Dorothy Stratten: Her Story

based in part on the research of John Riley and Laura Bernstein

The worst is public knowledge: Dorothy Stratten, 1980 Playmate of the Year, was murdered. Her estranged husband fired a round from a 12-gauge Mossberg pump shotgun close to her face. Paul Leslie Snider murdered Dorothy and then used the same weapon to kill himself, on August 14, 1980, two years and a day after her arrival in Hollywood. That much you knew, more or less. Her life you don't know. Her life and death are one now, at the end: abruptly stopped. Her life is what she left, and it is worth knowing.

Holland. 1940. Peternella Füchs, five years old, played alone at home. Her father had been arrested by the Germans and taken away. Her mother was at work. The house was unheated and there wasn't any food, so the neighbors called the police. The police came and took Peternella to an orphanage. Her mother wanted her back, but the court wouldn't release her. She grew up at the orphanage. It was wartime and the orphanage served the most basic food. Mashed potatoes with vegetables stirred into them, a drizzle of bacon grease for taste. A meatball with the potatoes on Wednesday and on Sunday a small piece of meat. The children went out from the orphanage in groups, walking three in a row: one, two, three. Once a year they went to the beach on the streetcar. For weeks afterward, they relived the streetcar trip.

The world entered the orphanage through the front door. Peternella won the important work of opening that door to visitors. She opened the door one day in late adolescence to a woman looking for an orphanage girl willing to work at a dentist's office. The woman chose Peternella, who was blonde, blue-eyed, with a broad Dutch forehead, not tall, innocent. She was filled with gratitude for the choice.

At the dentist's office Peternella met a young man, Simon Hoogstraten. He was tall, with dark hair and glasses and strong hands. He was a carpenter, well trained, a craftsman. In time he asked Peternella to marry him. She was 18 and she hardly knew him, but she wanted out of the orphanage. She would not normally be released, not even for marriage, until she was 21. Hoogstraten thought he could win early release for her if he arranged for them to emigrate. She accepted his proposal.

He went to the orphanage and met with its board--men of the cloth, churchmen. He passed out cigars. Where did he intend to emigrate? Canada. Why Canada? The country was seeking people with skills, he was a carpenter, they would pay passage one way. The churchmen liked the cigars. Feeling good, they agreed.

Simon Hoogstraten and Peternella Füchs were married at the orphanage in the spring of 1954. The new bride was not allowed to leave the orphanage until the day of her departure from Holland, two weeks after the wedding. She joined her husband at the airport.

They huddled with other Dutch emigrants in transit at Heathrow Airport in London. None of them spoke more than a few words of English. When one ordered orange juice, they all ordered orange juice. When one ordered eggs, they all ordered eggs.

On arrival at Vancouver, British Columbia, the Hoogstratens had $40 between them, but Simon found work. He was a carpenter and there is always work for carpenters. He built houses.

Peternella decided that her name was confusing. She shortened it to Nellie. Nellie Hoogstraten, a young Dutch woman in Canada. Vancouver was like Holland, cool and green, but the people were different. Even the people in the Dutch community. They wanted to get things fast. In the Old Country you couldn't get things fast.

After five years of marriage the couple still hadn't started a family. Nellie returned to Holland with a girlfriend. The girlfriend rented a car and they spent two weeks touring. Nellie had never seen her country. She was reunited with her mother and the change did her good. Not long after she got back to Vancouver, she became pregnant.

Simon bought four building lots on a green hillside in Vancouver's East End, planned four houses, drew his own blueprints. He built the houses entirely on his own. One he rented; two he sold. The fourth was for him and Nellie and the baby. While he was building it, he installed his expectant wife in a tiny cottage across the street. She kept a garden and waited.

The baby, a strong, healthy girl, was born at the Salvation Army hospital in Vancouver on February 28, 1960, near midnight. The Hoogstratens named her Dorothy Ruth.

The house wasn't ready and Simon worked hard to finish it. It had three bedrooms, a nursery, central heating, a picture window and red-tile steps. Nellie would nurse the baby while she watched Simon build it.

Dorothy's younger brother, Johnny, was born two years later, but neither family nor prosperity kept Simon home. He worked long hours. He worked at night. He was always working. Nellie became disillusioned. She was alone so much. She told her husband he ought to be a horse, he worked so hard.

Nellie's next child was stillborn. She discovered she was an Rh-negative mother.

When Dorothy was three, her father abandoned them. There was another woman in his life. Nellie had been given only a grade school education in Holland and her English was still halting. Abruptly and unexpectedly, she had children to support. Simon offered grudgingly to come back to her, but Nellie said no. If he didn't want her, she didn't want him. She was still young and able to work. If she had known then how difficult it would be, she would have taken Simon back.

Nellie found employment as a housekeeper. She moved to an upstairs apartment in the poorest part of the East End. One night, when it was raining, Nellie walked to a nearby bridge and looked down into the black water. She was despondent. She might have jumped, but she slipped and fell on the wet sidewalk. A couple passing in a car saw her fall and stopped, coaxed her into their car, drove her home. Her downstairs neighbor made tea for her and then she went upstairs to her children. The children were sleeping. Nellie thought: They didn't ask to come into this world; I can't leave them here alone.

She went to see a psychiatrist at a mental-health clinic. He gave her a little bottle of pills. The pills were supposed to help her, but they put her to sleep. She would wake in the middle of the evening and find the refrigerator door open. The children had been trying to reach the milk. There would be corn flakes spilled on the floor. This can't go on, Nellie told herself. It was time she smartened up. She stopped seeing the psychiatrist, stopped taking the pills. She meant to survive, meant to keep her children and to raise them. She had grown up in an orphanage. Her children would grow up with a mother and a home.

Nellie went on Social Assistance and worked as much as its income limitation allowed. She managed to make a down payment on a house--a cottage not much bigger than an average American living room. Whatever happened, she always wanted to have a house. Making the mortgage payments was hard. Better to eat dry bread and pay the mortgage, she told herself. There were stores in Vancouver that sold horse meat. The children couldn't tell the difference. To them it tasted good.

When Dorothy was six, Nellie became pregnant again. Nellie worked for the father as a housekeeper. She believed he loved her and might marry her. She told him at Christmastime, after he had given her an expensive gift. "You'll have to prove it's mine," he shouted angrily. "You'll have to prove it!"

Nellie considered abortion.

Because of her previous problems, her Rh-negative condition made it a legal choice in Canada. Approval took four months. Nellie lay in bed in the hospital. The abortion was scheduled for that morning. The baby kicked. It was the first time she had felt it move inside her. She got up, walked down the hall, called a cab. Her doctor came running. We've gone to all this trouble, he argued with her, and now you want to keep it.

She did. Louise, Dorothy's younger sister, was delivered by Caesarean section and survived a complete blood exchange.

Nellie loved her three children with an orphan's fierce, determined love. They moved to a cabin in the mountains, but it was dangerously isolated in winter. After a frightening blizzard, Nellie moved them back to Vancouver. They moved six times that year. They were living again in Vancouver's East End. It was a rough part of town.

Dorothy missed having a father. She knew her father had walked out on them and she dreamed of being famous someday, so that he would know and notice her and be sorry.

She was the oldest; she took that responsibility seriously. She helped her mother whenever she could: made sure Johnny got up for school, helped Louise dress. In school Dorothy studied nutrition. She and her classmates were supposed to keep daily diaries of what their families ate so the teacher could show them how to eat better. Dorothy kept a diary for her family and showed her mother what she had learned.

Exhibition Park beside Burrard Inlet was an easy walk in summer from their house. Dorothy took her brother and little sister to the park for the day. They rode the roller coaster. Dorothy watched the people coming and going from the race track and the big stadium. Sometimes the three of them walked down to the water and watched the boats.

In the winter, Nellie took them to Burnaby Mountain Park, east into Burnaby on Hastings Street. They took cardboard boxes or saucer sleds and sledded down the mountain. There was an observation deck on the roof of the park restaurant where they could stand and look out over the trees to the mountains on the other side of the inlet. Around them were fresh dark evergreens weighted with snow. Burnaby Mountain was fun.

Dorothy collected costume jewelry, but she didn't have a jewelry box, so she decided to make one out of plywood, with wire for the hinges. She painted the box pink and painted a big red heart on the lid. She brought her girlfriends home from school and Nellie made them Dutch pancakes. Then the girls played. Dorothy came out in a big hat and one of Nellie's dresses. She wobbled trying to walk in her mother's high-heeled shoes.

When she was 14, Dorothy and her best friend, Cheryl, went up and down the East End looking for jobs at places like Ernie's Take Home and Fabric Lane. They stopped in at the Dairy Queen brazier restaurant on Hastings Street. The owner was a burly, black-bearded man named Dave Redlick. While they waited for him to interview them, they bounced on the couch in his office and giggled. He almost caught them. Dorothy was tall for her age and looked older than her years. Redlick liked her and hired her. He hired Cheryl also. He showed Dorothy where they kept the red-and-brown-plaid smocks the girls wore and introduced her to the girl she'd be working with. After that, Dorothy worked at the Dairy Queen on weekends. She was a hard worker. She never missed a day.

She liked school. A lot of the kids in the East End cut classes. She never did and she made sure Johnny and Louise didn't, either. But the kids who did were out there when she walked home. They taunted and teased her. Because she was tall and skinny, they called her a bean pole. Because she was shy, they said she was stuck-up. They said she had big lips, beady eyes, no tits. She tried to ignore them, but it was hard to do. When they were hanging out together in the street at night, she'd be studying her lessons or helping Nellie at home and they hated her for it.

Then an older brother of one of the girls who teased her caught Dorothy one afternoon after school. He spat in her face and slapped her. He knocked her down. He kicked her. When Nellie came home from work, Dorothy told her mother what had happened. It made Nellie angry and behind the anger it frightened her. "Mum," Dorothy said proudly, "I didn't cry."

About that time Johnny started getting into trouble and someone broke into their house and stole most of their belongings. The neighborhood was so bad that Dave Redlick started driving Dorothy home on the back of his motorcycle when she had to work late at the Dairy Queen. Nellie decided they had to move.

