little dog they had given her
with Hefner’s middle name. She had already told me about this picture:
They had caught her unaware, her legs in such a position that Casuli could
snap a good view of her vagina. Knowing Dorothy’s stand about that kind
of shot, and with continued pressure from Hefner, someone had suggested a
dog to distract her. 'It’s not even a good picture,' she said. The photo was
over-lighted and in incredibly bad taste. Dorothy’s face was lit up like a
joyful ten-year-old with a new puppy on Christmas, her guard down just
long enough to flash her genitals to the waiting multitudes. I tried to make
as little of the picture as possible, but there was no question that it
depressed me.

Afterward, there was always amusement in her face when she told people,
Peter doesn’t like my layout.' She looked pleased about that, and I asked her
if she liked it. 'I’m not a hypocrite,' Dorothy said. 'I did it, didn’t I?' But
under what pressure? 'I still did it. I’m not going to go around saying I don’t
like what they’ve done to me in Playboy.' That didn’t mean she had to go on
endorsing the magazine and promoting it. 'But I do. That’s what it says in
my contract; it’s a three-year contract, with more than a year to go: nude
pictures, nude movies, and promotions—anytime they want.' What would
happen if she refused? Well, she had said no to a lot of promotions and
pictures. They weren’t being so bad about that now; things definitely had
improved. 'They could have said they wouldn’t let me do this movie—they
could have insisted. I am their Playmate of the Year. They’re giving me
$250,000 in gifts.' Which would be treated as income, I said, so the taxes
would be heavy. D.R. nodded, 'About $80,000.' She added: 'I don’t really
want any of that stuff—maybe the camera and the watch—that’s about it.'
The 'gifts' were highly overpriced and she would have to sell most of them
just to pay the taxes.

Many months later it would break my heart to remember the protective way
she had described her Jacuzzi encounter with Hugh Hefner—a version she
could only wish were true. After everyone on his staff and all his friends
had told her repeatedly how impressed he was with her, and how interested
in her career, Dorothy said, he had surprised her in the Jacuzzi late one
night and made an obvious pass. She told him that she was 'getting married,
and wanted to be a good girl.' And Hefner said she was a good girl, and left
her alone. On that weekend in May, D.R. added only that Hefner had
become considerably more insistent after that night in the Jacuzzi. One time
he banged on her door until she finally had to open it and tell him to please
leave her alone, that she had a boyfriend and planned to be married. He had
gotten angry that time, she said. He was even angrier, I later realized when I
knew the truth: The rejection had been much stronger. Hefner had
miscalculated and moved too fast. His best game hadn’t been good enough
to overcome his misjudgment of Dorothy’s character. Of course Hefner
would be angry—he had stolen a single round and lost everything to Snider,
a local boy just this side of a bum.

D.R. changed the subject to James Caan, the mansion’s resident movie star,
who had also been difficult, and another source of pressure. He had asked
her into his room for a drink. There she found one of the regular women
waiting, and Caan immediately went at it with this girl. 'Which quite
surprised me,' D.R. said. She got very angry and left the room. 'I was so
mad at Jimmy—that he would . think I’d want to be involved in something
like that. He was never very nice to me afterward.'

Then there was the lawyer Playboy recommended, who chased her around
his desk and started to take his pants off. Her crying finally made him stop.
And then the relative of a top Playboy executive who traveled with her on
the early promotions and only booked one suite, then became drunk and
abusive when she wouldn’t share his bed. She had lain awake all night on
the couch in the living room, too terrified to sleep: He might sneak in and
rape her. And there were others she had thought were gentlemen, who
disappointed her: TV-star Vince Edwards acted as her friend and then
turned on her when she refused his advances. That wasn’t friendship,
Dorothy said. Patrick Curtis had been a gentleman, she told me— one of the
only gentlemen.

Was Paul faithful to her? No, but she didn’t mind. It was a relief not to have
to make love with him. 'All I think about is getting it over with. He goes to
sleep right afterward and then I can read or write or watch a movie on TV.'

I remembered again the first time we had made love, not two months
before, how modest she had been and still was—not only about showing her
body, but in the way she behaved. When she got out of bed, she always
wrapped a large white towel around her; and that lovely night in May, when
I made a grab for the towel, she cried out sharply and ran to safety. When
she returned and slipped back under the covers, I commented on how
modest she was and wondered how on earth she had ever lived through all
those photo sessions at Playboy. I asked jokingly, not expecting an answer.
Dorothy gave one anyway: 'Hate.' I looked at her, my smile disappearing,
and asked how she meant that. Dorothy spoke evenly, her eyes cook 'I mean
that I hated all those men so much, and my hatred was so strong, it made a
kind of invisible shield between them and me, and then I didn’t feel as
naked anymore. The hate was protecting me.' I didn’t know at the time
which affected me more, the remark itself or the lack of anger or self-pity in
her manner. She was just giving me facts— answering a simple question.

Her Playboy companion, Elizabeth Norris, couldn’t fail to understand the

meaning behind Dorothy’s excitement when she returned to Montreal in
buoyant spirits, running along the hotel corridor calling Elizabeth’s name.
She was so happy! She was in love! When Dorothy phoned me, she insisted
I say hello to Elizabeth, who of course pretended she had no idea who I
was. (Much later, long after Dorothy’s death, I would find among her things
left at Snider’s house a packet of custom-printed matches from the Montreal
hotel that were embossed: 'Dorothy & Peter.' Surely D.R. had not ordered
these. Had Snider seen them?) I warned Dorothy that Norris’s loyalties
might more likely be the source of her paycheck, but there was such
exuberance in her voice, I couldn’t press the subject further.

On May 5, from Montreal, Dorothy wrote Snider a long letter asking for the
freedom to be herself: 'I need some time to be me.' She felt 'manipulated,
controlled, and smothered. . . . I just want to be my own person.' She quoted
an old saying: 'If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours
—if it doesn’t, it never was in the first place.' She mentioned the letter to
me but never discussed the contents. 'I hope he understands,' she said. But
Snider was infuriated by the letter and flew to Vancouver to meet Dorothy
when she arrived for her mother’s wedding on May 10, turning a happy
occasion into an unpleasant one for everybody.

D.R. quickly told me over the phone what had happened. They were in a
hotel in Vancouver. Snider was downstairs; she could see him down at the
pool. He had bullied her, she said, and threatened to leave, go to Hawaii and
never speak to her again. Good, I said, let him go. But Dorothy was
frightened, she said, she didn’t know why. She was afraid to let him leave in
such anger. She wanted to be his friend; he had been responsible for her
success. I said that was a ridiculous way to look at it. 'If I hadn’t done
Playboy,' Dorothy said, 'I wouldn’t have met you, Peter. I didn’t say
anything. 'Isn’t that true?
'We would have met.' I spoke quietly. That wasn’t the point anyway; she did
not owe him her life. She had done all the work; hadn’t he lived off her
labors for two years? Dorothy’s tone changed abruptly: Snider might be
coming. Didn’t she nave her own room? No, she said, Paul had moved into
hers; he gave her no choice. She sounded confused and sad. Paul was
heading for the elevator and she had to go. She didn’t know when we could
speak again.

Several months later, Louise told me how sad her sister had been at that
unlucky wedding, trying so hard to be gay for her mother, but ashamed of
Paul and of what he had insisted she wear. It was the typical Las Vegas
hooker’s outfit: gold plunging neckline, gold spike-heel shoes, too much
makeup, hair overly curled. Nelly asked her to please wear a shawl over the
front of the dress, at least for the ceremony. Dorothy was glad to wear it all
the time; she hated the dress.

Snider made a practice of dressing her as lewdly as she would tolerate and
taking her down to the nightclub district. Wherever they went, Snider had
arranged to be paid by the club for bringing in the Playboy Playmate. He
would march her in and parade her around for the boys to ogle, have a
couple of drinks, talk loudly of his accomplishments with her, get his cash,
and move on to the next spot. Now that D.R. was Playmate of the Year and
starring in two forthcoming movies, one with Audrey Hepburn, John Ritter,
and Ben Gazzara, Snider could demand more cash for her appearance. He
neither gave Dorothy a dollar of this money nor declared it legally. It was
like hooker money—why give the dame any of it? Hadn’t he made her?
Wasn’t he entitled to the tips? Dorothy went along with it one last time. She
thought maybe it would help to pacify Snider enough so that she could get
back to New York without him and finish the picture. She couldn’t think
beyond that right now. Maybe if she gave in to Snider, ne would leave her
alone for the remainder of our time in New York—to have that, she would
sacrifice almost everything—but again she would tell me nothing.

She wrote a poem expressing her terrors and showed it only to Nelly, who
knew nothing about our love, but was worried by the anxious, confused
words. Since Dorothy had asked for it back, Nelly copied the poem for
herself. The original has never been found!:
 A tornado of thought sweeping the mind . . .
Wanting to close your eyes
And open them again to a new beginning,
Or to start again on the right road . . .
Life is a mysterious path
Which no two travel alike.
And once the chosen path is taken,
There is no turning back.
Yet there is an alternative sometimes,
A crossroad somewhere in between
Which takes you on a different journey . . .
Will I be happy?
Yes.
For how long?
I don’t know.

The pressure on D.R. constantly increased from Vancouver to Los Angeles.

The naked Playboy sessions began again with more promotional
appearances; worries about me in New York and about her family in
Vancouver; and Snider every morning and night. Dorothy had not liked or
trusted her mother’s new husband, which only helped to increase her
tensions.

Antonia had left behind in New York a shopping bag full of her things.
Back in L.A., Dorothy made a date to take her out one afternoon and return
the stuff. They stopped at Snider’s on the way to a movie and Dorothy
introduced Toni to Paul as 'the director’s daughter.' Snider was sitting in the
dining room wearing only a shirt and jockey shorts, rolling joints with a
buddy. There were numerous exercise tables around that Snider had built,
and Toni noticed that none of Dorothy’s suitcases had been unpacked. With
a smirk, Snider offered Toni a joint and laughed when Dorothy gave him an
angry look. She took Toni’s arm and they left. In the shopping bag, Antonia
noticed an eight-by-ten photo of me that I had inscribed to Dorothy; didn’t
she want to keep it? D.R. asked Toni to hang on to the picture for her until
they were both back in New York.
Snider insisted on coming along to the Carson show and made a nuisance of
himself backstage, but D.R. managed not to allow him to affect her poise in
front of the camera. Months later I heard that at her request, Snider and his
friends had been banished from the NBC dressing room. John Ritter called
and raved about her performance with Carson. She had even managed to
score off Johnny—unheard of for a newcomer. And she had been so sweet,
Ritter felt, and so charming. When Carson asked her which part of a man’s
body she liked best, Dorothy paused one beat, and then said: 'Stand up.' It
got a good laugh and caught Johnny by surprise, but he liked her for it.
He’d stood up; then she picked the chest as her favorite, and Carson said he
was insecure about his chest. Later I asked D.R. what prompted her to tell
Johnny Carson to stand up. She said his question had made her angry. She
thought he was leading her into one of those vulgar areas for cheap laughs,
and the words just came out. Actually, she said, Johnny was very nice to
her, very polite and funny.

She looked beautiful in her white dress, so excited. She handled herself
with both the natural ingenuousness of a newcomer and the self-assurance
of a trouper. She even managed, in the most extraordinary way, to tell the
truth, but in such an offhand, guileless manner that only a close inspection
would reveal its significance—like evidence after a murder. Even as she
was carefully alert to Playboy’s image, Dorothy nevertheless backed
directly into an admission of her real feelings. Johnny got her to reveal
herself by first asking what reaction she thought women had to seeing
pictures of naked men. Dorothy answered:

Speaking for myself, I think a male is sexier showing a little bit or

some—in a bikini or trunks—rather than fully nude.
The studio audience applauded and Dorothy smiled. Carson closed in:
JOHNNY: I suppose that’s true with men really, you know—the
imagination plays a great part.
DOROTHY: I think so.
JOHNNY: And yet you appear here sans everything, right?
Dorothy realized she had been caught off guard, and stumbled for the
only moment on the show:
Well, um—there’s a difference, I think—other magazines leave
definitely nothing to the imagination.
At the close of the program, Dorothy mentioned the picture she was
shooting in New York, and when she said my name, her eyes sparkled. D.R.
told Johnny she had just graduated from high school when she was
approached by Playboy—she had been working for the telephone company
as a clerk-typist. Carson was visibly taken aback. She was putting him on,
he said. 'No,' said D.R., 'I worked there just six weeks before they carried
me away. . . .'

More than two years later, I saw a videotape of an edited version of the
Playboy press conference that officially announced Dorothy as Playmate of
1980; Hefner did the honors. He himself told me on the phone in New York
that she had been trembling during the proceedings, and Dorothy confirmed
her nervousness and tension. To me, Hefner dismissed her anxieties as
youthful stage fright, and Dorothy seemed to echo that interpretation, but a
great deal was left unspoken on both sides. Neither of them mentioned their
recent blowup when Dorothy refused to strike a Hefner-demanded pose for
one of the pictures in his Screen Goddess pictorial. The photo was to be an
imitation of Marlene Dietrich straddling a kitchen chair in Josef von
Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. Marlene, however, was fully dressed. Dorothy
would be naked, and the pose would be explicit. She exploded into angry
tears and refused to make the shot. She never told Mario any of the truth
about Hefner. Casilli later said to me that Dorothy was the least talkative,
most close-mouthed woman he had photographed in twenty years of girly
shots; she never revealed much about her personal life.

At the videotaped press conference, Snider was on the sidelines scowling at

Dorothy—while Hefner stood beside her and tried to appear as familiar as
possible while still being respectful. He looked a bit anxious and ill at ease,
but years of experience helped to conceal his awkwardness. Dorothy was
clearly not at ease. Her smiles looked forced, the several glances she threw
at her boss were politically friendly, but not genuine: There was an edge of
fear in her eyes. Hadn’t D.R. told me as much as she could when she said
Hefner always made her feel uncomfortable?

Dorothy returned to New York the third week of May. On the first night, I
told her there had been several times while she was gone that I thought she
might have changed her mind about us. She started to cry and said that if
that was how I felt, she really didn’t know what to do. She was terribly hurt.
She had told me how she felt. She had come all the way back from Canada
to tell me. She then described how abusive Paul had been, how he tried to
make love to her, and how her flesh crawled, she said, whenever he touched
her. She particularly couldn’t bear for him to touch her breasts. Dorothy’s
eyes filled with a kind of sad terror: 'I had to do it a couple of times, but I’ll
never do it again. I felt the way a prostitute must feel.' I took her in my arms
and said it was my own insecurities, not a lack of trust.