She found a house in Coquitlam, a suburb east of Vancouver. By then Nellie was studying for her secondary school equivalency, training in practical nursing and working in a hospital. They were still on Social Assistance. Coquitlam wasn't fancy, but it wasn't poor, either.

The house in Coquitlam was bigger than any the four had ever lived in. Finally, Dorothy had her own room. It was only eight by ten feet, but it had a closet with sliding doors and a window that looked out onto a back yard. It was beautiful.

Dorothy took the bus into Vancouver on weekends to work at the Dairy Queen. At night Dave would put her on the bus to Coquitlam and then call Nellie, who would drive to the bus stop to meet her daughter and take her home.

It was hard to pay the mortgage for the larger house and Nellie had her hands full. She didn't have much time to talk to her children. Sometimes she would pass the door to Dorothy's room and hear her daughter crying and not know what to do. Dorothy was 15. It was near the end of the school year when they moved. She didn't know anyone at the new school.

Dorothy collected stamps. Stamps told stories of other people and other places. She liked mounting them in the album and then dreaming about the people and places.

She started a hope chest. She learned to knit and made sweaters for it. She learned to crochet and began crocheting a throw. She made doilies for the furniture she would one day have in her own home.

For her last two years of high school, Dorothy went to Centennial Senior Secondary. She liked Centennial, but she was so shy that most of her classmates hardly noticed her.

"I never wore make-up or fancy clothes," she would later recall. "And I was scared to death of people."

She got good grades and did best in her creative-writing and secretarial courses. There was a rumor around school that one of their teachers had once appeared in Playboy. Dorothy thought it was strange, because the teacher wasn't very pretty.

Then Dorothy began to blossom. Her striking 5'9? frame--all awkward angles in adolescence--began to fill out with sexual maturity. Her Dutch heritage showed in her fine features and clear luminous skin. Her long blonde hair became lustrous and set off hazel-blue eyes. The cool Vancouver air put color in her cheeks. The bean pole was on her way to becoming a beautiful woman, but she would be the last to realize it.

In her junior year, Dorothy began dating her first serious boyfriend. What impressed her most about him when they met was his car, a Camaro.

"He was good-looking," she would write later, "but a little much. He had an apple and a carton of milk in one hand and a burger in the other, trying to get them all in his mouth at the same time. When he tried to say 'Hi,' everything came spurting out of his face and I broke up laughing."

It was a rocky romance. She reflected on it later in a notebook of personal reminiscences and poetry that she started writing after she arrived in Hollywood.

"I don't know what attracted me to him... . I had to keep making myself believe that I really loved him. I thought I loved him because he was my boyfriend and we went out for a long time and we slept together. I knew something wasn't right. If that was love, then love was a pretty big letdown. I was always afraid of breaking up, because I thought I wouldn't know what to do without him. But I'm sure a lot of my troubles and problems were my own fault."

Dorothy's fear of being without a boyfriend kept the relationship going for more than a year. She even bought him a ruby ring. It cost $70. She paid for it in installments out of earnings from her part-time job, five dollars at a time.

On odd weekends, when she wasn't baby-sitting or working at the Dairy Queen, they would go out to a movie or dinner--pizza or Chinese. More often, they spent the evening at her house or his, drinking and watching TV.

Sex was a constant conflict. Sometimes Dorothy thought it was all he wanted her for. He never saw her naked. She took her clothes off under the covers.

"I don't know what there was to be ashamed of," she wondered later, "but I was."

Sex with him included none of the romance she longed for. Not yet valuing her own worth, she blamed herself: "There was nothing wrong with him. It was me."

Dorothy tried to break up the relationship at the start of her senior year, but she felt so empty and alone she went back to him. They fought continually that fall and winter. On a weekend of skiing at Whistler Mountain, a good-looking boy named Craig paid attention to her and it made him mad. He argued with her on the long drive home. He'd had it with her, he said. He took off the ruby ring she'd given him and crushed it with a pair of pliers. After that, she didn't go out with anyone for more than a month.

II

Dorothy turned 18 in February of 1978. It was embarrassing to still be working at the Dairy Queen at 18: "At first I was 14 years old. It was great to get work that young, but I turned 15 and 16 and 17 and at 18 I was still working there, wearing a little red uniform with my hair in pigtails."

One weekend a black Datsun 240Z with red-leather upholstery pulled into the Dairy Queen parking lot. A guy got out with a blonde on his arm. He came in and sat in one of the pink-and-tan booths. Dorothy couldn't help noticing him. He was all flash. He was wearing a long, blond fur coat and lizardskin boots with spurs. His black hair was carefully groomed; he had sideburns and a mustache. Dorothy served him.

"What's your name?" he asked her. The big bad wolf. He wanted a Strawberry Sundae Supreme.

"I was in a good mood," Dorothy remembered, "so I made a huge tower out of it. I didn't even realize what it would make him think. I wasn't the type to make passes at guys."

A few days later, one of Dorothy's girlfriends phoned her. Some guy had called the Dairy Queen and said he had a date with Dorothy that evening. He wanted her number. The girlfriend wouldn't give it to him, so he gave her his. He wanted Dorothy to call him.

Dorothy thought about it and mentioned it to her mother. Nellie told her not to call. Dorothy didn't often disobey her mother. This time she did.

When the guy mentioned the Sundae Supreme, she remembered him. His name was Paul Snider, he said, and he wanted to take her out. She told him she was sick. He said he'd phone the next day and he did. She was still too sick, but the day after that she got up enough nerve to say yes.

The time finally came:

"He pulled into the driveway in the 240Z. I couldn't believe my eyes. I opened the door and watched him walk toward me. I was stunned, but also embarrassed. I knew I wasn't the girl he expected to see. 'You--look nice,' he said, but I could tell he was trying to cover his shock. I was wearing gray pants and a black top. He had on a long leather coat with a fur collar, two of the biggest diamond rings I'd ever seen, a necklace with a huge, diamond-studded star and a gold bracelet with his initials picked out in diamonds, PLS. I wanted to disappear."

But she didn't disappear. She put on her coat and walked out to Paul Snider's car and got in. He did all the talking as they drove. Twice he touched her hand. He took her to his apartment on 15th Avenue. It was a glitzy, fake-opulent bachelor pad in a modern building with a balcony outside a sliding glass door. Dorothy was wide-eyed: "It had plants everywhere, almost like an indoor jungle, and a huge skylight, fur rugs, a closet with a full mirror and a big platform bed." It reminded her of beautiful homes she'd seen on TV. It reminded her of big stars and famous people. She couldn't believe she was actually there.

Paul cooked dinner for them and served his favorite wine--asti spumante. He told her he was a big promoter. He put on car shows, he said. In awed silence, Dorothy wondered what he was doing taking out a waitress from a Dairy Queen.

He asked her if she had any nice dresses to go out in. She didn't reply, but she guessed he knew the answer.

In the living room after dinner, he played the guitar and sang songs he said he'd written himself. He moved closer. They kissed. He told Dorothy he felt the same things she did; she didn't have to say them; he knew. He said their lips were made for each other.

"I was being sweet-talked by an expert," she would write, "but I wanted to hear more." Paul was saying all the romantic things that the boys she'd dated at Centennial had never said. She wished this evening would never end.

Nellie had disliked Snider on sight. She thought he looked like trouble. When Dorothy didn't come home as expected, Nellie became frightened. She drove to the police station. She told the officer on duty she was afraid her daughter had been kidnaped by the Mafia. The officer calmed her and suggested she call home. She did and Dorothy was there.

"You shouldn't have worried, Mum," Dorothy told her mother, "we just drove around." Nellie was so relieved to find Dorothy safe that instead of scolding her, she promised her daughter she'd give up smoking.

Dorothy felt guilty about her first date with Paul, because she had started seeing Craig, the boy she had met at Whistler Mountain. She didn't know if Paul would ever call her again, but if he did, she intended to tell him she already had a boyfriend, sort of, and she couldn't see him anymore.

Paul called and Dorothy told him. But Paul wasn't the sort to take no for an answer. One afternoon he drove her to tiny Como Lake, not far from her house.

"If we like each other, we should be able to see each other," he told her. "Let your heart take you where you want to go. Don't fool yourself with logic. Happiness comes from the heart, not the brain. (continued on page 180)Dorothy Stratten(continued from page 152) You can see both Craig and me until you know who you really want. By being 'fair' and 'faithful' to Craig, you're actually cheating yourself."

Dorothy listened in silence, but she knew Paul was right. She didn't love Craig and thought there must be more to life and love than what she had discovered so far.

"I just followed my heart," she would remember. "For the first time in my life, I worried about myself without worrying about hurting somebody else."

She had one more date with Craig, and when he parked his car on a small mountain road and started kissing her, she told him she wanted to go home.

Dorothy knew she wasn't the only girl in Paul's life, but she stayed at home waiting for him to call. At first the calls came infrequently, but they increased as Paul's interest in his latest teenage conquest grew.

He gave her presents. Dresses. Panty hose. High-heeled shoes. He bought her make-up and got angry if she forgot to put it on when they were going out.

Dorothy's family hated Paul. They thought he was rude, self-centered and obnoxious, and they said so. The more Nellie and the two younger children argued against Paul, the more Dorothy defended him.

Paul banged the door against Johnny's bicycle coming into the house. He made himself at home on Nellie's couch, parked his boots on her coffee table. Nellie thought he must be into something crooked. He always had money to spend without working for it.

Ten-year-old Louise couldn't understand why her sister was spending so much time with Paul instead of the family. One night Dorothy tried to explain, but Louise became angry and started to cry. Dorothy persisted. Even though the family disliked Paul, she said, she loved him and he made her happy. He was the first person ever to make her feel attractive or important, she said.

Dorothy asked Louise if they cared for her happiness or if they were only thinking of themselves. Louise said she understood, and she was sorry. They hugged each other and Dorothy helped her sister dry her tears.

Dave Redlick saw Snider talking to Dorothy at the Dairy Queen one day. From then on, Snider waited for her outside in the car. Dave knew the bastard and didn't want him hanging around. They'd both been part of the heavy-duty biker crowd in their younger days around the East End, members of a cycle club called the Trojans. Dave had gone into the bar business and now he owned and managed his own Dairy Queen. Snider had dropped out of school when he was 14 and he'd been in trouble ever since.

Paul Snider grew up in an unhappy, hostile home. His parents fought constantly with each other and with their children. Paul's father, who operated clothing stores and, according to some observers, a sweatshop, regularly told his three sons that they'd never amount to much.

As the eldest son, Paul was the most resentful of his father's domination. He was short and thin, and he lifted weights until his biceps bulged. In his teens, he went to work for his father as a leather cutter. He hated the work. His father divorced his mother after 31 years of marriage and replaced her with an attractive sportswear buyer. According to a family member, after the divorce, when Paul asked his father for money to pay for an operation for his mother, his father refused.

Paul quit working for his father when he turned 21. By then, he would later tell a friend, he had been married and divorced. His wife walked out on him and took their child. He swore no one would ever do that to him again.

He started hanging out in Vancouver's night world, Hornby Street and Gas-town, districts of discos, bars and strip joints, studying the pimps. When he thought he was ready, he started smalltime pimping himself, a girl here, a girl there. Pimping and promoting: He groomed girls to become strippers. Paul backhanded one of his girls in a club called Oil Can Harry's one night and got slugged in turn by the bouncer. He burst into tears.

Snider sought out the company of the city's black pimps, who bought him drinks and tried to woo his girls away. He liked flashy cars and began promoting car shows in and around Vancouver. He acquired a Cadillac with etched windows; he acquired a Bentley that he "converted" to a Rolls-Royce with a switch of the radiator grille. He was handy at metalworking--he'd customized motorcycles in his biker days. One of his scams was duplicating metal sculptures from photographs of serious artists' work and hawking them out of a lobby salesroom in a north Vancouver hotel. He also worked a couple of girls out of rooms upstairs.

One of Snider's girls was also the girlfriend of a narcotics dealer who was serving a short jail sentence. Snider and the girl ran through $15,000 of the man's money. When the dealer got out, he hung Snider by his heels from a top-floor window of a downtown hotel. Snider paid the dealer with borrowed money and left town fearing for his life. He spent the next year in San Francisco and Las Vegas, then drifted down to Los Angeles. During the summer of 1977 he promoted two car shows in L.A. They both flopped, leaving a number of unhappy investors. When Snider returned to Vancouver, he concentrated on car shows and similar promotional schemes, avoiding any serious trouble. He was afraid someone would have him taken care of if he didn't.

Dave Redlick figured Snider for a thoroughly bad guy. He warned Dorothy to stay away from him. Dorothy looked up to Dave, but she didn't see how he could be right about Paul. The Paul Dave told her about wasn't the Paul she knew. She thought people misunderstood him. If Paul had made mistakes, they were a thing of the past.

Dorothy's friend Cheryl disagreed. One night at Pharaoh's, a Gastown disco, she watched Dorothy sit quietly at their table while Paul danced with one woman after another. Cheryl joked that when Paul told Dorothy to jump, she asked how high. Paul told Dorothy to stop seeing Cheryl and Dorothy complied.

"In a year we're going to find Dorothy dead in an alley," Cheryl predicted.

Just before graduation, Dorothy quit the Dairy Queen. Dave Redlick expected she would. Most of his girls did when they graduated. On her last day, he gave her a bouquet of roses.

She graduated from Centennial in a long, white, low-cut dress Paul had given her. Nellie didn't like the dress. Her standards of modesty were Old World standards. She hadn't seen her daughter naked since Dorothy was a little girl. The dress, and Paul's rudeness, ruined the graduation for Nellie.

On the way to her graduation dance, Paul took Dorothy to the studio of photographer Uwe Meyer and she posed for her first formal portrait.

The British Columbia Telephone Company hired Dorothy as a clerk-typist in early July. She was proud of her new job at B.C. Tel, but she was beginning to take steps toward a life beyond Vancouver.

In the summer of 1978, Playboy was engaged in The Great Playmate Hunt--a highly publicized search for the girl to be featured in the centerfold of the magazine's 25th Anniversary Issue. Dorothy didn't really believe she was beautiful. When people stared at her on the street, she wondered if her make-up was smeared or her dress torn. Paul convinced her to take the chance. One afternoon she posed for a nude test shooting by Meyer at Paul's apartment.

Paul had promised Meyer the $1000 Playmate Finder's Fee if Dorothy was accepted, but he later reneged on his promise. He used Meyer's photographs to interest the better-known Vancouver photographer Ken Honey in shooting her. Honey had already discovered several Canadian girls who had become Playmates.

Ken would agree to a test shooting only if Dorothy's mother cosigned the model release. Nellie was away at the time, visiting her mother in Holland, but Paul returned with a signature and Ken proceeded with plans for the test.

Dorothy liked Ken Honey. She couldn't believe he was a photographer. He was dignified and polite; she thought he looked like somebody's grandfather. They scheduled the shooting for late afternoon, after she finished work at B.C. Tel. Paul couldn't be there. He was busy setting up one of his car shows.

Posing for Honey was easier than Dorothy had expected. She wasn't nervous this time. Paul's absence helped. The only anxious moment came when Ken suggested trying some shots on the balcony before they lost the late-afternoon light. They attracted the attention of a couple of guys in the next building. Dorothy panicked, covering herself with a towel.

"It took Ken ten minutes to persuade me to take the towel off again," she remembered.

Ken had the film processed. The next day he mailed a dozen color transparencies to Marilyn Grabowski, Playboy's West Coast Photo Editor, in Los Angeles.

Marilyn's secretary logged in the package on Friday, August 11, 1978. Along with the photographs, Ken sent a standard Playmate Data Sheet filled out by Dorothy. She described herself as shy, very sensitive, romantic, fussy. She said she hoped the Playmate experience would help her gain more confidence in herself.

In the space intended for her father's name, she wrote: "Parents divorced." For her father's occupation she put: "Whereabouts unknown." Her career ambitions were simple: "I would like to become a star of sorts."

Marilyn was impressed by the photos. She thought Dorothy deserved serious consideration in the 25th Anniversary Playmate Hunt, which would end on August 31. Glamor photographer Mario Casilli, who had photographed more Playmate centerfolds in the previous two decades than any other man in the world, was available that weekend. Marilyn called Ken Honey in Vancouver and asked him to arrange for Dorothy to fly to L.A. on Sunday morning.

Ken found Dorothy working as cashier at Paul's car show. When he told her the news, she was ecstatic. Not Paul. He was annoyed. He was in the middle of a show and he couldn't trust anyone but Dorothy to handle the cash. He didn't want her to go to L.A. alone, as Ken advised she should. Paul never liked a deal unless he had control. He thought Dorothy's career was his deal.

It was the biggest decision Dorothy had ever faced. Her mother wasn't there to help her decide. She asked her 16-year-old brother, John, without telling him the offer came from Playboy. John, who despised Paul, was suspicious. He told his sister not to go. She drove down to the East End and talked to a friend of her mother's who was like an aunt to her. The talk helped. Dorothy made up her mind. She decided to go to L.A.

III

On Sunday morning, Dorothy flew to Los Angeles. She had never been in a plane before. When the jet took off, she pressed her face to the window, and it was still pressed to the window when she landed at LAX two and a half hours later. A long, black limousine was waiting for her. She had never seen a limousine up close, much less ridden in one. She couldn't believe this was happening to her. The chauffeur tried to make conversation, but Dorothy just got quieter and quieter.

Marilyn Grabowski arrived at the Playboy Building on Sunset Boulevard just as Dorothy's limousine was pulling up. As impressed as Marilyn had been with Ken Honey's test shooting, she wasn't prepared for the real thing.

"Dorothy was very blonde and very tall. She wore a simple but quite smashing black jump suit," Marilyn remembers. "My first impression, as she got out of the limousine, was that this was not an unusual experience for her. As I walked up to her and introduced myself, I realized I was wrong. I remember thinking: Here is a very young woman playing grownup. Her vulnerability drew an immediate, protective response from me.

"We went into my office and chatted while we waited for Mario Casilli to arrive. Actually, I chatted. Dorothy hardly said a word except in response to direct questions. I certainly didn't see any of the unique personality that would emerge in the months ahead. But whatever her inner feelings were, there was always that wonderfully engaging smile."

Mario and Dorothy spent the afternoon shooting at his studio in a converted public-library building in Altadena, a suburb of Los Angeles. Dorothy wrote in her journal: "I was a little shy standing stark-naked in front of a stranger, but after a while, I became more relaxed and got into it. I could even say it was fun." She napped on the drive back into L.A.

Marilyn had asked Casilli to return Dorothy to her office after the photo session. Dorothy would be staying at the Guest House of Playboy Mansion West. Because of her shyness, Marilyn wanted to accompany her there and help with introductions.

"The big iron gates slowly opened," Dorothy would write, remembering her first visit to the Playboy Mansion. "The scenery was incredible. There was a forest surrounding the winding drive. Then I saw the Mansion. I had never seen anything so huge. I felt like I had just walked into a storybook." The Mansion is a gothic castle on a wooded hill, with marble statuary, fountains, waterfalls. There is even a wishing well. Dorothy in Oz about to meet the Wizard.

It was late Sunday afternoon, a time when Hefner and his friends customarily gather for an afternoon buffet, to be followed by a movie in the spacious Living Room. Several dozen guests were already on hand, mingling at the bar and at tables on the poolside patio.

Dorothy met three Playmates who were also staying in the Mansion Guest House. She also met Hefner's social secretary, Joni Mattis, a former Playmate who has worked for Playboy for 20 years.

Hefner appeared, wearing pajamas and a tailored robe. He held a pipe in one hand and a Pepsi in the other. He worked his way slowly through the crowd, greeting guests and talking casually with friends.

Marilyn introduced him to Dorothy. Hef thought she was poised and pretty. Her nervousness didn't show. She remembered later: "As I was shaking his hand, I thought my knees were going to go out from under me. He was the first famous person I had ever met." He didn't act like a celebrity, she decided. "He was a human being. He had hands and arms and legs and a face just like everyone else. It took me a while to get over that."