As the days went by, Dorothy became certain that she was being observed
and followed. One day, a man drove alongside her in his car and asked her
to meet him later because he needed to talk to her, but Dorothy refused to
speak to him. Over several nights of location shooting, I felt a cold gloom
on the streets—an angry/dangerous atmosphere I could not pin down. There
was the chilly feeling that we were being watched with hostility.

D.R.’s business managers and the new lawyers I had recommended advised
her to allow them to send an official letter of separation to Snider, but she
preferred something less cold. Wasn’t there another way to make it legal?
Attorney Wayne Alexander told her that all she really had to do was to write
Snider a letter specifically stating her intention to get a separate place to
stay upon her return to Los Angeles. That fact in writing was sufficient
under the law to effect a legal separation. She wrote and mailed the letter,
her last to Snider, on June 26: 'Don’t make me afraid of you. . . . A sickness
only gets worse if it’s not discovered and treated in time.'

A short while after he received the letter, Snider went to their bank with
another woman and tried to convince the officers that she was his wife,
Dorothy Stratten. He wanted to get into her personal account, having
already cleaned out nearly $15,000 from their joint account. The bank
refused. What was he buying with all the money? Clothes and jewelry for
himself, Dorothy was told, but there was more to it that none of us knew.
Wasn’t Snider heavily into cocaine, which was very expensive? Weren’t
friendly doctors helpful, for good money, in obtaining the best grade of
coke— and many other drugs? Didn’t Snider have a regular drug
connection? Snider tried to get Patti Laurman, his new, blond, seventeen-
year-old Stratten look-alike, to take a joint and some cocaine, but she
refused. Although their relationship remained platonic, Snider held her hand
in public so people would believe otherwise. Hadn’t Snider also used
Dorothy’s earnings to hire detectives in L.A. and in New York to keep an
eye on his wife? The plot was almost identical to the one I had written for
the picture. The irony was horrifying.

I suggested to Dorothy that perhaps I should offer her husband $50,000 or

$100,000 to start his own talent agency since he seemed to want to run a
business. D.R. said that was a possibility, but after hearing of the attempted
theft and of how much he had already taken—-all the money she had been
planning to put down on a house for him—she told me she would ask her
lawyers to go forward with plans for a divorce. Snider would get half of
everything she still had left, everything she made from Playboy or any other
deal concluded during their marriage, but Dorothy was satisfied. She just
wanted to be nee, whatever the cost.

***

In June, with another six weeks of shooting left, Dorothy and I started
talking about a trip together, as soon as the filming was completed: A four-
to-six-week vacation all over Europe. I wanted to take her to Paris and
London and Rome and Venice, to see everything again for the first time
with Dorothy, to whom the world was new. Her immigration status would
come up for renewal on August 1. Officially she was working exclusively
for Playboy; and required their full cooperation to be employed and to
remain in the United States.

One night we went over to the Colony record store on Broadway, where a
young salesclerk recognized Dorothy and asked if she was indeed the
Playmate of the Year. D.R. was looking at some tapes, a light blush and
smile on her face. There was barely a pause before she answered with a
definite 'Nooooo-wah . . .'as though she were politely tired of being asked
the question. Afterward she said: ‘‘Wasn’t that embarrassing?' She would be
relieved, she said, when her Playboy issue was off the stands.

Dorothy revealed herself more and more as an expert picture actress. She
understood lighting, timing, and the nuances of expression. She always
made things look natural and easy. And she worked so quickly that
sometimes I couldn’t believe my eyes, so I would ask for a second take. The
first was often perfect and the second nearly as good. She was never less
than believable, with an honest simplicity that was artless. Everybody who
saw the rushes (overnight prints of each day’s filming) was impressed by
her beauty and her skill. And her behavior on the set was letter perfect: little
rehearsal, few takes, no temperament problems, always early and prepared.

At the start, there had been a minor accident with a propman over a pair of
glasses D.R. wanted to wear off the set. He refused to give them to her and
she complained to me, causing friction between the crewman and myself. I
knew situations like that were dangerous and was trying to find a moment
to explain, but she brought it up the very next evening. She was sorry, she
said, for coming to me that way. 'I shouldn’t have done that.' She had
arrived at a conclusion that had taken me many years to figure out. Dorothy
never did this again throughout the shooting. I would come to wish that she
had troubled me more with her problems.

When she wasn’t in a shot, Dorothy spent most of the time either watching
quietly or reading a book. I could sense some of the crew’s silent contempt
for a blond Playmate showing off her supposed studiousness. If D.R. felt
anything, she ignored it and went through several novels and books of short
stories, poetry, and nonfiction during her four months in New York. She
particularly liked Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, and A
Farewell to Arms. By the middle of August, she was halfway through The
Idiot and said it was her favorite.

Life was busy for D.R. Besides the shooting, there were business meetings,
phone calls, and then, when a serious illness appeared, a long series of
doctors’ appointments. Dorothy met with the editors of Vogue and Harper’s
Bazaar, and both magazines wanted fashion layouts of her to be timed with
the release of the picture. There was even talk of putting her on a cover.
Neither magazine had ever been willing to feature a model who had worked
for Playboy, but they were going to break a precedent for Dorothy Stratten.
She had overcome all the obstacles.

As shooting continued, several picture and TV roles were promoted by

various agents, each of whom was interested in representing her. She
wanted to sign with William Morris, but to be politic, she called Hefner for
his opinion. He solemnly recommended that she not rush into anything, that
he would look into matters himself upon her return to Los Angeles. It was
apparent to us that Hefner wanted to keep control or Dorothy. What
ultimately concerned him, we agreed, was that the William Morris Agency
had too much clout, that Hefner could not easily move it into deals
favorable to Playboy. To appease him momentarily, Dorothy decided to
wait until she returned to L.A. before signing, but she told the agents she
would before the end of August.

Her Playboy Models deal was almost finished, and it didn’t take long for
word to get around that D.R. was making a big splash in New York. Johnny
Casablancas’s agency, Elite, had just signed Patti Hansen, who was the top
model in the country at the time. And Casablancas wanted Dorothy as well.
The one time we met, Johnny told me how impressed he was with her. She
could work all over Europe, he said, just as soon as she was free. D.R. told
Casablancas that her term with Playboy was nearly over and that as soon as
it was, she would sign with Elite. They shook hands on it. Because I didn’t
know these agents except by reputation, her choices helped avoid any
accusations of my manipulating her.

***

Patti Hansen didn’t like D.R. very much. Already involved at the time with
Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones (they would marry late in 1983), Patti
nevertheless seemed to resent Dorothy on sight. I asked her once why she
didn’t give D.R. a chance. 'I don’t like blondes,' she said. On Patti’s last day
of shooting, she turned to Dorothy in front of a group of the cast and crew
and said: 'Jesus, you got big tits.' D.R. blushed and looked down; she didn’t
say anything. There was a hushed, awkward laugh, and Patti looked
embarrassed. She left a few moments later. It was the last thing Patti ever
said to Dorothy.

Colleen Camp was also dubious at first, and distrustful, but as she came to
know Dorothy, she became a close friend. They made lunch dates and went
shopping on Madison Avenue or down in Greenwich Village. When filming
went on late into the night, they curled up together on a single cot in an
improvised dressing room. Dorothy constantly encouraged Colleen, told her
how good her acting was, and how much she liked her singing. She thought
Colleen deserved an Oscar for her performance. For Colleen’s birthday in
June, Dorothy bought her a silk blouse and insisted we throw a party at
Nicola’s. Colleen loved the blouse: 'You don’t understand, D.R., this is silk!
Do you know what this costs?' Dorothy laughed and snapped her Kodak.
They were delightful together. The most fun we had shooting was during
their scenes together: along Fifth, in Soho, in the Village, on Wall Street.
Dorothy with John Ritter, Colleen with Sean Ferrer, or the other way
around. They were well matched, and all four shared friendship and high
spirits.

During my favorite sequence, with the four of them at a Fifth Avenue shoe
store, Colleen sat on the sidelines with Rosarine Katon, the black actress I
had last seen on the buffet line at the mansion with Dorothy. D.R. and I
were at the far end of the store while the lights were being prepared. I was
lounging on a couch and she was sitting on the floor. Rosanne looked over
at us and asked Colleen if she had ever met Dorothy’s husband. No, Colleen
hadn’t. Why? Rosanne saw him all the time around the mansion, coming on
to everybody, talking big. He was a real creep, Rosanne said. She wouldn’t
put anything past him. Colleen turned to her: What did she mean by that?
He was dangerous, Rosanne said. He was the kind of guy that might kill
Dorothy and Peter and himself. Colleen was outraged: What was Rosanne
talking about!? Rosanne shook her head. Colleen had never met him, she
couldn’t understand. Colleen thought Rosanne was exaggerating, but asked
D.R. if she thought Snider would ever harm her. No, Dorothy said, that was
not a danger. Colleen did not mention the incident to me. But Dorothy did
say later: 'Paul doesn’t think much of people.' She had worried that Paul
might kill himself. She thought he was capable of that, she said. 'He doesn’t
have a very high opinion of life.'

Outside the Roxy skating rink, we were setting up a shot that involved
several of the principals, but as I look through the camera’s eye in
preparation, there was a blond double for D.R. Dorothy would not be able
to participate in that night’s shooting: She had to be up at 6:00 a.m. to check
into a hospital for a biopsy that would determine the nature of two growths
that had appeared on either side of her face. Each was on the jawline just
below her ear, but the one on her left had become particularly noticeable.
Progressively, more care had had to be taken to hide the swelling from the
camera. When she first returned to New York toward the end of May, I
immediately noticed the problem. Although seven different doctors had
examined her, not one was able to make a diagnosis.

The word cancer was so carefully avoided that naturally it became

uppermost in our minds. Were the hard and growing tumors benign or
malignant? Even if they were benign, their increasing size had to be
checked or they would become impossible to conceal on the screen. If they
were malignant, an operation would have to be performed instantly, and the
scars from this would show. Plastic surgery would take months, and what
would happen to Dorothy’s role in the picture? There would be no way to
finish it. More important, what would happen to Dorothy? Disfigurement.
Would it, honestly, or would it not, affect my love for her? Was love
irretrievably bound to outward appearances? Or did it finally have to do
with feelings and spirits, both invisible and indefinable? I never asked
myself this question then but I think I knew that my passion for Dorothy
and my empathy with her was far too strong to be lessened by a change in
her physical appearance.

Yet these were questions we both tried to avoid, though we became

increasingly anxious as one doctor after another concluded that only a
biopsy could identify the disease. There were two biopsy choices: needle or
surgical knife. Only the latter required anesthesia and, whatever the ultimate
result, would leave at least a half-inch scar. Her hair could conceal this,
however. The needle biopsy was preferable, but it carried a risk: If the
tumor turned out to be malignant, the needle might spread the disease more
quickly. It could also fail to pull out enough of the growth for analysis, and
the knife biopsy would then be required anyway. D.R. and I nevertheless
agreed the needle was worth chancing, and the office operation was
performed one afternoon. But it proved insufficient, so the hospital was
booked. Because of the filming schedule I was unable to accompany D.R.
to her medical appointments, but my assistant Linda MacEwen proved to be
a good friend by going with her.

Setting up the shots without D.R. (which required keeping her double a
good distance from the camera) gave me a sense of what the film would be
like if Dorothy could not rejoin us. There was a dark, foreboding cloud over
the whole night that no amount of effort could shake. The sequence called
for physical comedy and required a good mood from me to help the actors,
so I tried not to allow my preoccupation to show, but I knew the work was
suffering. I kept wishing I had insisted on canceling the call and letting the
film’s medical insurance cover the cost of the delay. Novak had argued that
the picture was in enough hot water with Time-Life. We should press on,
work around Dorothy. He had little patience on the subject of D.R.’s health
and only seemed annoyed about whatever harm it might cause the movie.
Sean, on the other hand, helped us find a doctor, his uncle Jose Ferrer,
whom Dorothy trusted.

Because of the late-night shooting, I was still asleep when the phone rang
the next morning. Dorothy sounded groggy but cheerful: It was OK, she
said, it wasn’t malignant. I began to cry, not only because of the weight that
had suddenly been lifted, but for the confirmation that no matter how much
we were risking, everything would be all right. She had a sarcoidosis, or
sarcoid granuloma, an extremely rare inflammation that could be cured with
small amounts of cortisone steroid if the swellings didn’t subside on their
own. Dr. Ferrer suggested she do nothing until her return to California in
August. From the hospital, Dorothy called her mother in Vancouver and, for
the first time, told Nelly of her condition. If anything had happened to her,
Dorothy said: 'It should all be yours, Mum.' She had mentioned nothing to
Snider of the problem, for fear he would use her illness as an excuse to
come to New York, and she was, therefore, all the more surprised the next
day when he wanted to know what she had been doing in a hospital. When
she asked how he had found out, Snider chuckled smugly and said he had
his ways.

Not long before D.R.’s hospitalization, Dr. Cushner had visited New York
and spent an afternoon pleading Snider’s case; that she should return to
him. He seemed totally disinterested, she told me, in her point of view.
When Dorothy came down a short while after Cushner left, she noticed him
sitting in a car with another man. She went over and chatted briefly and,
feeling as she walked away that they were watching to see where she went,
she took a circuitous route to the Plaza. Even then she realized that Cushner
had joined forces with Snider against her. The Wyndham experience soured
her on Cushner. She had bought him the gift of a record album but never
presented it.

One morning, there was a knock on the door of the suite. D.R. went to
answer, thinking it was room service. She didn’t check the peephole, so the
door of 1001 opened onto a pair of photographers Snider had sent to find
her. I heard Dorothy talk with them at the door; then, from the sound, I
could tell that she moved them into the corridor, but I couldn’t hear what
was said. I paced irritably, wondering who the hell would crash in here like
that.

After a while, D.R. came back with proof sheets of the photos the couple
had taken, and explained under her breath that they had flown in from L.A.
to see her and get permission to use one shot for a poster. They were
working with Paul. I was livid.

How had they known the suite number? How had they known she was
here? Dorothy hadn’t asked. What did I think she should do about the
photos? They were waiting for a decision^ She held out the proofs and I
looked over her shoulder. They were nothing special: imitation Playboy
Bunny outfit with roller skates and garish lighting. The shots made her look
cheap and ordinary, with none of her innocence or wit, and I said as much.
D.R. turned them down diplomatically.

Snider had undoubtedly used Dorothy’s money to pay for plane tickets for
the photographer and his wife to come to New York and hustle her into the
deal by making her feel sorry for them. Although they said the Wyndham
staff had told them to try Bogdanovich’s suite at the Plaza, it was far more
likely the information had come through detectives Snider had retained. I
didn’t realize it, but this was the first conclusive evidence Snider had that
Dorothy and I were living together.