Dorothy was introduced to Patrick Curtis, a former child actor (Leave It to Beaver), now a producer, who was once married to Raquel Welch. Marilyn had a dinner engagement elsewhere. She asked Patrick to look after Dorothy that evening. Recently divorced again and lonely, Curtis was delighted. He guided Dorothy through the buffet line and sat with her during dinner. Afterward he took her on a tour of the property. On a secluded path in the redwood forest that covers one side of the estate, he moved to kiss her. "I told him I wasn't there for that purpose," Dorothy would record. "He smiled and we walked back up to the house. There was a movie playing in the Living Room. We started to watch it. The day seemed like a lifetime by then. I was so exhausted I asked Patrick to walk me to my room. He did and said good night at the door and I was soon into sweet dreams, awaiting the morning."

Dorothy spent all day Monday shooting with Mario. She decided he was "the sweetest man in the world." Marilyn told her at the end of the day that her appearance as a Playmate was assured. They would need at least two weeks to complete principal photography for her centerfold and the picture story that went with it.

Dorothy flew home to Vancouver on Tuesday--"Maybe I was leaving a dream or maybe I had just started walking into one"--to try to arrange a leave of absence from B.C. Tel. The company would allow her only a week, and that wasn't enough time. Her excitement irritated Paul. "I think he got a little jealous and maybe he was worried," she decided. Dorothy had another difficult decision to make, and again she made it herself. She quit her job and returned to L.A. on Thursday.

"So I lived at Hugh Hefner's Mansion for three weeks, and worked with Mario almost every day." The hardest part was posing for the centerfold, shot with a stationary 8 & times 10 camera in a studio. The photographer disappears behind the camera, lights are adjusted, make-up improved, accessories changed, poses modified. The process is long and often tiring, but Dorothy rarely complained. She seemed to enjoy the challenge.

The small-camera sessions were pure pleasure, with Dorothy changing poses almost as rapidly as Mario could shoot them. "We had a lot of good times while we worked," she said. "We made each other laugh."

Casilli thought she enjoyed being photographed. She reminded him of a little girl playing make-believe. Secret dreams and fantasies, long locked inside her, found expression in front of the camera. With training this girl could be a damn good actress, Mario thought.

On her first morning at the Mansion, Dorothy had felt uneasy with the casual nudity of the other Playmates dressing in the Guest House. At breakfast it had taken a long time for her to work up enough courage to give her order to a butler. But within a week, a different Dorothy began to emerge--more confident, more outgoing and very much at home in this new environment.

"I was living a wonderful life in the warm sunshine," she wrote in her journal, "being catered to 24 hours a day, butlers to feed me, maids to clean my room. I could have anything I wanted and more.

"Usually, when I got home, I ate and went straight to bed. Sometimes I would stay up for a while and talk to Hef and his friends in the Living Room or play pinball in the Game House with the girls. On Friday and Sunday nights there was a buffet and movie. Friends would come over and visit and have a good time."

Paul Snider phoned constantly. He called Dorothy; he called Marilyn Grabowski; he called Mario. He called two, three and sometimes four times a day. He couldn't understand why the photography was taking so much time. He was suspicious; he thought someone must be doing a number on Dorothy's head. He asked Mario how she liked it there. Mario told him he thought she was more excited by the limousine that drove her to and from his studio each day than anything else. When Mario and his crew took Dorothy to Vancouver in early September to shoot on location, Paul met them at the airport with a rented limousine. "You guys take a cab," he told Mario. "The limousine is for Dorothy and me."

Dorothy told Nellie that she was modeling. She didn't tell her yet that she was modeling for Playboy. She didn't think her mother would approve.

After Mario left Vancouver, with her Playmate appearance confirmed, Paul told Dorothy he wanted to get married. She hesitated; she wasn't certain she was ready to marry yet. But Paul persisted and she agreed to an engagement.

Patrick Curtis had become a good friend. He'd shown Dorothy around L.A. while she was there and she had lived for a brief time at his house. Now she called him from Vancouver. Could she and her boyfriend stay at his house until they found an apartment? Patrick, who imagined Paul to be someone special if Dorothy loved him, agreed. When they arrived, he was appalled at the pushy, crude hustler who moved in with her. Curtis was happy that he was kept away by business much of the time they were there. The couple stayed two months, and in all the time they lived with him, Patrick never saw any sign of genuine affection between them.

The decision on the 25th Anniversary Playmate was made in mid-September. From several thousand candidates, the choices finally came down to two stunning women: Candy Loving and Dorothy. Candy was chosen because she was a senior in public relations at the University of Oklahoma, and better able to handle the promotional responsibilities that went with the title.

Dorothy, who shortened her name to Stratten for professional reasons, was scheduled to appear as the August 1979 Playmate. By then, it was felt, she would have enough poise and self-confidence to appear before the public and the press.

Hefner first met Snider at a Halloween costume party at the Mansion. Hef hadn't seen Dorothy since her return to L.A. and he greeted her warmly. She introduced him to Paul. They were an incongruous couple. She a shimmering angel in white satin. He, several inches shorter even in lifts, was dressed as a pimp. Hefner was appalled.

He was concerned enough about the relationship to have Snider checked out with the Vancouver police, but they had nothing on him in their computers.

Dorothy went to work as a Bunny in the Los Angeles Playboy Club in November. She wanted to study acting, hoping for a career. Patrick Curtis sent her to an agent friend who gave her the names of three teachers. Meet with all three, he advised, and go with the one you like the best. Dorothy and Paul chose Richard Brander, whose class of ten met twice weekly in Sherman Oaks.

Brander found vulnerability under Dorothy's obvious sexual appeal, vulnerability that reminded him of Marilyn Monroe. He thought Dorothy had star quality. She learned quickly; she could learn to act. Brander was surprised to discover that Paul had talent, too, but Paul wasn't interested in acting. He confessed that he came to class only to watch over Dorothy.

Paul and Dorothy took a small apartment in Westwood. To help with the rent, they asked a young actress they'd met in class named Molly to share the apartment with them. She agreed. A devout Lutheran, Molly blessed the apartment when they moved in.

Paul didn't look for work. He was too busy planning new deals. But nothing he touched worked out. He came close once in a scheme that involved a West Los Angeles disco called Chippendales. He approached manager Steve Banarjee with a promotion. Disco was dying, and Banarjee was ready to try anything. Paul got his idea from Misty's, a club in Vancouver: male strippers for female audiences. He supplied the strippers in exchange for the admission proceeds; Banarjee took the bar business.

To Banarjee's surprise, women mobbed the place. But he and Snider soon had a falling out. In the past, Snider's business partners invariably wound up losers, but this time it was Paul who got stuck--netting only a few hundred dollars after expenses.

Dorothy was earning money from her part-time job as a Playboy Club Bunny. Paul spent it. It worried her to have to support them both. She and Molly would go home in the middle of the day and Paul would still be sleeping. Or they'd find him lying on the couch, watching TV with the drapes drawn. He kept the apartment dark, even in the daytime. Other times he'd be on the phone for what seemed like hours, talking new deals. He was pushing wet-T-shirt contests, wet-underwear contests, a "handsomest man in L.A." contest. But nothing was working.

Paul constantly bullied Dorothy and routinely berated her. When she wasn't (continued on page 216)Dorothy Stratten(continued from page 184) around, he made passes at her girlfriends. He opened her mail. He tried to bully Molly, too, but with less success. Molly wondered why Dorothy put up with it. Love certainly is blind, she thought.

Once, when Paul went back to Vancouver for a few days, Dorothy seemed a completely different person. Spirits soared and sunshine filled the apartment. She smoked cigarettes--forbidden by Paul--and joined Molly in safaris for cookies and chocolate ice cream at the Westward Ho market. From their fourth-floor window, laughing uproariously, Dorothy and Molly threw all of their grapefruit at Iranian students passing below. Then Paul returned to L.A. and everything was back to normal.

Paul pressured Dorothy to marry him as her Playmate appearance drew closer.

"I don't even like blondes that much," he told an acquaintance, an older man. "I really prefer brunettes."

Paul's dark days were almost over, he thought. Dorothy would receive the rest of her $10,000 Playmate fee and begin earning money from Playmate promotions. But she was more than just a meal ticket to him. Dorothy was going to be his passport to the world that had thus far eluded him, especially here in Hollywood: the big time. The big deal. The big score.

Paul knew, as Dorothy did, that she was likely to be chosen the next Playmate of the Year. That would mean $200,000 in cash and prizes. More important, Dorothy would be famous. Paul envisioned a Dorothy poster. A Dorothy book. Dorothy perfume. After that, the movies. Dorothy could become a star. If Dorothy was a star, why couldn't he be her producer? Anything was possible.

One morning, at exercise class, Dorothy talked to Marilyn Grabowski about marrying Paul.

"I owe it to him," Dorothy said. "I was a nobody when he found me."

Marilyn disagreed. "You were never a nobody. You just thought you were a nobody. Whatever you become will be because of who you are, not because of someone else. The next year is going to be an adventure. Don't spoil it. Don't do something you may regret later. Live with him if you want to, if you feel you owe it to him. But don't get married."

Paul increased his pressure. "This is a partnership," he told Dorothy. "It's a lifetime deal, 50--50. I just want to make it legal." When she remained indecisive, he threatened her: "If you don't marry me, I'll leave you. Then what'll become of you?"

Dorothy went to see Hefner and told him she was going to marry Paul. Since Hefner had become as much of a father to her as she'd ever had, she wondered if he'd be willing to give her away at the wedding.

Hefner was touched and flattered. He was fond of Dorothy and concerned about her welfare. But a role at her wedding would be inappropriate, he said, since he really was opposed to her marrying Paul.

When she wondered why, all Hefner could think to say was: "Paul has the personality of a pimp." He was sorry as soon as he said it. It was insensitive and improper, he knew, and he started to apologize, but Dorothy was laughing.

"Hef," she said, "that was just his costume at the Halloween party." And she meant it.