Soon we would hear that Snider was going around the mansion telling
everyone who would listen that Dorothy had run off with Bogdanovich, and
they were shacked up together at the Plaza. 'I think that’s awful,' D.R. said,
'it’s none of people’s business.' And yet she denied it to Paul, said she and I
were good friends, that she helped out with my children. And all of that was
true.
While we naively thought we were being discreet and inconspicuous, the
word was out around the Hollywood community. Patrick Curtis heard the
rumor a number of times at the mansion. Dorothy had confirmed the truth
to him, but everyone who mentioned it seemed to be quite certain as well.
Mario Casilli had heard something back in May, though neither he nor
Dorothy brought up the topic. Hugh Hefner, though he had heard the
rumors early, probably preferred not to believe anything until it was
substantiated by either of the two principals.

Since neither Dorothy nor I had said a word to him on the subject, perhaps
he thought it was because the affair wasn’t happening. What might have
worried him privately, however, was that perhaps it was, and that Dorothy
had told me the truth about him and his company, that we were now united,
in our contempt for him.

There were only two weeks of shooting left. July 4 fell on a Friday, giving
everybody a long weekend, and no one could have appreciated it more than
D.R. and me. There would be fireworks over the Hudson on Friday
evening, and to watch them we rode across town to Riverside Drive. A lot
of people were out that night, so I kept the limousine with us all the time,
whether we walked along the river or into the park. Dorothy was amused at
the way the car trailed along behind, and we wrote a scene like that into the
movie for Colleen and Sean.

We tried to get a view of the river from Seventy-second Street, but it was
much too crowded, so we bought a couple of Eskimo Pies and rode up to
Ninetieth, the street my parents had moved to when I was thirteen. I had
lived there with them and my sister (her arrival had prompted the move) for
nearly a decade, right across the street from the Soldiers and Sailors
Monument. As we prowled around on that lovely hot evening while the
country celebrated its freedom, we went openly together among the crowds.
We held hands and didn’t care who noticed. We walked across the spray-
painted monument, down several paths, into the grass and over rocks,
looking for the best place to see the fireworks. Dorothy was like a child
who had never seen fireworks. She made me feel the same way and we
stayed there until the last starburst faded.
D.R. and I tried not to worry about anything those last weeks in New York.
I eased up on the cutting and we spent more time together on weekends, in
the park or at the movies. I had been through Central Park so many times as
a child but not once in the past twenty years, except with Dorothy. And I
felt like a boy again. It was as though D.R. had given me back the
childhood I tried to forget. Even in choosing locations, I had unconsciously
avoided the old neighborhoods. But Dorothy made me feel like
remembering those days again—from one to thirteen, the innocent years.
She was the perfect companion; it was like taking her home to my mother
and father, who had died, and who I know would have loved her.

The early morning we finished shooting, there was a sad little wrap party at
a luncheon cafe around the comer from the Tenth Street apartment where
we’d filmed the last few shots of the picture. The second to last was
Dorothy’s final close-up. She and I sat in one of the little booths at the back
of the harshly lighted cafe while a lot of people came over to say good-bye.
Dorothy was gracious to everyone. She was sorry to see them all go, she
said. After the last person left, Dorothy began to cry quietly. But the picture
wasn’t really over, I said. After we returned from our vacation, there would
be more cutting, sound mixing and previews, publicity and openings. I
wasn’t finished with the picture, and neither was she, because I wanted her
with me all the way through. As it turned out, I was wrong. The picture was
over for Dorothy the night we shot her last close-up. She would be alive for
only four more weeks.

One of the last times Dorothy spoke on the phone to Snider, he had said he
wanted to meet her at LAX, but she put him off by saying that she was
going over to London with several girlfriends, Colleen among them, and
wasn’t certain when she would return. In truth, Colleen was in London at
the same time we were, but didn’t want to disturb us. The wrap party was
the last time she would see Dorothy. All month long, Snider had been
sending various messages: an album of all the greeting cards he had ever
given to Dorothy, along with a poem (she hid these from me), and a
paperback self-help manual explaining What Men Need. D.R. had looked at
the book, but left it behind when she packed. What about what women
need? she had said. As usual, Paul was thinking only of himself—that
wasn’t love. Why didn’t he ever understand what she needed?
Yet most of the questions that had troubled Dorothy so terribly in May
seemed to have settled themselves by early July. A couple of weeks before
we finished shooting, D.R. wrote the most contented poem of her life. It
was her last:

The bright green blades of grass

Are glistening with dew as the morning sun
Rises up over the hills, and a breeze
Ever so gently flutters them about.
And she stoops to pluck a dandelion
And pauses, shuts her eyes tightly,
Blows hard, and the white fluff
Disperses all around as she makes a wish . . .
She’s thinking but not sure of what.
The day will be beautiful for a while . . .
Instinct has been allowed to take its course
And proves to be right somehow.
And then she sits:
Her dress encircles her, hides her feet
Save the tips of her white socks and sandals.
The stem of the dandelion has fallen,
Somewhere, it doesn’t matter.
No reason for coming really—
Feels much better though:
Hasn’t had much time to think.
She sighs and places her hand
On the grass to help her stand;
She looks around and sighs again,
And knows it will still be there.

That final weekend in New York, Dorothy brought out a medium-sized box,
gift wrapped, a present for me. The box was much heavier than it looked,
and, to indicate my surprise, I pretended to stumble. Dorothy grinned, her
eyes sparkling. I smiled at her manner, like a kid who can’t wait for you to
open a present. I felt as though I had outgrown presents. Maybe I was
embarrassed too; she had given me so many gifts. But I never expected
what was inside: a unicorn made of solid brass, nearly a foot high. Did I
like it? she asked as I gingerly lifted the present out of its wrapping. The
unicorn stood rearing up on its hind legs, attached to an irregularly shaped
base of brass, like a tiny island, on which I saw that Dorothy had had an
inscription engraved. In simple block lettering, it read:

TO PETER
'ONE DAY SINCE
YESTERDAY'
FOREVER,
DOROTHY

There was a shy smile on her face. She had found something so forthright
and lovely. It was no small ornament, but an extraordinary prize, and it
would mean more than a dozen Oscars.

***

We spent ten shimmering days and ten magical nights in London. In the
distance dark clouds were forming, warnings we tried to ignore. Dorothy’s
awareness of doom was far greater than mine. I would not understand until
much later—long after the most tragic possibilities forecast in the signs had
become horrible fact. We gave a reward to ourselves—the honeymoon we
had both wanted. And it did become that in a way: a very brief and very
beautiful period of borrowed time, in which we tried to let the world fall
away.

I wanted to share with her a city I had come to know and a culture in which
I sensed she would thrive, and she did. It was her first trip to Europe since
she was four. We went to the theater almost every night, from plays by
Pinter to Dario Fo, caught Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald, visited
Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace, the National Gallery, and Trafalgar
Square, and dined in restaurants all over town. Dorothy had never been to a
museum, nor had she ever seen a performance of a play she had read. So we
went to see Private Lives. That it was playing was a good omen, we both
thought. Everything was going our way after all. But the name of the
chauffeur who met us at Heathrow with a new Daimler froze our smiles:
The pleasant-looking man introduced himself as Paul. D.R. and I avoided
looking at each other. To her the name was a reminder of everything she
wanted to forget.

We settled into a lovely kind of wedded life. D.R. was still modest with me,
but less so. She allowed a dim light in the room when we made love; and
when I showered, she sometimes stood at the bathroom mirror wrapped in a
towel so that we could talk.

Late one night, in the middle of our stay, D.R. was curled up on the couch
in the living room leafing through a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald stories
she had just finished. She preferred his to Hemingway’s, she had decided:
The writing seemed more natural, less self-conscious. She turned to the last
page of 'Winter Dreams,' and recalled for me that Dexter’s friend, Devlin, is
talking about the love of Dexter’s life: 'Lots of women fade just like that.'
After Devlin leaves, Dexter looks out the window at the New York sunset
and is overcome with a sense of loss. Dorothy began reading, without
hesitation, and with all the understanding in the world:

The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. In a sort of
panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring
up a picture of the waters lapping on Sherry Island and the moonlit
veranda, and gingham on the golf-links and the dry sun and the gold
color of her neck’s soft down. And her mouth damp to his kisses and
her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like new fine
linen in the morning. Why, these things were no longer in the world.
They had existed and they existed no longer. . . .

I suddenly realized I was crying. There were usually warning signs and I
could control myself, but not this time. Dorothy continued:

For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But
they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and
moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had
gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were
closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray
beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have
borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the
richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. . . .
D.R. looked over—she had read the words of the title with such soft
eloquence—and saw now that I was crying. She seemed a little surprised
and smiled tenderly, moved closer, and put her arms around me.

We spent more than 240 hours together and the passing of each one made
me yearn for another thousand to follow right away. When we saw Private
Lives, we held each other’s hands tightly during the second act. Tears came
to our eyes as the performers spoke the lines I had read to Dorothy in my
office nearly eight months before. Suddenly they seemed to mean so much
more:

AMANDA: What happens if one of us dies? Does the one that’s left still
laugh?
ELYOT: Yes, yes, with all his might.
AMANDA: (wistfully clutching his hand): That’s serious enough, isn’t it?
ELYOT: No, no, it isn’t. Death’s very laughable, such a cunning little
mystery. All done with mirrors.

There was a strange moment when we left the National Theater after seeing
Amadeus. We had been very moved by the production and play: the
dreadful tale of how Mozart had been poisoned by the envy and hatred of
the rival composer and pretended friend, Antonio Salieri. Paul Scofield’s
performance as Salieri captured the essential meanness in mediocrity; the
terrible pettiness and suppressed venom behind a polite, courtly manner was
chilling. The drama had frightening implications and disturbed us both
because the play was a love story too: Mozart and Constanze, his lusty wife
and muse, were very much in love, and had an innocence and honesty
unique among the play’s characters. Mozart’s downfall, then, caused
partially by his irreverent, often tactless habit of telling the truth, was also
the destruction of an inspiring and passionate love. As Dorothy and I left
the theater, our eyes met. We suddenly glimpsed the death of each other. I
clutched her hand tightly and we ran to the car. Only after we were riding
along the wet streets did we dare to look at one another again.

One afternoon while we were shopping, Dorothy excused herself to go up

the block and find some water. She was delayed and after a while, I went
searching and couldn’t find her. I reacted as though she had been
kidnapped. My heart was pounding by the time I finally spotted her on the
crowded street. She shook her head when she saw that I was alarmed, and
we embraced in the safety of the car as she said: 'Poor baby.' I didn’t ever
want her out of my sight again, I said, and she grinned. Did she know now
truly I meant what I’d said? Or realize that I would have been most content
if we could have been together every hour of every day for the rest of our
lives?

A few days later, Dorothy was lying on the bed while I sat beside her. Her
mother, she said, was worried that Paul might try to harm her physically. I
looked at Dorothy sharply, but she was smiling faintly. Did she agree with
her mother? She shook her head no, and smiled again. 'I don’t think Paul
would ever harm me.' Nelly later would tell me her own exact words: 'He
could cut your face,' she had said, 'he could ruin your face.' But D.R. only
smiled at my worried expression and repeated her belief that Paul would
never hurt her. I thought then perhaps she had mentioned it because of my
safety. Didn’t jealous husbands often go after the lover? Somehow for the
first time, the idea seemed possible. But it didn’t worry me: I was certain
that Snider could eventually be bought off. I also believed that he would
never harm D.R. since the thought was inconceivable to me.

During one of our last days in London, Dorothy spoke about Hefner’s
pursuit of two of her friends from Playboy, both of whom were actively
disinterested. D.R. said that, despite her reluctance, one friend had been
maneuvered into sex with Hefner. When I expressed dismay, Dorothy was
quick to defend her: I had no idea, she said, now difficult the pressures at
Playboy were. The other friend, a future Playmate of the Year, had done
everything she could to avoid Hefner, and Dorothy was saddened to have
heard recently that she too had been forced through circumstances to
capitulate to him. I didn’t realize at the time that D.R. was circling around
the secret she most wanted to unburden to me, watching for my reactions to
her friends’ misfortunes, the better to gauge my ability to deal with her
own. But she was right, I had no idea. I only shook my head and said
something about the women not having been as smart as she had been in
avoiding the traps. Dorothy did not mention the subject again.

There were other warnings I did not understand. She walked out in the
middle of the first act of Doctor Faustus, Marlowe’s play about the man
who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for fortune, fame, and power. It
was the last play she would see. Dorothy listened more and more intensely
as the story unfolded. The student Faust, bored, cynical, and self-interested,
reminded her all too well of the men she had just escaped. She had felt
uneasy from the beginning, and sat forward. By the end of the fourth scene,
it was clear that catastrophe was imminent. D.R. felt irrevocably implicated,
and terrified.

The next scene began with a frenzied rape staged behind a scrim, and
accompanied by the screaming sound track from the shower murder in
Hitchcock’s Psycho. The young actress—the first woman in the play thus
far—arched her torso and threw back her head in agony. As Faust and
Mephisto had their way with her, the piercing, horrifying cries from the
sound track seemed to come from the woman’s silent open mouth. The
walls of the theater closed in on D.R. The actress’s silent scream became a
shriek in Dorothy’s mind, her own muffled cry of pain.

As the rape went on, the flashbacks continued: perhaps the dark, gloomy
scent of the Playboy studio, the men sweating from behind their cameras as
she walked around naked for them to fondle or rape in their imaginations.
She had sinned as much as they, hadn’t she, in the eyes of God? Wasn’t that
what this play was saying to her? That people still sold their souls to the
Devil for fame and fortune, and that others could be thrown into the
bargain?

D.R. moved slightly in her chair. I thought she was going to close her eyes
or put her hands to her face, but instead she leaned over and said, flatly:
'I’m not going to watch this.' She was past me and up the aisle and through
the door before I could even figure out what she had said. I got up and left
as quietly as possible.

It was drizzling slightly, but D.R. was pacing up and down the wet sidewalk
in front of the theater. She looked lovely, resolute, and a little angry. It was
a relief to be out of the theater. She hated the play, she said. The idea that a
man would actually sell his soul to the Devil! She spoke as though she had
been personally insulted. But wasn’t it a metaphor? I asked. Didn’t a lot of
people sell themselves for money or power? But not consciously to the
Devil, Dorothy said seriously. That was absurd. I could stay and see the rest
of the play if I wanted, but she would prefer not to speak of it any further.

Back in the suite, I pressed for answers on why the show had bothered her.
She began to cry, and there was a touch of hysteria in her voice that I had
never heard before. Please! she pleaded, sitting on the bed in her room, all
the new clothes I had bought her packed neatly in suitcases, ready to go
home. Tears rolled down her cheeks. 'Please don’t make me talk about it
anymore! I have a right not to talk about something, don’t I!?'

The real problem was that Dorothy understood me far better than I ever
understood her until it was too late. She knew certain things would be
difficult to tell me, and she wanted to protect our relationship above all, to
shield me from the unpleasantness in her own life. She felt it was not my
problem, that I had enough troubles with my career and family. In many
ways I didn’t really understand D.R. until after she was killed—some things
were not clear until almost two years later, and I continued to find out
horrors she had never told me about. I had believed that she was revealing
all of her innermost secrets because I told her most of mine and would have
told them all if we had had the time. There was so little time. D.R. and I had
just begun to live, but there were fears and terrors locked in her heart that I
never suspected.

I felt so sorry that I had pressed her, that I hadn’t been quick enough to
tread carefully. But Dorothy could put on a mask that was absolutely blank,
that couldn’t be penetrated. She had learned to deal with men, and a
deadpan expression was a hint for a man to disappear. She had learned that
to smile shyly only encouraged men. So many didn’t know the difference
between politeness and invitation; they were arrogant enough to believe that
if a woman smiled or looked kind, she wanted to bed them. But why would
Dorothy, I thought, feel akin to a fallen angel?

On our last morning in England, two weeks before she was murdered, when
Dorothy asked me if I had ever wanted to make a sad love story, it never
entered my mind that she was thinking of us. I knew a little of the sadness
she had been through, but I couldn’t even guess how worried she was that
our life together might be destroyed. The hell into which she had fallen was
known to her in ways I never suspected, and when we fell in love, to
Dorothy I became her only way out—the one hope she had to be free of the
nightmare world she had been lured into while still a child. It was that same
morning she asked again if I had read Our Town.

***

During that week we had wanted to go somewhere romantic, away from

people, someplace outside in the rare London sun. The Serpentine, we were
told, an area on the far side of the Thames River, where people just liked to
walk, would fit the bill perfectly. As we rode toward the river, Dorothy
asked the driver about the Serpentine like an excited child on an outing who
wants to know everything that’s going to happen. After the car pulled into a
parking area down near the riverside, we took each other’s hands and
walked up onto the paved road that ran along the shore as far as we could
see. There were rowboats and children, women in hats and dresses, men in
suits or sporting clothes, and lots of dogs. It was wonderfully fresh and
unspoiled: open fields of grass, large trees, and the quiet waters of the
ancient river. Every moment was special during those two brief hours on the
Thames. There was magic in the country air.

For time to time Dorothy had a faraway look that I didn’t understand, and
when I asked, she would say: Nothing, she hadn’t been thinking of anything
special. Perhaps she felt as I did that we had touched the heavens, and she
was afraid to speak lest the holy thing we had together be taken away from
us. Perhaps there was something wrong with her: Hadn’t every joy been
followed by the darkest fall? Hadn’t she sensed and seen danger from men
since her youngest days? The stem father who deserted her, the boys who
chased her, spit at her, knocked her down, kicked her, exposed themselves
to her, her first lover’s fury toward her, her husband’s violent tirades against
her, and the traumatic mansion incident. Dorothy’s tentative look masked a
kind of watchfulness. Yet only moments before, we had acknowledged the
strength of our devotion to each other.

D.R. had found a spot in the sun a few yards off the walkway and she sat on
the grass. I joined her as she leaned back on her arm and we looked at each
other, smiling. It seemed as though we had been transported into one of
those vivid but tranquil landscapes we had seen at the National Gallery. A
rare moment when two people were indescribably happy at the same time,
in the same place, together on a cloud of perfect understanding. Dorothy
started to laugh. I didn’t know why, but her laughter was so infectious that I
laughed too. I asked what was funny, but she was laughing so hard, it took a
few seconds for her to get the answer out. She shrugged her shoulders
slightly and said: 'Nothing!' Then she laughed even louder. Now I had
trouble speaking myself. Finally, I repeated the word: 'Nothing?' Dorothy
nodded, and then shrieked with laughter, so strong and full it echoed off the
skies. I had never heard anyone laugh that way—with total abandon. I
joined her in body-shaking silent laughter, my sides aching. Tears streamed
down our cheeks as she pointed at me and laughed even more. We were
convulsed with laughter and there wasn’t any way to stop it. We would
simmer down for a moment, trying to speak, and then one of us would be
off again, with the other following. What we must have looked like under
those trees, howling, we didn’t think or care about. Dorothy’s laughter that
day had the joy of the ages, and I felt that it would ring through time
forever.
 V - The Ninth Moon
. . . Racing
To catch up with time,
But, when out of breath,
Time still races on 
And laughs.
Yet now
There is no need to race,
But time to rest,
And let time’s silly game
Be played by someone else.
—Dorothy Stratten Vancouver, 1976-77

Aren’t there always hunters in pursuit of the unicorn, and others who stand
by and watch or weep? The most brilliant detective in the world, who might
solve to the tiniest detail each possible aspect of the crime, could not give
back to Dorothy one second more of life; nor could he give to the ones who
loved her an extra moment of her radiance. Hefner, the master of the chase,
set in motion the frenzy of Snider’s egomania by banning him from the
mansion. Five days after Snider found out, Dorothy’s future was gone.

The killer, by committing suicide, made the most humane gesture of his
life. Hefner tried to hide his own culpability, to cover up the trail of clues in
public statements and at length in his own magazine.

On July 30, my forty-first birthday, Dorothy and I had our longest day
together, gaining back the nine hours we had lost flying to New York and
Europe. At London’s Heathrow Airport, we had just begun to look through
the bookstalls in the waiting area when she said, 'I want to show you
something,' and walked over to the men’s magazines. She pulled down one
of the Playboy’s special all-photo editions, The Playboy Girls of This or
That, and came back, flipping quickly through the pictures. She held the
magazine open for me and I moved behind her slightly to take a better look.
It was a full-page color shot of Dorothy sitting on a rug, stark naked, legs
brought up under her, smiling at someone at the right, and clearly unaware
of what was visible from the left angle of Playboy’s ever-vigilant cameras.
Someone had perhaps made a funny remark, and while she was off guard
they caught what they wanted.

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 loves 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.

Snider was probably informed of Dorothy’s trip to the airport. That same
morning, Wayne Alexander had called my house to get a final answer on
the Snider-sponsored roller-skate poster; Dorothy had left word, with my
encouragement, to pass on the deal. Later, of course, I would desperately
wish that I had told her to let Snider have his damned poster; perhaps the
gesture would have somewhat abated his mounting fury. Alexander called
Mike Kelly and said Dorothy did not want to go forward; he would be
sending a letter to that effect along with the poster, but wanted Kelly to
know immediately where they stood. Kelly called Snider, who phoned
Alexander sounding angry and sullen: Where was his wife? Alexander said
he could not give out that information. He never spoke with Snider again.

Later in the day, the phone rang and when Snider answered, it was Dorothy
calling him long-distance. She was in Houston, she said, and she hoped he
was all right. Snider was so surprised by the call, he wasn’t sure how to
play it. He asked when she would be back, when he could see her. D.R. told
the truth. She wouldn’t be back until late Thursday, or Friday morning.
Why didn’t they have lunch together on Friday, August 8? She would come
by around two. Snider said he loved her and Dorothy said she loved him,
but that he had to understand she had not changed her mind about wanting
her freedom. Snider must have hung up the phone feeling elated. She was
coming back after all.

Earlier that afternoon, I had placed a call to Hugh Hefner. When he was told
I was calling, Hefner barely hesitated before he told his secretary to say that
he was in a meeting. It was five days since we had returned from London,
and Dorothy was off in Houston. Hefner did not return the call.

Also, Hefner was hearing reports about Dorothy in Texas. She had changed
her hair to a simpler style and was wearing almost no makeup. Once the
Playboy models had lost their 'innocence,' their image changed: the Sunday
School girl-next-door became the Vegas showgirl-in-the-next-motel. It was
part of a standard male fantasy: the innocent Madonna turned into the
wanton harlot. These were the only two sides of a woman worth
mentioning. Of course, sex was more fun with the prostitute because she
knew what to do. But the special thrill was in the memory of her innocence:
That defiled Virginity could sustain many an erection. D.R. was not
behaving in the approved Playboy tradition. After all, she was Playmate of
the Year.

On Wednesday, August 6, D.R. and Elizabeth flew to Dallas. Dorothy had

talked as much as possible about They All Laughed, without a hint of our
involvement, and she gave the usual party line about Playboy whenever
necessary. There was nothing wrong with posing nude, and Hefner really
did love and respect women. He was 'nothing like his reputation,' it amused
her to say because it wasn’t a lie. Elizabeth told Dorothy she ought to talk
more about Playboy and put on more makeup. Dorothy didn’t want to look
like an albino, did she?

That night, Dorothy called me from Dallas in tears. At a banquet for

Playboy distributors who had flown in from all over the country, one of
them had come up and grabbed her right breast in his hand, and turned to
one of his pals to take a photograph. I had never heard her so upset: She felt
humiliated and dirtied; raped. She couldn’t wait to come home. She had
arranged to take the evening flight Thursday rather than stay overnight
again in Dallas.

After I had phoned Hefner for three days in a row, with no success, on
August 7, he finally returned my calls, apologizing for the delay. I asked if I
could drop by for a chat the following week. Anytime, Hefner said coolly. I
felt the iciness in his tone, and tried to warm things up by telling him how
well the movie had gone and how good Dorothy was in it. The part had
been greatly enlarged, I said, and I felt confident that it would have a
tremendous impact on her career. Hefner said he had heard some rumors
that Dorothy and I were . . . Yes, I said, it was true. We were in love.

There was a brief pause, followed by a sort of hollow chuckle, and then
Hefner said: 'Well, heh-heh, you always did have a weakness for blondes.' I
laughed much too loudly, and felt more and more uneasy: I had been hoping
to put off the facts until I could see Hefner next week, but clearly he did not
care to wait. I said that no matter what he might have heard, it was serious
between Dorothy and me, that we loved each other, that she was the first
woman who had ever really made me want to settle down. He said he was
glad to hear it.

I said I did not want anyone but him and some other dose friends to know
the truth because it could only hurt Dorothy and me and our relationship.
'That’s going to be a pretty difficult thing to keep quiet,' Hefner said. Not
necessarily, I said, if none of us confirmed it for a while. But Heftier told
me he had already heard rumors.

Then he said: 'Look, if you’re worried about that husband, I’ll just make
sure he’s not allowed in here without Dorothy.' He had taken care of that
last week for the Dream Party, Hefner said, but we hadn’t come by. He was
going to make certain that creep never got in there again, and then Dorothy
and I could feel free to drop by any time of the day or night. I tried to make
him understand that her husband was by no means the only issue. Hefner
repeated that keeping it a secret was going to be impossible.
Soon after he put down the phone, Hefner told one of his assistants to make
certain that Paul Snider did not get into the mansion anymore unless he was
accompanied by Dorothy Stratten.

***

Less than two hours later, at 4:48 p.m., the Delta flight from Dallas touched
down at LAX, and the limousine brought Dorothy to the apartment on
Spalding, where she got into her own car and quickly drove the few minutes
to Copa de Oro. She was in my arms by 6:30.

Snider had told Goldstein of their impending rendezvous the next day for
lunch, sounding optimistic about a reconciliation.

While unpacking her bags, D.R. casually showed me a Playboy test slide of
herself made up to look like Brigitte Bardot. It was part of Hefner’s
marathon Screen Goddess pictorial for Playboy’s cable, videocassette, and
stag-movie plans. The whole thing was a modem version of the old
Hollywood whorehouses that used to feature look-alikes for the most
popular current screen actresses. For a price, you could fuck your favorite
movie star. The best of both worlds for the Playboy readers and the
magazine which had made everybody’s girl-next-door into a hooker, and
was now preparing to do the same with the great women of the screen.

I held the slide up to the light. It was a head shot of D.R. in a red wig, with
several thick and shiny coats of pancake on her face, heavy on the lipstick,
rouge, mascara, and eye shadow. The photo looked about as appetizing as
one of the figures in the Hollywood Wax Museum. From the center,
Dorothy’s eyes looked out sadly, like those of someone trapped in a cave.
The picture depressed me, but I didn’t want to make her feel worse: She had
to do the job.

I told Dorothy I had spoken with Hefner, but didn’t mention the threatened
barring of Snider, feeling vaguely guilty. She was having lunch with Paul
tomorrow, which was going to be difficult enough. I didn’t want to worry
her about Hefner’s manner on the phone.
During dinner that night, I suggested that Blaine and Doug follow Dorothy
over to Snider’s the next day. He would recognize me. They agreed, and
Novak said they could follow at a discreet distance, go into the restaurant,
and sit several tables away to keep an eye on things. But D.R. said no, she
really didn’t need anyone to follow her over, and she thanked the fellows
for offering. Blaine asked if she was sure of that, and Dorothy nodded: Yes,
it was all right, there was nothing to worry about. She had spoken with Paul
and he had sounded fine. She would make sure they went to a restaurant.

Playboy was talking about sending D.R. to New York to do the Merv Griffin
show. The Krofft brothers wanted her to costar in a Western with Bruce
Dern (eventually released as Harry Tracy). They were offering $100,000
and the script wasn’t bad. If anything could bring Westerns back, I thought,
Dorothy could. She had the wit and elegance of a nineteenth-century
aristocrat, as well as the innocence of a country girl in chaps, wrestling the
cattle as well as any man. One way or the other, it looked as if Dorothy was
going to do a lot of traveling, and she and I would often be separated. We
fell asleep in each other’s arms early on the morning of Friday, August 8.

That day was the first time Dorothy and Paul saw each other since the
beginning of May. She had written the legal statement of separation in June.
Now, a month and a half later, Dorothy was driving over to the house on
Clarkson. She was not looking forward to the meeting, and the closer she
got, the more she wanted to turn around and run. But it had to be gotten
over with, she thought—there was nothing else to do.

Snider, dressed in a suit, welcomed her warmly. There were roses and
champagne set out, but she didn’t even take a sip. Nor did she pay much
attention to the flowers or the note he had written. She wanted to go to a
restaurant. They did, and then came back and had a loud argument. It was
the first time Dorothy admitted to Snider her love for me.