Kim Desmond, the girl Dorothy trained as her replacement at the Playboy Club, went with her to pick out a wedding dress. Kim expected the shopping to take all afternoon. Dorothy picked the second dress they looked at in the first store they tried. The dress was white, tight-fitting, floor-length. It was slit up the side and had abalone-colored sequins sewn on the bodice. Very pretty, Kim thought. Dorothy was being practical. She wanted something she could wear more than once.

Dorothy's first Playmate promotion was scheduled in Las Vegas at the beginning of June. Paul flew to Nevada at the same time and they were married in the Silver Bell Wedding Chapel. Paul chose the Reverend James Whitehead's $65 wedding package, which included a short ceremony, a corsage for the bride from the floral refrigerator, photographs and a cassette recording of the ceremony. Jake Mastran, a pal of Paul's, was best man.

Although the newlyweds spent three nights in Las Vegas, Dorothy later confided to a girlfriend that they didn't consummate their marriage until two weeks after the ceremony.

The wedding reception was held on June fourth at the Van Nuys residence of actor-producer Max Baer, Jr. The bride seemed tense; a friend of Paul's, a doctor, gave her a Quaalude, then dispensed one to Paul and took one himself. With the exception of 1978 Playmate of the Year Debra Jo Fondren, no one from the Playboy organization attended, though several had been invited. Paul's father flew down from Vancouver and posed proudly beside his new daughter-in-law in a white suit. Molly was there, though she no longer shared the apartment with Dorothy and Paul. While cooking dinner one evening she'd popped off at Paul and he'd raged at her, turned over the kitchen table. He'd scared her badly. None of Dorothy's family attended either the wedding or the reception. Dorothy would wait weeks before mustering enough nerve to call Nellie and tell her that she had married Paul.

That summer Paul and Dorothy found a house in West Los Angeles. It was two stories of pale-yellow stucco with a flat, tile-trimmed roof. One small window beside the front entrance was guarded with a spiked, wrought-iron grille. The house had a double garage and on its roof was a deck for a second-floor living room with a sliding glass door. There was a small bedroom on the first floor at the back of the house. The street was almost a cul-de-sac. Across the street, and elevated above on concrete pylons, partly blocking the sun, pounded the Santa Monica Freeway. The house was new. It rented for $650 a month. Paul invited Steve Cushner, a young doctor, to share it to lay off part of the rent. Cushner agreed and took over the upstairs quarters.

Paul's father helped the newlyweds move in. He stayed at the house with them while he was in town. His clothing business had shut down. Paul told a friend that during the visit his father asked him for a loan and he took delight in turning him down.

July 1979 began Dorothy's whirlwind. With her August issue on sale, she flew off to Canada to promote the magazine. She was one of the few Canadians ever chosen to be a Playmate. It made her an instant celebrity. She would tour Canada for most of the month.

Elizabeth Norris, Playboy's Playmate Publicity Manager, rendezvoused with Dorothy in Montreal. From there they worked back west across the country. Dorothy frolicked in a park for photographers, appeared with Candy Loving at a football game to kick out the first ball and gave interviews on talk shows.

Elizabeth was impressed with Dorothy's dedication and with how quickly she caught on. The public adored her. People responded not only to her exceptional beauty but also to her naïveté, warmth and charm. At personal appearances, crowds would swarm around her. "You're so beautiful," someone would say, and Dorothy would be delighted. She could sign autographs by the hour.

"Come on, Dorothy," Elizabeth would say, "it's time to go."

Dorothy would shake her head: "I'm not done yet." She wanted to sign every one. She was having the time of her life.

Vancouver was their last stop. Elizabeth was introduced to Nellie. To Dorothy's surprise, her mother seemed genuinely pleased with her success with Playboy and her new celebrity. Nellie was worried about Dorothy's marriage to Paul, however, and she said so.

On her return to L.A., Dorothy wrote her mother a letter:

Dearest Mom:

Thank you so much for being so good to me and understanding of my schedule in Vancouver. I remember your tears as I was leaving. It was so sad. Please don't feel bad, Mom. The family's got each other. That's all that matters. Don't ever worry about anybody else. I'll try to get home again as soon as possible for a longer visit... . Please try and take care of yourself, Mom, and be proud of yourself. I'm proud of you. You're beautiful.

Love always, Dorothy

P.S. I miss you.

IV

When Dorothy was hired for a walk-on in the movie Americathon--she escorts Meat Loaf on stage to give blood to help save America--she decided she needed an agent. She signed with David Wilder, who represented several other Playmates also pursuing acting careers. Wilder immediately found Dorothy a small speaking part in Skatetown, U.S.A.

In September, Hefner hosted a Playmate Reunion. Dorothy Stratten was one of the most recent of the 136 Playmates of the Month who attended. Each of them received a jeweled Rabbit pendant to commemorate the occasion. It was an emotion-filled day for Hefner and for the women--who spoke of sharing a sense of lasting identification with one another and with Playboy. Hefner stood on a stage welcoming three decades of Playboy centerfolds.

"Without you," he cracked, "I'd have a literary magazine."

Seated next to Dorothy at the Reunion luncheon was a reporter for The Washington Post. During lunch they talked.

"Tell him about your film career," Paul whispered from his seat on the other side of Dorothy.

"I'm interested in acting in films and television," said Dorothy to the reporter.

"Mention Americathon," Paul intoned again.

"I'm in a movie called Americathon," said Dorothy. "It's about a telethon to save the country."

"Tell him about Skatetown," prompted Paul, his asides growing more obvious.

"And I just finished making a movie called Skatetown, U.S.A.," said Dorothy dutifully. "I roller-skate in that one."

"Really?" said the Post correspondent, fascinated by this amateur Svengali act with the beautiful blonde and the man in the black shirt open down the front, neck chains and a leather jacket, who looked like someone who hung out on street corners.

Dorothy found more film and television work throughout the fall and winter. Because Canada allows tax credits for motion pictures made in that country with Canadian citizens, she offered advantages for Canadian film makers beyond her obvious beauty and her novice acting skills. Immediately after Skatetown, Wilder placed Dorothy in a Canadian picture, Autumn Born. It was to be a low-budget drive-in feature, but it would be Dorothy's first lead. Wilder set the deal to give her a learning experience, actual acting time in front of the camera.

Learning was what Dorothy proposed to do, because she had settled by now on an ambitious goal: She wanted to become a serious actress. Her beauty opened doors. She meant for her acting to carry her through. She made the round of casting calls. She read scripts and plays on her own, outside class, and acted out parts with friends. When she got a part, she arrived at the set on time, was always prepared.

An episode of Fantasy Island turned up next. Money was starting to come in. Wilder noticed that it was Paul who cashed the checks. Dorothy's husband might have been helping her manage her money, but Wilder also noticed that he was spending more on himself than he did on her. The couple bought a 1974 Mercedes 450SE from Paul's pal Jake for $13,000, but Dorothy complained to Casilli that she never got to use the car, because Paul had it all the time. She made do with a beat-up 1967 Mercury Cougar.

Marilyn Grabowski had dinner with Paul and Dorothy one cold, wet evening. Paul carried a mink coat over one arm when they arrived and Marilyn thought, Well, occasionally he can be considerate. He's carrying her coat. When they left the restaurant, there was a light rain. Paul put the mink on himself.

In October, executives from ABC-TV went to Hefner with a problem. The Nielsen ratings for the new season showed the network losing its lead in prime-time programing to CBS. Playboy Productions had given ABC a 25th Anniversary show that had done well in the ratings the previous spring. They needed a similar special--something with a Playboy party theme--and they needed it for November.

Hefner put together The Playboy Roller-Disco and Pajama Party in record time. Richard Dawson was the host. Chuck Mangione played by the pool in the afternoon, and the Village People held forth in the Great Hall at night. Playmates were on camera throughout. A special film segment featured the Playmates of the Eighties. Dorothy did a brief comedy bit with actor James Caan, a pet squirrel and Caan's dog Rooter. When Hefner looked at the tape, he was so taken with the way Dorothy came across on camera that he gave her a running part with Dawson throughout the show.

Someone else was impressed with Dorothy Stratten that day: film director Peter Bogdanovich. Hefner had been an executive producer on Bogdanovich's latest film, Saint Jack, which had been adapted from a Playboy story. Bogdanovich was casting a new comedy titled They All Laughed. He was looking for a beautiful ingénue to play a featured part in the film. Dorothy might be a possibility if she could act. He told her he was interested in hearing her read.

Dorothy called her agent. She'd heard so much gossip about Peter Bogdanovich and his previous romance with Cybill Shepherd. She wondered: Was he serious about having her read for the part? David Wilder checked. Bogdanovich was serious. Dave drove Dorothy to the director's house in Bel Air. She read for him. He asked her back for a second reading. This time Paul drove her to Bogdanovich's--in the Mercedes. He sat parked outside the director's gate the entire evening.

In late November Dorothy learned that she would be the 1980 Playmate of the Year. Official notice would come later, but she and Mario Casilli needed to begin work immediately on the photography. Mario hadn't seen Dorothy for a while. He was struck by how much she'd matured from the shy, insecure kid who first stepped off the plane from Vancouver 15 months before. He was fascinated by the way people responded to her. When they walked through an airport together, people would turn and stare. She had the stately blonde thing, he thought, even in baggy corduroy slacks and a shirt. Part of it was the way she walked. She was nearsighted and, like a lot of nearsighted people, she carried her nose a little in the air. But she wasn't at all standoffish or a snob. In all the years he had been photographing Playmates, he'd never met anyone quite like her.

Paul's plans were expanding with Dorothy's career. He'd made a deal with photographers Bill and Susan La Chasse to photograph Dorothy on roller skates wearing a sexy skating outfit. From this Snider hoped to market a poster that he figured would sell 1,000,000 copies and earn, by his calculation, $300,000. He wanted John Derek to do a book on Dorothy similar to the one he was doing on his actress wife Bo. He had plans for a book about himself as well and he paid a writer $1000 to write the first draft of a biography.

One of Paul's few friends in L.A. was a former Floridian named Chip Clark, a health-spa manager and the boyfriend of June 1979 Playmate Louann Fernald. They'd met earlier that fall, Chip and Louann's first weekend in town, when Dorothy and Louann worked a Playmate promotion together. Since Paul had so much free time, he spent a lot of it with Chip.

Chip was a laid-back guy who could get along with almost anybody, but he couldn't believe Paul. He'd never met a more impulsive, hostile individual in his life, with a real propensity for violence. In the short time they'd known each other, he'd seen Paul fly off the handle and swing at strangers, chase cars, kick doors, push people down who provoked him and throw food onto the floor in restaurants if the service didn't suit him. He embarrassed Chip a lot of times in public, but when just the two of them were together, Chip found him good company. Chip talked Paul into working out at the health spa, and they hung out there that winter, while the two women were away on promotions. Chip and Louann were among the first to sense the trouble building in Paul and Dorothy's relationship.

Dorothy took her sister, Louise, who was now almost 13, to Los Angeles for Christmas. She'd started sending money home to Nellie to pay for Louise's braces and other things the family needed. She gave Louise a tour of the Mansion and introduced her to Hefner.

Two days after Christmas Dorothy shot an episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century in which she played Miss Cosmos, the most perfect woman in the universe. When she found her name listed in TV Guide, she rolled on the floor in excitement. Then she called her mother to share the thrill of the discovery.

Bogdanovich invited Dorothy back for a third reading. Her agent sent her on a casting call to Crown International Pictures. Producer Marilyn Tenser, a tough-minded woman, not easily impressed, was looking for a beautiful young actress to play the title role in Galaxina. Crown's first big-budget film, Galaxina was a science-fiction satire about a stunning female robot. Avery Schreiber and James David Hinton were to be the male co-stars.

"Director William Sachs and I had interviewed more than 300 girls for the part," Tenser remembers. "The girl we wanted not only had to be an actress, she had to be a knockout. Unfortunately, most of the girls who could act weren't pretty enough.

"When Dorothy came in, she was absolutely exquisite--and she read very well. You wouldn't expect a girl who looked like that to be able to act, but she could. She was convinced she was going to be a major star and I think she would have been."

Dorothy got the part. Paul ordered new license plates for their cars: Gal-x-ina for the Mercury and star-80 for the Mercedes.

Mario and Marilyn Grabowski both noticed a change in Dorothy near the end of the Playmate of the Year photography in January. She would arrive at the studio tired and puffy-eyed. She seemed moody and distant, a new experience. Paul would interrupt the photo sessions with a phone call, an argument would ensue and Dorothy would go into her dressing room and cry.

Marilyn surprised Dorothy one afternoon with a gift, a purebred Tibetan Shih Tzu puppy. She thought it might cheer her up. Mario photographed Dorothy playing with her new pet for the Playmate of the Year pictorial, scheduled for the June issue. Dorothy named the dog Marston--Hefner's middle name--and that evening she took it to the Mansion to show him.

Later that week Mario asked Dorothy about the puppy. She said Paul kept it with him all the time, so she couldn't play with it. Three days later the dog died.

Marilyn saw that Dorothy needed to get away for a few days and suggested the two of them spend a week at La Costa, a health resort near San Diego. The two women worked out, played tennis, swam, took massage and whirlpool treatments, ate lightly and slept well. Dorothy was good company, but she didn't reveal what was troubling her.

Dorothy returned to L.A. five pounds lighter. She looked sensational. Her agent called with good news. Bogdanovich wanted her for a part in They All Laughed, which would star Ben Gazzara, John Ritter and Audrey Hepburn. The film was to be shot on location in New York and Dorothy would have to leave at the end of March, as soon as she finished Galaxina. She was days away from her 20th birthday and well on the way to her dream of stardom.

It was a process Hefner had seen repeated in different ways many times over the years. When a young woman was chosen Playmate of the Month, it was more than simply a modeling assignment. It was an opportunity that could lead to a dramatic change in her personal and professional life. What each Playmate did with that opportunity depended a great deal on her own individual motivations and talent, of course--and none had come so far in so short a time as had Dorothy Stratten.

Equally remarkable to Hefner was how much she had grown as a person in self-awareness and assurance--without losing her unspoiled sensitivity.

For Dorothy, growing up also meant struggling toward independence from Paul's domination. Somewhere along the way, she had realized that although she still cared for Paul, still felt obligated to him and concerned about his welfare, she no longer wanted to live with him. She talked about this change in her feelings with Louann Fernald and other close friends. Louann remembered Christmas as the time when Dorothy started thinking seriously about leaving Snider. Louann understood that she meant to move slowly because she was afraid of hurting him and possibly afraid of what he might do.

One of Dorothy's first assertions of independence was her decision to hire a business manager. With an accelerating career, she needed one. Actor Vince Edwards, television's Ben Casey of the Sixties and a friend she'd met at the Mansion, suggested Robert Houston. Houston's firm handled such clients as Warren Beatty, Farrah Fawcett, Paul Newman and Goldie Hawn. Dorothy made an appointment to meet with Houston and Paul went along.

To Bob Houston Dorothy seemed like a young woman starting out on a promising career who sincerely wanted to establish responsible controls over her financial life. Paul preferred pontificating, theoretical discussions of how their affairs ought to be arranged. Partners was the key word. Paul wanted equal authority over her finances and half of all her income. Dorothy didn't openly disagree. But from her expressions, Houston read a message to appease Paul now and talk to her later. At which point Houston would mumble something about legal difficulties or the problems of Canadian citizenship.

Houston discovered that Paul had no real income of his own. He wasn't Dorothy's agent and he wasn't her manager--though he imagined he was and liked telling strangers about "their" career. Houston understood what Paul was, and did his best to help Dorothy deal with him.

For tax purposes, Houston set up a corporation called Dorothy Stratten Enterprises to receive whatever money she earned. She was its president, Houston's partner its treasurer, Houston its secretary. She owned 100 percent of its stock. The corporation's income went into a separate account from which Dorothy, but not Paul, could draw funds. The corporation paid Dorothy a salary that was deposited in a joint checking account on which both she and Paul could sign.

Paul Snider chafed at this unexpected curtailment of his easy access to Dorothy's earnings. What upset him even more was Dorothy's heeding counsel other than his own.

Before beginning Galaxina, Dorothy started shooting another pictorial for Playboy with Mario Casilli. It was an unusual feature, an idea Hefner suggested to her; a tribute to the famous blondes of Hollywood, in which she would portray such classic sex stars as Jean Harlow, Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe. The theme intrigued Dorothy and she read biographies of each of the stars to be depicted.

Galaxina was shot at a ranch in the mountains above Malibu, a long drive from their house. Paul drove Dorothy to work in the morning, drove back to keep an eye on her at lunchtime and sometimes drove back again in the evening to pick her up. He'd burn a full tank of gas a day. Between visits he called the Galaxina set as he'd called Mario's studio, and the calls reduced Dorothy to tears. He badgered and brutalized her. Dorothy found a friend in co-star James David Hinton, an easygoing Texan and a Baylor graduate. They worked together into the evening; in the camaraderie of filming, they spent time together and Hinton fell in love. But he discovered to his surprise that Dorothy was straighter than the girls at Baylor. She always called Paul to let him know where she was. He rewarded her with angry demands that she come home.

"I don't know why he wants me at home," Dorothy said to Hinton after one call to Paul. "When I get there he'll be out at a night club somewhere."

Paul wanted to go with Dorothy to New York for the filming of They All Laughed. She would be gone for three weeks. She wanted the time to sort out her feelings, away from Paul's pressure. Boldly she told him no, and she made the decision stick.

In New York, she showed up on time, as always, and quietly watched the production taking shape. She was especially fascinated with Audrey Hepburn and studied her as she worked. Sometimes Dorothy read--A Farewell to Arms or a diet book. Bogdanovich treated her gently. "She was a darling little girl," the make-up specialist, Fern Buckner, later told a reporter. "Very beautiful, of course. Whatever you did to her was all right."

Paul was suspicious from the beginning. He couldn't imagine Dorothy functioning independently, so he assumed someone else must be manipulating her. She was working 12 hours a day because Bogdanovich was pushing to stay on a tight production schedule. She was dieting strenuously, which gave her headaches, and returning each night to her room at the Wyndham Hotel to study her lines. Paul called her in the middle of the night to vent his displeasure at her absence, to threaten and cajole, and especially to complain that he needed money.

He worried as much about his worsening financial position as he did about the prospect of losing Dorothy's affection. He appeared almost daily at the Union Bank in Century City to check on the deposits and withdrawals in Dorothy's corporate trust accounts. Once, he showed up with a brunette girlfriend and tried to convince the teller that she was Dorothy Stratten. He wanted to cash a check for $2000 on the corporate account. When the teller refused to honor the check, Paul stomped out of the bank in a rage.

He called Bob Houston one afternoon with the news that Dorothy had changed her mind and wanted him to have half the stock and become an officer in the corporation and a signer on the corporate bank account. "What the hell, Bob," he shouted at Houston in feigned anger, "you're managing both of us, not just Dorothy. What the hell!"

Another day he walked into the office and announced, "Bob, we've got to do it. This is the way it's got to be. We're partners in this thing. She'll share 50 percent in my income and I'll share 50 percent in hers."

Houston called Dorothy in New York to talk it over. "I just can't believe two people can fight so hard over business matters and still maintain a romantic relationship," he said along the way.

"Bob," Dorothy told him sadly, "there hasn't been a romantic relationship between Paul and me in over a year."

Exactly when Dorothy's relationship with Peter Bogdanovich became more than professional is unclear. Bogdanovich has been understandably reluctant to discuss the matter since her death. They may have been interested in each other before New York: Dorothy's refusal to allow Paul to accompany her suggests that they were. But her lifelong preference for single relationships strongly suggests a later flaring of the romance with Peter--in New York during the filming of They All Laughed, after her marriage to Paul had deteriorated beyond repair.

Dorothy returned to Los Angeles in mid-April during a break in production. When they next visited the Mansion, Paul was even more inattentive to her than usual. He spent most of his time hitting on other women guests. Dorothy sat quietly in a corner, talking with friends. She found reasons to visit Bogdanovich at his Bel Air home, telling Paul that Peter was helping her with her part in the picture.