Snider had done a lot of checking and collected a considerable storehouse

about me to tell Dorothy, strewn across a litter of fifteen years in the public
and private wars of Hollywood. I had destroyed Cybill Shepherd’s career—
was that how Dorothy wanted to end up? Bogdanovich had paid a girl five
thousand dollars to sleep with himself and another man—what did she have
to say about that? It had happened at the mansion, he said, and a lot of
people knew about the incident. Dorothy didn’t believe it, and said she
didn’t want to hear about it. In the Jacuzzi, Snider went on, Bogdanovich
had paid this girl, Lee, five grand to fuck him and his friend Bob. That was
the kind of guy she was in love with, he said. But maybe she hadn’t minded
that night with Hefner in the Jacuzzi. Maybe that was the kind of stuff she
really liked. Dorothy got angry. She had only done the Playboy stuff for
Snider in the first place! Hadn’t he told her that she might have to sleep
with Hefner? He hadn’t even cared. He had been using her from the
beginning. Snider began to scream at her and Cuslvner’s dog began to bark.
Soon after, Dr. Cushner had come in on them, and they quieted down. He
had stopped by to get his German shepherd who was locked up outside,
barking and crying because of the shouting. The neighbors could hear
nothing beyond the constant roar of the freeway. After the doctor went
upstairs, there was no further shouting.

The interruption turned Snider around. He realized his ace had been played
and she hadn’t batted an eyelash. Brainwashed, she definitely had been
brainwashed. He realized that he had lost Dorothy, and he began to cry. He
sang her a song and became more depressed. Did she really mean it when
she told him she wanted to be friends even though she was in love with
someone else? Dorothy seemed to be sincere as she spoke, and he cried
even harder. What a fool he had been!

Eventually Dorothy was able to cheer him up, and by the time Patti
Laurman arrived, the two of them seemed quite friendly. Was she staying?
Patti asked since both of them were smiling when she walked in. No, damn
it, Paul said lightly, she’s got to leave. Dorothy looked over a closetful of
her remaining clothes, took one or two items, and told Patti she could have
everything else. Dorothy and Paul seemed to have reached an
understanding. Patti left them alone again.

The phone rang. It was Linda MacEwen, Snider said, and he tried not to
sound too hostile. D.R. took the call and said she would be leaving soon for
their meeting at the apartment. It was the story Linda and I had cooked up
as an excuse for her to call. I had been worried and asked Linda to see if
everything was OK. Of course Dorothy couldn’t talk, Linda would tell me,
but her voice sounded all right. She would be coming back shortly. Dorothy
left Clarkson soon after the call. Everything would be OK, she told Paul.
She would call him on Sunday just to see how he was.

Dorothy felt sorry for Paul, she told me. He had cried, and at one point he
tried to kiss her and take her in his arms. His touch had made her skin
crawl. His eyes looked so sad, Dorothy said, making no mention of the
seedy accusations. Two years later, John Riley would tell me that during the
summer of 1980, Snider had learned his version of the Lee/Bob story from
Lee’s former husband and that the two men had cursed me and agreed that I
deserved to be punished severely, maybe even shot. Certainly Snider would
have used the story on D.R. as an example of my true nature. But Dorothy
said only that Snider had delivered a diatribe against me, quoting the usual
inaccurate Cybill Shepherd stories. If she had brought up the Lee/Bob
incident, I would have told her its true origin: how Bob had lured me into a
compromising position with Lee at the mansion’s Jacuzzi. Six months
afterward, I had tried to help Lee, who had had a haunted childhood
compounded by humiliating experiences in the men’s magazine business.
She stayed at my house a few days. I had then given her a cashmere sweater
and five thousand dollars to rent an apartment and have her car fixed.
Though D.R. said nothing of this story, it must have given her pause. Could
she trust me fully?

Late that afternoon, Dorothy and my sister Anna met for the first and only
time. Anna had come over to bring me a belated birthday present—a bow
and arrow. The gift puzzled me, but she gave me no reason for selecting it,
and so I was not alarmed.

That same evening, while D.R. and the kids and I made dinner in the
kitchen, Prince the dog suddenly returned. We couldn’t figure out how he
had gotten in, since the front door was closed. He again went immediately
over to Dorothy, barking and yelping, and seemed even more insistent than
ever on telling her something. We thought perhaps he was simply overjoyed
to see her, but Prince acted as though he had run away only to be with
Dorothy. His paws were on her shoulders and he was licking her face, his
tail wagging furiously.

Saturday didn’t go well for Snider. He phoned the mansion to get his name
and Patti’s cleared for the next night, and was told he was barred. He was
livid; it was the worst day of his life. He had lost his wife and his second
father. Well, he would show them! He would show all of them! They would
be very sorry for excluding him from their happy threesome, the starmakers
and their star. The world had not heard the last of Paul Leslie Snider!

Soon after, his actor-friend Chip came by and took back the gun he had lent
Snider. He was leaving town and needed to have it with him. Coming from
the house, with the giant curve of the freeway behind, Snider pointed the
.38 up toward the sky and fired. Goldstein was there and noticed how the
sound was washed out by the noise of the freeway, but Cushner’s dog
started to bark. Chip saw that his gun had been fired before, but didn’t
mention it. They all shook hands and Chip drove off feeling relieved. He
had never felt quite right at the idea of Paul having his gun.

Snider then put the heat on Goldstein to help him get a weapon, 'for
protection,' Goldstein later would recount: Snider said that maybe Hefner or
Bogdanovich was going to try to have him deported or killed. They were
shutting him out of everything— maybe they would try to finish him off for
good.

Goldstein went with Snider to a gun shop. Snider wanted a small machine
gun, and the shop had just what he wanted. Goldstein refused to buy it in
his name. Snider had the money to pay, but was not a U.S. citizen and his
visa had expired. He could probably pick up something through the
personal ads in the Recycler, a weekly paper that featured personal ads of
all sorts, including weapons. Owner sales required no registrations or
paperwork.

Before long, Snider had found the item that appealed to him. It was an
eight-shot shotgun. He called the owner, a man named Tuck, who agreed to
come over and show him the weapon the next morning. In the meantime,
Snider didn’t need the Playboy mansion. He would have his own goddamn
parties. He got Lynn, his main girlfriend at the time, and Patti together and
invited everybody they could think of to a barbecue. He didn’t want anyone
to think he was depressed. And he would tell Dorothy what he was going to
do when she called tomorrow. He would scare the bitch to death.
Dorothy’s sister, Louise, had arrived from Vancouver that morning at ten,
and Dorothy met her at the airport gate. On the way home from the airport,
Dorothy told Louise that they wouldn’t be staying at Paul’s anymore.
Dorothy was getting an apartment with Linda, Peter’s secretary, she said,
but it wasn’t quite ready yet, so they would be staying at Peter’s house in
the meantime. She had not yet told Louise that we were lovers. Louise was
a sweet, shy girl with a wild sense of humor when her introspective nature
let it out. She had a critical, watchful eye, and looked out for her big sister’s
welfare.

When they got to the house, and after everyone had been introduced, the
two sisters called to tell their mother that Louise had arrived safely. D.R.
had warned her not to say where they were staying, not to mention Peter’s
place at all, or to give out any numbers. She didn’t want to worry their
mother. Nelly was happy speaking to her daughters together, and she was
especially relieved to hear Dorothy’s voice. She had been terribly worried
about her. Had Dorothy received her letter? Nelly had sent a letter to New
York early in July. No, Dorothy said, it must have missed her, but the hotel
would forward it. She had left her business manager’s address. Nelly asked
about Paul, and Dorothy said everything was all right, she had seen him
yesterday and they had agreed to be friends. 'But he was very sad, Mum,'
Dorothy said. 'He cried.' Nelly told her not to see Paul again. She knew
what men were like. Dorothy should try to get out of the city for six to eight
months, to let things cool down.

Playboy wanted to send her to Chile, Dorothy said, but there was 'unrest'
there. Nelly told her to go anyway. It would be safer than being anywhere
near Paul. She would get her new husband to call Immigration again about
that rat Snider, get him out of the United States and away from Dorothy.
When Louise was finished, Dorothy grabbed the phone to say good-bye
again. It would be the last time that Nelly would hear the voice of her first
child. Good-bye again, Mum, she had said, don’t worry, see you soon.

Later, Louise asked which house was better, this one or Hefner’s? 'This
one,' D.R. said. 'This one is much better.'

At 9:00 A.M. on Sunday, August 10, Mr. Tuck, the owner of the shotgun
that would be used to kill Dorothy Stratten, arrived at the Clarkson house to
show the weapon to Paul Snider. Dr. Cushner answered the door and
checked, but Snider was out. Tuck was annoyed. He had driven all the way
from the San Fernando Valley because Snider had said he would be there in
the morning. It was about a shotgun he had for sale.

Less than half of the people who had been invited to the barbecue at
Clarkson that afternoon showed up. To maintain his bravado, Snider had
cocaine in the bathroom. Dorothy had said she would call him, but as the
hours went by and she didn’t call, he believed her less, taking more coke to
keep his cool. Every hour increased the rage inside him; every minute
clicked off another imagined lie, one more moment of deceit. They were all
against him. At one point he told a friend: 'Maybe this deal has just got too
big—maybe I just ought to go back to Vancouver for a while.' No, he
mustn’t give up, he must fight for his rights.

There had been barely a moment’s peace for Dorothy from the time she had
awakened. When the Playboy limousine arrived at Spalding, the driver
loaded the sisters’ bags in the trunk, they piled into the back, and started off
on the three-hour drive to the Mojave Desert.

Paul Snider had ended the night in a fury because Dorothy had not called
him as promised. But he would show her. He would have his gun tomorrow.

At the mansion, the staff had been making jokes about the fact that the
Playmate of the Year hadn’t been there in nearly three months. Otherwise, it
had been just the end of another typical weekend for Hefner, nothing very
unusual. But it would be Dorothy Stratten’s last weekend alive.

Her final Monday, August 11, began very early in the desert. They were
shooting by six; the heat meant they’d have to quit by eleven. The shoot
would start again at 3:00 and then continue until the sunlight was gone. The
result would be a print advertisement for an eyeglass-frame company
owned by Playboy. No naked pictures were involved. The money was the
usual five hundred dollars a day, no matter how many hours. For a normal
eight-hour day, a top model of the time, such as Patti or Shawn Casey,
would have made close to four times that amount, and neither of them was
starred in two forthcoming features, nor had the media attention Dorothy
had generated in less than a year. But Playboy Models kept it all in the
family. Why pay Dorothy more just because she had earned it?

The first thing Paul Snider did that morning was to call Mr. Tuck about the
shotgun. He would drive out to the Valley in the late afternoon and they
could exchange cash for weapon. Tuck filled out a purchase-order, dating it
8/11/80.

When they broke from shooting, Dorothy and Louise went swimming in the
small pool at the motel and the Playboy crew joined them. Everyone must
have noticed how happy Dorothy seemed, despite lack of sleep and five
hours of hard work in the sweltering heat. She and her kid sister were like
two seals. Three times in less than a month Dorothy had been deliriously
happy. Louise could never remember seeing Dorothy laugh the way she did
that day.

She had reason to laugh: Peter loved her, Hefner wasn’t going to hold it
against her, and Paul understood. In a year she would be free of Playboy
forever, and maybe Paul and Patti would get married and they would be
happy. Life and love were possible, after all. Dorothy could have children
and be happy with the father. She had always wanted a big family, and
already there were two prospective stepchildren she loved. The money she
would make in movies would give her mother freedom too, a freedom Nelly
had never known. She was sure that Nelly and Peter would get along, and
Peter and John. Finally they could both have their families in order.

But what would become of this happiness? Would the love and fulfillment
of New York, London, Bel Air, and now Mojave bring something equally
terrible? If her joy was this great, would the punishment be, as well?

Dorothy excused herself to place a long-distance call to Clarkson Street in

Los Angeles. She had promised to phone yesterday. When Snider answered,
the first thing Dorothy said was how sorry she was not to have called; she
had had to go to Mojave for Playboy . . . But Snider cut her off with a storm
of abuse on a level so fierce it made her tremble. It is safe to assume, based
on what I now know about Snider’s previous behavior, that he used the
harshest words he could conceive of to frighten Dorothy into coming back
to see him again. Why would she have been so upset unless he had called
her every name imaginable, and told of the night he had waited with the .38,
of the gun he had ordered to blow her brains out? And Hefner’s, and
Bogdanovich’s, and his two children’s, and her sister’s, and then he was
going to blow out his own brains. She was a lying, scheming, conniving
cunt and he was going to blow everybody off the face of the earth. Dorothy
began to cry. She begged him to calm down and explain what had made him
so angry. Surely it could not be only because she had been twelve hours late
in calling. And Snider started to scream again, so viciously she had to hold
the phone away from her ear: She could stop playing dumb! He knew what
she was doing! He was on to her! She was a lying, scheming bitch!

Out by the pool, Louise was becoming concerned: Why had Dorothy gone
away so suddenly? And been away so long? Maybe she was sick in the
bathroom. Louise walked to their room. As she raised her hand to the
doorknob, she could hear Dorothy’s voice. It sounded as though she were
crying. Her tone was pleading. Louise moved close to the door. The sun
was hot and the asphalt burned her bare feet. Now she could understand the
words quite clearly: 'Please, please, Paul!' Dorothy cried: 'Don’t be like
that! Don’t do this to me!'

Louise felt both afraid for Dorothy and guilty for eavesdropping, though
she hadn’t really been able to help it. Anybody walking by would have
heard through the thin walls (and several among the Playboy crew did). She
put her hand on the knob but didn’t turn it. Dorothy’s voice rose again, half
sobbing, half angry: 'I will come to see you! But please! Please don’t say
those things!' Louise tried to turn the knob but it was locked, which
somehow frightened her more. She called out Dorothy’s name and knocked
on the door. There was quiet for a moment, and then she heard, 'Just a
second,' and when the door opened, she could tell Dorothy had been crying.
Her eyes were bloodshot. Louise felt tears come to her own eyes and she
asked what the matter was, but Dorothy said it was nothing. She returned to
the floor between the two beds, where she had been sitting with the phone.
She told Snider her sister was waiting and she would have to go now, but
Louise could hear the angry sound of Paul’s voice, though the words were
not clear and she tried not to listen. Dorothy attempted to cut the
conversation short. She would be back in a few days and she would
definitely come to see him, she promised, but only if he did not talk that
way anymore. She would call him soon from L.A.

Louise had been with her sister through marital arguments before, and
Dorothy always had been able to put away the miseries afterward, but this
time was different. D.R. threw some water on her face, put on her new
sunglasses again, and took Louise back to the pool. Everyone noticed how
different her mood was. A couple of guests had overheard some of the
conversation, and Dorothy volunteered to several of the crew that she had
had a difficult phone call. She would tell me over the phone that night that
she had had 'a very unpleasant conversation with Paul.'