Louann noticed that Dorothy didn't confide in her anymore, probably because she was afraid Louann would tell Chip and Chip would tell Paul. On the way to exercise class one morning, Louann noticed that Dorothy had taken up smoking again. She scolded her for it.

"I don't know what to do about Paul," Dorothy replied forlornly. "I wake up in the morning and I'm so unhappy. He makes me so nervous. I need a cigarette to calm down. It's all I have."

At home Paul had become a tyrant. When Dorothy suggested the possibility of a separation, he threatened her with an echo of her father's abandonment:

"Once you walk out that door," he ranted, "you can never come back." Louann heard the threat. It made her angry.

"You treat your women just like you'd treat a horse," she said.

"Well," Paul replied defensively, "that keeps her in line."

At the end of the month Hefner introduced Dorothy Stratten as the 1980 Playmate of the Year at a press luncheon in her honor. A tent was erected on the Mansion lawn to handle the crowd. Art Buchwald flew in from Washington to emcee, and the Washington Post reporter was once again on hand. Dorothy, breath-takingly beautiful in a gold gown, stood at Hef's side trembling in anticipation. He put an arm around her in reassurance.

Buchwald convulsed the crowd with a fanciful explanation of how the Playmate of the Year is chosen. Then Hefner introduced Dorothy.

"She is someone quite special," he said. He told about her first flight from Vancouver and her promising acting career. He mentioned the $200,000 in cash and prizes she would be receiving as Playmate of the Year and handed her a check for $25,000.

"For you, Dorothy," he said, "with a great deal of love."

Dorothy thanked Mario Casilli, Marilyn Grabowski, Elizabeth Norris, Miki Garcia of Playmate Promotions and Hef for their friendship and "for helping to make so many of my dreams come true."

"I'm sure I must be the happiest girl in the world today," she said, beaming.

Dorothy responded easily to the reporters' questions and posed for photographers on the stage. Paul stood at the bar at the rear of the tent, drink in hand, and glared into the middle distance.

The reporter from The Washington Post remarked on how polished a performer Dorothy had become since the Playmate Reunion the past September, when her every word had been the result of Paul's prompting.

After the luncheon Dorothy was scheduled to tape a guest appearance on The Tonight Show. Paul followed with his own entourage. Dorothy barred him and his pals from her dressing room.

With poise and good humor she described her Playmate of the Year gifts to Johnny Carson. Her $13,000 brass-lined rosewood bathtub seated ten people, she said.

Carson winked a quick response: "What are we going to tell the other eight?"

For the next two weeks Dorothy toured Canada again with Elizabeth Norris. As Canada's first Playmate of the Year, she was a major celebrity there. Elizabeth noticed the new polish in both her appearance and her performance, but she also realized Dorothy was working under terrific stress. Paul called constantly. Elizabeth heard her sobbing in her room long after midnight.

A few days into the tour Dorothy decided to write Paul a letter. She let Elizabeth read what she had written and then sent it off by courier.

I want to be free, the letter said. Let the bird fly. If you love me, you'll let me go. If what we had was right, I'll come back.

And then the agony of waiting for a reply. Sitting through interviews. Meeting the public. Appearing on talk shows. Smiling all the while, Elizabeth noticed with admiration.

Paul called in a rage. Freaked out. Threatening. But he caught himself in midsentence, thought better of it and hung up. Ten minutes later, when he called back, he managed to sound calm.

Elizabeth knew there was someone else in Dorothy's life. She didn't know who. In the middle of the tour Dorothy begged the weekend off to go to New York. She came back Sunday night, hopping happily down the hall, carrying her own luggage, kicking the hotel-room door: "Elizabeth, I'm home!" She went in, set down her bags, stood at the foot of the bed, deliriously fell backward, feet flying. "Oh, Elizabeth," she said, "I had such a wonderful time!"

The phone rang. Elizabeth answered. New York was on the line. "I don't know who you are," Elizabeth said, "but thank you for making Dorothy so happy." It was Peter, calling to make certain Dorothy had returned to Toronto safely.

The Canadian tour was once again scheduled to end in Vancouver. The timing had been arranged to get Dorothy home for her mother's wedding. Nellie was marrying a broad-shouldered, soft-spoken master mechanic named Burl Eldridge. Burl restored classic automobiles for a living. He'd admired Nellie from a distance for weeks, and finally asked her out. A month after they started dating, he proposed.

Paul announced he was going to Vancouver for the wedding, though he hadn't been invited. Dorothy reluctantly agreed to meet him there. She told Elizabeth that the meeting worried her. She seemed afraid of Paul. Elizabeth offered to arrange for a bodyguard. The offer surprised Dorothy. "I can handle Paul by myself," she said.

Snider barged in on Nellie's wedding reception and disrupted the day. When he wasn't following Dorothy around the house arguing, he was on the phone setting up promotions for her with club owners he knew.

Everybody at the reception wanted Dorothy's autograph and to have his picture taken with her. Dorothy's brother, John, tended bar. Her sister, Louise, sat on their new father's lap.

Paul tried to tell Burl how to open a bottle of wine. Eldridge knew his way around fine cars and their wealthy owners. He'd been big-game hunting in Africa and he didn't need advice from Paul Snider.

"I was opening these things before you were born," he told Paul, who disappeared from the kitchen. There was something furtive about him, Burl thought. He never looked you straight in the eye.

Paul dragged Dorothy off to her suite at the Four Seasons Hotel and ranted and raved at her most of the night. "He was so mean, Mum," Dorothy told her mother afterward. "So mean."

Paul insisted that Dorothy remain in Vancouver several more days. He had his own plans for promoting her. Despite her strenuous two-week tour of Canada for the magazine, he ordered her to make appearances at night clubs along Hornby Street. He charged the club owners for each appearance and pocketed the fees.

Dorothy returned to New York, to Peter and the filming of They All Laughed. She was still undecided about whether or not to end her marriage. She wanted a separation. She was sure of that. But she also wanted to be fair to Paul. And Paul still insisted that she "owed" him.

On a rainy Manhattan morning early in June, she wrote to Nellie and Burl about the confusion she felt:

Thank you very much for all your concern and advice, but as you know, my problem goes much deeper than money, and as you also know, I don't intend to use money as an excuse. Everyone needs money to live, but I won't decide about my marriage on that basis. All I want is to be happy, no matter how rich or poor, and if it makes me happy to give everything away for my freedom, then that's what I'll do.

Throughout the month, Paul found it increasingly difficult to reach Dorothy on the phone. She had all her calls screened now and spent less time at the Wyndham and more with Peter at the Plaza.

By the end of June she'd made up her mind. She sent Paul a letter declaring their physical and financial separation.

Paul had several responses to the separation. He cleaned out their joint bank account, buying some $1500 worth of new clothes and the gear he needed to install Dorothy's Playmate of the Year stereo equipment in his living room. He called an old girlfriend in Vancouver and talked her into flying down for a few days to console him. And he went to see a divorce lawyer, J. Michael Kelly, who took him as a client and introduced him to a private detective named Marc L. Goldstein. Goldstein was eager to help Paul get the goods on Dorothy and Bogdanovich. Since Paul considered himself Dorothy's personal manager, he believed he might have grounds for a suit against Bogdanovich for encouraging Dorothy to leave him. Goldstein's job was to build a case.

Marc Goldstein was the son of a Beverly Hills psychologist. He wanted to be a lawyer and he started practicing early, as an undergraduate at Berkeley and at Hastings College of the Law. His license plate at law school read Litig-8, and litigate he did. At various times he'd sued telephone companies, a parking lot, Macy's, a camera store for losing transparencies, Fabergé for cologne injury, Yellow Cab for false imprisonment and emotional distress, Whirlpool for an exploding washer, his family's orthodontist for professional negligence, his own uncle for fraud. A defendant in one suit charged that Goldstein had threatened to have him killed. He was refused admission to the California bar on grounds of "moral disqualification." American Express threatened to prosecute him for reporting several thousand dollars' worth of money orders missing, accepting reimbursement and then spending the "missing" money orders. He made good to AmEx. Opposition lawyers in one lawsuit described him as a "pernicious, greedy scoundrel who 'uses' the legal process as a means of extorting money." Goldstein and Snider hit it off immediately.

Paul went to see Bob Houston about financial arrangements. Dorothy had instructed Houston to pay Paul's rent and other living expenses. She also agreed to several lump-sum payments, including one to repay a loan Paul had received from his mother.

"Dorothy's going to pay all your bills," Bob told Paul, "plus a cash settlement. Under California law, you're entitled to half of everything earned to date. What could be fairer than that?"

After taxes, Houston calculated, that would come to about $40,000. Enough, in his estimation, for a healthy young man to buy himself a new start.

Snider had other ideas. He was thinking about alimony. Maybe 50 percent of Dorothy's gross income for the next three years.

"That's not realistic, Paul," Houston said. "You've taken enough from this woman. You're not going to extort any more."

But Paul wasn't listening. He collected more than $5000 in cash advances in the month of July, but he told Chip Clark that Dorothy had cut him off.

Dorothy and Peter kept their relationship quiet in New York. The New York press missed the story entirely. Each had occasion to call Hefner during production, but neither mentioned it to him.

Dorothy called to ask Hefner's advice. Peter had suggested she switch agents and sign with William Morris, a major talent agency. Hefner thought she ought to wait until her return to L.A., when they could discuss the change at length.

Peter called to tell Hefner how well Dorothy was doing in the picture. He'd given her additional lines, he said, and added a roller-skating sequence. He was enthusiastic about her performance, but he neglected to add that they had fallen in love.

New York Village Voice reporter Teresa Carpenter discovered later that not even the production crew really noticed the romance until near the end of shooting. Then Peter and Dorothy began coming to work holding hands. "One day Bogdanovich walked over to a couch, where Dorothy sat chewing gum," Carpenter would write. "'You shouldn't chew gum,' he admonished. 'It has sugar in it.' [Dorothy] playfully removed the wad from her mouth and deposited it in his palm." By that time, Bogdanovich had affectionately begun calling her D.R. for Dorothy Ruth; she, in turn, had begun calling him P.B.