The obviously potent effect Snider’s anger had on Dorothy only encouraged
him further. Now she was begging him; wait till she saw his gun! With
Patti, he drove out to Richard Brander’s acting studio in the Valley, ranting
about Hefner and Bogdanovich and Dorothy, his duplicitous wife. But he
would show them. The drugs he took only increased the fever pitch. On the
way out to Tuck’s however, Snider got lost, which made him angrier and
more lost. Eventually he gave up and furiously drove back to Clarkson.
Why should he have to drive around anyway? Let the shotgun be brought to
him. He wouldn’t be needing it until later in the week—maybe not until
Thursday. Let Tuck meet him someplace tomorrow or the day after; that
would be soon enough. Snider and Tuck made an appointment at a
construction site for Wednesday afternoon, August 13.

On Monday afternoon, I left another message at the mansion. Would it be

OK if I dropped by to see Hefner on Tuesday afternoon?

Louise had a bad dream that night, and then woke up to find she hadn’t
been dreaming: Dorothy was in the next bed crying quietly into her pillow.
Sad and frightened at once, Louise said: 'Dorothy?' The crying stopped
immediately and there was silence. Louise said her sister’s name again but
received no response. Eventually Louise decided it must have been a dream
after all, and soon fell asleep again.

By the time I got up on Tuesday, August 12, D.R. and Louise were already
off in the desert shooting. I was anxiously looking forward to seeing
Dorothy, and had a surprise for her: We were preparing another movie to
shoot very soon, and she had the leading female role.

That afternoon, driving out of the parking lot of the Cafe Rodeo in Beverly
Hills, Patrick Curtis stopped at the curb and pointed out to his passengers
the young man on roller skates coming toward them. It was Paul Snider,
and quite obviously he was zonked out on something: coke, Quaaludes—
probably Quaaludes, Curtis guessed. (Journalists Riley and Bernstein would
later report that at Dorothy’s wedding reception, Dr. Cushner had handed
out Quaaludes, which he kept in the glove compartment of his Rolls-
Royce.) Snider skated up to the car but didn’t seem to recognize Patrick. He
put his hands on the car for a moment, barely taking in Curtis, his friend
Richard Johnson in the passenger seat, or the two young women in the
back. After a moment, Snider skated around the car and continued on his
way up toward Santa Monica Boulevard.

Curtis would remember thinking: What a coincidence. The last time he had
taken Dorothy to lunch, back in May, they had been to the Cafe Rodeo, and
now, coming out of the same place, he had nearly driven into her husband.
Did it mean something? Snider certainly looked out of it. Maybe Curtis had
better call Dorothy tomorrow to see how she was. But Patrick would never
again see or speak with either of the two people about whom he had been
troubled on that warm Tuesday afternoon.

Later the same day, I drove over to the mansion for the last time. I had no
idea as I drove east on Sunset to Charing Cross Road that almost exactly
two years before, the man I was going to visit had traumatized the woman I
loved.

By the end of that Tuesday meeting, I realized things were not right
between Hefner and me. There was a chill and stiffness in his manner I had
not experienced before. I had told him at length about the glories of his
Playmate of the Year—how extraordinary she was in the picture, how
conscientious and cooperative she had been. How much more Hefner
thought I knew! And the more I talked, the more irritated he appeared. The
room turned frosty as I went on to explain how difficult the professional
and personal circumstances on the movie had been: the New York streets,
the producers, the two other women on the picture with whom I had once
been involved, and how well Dorothy had handled everything.

The mentions of Patti Hansen and Colleen Camp might have been the coup
de grace. Colleen had given Playboy a hard time about naked pictures; and
hadn’t Hefner called me in New York to ask if Patti would pose nude for
Playboy? When I had asked her, she replied: 'Only if the rest of the cast
does it with me.' Hadn’t I repeated those words with a laugh to Hefner less
than two months before? Heftier had covered his irritation at the time by
offering a big layout on the movie if I could indeed arrange a shot of all the
girls nude. While I had thought he was kidding, he had probably thought
what the hell was I laughing at? Was I laughing at Hefner?

Now, in his living room on August 12, it seemed I was secretly laughing at
him again as I extolled my fond association with women who had rejected
him. Not realizing how guilelessly I spoke, he became more affronted when
I asked if he would like to come up the block to my place in a couple of
weeks and see a rough cut of the picture D.R. and I had made. To his way of
thinking, it seemed a gross insult even to suggest he leave the 'Vatican West'
to see his very own Playmate of the Year, especially this one. Hefner stood
up abruptly. 'I doubt I’ll have the time right now,' he said with an air of
dismissal.

Did I care to take a look at the remodeling work Hefner had had done to the
private rooms upstairs? He made the invitation as though it were merely a
formality; he didn’t really expect me to accept, but his mood seemed to
brighten after I agreed. I was surprised at what a difference this appeared to
make to Hefner. It was a privileged tour of his Wonderland Paradise—not to
be taken lightly.

He showed off the brass pulls that had been specially made for his built-in
clothing drawers: small reclining nude nymphs for him to admire as he
dressed himself for the day or evening revels. I smiled as much as possible
in admiration. But Hefner wasn’t kidding. There were brass naked women
on every one of the many drawers, and three desk areas to work on his
scrapbook. He wasn’t kidding about his scrapbook either: He
conscientiously updated it. I had never seen it, but it had to be many tomes
by now. Evidently every little thing about Hefner or Playboy from the very
beginning was in there, nearly thirty years—a record reportedly more
thorough than a Pharaoh’s.

The upstairs looked quite a bit fancier than it had the one other time I had
been there, more than four years earlier, just after Playboy’s whatever-feels-
good philosophy had curdled Hefner’s relationship with Barbi Benton. The
notorious Hefner bed was as large as ever, low to the ground, with two giant
television screens at the foot, and numerous shelves stocked with video
cassettes built into the surrounding walls.

Although Hefner still had a certain boyish charm, he was beginning to look
more sinister that afternoon than I had noticed before. I knew what this
second tour of the inner sanctum meant: Dorothy and I were welcome there
anytime. Didn’t the opulence of its appointments tempt me for a moment?
Hefner began to sense my discomfort, though I tried to be enthusiastic
about all his new belongings. The tour had begun with an almost deliberate
slowness, but I felt Hefner could see past my feigned expressions of
admiration, especially since he now considered me a possible enemy. The
speed of the tour accelerated as e seemed to read my attitude.

Hefner brought up Dorothy’s husband. He had sent word that Snider wasn’t
to be admitted without Dorothy, so she and I could feel free to come over
there anytime we liked, separately or together. Of course we would, I said,
but, as I had told him over the phone, we didn’t want to be seen together in
public. This wasn’t public, Hefner said, this was private. I laughed and said
that if we were seen here together, it would be all over town the next day.
That was exactly what we wanted to avoid. I told him the truth: Dorothy
had a lot of traveling to do; in fact, she was coming back in just a few hours
and, with my daughters and her sister staying with us, the two of us had
little free time.

Hefner’s attitude became one of brisk formality, and we were soon

downstairs at the main entrance. I tried to keep the spirit friendly and not
appear anxious to leave, but Hefner by now had turned even chillier than he
had been earlier. He didn’t bother to mince words: He didn’t have any more
time to chat, he said, and put his hand out. We shook and I tried to pretend
there was nothing wrong. Perhaps I was mistaken, I thought as I drove
away; perhaps he was simply busy.
The more he thought about it, the more Hefner’s sense of indignation must
have become aroused. Hadn’t he tolerated Stratten’s husband for two years
and given her the top prize in his kingdom? Hadn’t she resisted him and his
philosophy, and turned her new boyfriend against Playboy as well? Hadn’t
Dorothy betrayed him, just as his wife had done thirty years before?
Perhaps he smiled inwardly at the problems Snider was going to give us:
Bogdanovich would now have to handle the phone calls and threats and
attempted deals. It was a fair assumption that there would be plenty of other
chances at Dorothy Stratten.

D.R. spent most of the last Tuesday of her life having her picture taken in
various eyeglass frames and costumes in the midst of the Mojave. There
were cowboy clothes and guns, and a small airplane. Louise hung around
and watched. Back at the hotel during the break, they swam in the pool for a
while; but it wasn’t the same as yesterday, Louise thought. Dorothy looked
unhappy all day, and there didn’t seem to be anything to bring her out of it.
She laughed once or twice, but Louise could tell her heart wasn’t in it,
though she had been sweet to her kid sister, anxious that the time shouldn’t
be unpleasant for her. Yet Louise had seen Dorothy’s red eyes that morning,
the skin around them puffy; they remained very sad for the rest of the day.

Riding back to Los Angeles in the limousine that night, D.R. kept the inside
light on and looked through a stack of fan mail that a Playboy associate had
given her. She read the letters of admiration, requests for autographed
photos from her Playboy fans, and then she tore them up. One fan, Dorothy
showed Louise, had written three different letters; she destroyed all of them.
A few times she made a noise that sounded like a cross between a grunt and
a laugh, but it was so cold that Louise wasn’t prompted to ask if something
was funny. Her behavior frightened Louise. She had never seen Dorothy
like that.

The sisters didn’t arrive at Copa de Oro until after nine. I could see that
D.R. was tired, but at first I didn’t notice anything else was wrong; I was
too happy to see her. Later, I perceived a slight distance from me and
couldn’t figure it out. Perhaps she was annoyed because I had been short on
the phone the previous night. I tried to compensate by being oversolicitous.
At one point Dorothy was starting up the staircase to her room as I was
starting down to deal with the kids; I stopped halfway to tell her I had been
over to Hefner’s. She slowed her steps but continued upward and passed me
just as I said Hefner told me he had barred Paul from the mansion unless he
was accompanied by her. Dorothy hesitated momentarily, did not change
expression, and continued slowly up the stairs. I stood watching her, feeling
slightly relieved that the news hadn’t appeared to upset her. Certainly no
one could better gauge her husband’s reactions than Dorothy, and she
appeared unconcerned as she reached the top of the tile staircase. I told her
that Hefner wanted us to come over there together, but that I had put him
off. Without a word, Dorothy continued on through the door into her room,
so that I had to raise my voice slightly to say that I still did not want to go
there—did she? D.R. called back: 'No, I don’t.'

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 position: 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 continued 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.
Louise couldn’t decide whether she wanted to go along with Dorothy to her
appointments or stay with Antonia and Alexandra. Dorothy had told her
sister that she was going to see her business manager, and then to see Paul,
and then to a Playboy sitting, but Louise wasn’t to tell anyone about the
meeting with Paul—especially not Peter, she emphasized, and Louise
nodded.

Dorothy knew Louise had been bored at yesterday’s meetings, so the

business manager wouldn’t sound very interesting, nor would the Playboy
visit. And since Louise had never liked Paul, a rendezvous with him would
hold little hope of fun. D.R. knew her sister too well to forbid her to go to
Paul’s— Louise was bound to be worried or suspicious: Why shouldn’t she
go? Better simply to paint a bleak and boring picture of the prospects of
accompanying Dorothy, and highlight some of the virtues of staying here.
Dorothy said she would be back before 2:30; Louise asked her to promise to
return by then, and Dorothy promised. Louise said she would stay home.

In Vancouver that morning, Nelly awakened with a premonition about

Dorothy. She felt more than a little frustrated at her inability to reach either
of her daughters in Los Angeles. Her new husband didn’t seem very
interested in her worries. When the phone rang and it was Louise, Nelly
was relieved. Where was Dorothy? She was out swimming, Louise said.
Her mother asked for the number. Louise lied and said it wasn’t written on
the phone, and when her mother pressed her to find someone who knew it,
Louise said there was no one else around. Dorothy had instructed her not to
give out the number, or to mention Peter. They were staying at a friend’s
until Dorothy’s new apartment was ready. Nelly told Louise to ask Dorothy
please to call her back as soon as she could, and Louise said she would.
When she hung up, Nelly felt anxious again. She stayed home a good part
of the day waiting for Dorothy’s call. Louise reported the conversation to
Dorothy, who said she would call back that afternoon, as soon as she
returned.

Dorothy hoped that by the time she got back, her mind and heart would be a
good deal lighter because she would have finished dealing with Paul. Or she
would not come back. That thought echoed in her mind every so often, and
she felt her knees weaken and her heart tighten. She would talk to herself
then, to get back her courage, tell herself to be brave and remember the
hardships and troubles with men that her mother had survived, and that her
maternal grandmother had survived. She would make it too. Yet, as she
looked at the children and Peter, she realized she might never see any of
them again. She had to fight back the tears, fight back even the thought of
tears—because if she cried to Peter now, he could make her reveal
everything. By the time she said good-bye to him in the kitchen, she had
steeled herself against her worst fears. She would simply close off her eyes
and mask her feelings. Wasn’t that a practice at which she had come to
excel?

When Dorothy came in to say good-bye that morning, I had just fixed
myself cottage cheese with yogurt. We spoke for a moment or two, and
D.R. told me quite coolly not to talk with my mouth full; it wasn’t very
attractive. She was right, of course, but the force with which she spoke and
the darkness in her eyes shocked me. She was sitting on the high stool
where seven months earlier I had first kissed her. I reacted as though she
had slapped my face: 'OK,' I said and turned away to get a napkin. I had
been planning things to do with the kids when she came back in the
afternoon, and walked over to her as she stood to go, held her arms, and
said everything would be all right. I was sorry to have been grumpy. I
understood it was difficult for both of us, but when she returned in the
afternoon, we could sit down and talk out the problem, anything that was
bothering her. I loved her, I said. Everything really would be all right.

The expression on Dorothy’s face didn’t change, however, nor did her eyes
brighten even slightly. Her teeth seemed to be clenched. This was so
uncharacteristic of her that it baffled and frightened me.

I moved closer, still holding her arms, and tried to look deeply into her
eyes. 'Baby,' I said, 'what’s the matter?' Dorothy just shook her head and
said nothing was the matter, she would talk to me later. The severity of her
manner, together with the deep tan she had acquired, made her look much
older than her twenty-and-a-half years. There was a strain in her face. I
shrugged slightly and said OK, and then for a third time I said that
everything would be all right—I emphasized each word and Dorothy
nodded again. We kissed one more time briefly, and she turned and walked
quickly out of the kitchen toward the front door. I never again saw Dorothy
alive.

She left the kitchen fighting not to show emotion and knew she still had to
say good-bye to the kids. They were playing by the fountain with Blaine
and his girlfriend, and Dorothy threw a quick kiss and said she would see
everybody soon. Louise, however, followed her to the door and asked again
what time she would be back, and made Dorothy promise once more that
she would not be home later than 2:30. They hugged each other tightly
Louise wondered why Dorothy had almost pushed her from their embrace.
As D.R. stopped her Cougar by the gate to check traffic before turning left
toward Sunset, Louise noticed that her sister was crying. It was the last
view Louise had of Dorothy alive.

Linda was late for work that morning. She had stopped by at Spalding first
and picked up the two urgent messages for Dorothy from Playboy. By the
time she arrived at my house, Dorothy had been gone less than fifteen
minutes. Linda was told that D.R. had several appointments and was
expected back around 2:30. Linda put the two notes on her desk along with
a couple of other things for Dorothy.

In business manager Bob Houston’s office, the phone rang while Dorothy
was there: It was Snider. Houston took the call in the next room. Yes,
Dorothy was there with him now. Snider asked if she had told Houston
about the house yet. What house? Houston asked, and would remember
thinking how especially cheerful Snider sounded. It smelled phony to
Houston. Eventually Snider asked to speak to Dorothy. Houston brought her
to the phone and went back to his office. The call lasted barely three
minutes, and when she returned, Houston told her that she didn’t have to
put up with those calls and that she most certainly didn’t need to go down
and see him. No, it was all right, Dorothy said, they had an understanding
now. He had been upset. Houston shook his head. All Snider wanted was
money and the green work card, Bob said. Dorothy nodded. Houston asked
if there was something about a new house, and D.R. said she didn’t know of
one.

Houston told her again that he really didn’t think she had to see Paul. Bob
Houston believed that Dorothy owed Snider exactly zero, since every idea
he had ever heard Snider express had been terrible. When he first met both
of them nine months ago, Houston had known the marriage was crumbling.
Everybody did—including Paul. Houston also knew Dorothy was going
with Bogdanovich, though she never mentioned it. He and the rest of the
firm had known since late spring. All the more reason why, Bob felt,
Dorothy’s husband was now solely a business and legal problem, and
certainly should not concern her emotionally. It was costing her enough
financially. Smiling sadly, Dorothy kissed Bob on the cheek when she left.

All day, whenever he thought of Dorothy, Houston felt strange. He did not
realize he would be the last friend to warn her about Paul Snider. When she
left Houston’s office that morning, Dorothy had less than ninety minutes to
live, less time than the length of an average movie.

At nearly the same moment, Playboy put out another urgent call for
Dorothy Stratten. The two messages at Spalding had been picked up, but
Dorothy still had not returned the call to the head of Playboy’s model
agency. Linda was out of the office when Playboy phoned, and our new
accountant, who knew nothing of the politics involved, answered the phone.
When the Playboy secretary asked for Dorothy Stratten, the young
accountant told the truth: Dorothy had gone out about an hour and a half
ago and wasn’t expected back until midafternoon. Did anyone know where
Dorothy was at the moment? No. Did Playboy care to leave a specific
message? Yes. Please ask Dorothy to call Valerie Cragin at Playboy Models
as soon as possible—it was extremely important— mark it urgent. When
Linda was told of the call, she became uneasy: Playboy calling here for
Dorothy? She knew that both D.R. and I were officially denying our
relationship, as well as Dorothy’s living at my house. What could be so
important that it would make Playboy obviously blow our cover? Late that
afternoon, on the call sheet Linda left for D.R., she made special note of the
Playboy messages and the call. She put quote marks around the word:
'Urgent.'

By the time Playboy had finally phoned Copa de Oro, Dorothy was already
on her way to Clarkson.

She stopped at her bank on the way and cashed a check for one thousand
dollars. Maybe Paul would be happy with not only the gesture but the cash,
since he was usually broke.

At Clarkson, Snider was waiting impatiently for Dorothy’s arrival. She had
said 11:30 but by 11:45 she still wasn’t there. Patti and Snider’s main
girlfriend, Lynn, had cleaned up the place in the morning, vacuumed and
tidied up in readiness for the grand confrontation Snider had been planning.
Dr. Cushner had gone to his office at the usual time, leaving his dog penned
in the back. At around 11:00, Patti and Lynn had gone out shopping. Snider
said that if he didn’t meet them downtown by 2:30, they should call—he
would certainly be finished by then.

Goldstein might have been following Dorothy since she had left Copa de
Oro, but he would later admit only to having seen her park her car and walk
into the house. She wore slacks and shirt and flats and carried a large
zippered purse. Once she was inside, Goldstein claimed to have driven off
and called the house at 12:30, at which time Snider told him breathlessly
that everything was going well. Goldstein then drove by at 2:00 and, seeing
the cars still there, drove off again and didn’t return until much later.

At the Playboy studio, Mario Casilli and the staff were waiting impatiently
for Dorothy’s arrival. She was already a half hour overdue and had never
been late for a session before. Well, Mario said, maybe Dorothy had finally
gone Hollywood.

***

Dorothy would certainly have been frightened walking up to the house on

Clarkson, the last place in the world she could have wanted to be. But there
was nothing to be done now. Though her heart would have been beating
hard, she would have taken a deep breath, and gone up to the bell and rung
it. Whatever would happen, she could handle it—but she wasn’t going to
give in to his bullying and his tantrums. She had a right to her own life.
They could be friends, and he could have half her money, and she would
help get him a green card, and do whatever she could about Playboy. But
she wasn’t about to ask Hefner for a favor, and Paul knew why only too
well. Didn’t her presence, after all his threats, show him how much she
cared for him? Why couldn’t he trust her? They didn’t have to sleep with
each other to be friends.
What exactly happened between the time Dorothy Stratten entered the
house at noon on August 14 and the time, hours later, when she and Paul
Snider were found, both naked, both of their faces blasted by a shotgun?
The cause and times of their deaths would turn out to be among the few
facts that could be definitely established: Dorothy was dead by 1:00 p.m.,
and her killer was dead by 2:00.

What occurred in that last hour of Dorothy’s life— and the last two hours of
Snider’s? There was enough evidence to prove without doubt that Snider
used the bondage machine to strap down his estranged wife and rape her,
and that he also sodomized her so forcibly and with such brutality that it
literally tore her body apart. The pain that the sodomy caused her would
have been the most excruciating torture. After shooting away the left side of
her face, Snider apparently moved the body a number of times, holding her
head up by the hair. He had rear-entry intercourse to orgasm with the corpse
before scrawling a terse note that blamed Mike Kelly and Lynn for not
keeping a better eye on him. Then he turned the shotgun on himself and
blew his face away.

Outside, the only sound the neighbors recalled was the doctor’s German
shepherd. He barked and howled and whined throughout the afternoon.
 VI - Tower Struck by Lightning
As you lie sleeping
So innocent and content,
The world around you doesn’t stop,
But keeps turning, and time doesn’t wait,
And has no mercy . . .
And as you lie sleeping,
Another, at the same moment, is crying,
And still another is laughing:
Time has no pattern.
Some are worried and try
To save time for a later date,
But then realize time cannot be saved,
And all the while they are living
They are also dying . . .
—Dorothy Stratten
Vancouver, 1977

Louise was the first to tell us Dorothy had gone over to see Paul that
morning. She let it slip around six in the evening. We were sitting in the
kitchen and she must have read the worry in my eyes. She could not hold it
back any longer. I was trying to be casual, but when I heard the words, an
icy chill went through me.

'She said she was going over to Paul’s, but I wasn’t supposed to tell
anyone.' And then Louise was afraid her sister would be angry with her, she
said, for telling. She had been especially insistent that Louise not say
anything to me.

The first thing I thought was that I had lost her to Paul. The second thought
was that the first thought was ridiculous. Dorothy may have been irritated
with me this morning, but there was too much between us for her to believe
I had changed my mind. I had once or twice been slightly apprehensive that
she might go to Snider out of compassion. She had a self-sacrificing nature.
But in recent months she had certainly seen what kind of man he was.
I didn’t want Louise to worry. Dorothy hadn’t told her yet that she and I
were lovers. I asked Louise to tell me what D.R. had said exactly, and she
repeated go over and see Paul for a while,' but would return by 2:00 in the
afternoon, 2:30 at the latest. 'Don’t say anything about the meeting with
Paul,' especially, she said it a couple of times, to Peter.

That whole day I had a nagging, sickly feeling. The hours inched past, one
second at a time, no call, no call, no call. Every minute the thought was
there: Where was Dorothy? Was she all right? Was she unhappy? Why
didn’t she call? There were phones everywhere—it wasn’t like D.R. not to
call. Every minute the only thing I wanted in the world was for the phone to
ring and to hear Dorothy’s voice. I heard it several times, in the back of my
head: She was sorry, she had got stuck and couldn’t call—she’d be right
home.

At the pool table I worried out loud. Blaine Novak was playing a round of
eight ball with the girls. Our friendship had cooled since I had met Dorothy,
but both of us were on our best behavior, hoping to have a pleasant summer.
Novak was staying at the house with his new girlfriend, and his buddy
Doug Dilge had moved to Los Angeles with his wife and child. He was
usually at Copa de Oro too. It was before Louise had let her secret out that
Blaine looked up from a pool shot, grinning: 'What’s the matter,' he said,
'you worried you’re never gonna see her again?'

Antonia picked up quickly on his note, 'Yeah, Dad—she’s not dead. I

nodded quickly. I didn’t like her saying that, though I behaved as casually
as I could. By then, Dorothy had been dead for more than four hours.

Later, at the kitchen sink, I asked Dilge if he had any idea where Dorothy
might be. Doug had worked on the movie too, and although that morning he
had surprised Dorothy on the kitchen phone, he would not tell me about it
for another couple of hours. He figured she was talking to Snider. But, at
the sink, he leaned over and the only thing he said was: 'Any girl I ever
knew that didn’t show up when she said she would was out getting laid.'

I nodded vaguely and moved away. I had begun to think Dorothy had been
so upset by our minor argument in the morning that perhaps she had had an
accident in her car, or maybe she was driving around reconsidering her
decision to live with me.

When Louise first told me about Dorothy’s secret appointment, I asked

Linda to call Paul’s house, and if he answered, just politely give her name
and say she was looking for Dorothy.

There was no answer at Snider’s. I thought at first they were out driving
around, talking late at a restaurant—I had been through enough emotional
scenes to know they were sometimes difficult to cut short. But then Dorothy
had been to see him less than a week earlier—and she had told me about
that appointment long before she went. She had felt sorry for him. Maybe
that was it—she felt sorrier for him now. Was she leaving me? The question
was in Novak’s eye, and Dilge’s. Had she gone back? It didn’t make sense.

At around 7:00 in the evening, Novak offered to drive over to Snider’s

house with Dilge to check out the situation. No, I said, that might make it
more difficult for her at the moment. I saw the three girls to bed around
9:30. For the first time, my kids asked Louise to sleep with them in their
room, and Toni even volunteered to take the floor. Perhaps everyone
thought that if they behaved properly, Dorothy would be back by the time
they woke up. Louise said she was really angry at Dorothy. She had
promised to be home by 2:30 and she didn’t break her promises. She should
have called. I kissed each of them several times—it was a nightly ritual—
but I held on a little longer tonight.

Novak, Dilge, and I went to the other side of the house and watched
television, trying to pretend nothing was wrong. I kept telling myself we
would

hear from her any minute, but the phone didn’t ring. Sometime after 11:30,
it finally did. My heart jumped and I smirked, reaching for the receiver.
Novak nodded smugly, while Duge grinned and turned the TV down. But it
was a man’s voice on the phone— Hefner’s. I recognized it immediately.
When they heard he was calling, Novak and Dilge looked at each other.

I was still grinning. My tone was light when I asked how he was. His voice
stayed quiet: 'Haven’t you heard?'
'No—heard what?'

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 diagram 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.

The Village Voice piece by Teresa Carpenter, 'Death of a Playmate,' was

published in November 1980. It was later syndicated to newspapers all over
the world, and helped her win the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism. Although
Carpenter had to admit grudgingly that Hefner seemed, from her evidence,
to have behaved well personally toward Stratten, she concluded
nevertheless that his policies and philosophy had been directly responsible
for her torture and murder. At the close of the article, Carpenter printed the
press statement I had written, which Playboy would also feature toward the
end of its piece:

Dorothy Stratten was as gifted and intelligent an actress as she was

beautiful, and she was very beautiful indeed—in every way imaginable
— most particularly in her heart. She and I fell in love during our
picture, and had planned to be married as soon as her divorce was
final. The loss to her mother and father, her sister and brother, to my
children, to her friends and to me is larger than we can calculate. But
there is no life Dorothy’s touched that has not been changed for the
better through knowing her, however briefly. Dorothy looked at the
world with love, and believed that all people were good down deep.
She was mistaken, but it is among the most generous and noble errors
we can make.

The Voice article terrified Hefner. He phoned to ask if I had read it. I told
him I hadn’t. The story’s main point, he reported, was that I had been 'in too
much of a hurry,' a summation effectively calculated to sting me with his
own guilts. He asked for my cooperation on Playboy’s article once more. I
refused and we never spoke again.

In December, director Bob Fosse bought the movie rights to the Voice
article for $130,000, and wrote his own script. The Ladd Company would
produce for distribution by Warner Brothers. Fosse titled the picture after
the license plates Snider had specially ordered for the Mercedes that
Stratten bought for him: Star 80. When told by New West reporter John
Riley of the director’s plans, Hefner grinned and, alluding to Fosse’s
reputation as a director of musicals, said: 'Does that mean I get to dance?'

Riley and Bernstein’s article for New West, called 'The Girl Next Door Is
Dead,' was paid for, but never published. The authors were told that the
Voice had scooped them, even though their piece was more thorough and
more detailed, with far more damning documentation on Snider, and the
other principals in the drama. After the article was cancelled, negotiations
were concluded for Riley’s and Bernstein’s research to be sold to Playboy.
The promise of subcredit with Rhodes failed to materialize, and much of
their reporting was cut out. Many of the questions they brought up remain
unresolved.

The first Playboy article appeared in May 1981, printing without permission
several lengthy, if carefully edited, quotes from Stratten’s aborted memoir.
In its acknowledgments, the magazine incorrectly listed both the name and
date of the copyright. When the Stratten Estate threatened to sue for
copyright infringement, Playboy offered $15,000 for retroactive one-time-
only rights. Nelly agreed to the settlement. 'They killed my daughter,' she
said, 'what more can they do?'

The Playboy article carried family pictures, an in-depth interview with the
mother, and excerpts from Dorothy’s seemingly glowing memoir about the
Playboy way of life. Hefner, who was known to have personally supervised,
edited, and largely written the piece himself, was painted as a concerned
father figure, and the barring of Snider from the mansion was stated as
occurring months, not days, before the murder. Hefner made a point of
prominently quoting a New York gossip columnist’s remark about me, to
the effect that Snider had 'shot the wrong person.'

In November 1981, MGM-TV’s Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy

Stratten Story aired over the NBC network with Jamie Lee Curtis as
Dorothy. At the family’s insistence, the names and relationships of her
mother and sister were altered. My name was also changed. The reviews
were negative, the ratings unremarkable—it finished twenty-seventh for the
week—but several million people were led to believe that what they were
seeing was the true story. The film would be rerun in the summer of 1983
and finish fourth for the week. A credit at the end of the show read:
'Technical Advisor: Marc Goldstein.'

Toward the end of 1981 and the beginning of 1982, They All Laughed
opened to mixed notices in the United States and Europe. I paid $2.8
million to buy back the picture from Time-Life and 20th Century-Fox and
to distribute it through my own company. John Ritter had suggested that we
dedicate the picture to Dorothy, and a simple card was inserted in each
print. If the comedy for us was no longer funny, at least this movie gave
people an opportunity to see how Dorothy looked and behaved, how she
had dressed and moved and spoken. Despite three top-billed stars—Audrey
Hepburn, Ben Gazzara, and John Ritter—most newspapers and magazines
around the world ran photos of Dorothy to illustrate their articles. In
Newsweek, Jack Kroll concluded his review:

. . . It’s heartbreaking to see the promise of Stratten . . . whose stunning

face ironically evokes Stendhal’s line: 'Beauty is . . . a promise of
happiness/’

In the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas wrote:

. . . Stratten was indeed something special—a funny, irresistible lady

who could convince us she hadn’t the slightest idea of how beautiful
she really was.

Stephen Schaefer, in Us magazine, seemed to sum up best most audiences’

reactions to Dorothy:

. . . Stratten’s tragic history makes her every line and appearance an

emotionally mixed occasion of helpless joy and sadness. . . .

Although the first Playboy Memorial Tribute ran no naked pictures of

Dorothy, subsequent coverage in other issues did. Playboy also sold picture
postcards of her naked. They prepared a video-cassette and cable-TV tribute
featuring never-before-seen naked footage.

By the spring of 1984, the financial matters of the Stratten Estate were still
not settled. Snider’s father, through Snider’s lawyer, Michael Kelly, insisted
on a fifty/fifty split, but settled for five thousand dollars and the 'Star 80'
Mercedes. Nelly asked for a stipulation that the former Mrs. Snider, Paul’s
mother, receive half: Nelly said she was the only member of the Snider
family who deserved anything. Almost four years after the murder, the
killer’s family had received the value of twenty thousand dollars, while the
victim’s family would likely receive, at most, five thousand.

In 1982, Novak and Dilge were associated, respectively, as writer-actor and

producer with an independently made little picture they told the press was
based on observations made during the Stratten-Bogdanovich affair.
Though the film actually had nothing at all to do with either of us, the initial
publicity helped the production to obtain distribution. A threatened lawsuit
from the Stratten Estate and me dissuaded them from further use of such
publicity.

To gain the support of Stratten’s family, in February 1982, Bob Fosse wrote
her mother a personal letter offering $25,000 of his own money to prove his
good intentions. Nelly asked her lawyers to decline and requested that her
name and relationship to Dorothy, and the names and relationships of her
two surviving children, be altered for the movie, as they had been for the
TV film. The names have been changed (though virtually unmentioned),
but the familial relationships remain the same. Eventually a financial
settlement was made. Although it credits Carpenter’s Voice article, the
Fosse script in no way expounds the same message, and therefore the
Playboy organization lent its full cooperation.

Mariel Hemingway plays Dorothy in the Fosse picture, despite the fact that
her young boy’s body is the opposite of Stratten’s lean voluptuousness. Her
face bears little resemblance either, but she is the correct age. Hemingway
had her underdeveloped breasts surgically augmented for the picture,
though this does not make her body look any more like Dorothy’s. Jamie
Lee Curtis’s TV-Stratten, though in no way resembling Dorothy,
occasionally comes near to capturing some of her strength and wit. She is
also allowed to yell at Snider and fight with him, while Hemingway’s
Dorothy simply goes along, cow-like and dim, manipulated first by Snider,
then by my surrogate—the quintessential^ dumb, even listless, blonde.

Choosing to tell his story from Snider’s point of view, Fosse cast a
charming, good-looking actor, Eric Roberts, in the role. (The TV film
presents him as a cold and unmitigated scoundrel.) Hugh Hefner is played
by Academy Award winner Cliff Robertson, well known as a loyal husband
and man of integrity. In 1977 Robertson had blown the whistle on the
Hollywood/Wall Street scandals involving embezzlements and forgeries at
Columbia Pictures. As a result of his honesty, movie politics being what
they are, he was blacklisted by producers, and Fosse’s casting gained
respect by breaking the blacklist. Robertson had previously played another
living figure, John F. Kennedy.
Conversely, the character of 'Dorothy’s Mother' is played by Carroll Baker,
an actress whose initial screen persona as a sexpot, in Baby Doll, was
further emphasized by the title of her autobiography, also Baby Doll, which
was published simultaneously with the release of Star 80. Mario Casilli, no
longer in the girly-mag business, offered 'in Dorothy’s memory' to assist in
getting the nude layouts to look right, and was shocked to find Fosse
insisting on the sort of poses to which Dorothy had objected so bitterly.
Casilli told Fosse that 'Dorothy didn’t do those kinds of shots,' but Fosse
was undeterred, and Hemingway submitted—though no graphic pubic-area
shots remain in the completed film.

While neither the TV movie nor the Fosse film conveys the truth, the TV
version (directed by Englishwoman Gabrielle Beaumont) is somewhat more
accurate in recounting certain incidents. Neither film deals with Dorothy’s
passionate reluctance to pose naked. Though the TV version at least gives
her a moment’s firm hesitation on the subject, Fosse’s Stratten leaps into the
nude scenes with abandon. His picture, though vastly more expensive,
better produced, and far more slickly directed, has less than a handful of
moments that ring true. It contains not a flicker of authenticity in its
depiction of Dorothy’s relationship with me. Fosse leaves out all the
laughter and love—how could he have known?

One glaring misconception in his movie concerns drugs. Although Paul

Snider admitted over the phone to Molly Bashler, a month before the
killing, that he had been heavily into both drink and drugs over the past few
months—cocaine in particular—the only mention of drugs in the entire film
(there is no drinking) occurs when the Snider character tells the Dr. Cushner
character that he thinks I am giving Dorothy cocaine in New York. The
doctor stoutly defends us, but the implication remains. The truth is that D.R.
and I tried cocaine together a couple of times, but neither of us liked its
effects. Snider had given some to Dorothy previously, but she had never
enjoyed it. She would not smoke grass with me and lightly discouraged my
using it. She said it reminded her too much of Paul. Every time she had
tried it with him she had become depressed.

Another major inaccuracy in Star 80 has my character informed, evidently

on the day of the murder, that we have been followed by private detectives.
In reality, I knew nothing of Goldstein’s activities until late in October,
more than two months after the killing. One of the questions Teresa
Carpenter asked me in her letter was when I first learned we were being
followed in New York and Los Angeles. Ironically, the question itself was
the first I had heard of it. Had I known sooner, even as late as August 14,
subsequent events might have been different.

Bits of the murder sequence are flashed throughout the Fosse picture, like
subliminal coming attractions for the main event. When it finally arrives,
the result is anticlimactic: Fosse has 'tastefully' avoided much real violence
or even the implication of its true horror. His Snider cries and yells, shoves
his Stratten down a couple of times, is going to rape her, but stops himself
and cries again instead. When Stratten then tries to console him with a gift
of lovemaking, Snider considers it pitying and takes her violently, yet she
doesn’t appear terribly upset. The corresponding TV sequence is pure rape,
as ugly and brutal as television allows; the murder is quick but savage.
Fosse’s Snider seems almost to be committing euthanasia, he is so gentle as
he puts the barrel beside her head, and his Stratten barely seems to notice.
This is followed by a flash of necrophiliac bondage and intercourse before
the Snider suicide.

Bob Fosse’s movie is all rhythm without notes— fancy footwork and weak
surmise, based on insufficient research and knowledge, along with a built-in
early decision to create an apologia for the killer. The film’s showy
mediocrity and repressed misogyny define none of us as much as it does its
director and his Playboy collaborators.

When Star 80 opened in November 1983, reactions from the media and the
public were widely mixed. Business was good at first in New York, L.A.,
and one or two other major cities, but fair to poor in more average markets.
Some critics raved respectfully, while others savagely denounced the
picture. Vincent Canby of The New York Times, who had panned They All
Laughed, gave Star 80 an extremely favorable notice. On the other hand,
Andrew Sarris of the Voice, who had given our picture an especially
glowing review, attacked Star 80. Jack Kroll of Newsweek liked both. None
of the press or public, of course, had the faintest idea whether the story
being portrayed was moderately accurate, largely true, or mainly false,
which left them discussing the merits of the picture’s style and viewpoint.
Some called it extremely moral, others extremely exploitative. Some, like
Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times, expressed only contempt.

I had been shown the film privately in August, and found myself alternately
appalled, disgusted, bored, and bitterly (though often uproariously) amused.
It was the blackest of humors that made me laugh: Fosse trying to have it
both ways with Hefner’s character, respectable and slightly sinister, at the
same time trying to belittle and mock my character, but in such feeble and
cowardly terms that only the director emerged pathetic. He had no idea
what Dorothy was like, and so portrayed the usual (though more lethargic)
dumb blonde of a thousand fictions. The most preposterous and obscene
achievement, in light of the known facts, is Fosse’s rendition of the final
murderous confrontation. Desperately trying to create moments of
sympathy for the killer and irritation with the victim, and thoroughly
disregarding the physical evidence in the crime, Fosse reveals his true
intentions by softening the circumstances and actions, as one might by
altering the church execution of Joan of Arc from burning alive to firing
squad.

Did the filmmakers realize at some point that even to suggest the truth
would constitute not only the ultimate stag film, but a damning indictment
of the fake sexual revolution they and so many others of us have endorsed
and exploited? Weren’t Snider’s actions, finally, an imitation of the stag
reels and porno magazines he was addicted to? Wasn’t his mind’s eye also
photographing himself and the most sensuously proportioned of Playmates
as she was forced at gunpoint to strip, then was taped down, raped,
sodomized, murdered, and brutalized even after she was dead? The Stratten
Extended-Murder reel—ideal for the eighties. But the filmmakers had tidied
up Snider’s Act, perhaps to save the face of Man.

After the murder, Hugh Hefner instructed his staff and the other Playmates
not to speak to the press about Dorothy. Later, Hefner would not discuss
Dorothy in private. He especially wanted no publicity about his relationship
with Snider. Although standard mansion policy was to admit as few
boyfriends or husbands as possible, Hefner had made a noticeable exception
for Snider and allowed him to bring in 'other Dorothys.' Didn’t Hefner
figure that the only way to get Dorothy back was to remain friendly with
her husband? Didn’t Hefner know the kind of man Snider was, and keep
him around as part of a master plan to win Dorothy Stratten for himself?

Public Playboy statements emphasized Hefner’s barring of Snider from the

mansion months before the killing. For what reason—except to obscure the
fact that Snider had been informed only five days before? The question
might easily be asked why more discretion and care had not been taken in
such a volatile-situation. Particularly curious is the wisdom of antagonizing
an already angry husband who was capable of doing malicious injury to one
of Playboy’s major assets: the most popular Playmate in nearly three
decades, well on her way to film stardom—a goal that had eluded the
hundreds of other Playmates.

***

If Hefner had not been brought up in the strict repressive atmosphere of

Puritanism, would he have reacted differently when his girlfriend Mildred
broke down from guilt during the Loretta Young movie in the Midwest of
the late forties, and the dark stranger made his first appearance to young
Hefner? The great resolution of his life had to be never again to allow this
brooding shadow to threaten him, and the one certain way was to himself
become the dark stranger—in every woman’s life. Thirty years later, in a
London theater, he appeared in that form to Dorothy Stratten—but she
protected him, as Mildred had not. As he would not protect Dorothy—or
any woman.

Wasn’t revenge the grand inspiration for Hefner’s millions of pages of

photos and print? Wasn’t he trying to strip every last vestige of secret magic
from the one figure in his life who had so humbled him in his own mind?
Hadn’t Hefner decided that one way or another he would take every woman
he could get, and make all of them show everything to the men of the
world? The public image Hefner would strive to uphold was that no woman
could keep him long, since he was too much the King of Women for only
one to possess. Wasn’t it his goal to prove that he was no pathetic cuckold,
but rather the greatest lover who ever lived?
Those close to him speculated that Hefner’s refusal to talk about Dorothy
indicated a sudden awareness of his own mortality. But wasn’t it perhaps
more a conjecture on his immortal spirit? Hadn’t Shaw and Mozart, like all
great artists, damned Don Giovanni/ Don Juan to hell?

In truth, doesn’t Playboy figuratively seduce and rape young women? Live
off them? Ridicule their gender? Destroy their lives? And monthly instruct
and inspire millions of men to follow the Hefner example? It is no secret
that some men surround themselves with women because they love them,
some because they use them, and some because they fear and hate them.

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, and 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.

If the law had existed in 1979-80 when D.R. first began to reveal to me how
she really felt about posing for Snider and Playboy, instead of just
suggesting she quit, I could have said: sue them. When she replied at she
had signed a contract, that she was trapped in it, I could have told her it
didn’t matter since she had been tricked and intimidated and pressured. If
she worried that it would be her word against Snider’s/Hefner’s, and all the
film they extracted would be used against her, I could have encouraged her
to be hopeful a court would understand that the photos and footage
documented acts of sexual violation and that her word might, finally, count
for something. And when she spoke to me in whispers of getting through
the photo-sessions on hate, and of all the other injuries and injustices she
had suffered and survived in her brief twenty years, we would both have
known, as we did not then, that she was not alone. A law of this kind would
have made a real difference in Dorothy’s life. Most of all, when eventually
it is passed across the land, when the used and the innocent finally have a
weapon with which to fight, the new civil rights law will stand for the life
D.R. could have had—something better than being taken and sold, with
something other to say than the script the pornographers wrote.

For herself, Dorothy had said it most simply in 1978, a few months before
we met and shortly before she was made to pose naked for men:

. . . How can people be satisfied

By accepting someone
Without exploring them?
Is the connection
Only physical?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Bogdanovich is an internationally known film director, producer, and

writer. Among his ten films are The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?,
Paper Moon, Daisy Miller, Saint Jack, and They All Laughed, which starred
Dorothy Stratten in her last role. He has also published books and articles
on the movies. He has just completed his eleventh film, Mask.