Dorothy's role in They All Laughed isn't a big one, but as Carpenter wrote in The Village Voice, "Dorothy, by all accounts, emerges as a shimmering seraph, a vision of perfection clad perennially in white. In one scene she is found sitting in the Algonquin Hotel bathed in a diaphanous light. 'It was one of those scenes that could make a career,' recalls a member of the crew. 'People in the screening room rustled when they saw her.'"

The film wrapped in mid-July. Peter flew with Dorothy to London on the Concorde for a short vacation. They registered at the Dorchester Hotel under assumed names. He bought her a new wardrobe and proceeded to show her the town.

Paul Snider had always found time for other women. At a Mansion party the previous summer, a startled guest had come upon him on a lounge chair by the pool screwing someone else's date. Now Chip noticed that he was seeing several different girls. They all had sympathetic, comforting natures. Paul would spend the whole evening talking about Dorothy and the girls would console him.

One regular overnight guest was a student at Loyola Marymount named Lynn Hayes. Paul had picked her up at the Max 151 disco in Beverly Hills. Lynn took Paul's obsession with Dorothy personally. It made her jealous. When Paul talked about Dorothy, she got mad. For his part, Snider directed his detective friend Goldstein to look into Lynn's family assets.

Paul asked Chip if he'd like to move into the spare bedroom. He could use the money, he said, so he wanted to sublease it. Chip wasn't interested, so Paul offered the room to Patti Laur-man, who lived way out in Riverside. He'd met Patti at an auto show in November 1979 and was grooming her to be a second Dorothy Stratten. A young, blonde check-out girl who modeled on the side, Patti was no Dorothy. Snider had tried to interest Casilli in photographing her for Playboy, but he had declined, because, at 17, she was still under the age of consent. Patti agreed to take the room and moved in with her water bed, her clothes and her record collection.

To earn money that summer, Paul and Chip built weight benches with the metalworking tools Paul had assembled in the days when he customized motorcycles in Vancouver. He sold the benches to Chip's customers at the health spa and through ads in The Recycler, a local newspaper. One day he took Chip to the Pleasure Chest, a sex shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, and showed him an S/M chair--a bondage bench--that sold for $300. Back at the house they put together their own version of a bondage bench--steel frame, padded boards, Velcro restraints--with the same materials used in the weight bench. Paul talked about selling bondage benches to sex shops and through ads in sex magazines, but Chip didn't think he was serious. Weight benches accumulated around the house--a dozen or more by late summer. The bondage bench sat in a corner of Paul's bedroom.

V

Paul Snider's moods grew darker in the last days of July--alternating between anger and despair. He plotted with Goldstein, but with others he was increasingly despondent. The doctor who shared the house found him sitting alone in the living room one evening trying to compose a letter to Dorothy. "This is really hard," he said. He started to cry. Paul felt Dorothy might now be so cut off from him by her lawyers and Bogdanovich that he would never see her again.

He called their former roommate early one morning, crying, and asked her to intercede for him with Dorothy. "I've lost her mind," he said. "She won't listen to me anymore. You're her best friend. You've got to talk to her. We've got to get her back in tune with me again."

Molly had no intention of helping Paul. She was pleased that Dorothy might finally be free of him. He talked about killing himself and the young actress thought he sounded spaced out. He told her to come over, he wanted to talk, but she refused. She was too afraid of him to consider being with him alone.

Dorothy and Peter quietly returned from London to Peter's home in Bel Air in late July. The night Paul learned that Dorothy was back, he drove to Bel Air in the Mercedes with a .38-caliber police special Chip had lent him. "I need it for protection," he'd said. He sat outside Bogdanovich's front gate for two hours with the weapon. He then drove up to the hills above Bel Air, parked and thought about killing himself. He fired the revolver twice before he drove home.

Dorothy had never been happier or busier, though she still had nagging concerns about Paul. She flew to Houston and Dallas on a three-day promotion the first week in August. She had been approached to play Marilyn Monroe in Lawrence Schiller's TV movie about the famous actress but was still working on the Bogdanovich film. She was scheduled to meet with producer Marty Krofft to discuss a major role in his new film, The Last Desperado, starring Bruce Dern. With Peter's help she found an apartment in Beverly Hills. They invited Louise to come to L.A. for a visit the following week.

In Houston, Dorothy threw out the first ball at an Astros game. She wanted to work out a final separation from Paul, and she felt a strong sense of responsibility about doing it herself. She called him from Houston and agreed to have lunch with him on Friday, August eighth.

"The queen is coming back," he boasted at dinner with friends Thursday night.

Patti cleaned the house for Dorothy's visit. Paul bought champagne and red roses. He put on the three-piece fawn suit he'd worn at their wedding. He'd predicted she would wear something dressy to their meeting. She arrived in casual clothes and the reunion went downhill from there. Dorothy didn't read the card on the roses and barely sipped at the champagne. They went out for lunch. She patiently explained to him that the relationship had run its course. She was serious about a separation and wanted to proceed with a settlement.

When Patti Laurman returned to the house, she found Paul and Dorothy there, smiling and talking. At first Patti thought they'd reconciled.

"Should I leave?" Patti asked.

"Naw, she's leaving," Paul said dejectedly.

The telephone rang. It was Bogdanovich's secretary, Linda Ewing. Dorothy spoke to her briefly, then chatted with Patti and went through her clothes. She took some, left the rest for Patti. After Dorothy left, Linda called again to make sure she had gone.

"I couldn't get through to her," Paul told Patti. "Bogdanovich has got her in the palm of his hand. Nothing I say to her sinks in anymore."

Paul's girlfriend Lynn Hayes refused to go to the house that day after his meeting with Dorothy. She was jealous and angry. Paul never bought her champagne or roses. When they went to the beach or roller-skating, he asked her to pay for the hot dogs.

Friday evening Chip and Louann dropped by Paul's house to pick up Chip's .38. Chip was moving back to Florida and wanted Louann to have the gun for protection, he said. Paul went to get the gun, walked outside with Patti, raised it over his head and fired it, laughing strangely. Noise from the freeway masked the sound.

Sitting in the living room upstairs with Louann and Goldstein, Chip thought he heard a shot.

"Are you shooting down there?" he called to Paul.

"No," Paul called back, "that was a backfire on the freeway."

When Paul handed him the gun, Chip checked the cylinder and found that not just one but three shots had been fired. He asked Paul about it in private. "I sat out there in my car the other night and thought about straightening things out my way," Paul said. "It's a sobering experience to sit there and really contemplate the end."

Paul told one of the women in his life something more: that he'd thought about killing Dorothy and then himself.

On Saturday, August ninth, Goldstein took Paul and Patti to a gun store, where Paul tried to buy a $300 semi-automatic rifle. "For protection," he said. The dealer couldn't sell the rifle to Paul because of his Canadian citizenship. Paul asked Goldstein to buy the rifle for him. Goldstein said no.

On Sunday, the tenth, Paul wanted a party. He gave Patti a list of 20 names. He had strawberry daiquiris, barbecued chicken, a tossed salad, rolls, Jell-O and jug wine. Fewer than half the people Patti called showed up. Dorothy was supposed to call him to confirm a meeting on Thursday to talk about the settlement. When he didn't hear from her, he was furious.

Dorothy had gone with Louise to the desert northeast of L.A. for a sunglasses promotion shooting for Optyl. She would be there two days. She called Paul on Monday from her motel and agreed to see him at the house on Thursday, after a morning meeting with Bob Houston. Then she and Louise called Nellie. Dorothy told her mother about the lunch with Paul three days before. "His eyes looked so sad, Mum," she said.

It worried Nellie. She thought Paul was being too quiet. It wasn't like him. "Don't go and see him again," she advised her daughter. "It's dangerous."

"Oh, Mum," Dorothy said, "what could he do?"

"He could hurt you," Nellie warned.

Paul found a shotgun for sale in The Recycler. On Monday, he called the owner and arranged to drive out to the San Fernando Valley to see it. Patti went along for the ride. They stopped at Richard Brander's to enroll Patti in his acting class. Paul bitched at length about Bogdanovich's turning Dorothy against his poster deal while he was there. On his way out, he slammed his fist into the side of Brander's jeep. He drove off toward the valley, got lost, drove back to Beverly Hills, called the owner of the shotgun and arranged to meet him two days later. On Tuesday, August 12, he went roller-skating on Rodeo Drive. Patrick Curtis saw him there and stopped to talk. Something was wrong, Patrick thought: Paul was talking, but he wasn't making sense.

The writer Paul had commissioned to do his biography got an unexpected phone call. "Hang on to my story," Paul said. "It's going to be worth something." The writer didn't know what he was talking about.

On Tuesday evening, Bogdanovich dropped in on Hefner at the Mansion. It was the first time they had seen each other in months. They sat together on a couch in the Living Room. Peter couldn't stay seated. He kept jumping up as he spoke of Dorothy and the picture.

"She's wonderful in it," he said, pacing about. "You're going to be very proud of her."

"I already am," Hefner replied.

Peter then told Hefner about his relationship with Dorothy.

Hefner chided him for their secrecy.

"We're trying to keep a low profile until after the film is released," Peter said. "I don't want Dorothy to go through what Cybill and I did in the press."

"I hope this isn't a casual affair," Hefner said. "Dorothy deserves better than that."

Peter grew serious, shaking his head. "I'm in love," he said, "but I mean really in love. I've never felt this way about anyone before in my life."

Marilyn Grabowski took Dorothy and Louise to lunch at Le Dome on Wednesday, August 13. The French menu confused Louise and Dorothy helped her young sister order. Louise finally decided she wanted a hamburger.

Marilyn couldn't get over how good Dorothy looked. She was always lovely, but at lunch that afternoon she was luminous. Marilyn asked about her London holiday and commented on how happy she seemed. Dorothy nodded, then actually blushed.

She was pleased with the layout she'd been shown for her Hollywood-blondes pictorial. They discussed her schedule for the rest of the week. She was meeting with Bob Houston on Thursday morning. On Friday she was to see Marty Krofft to talk about the part in The Last Desperado. She had a good chance at it. She was also scheduled to appear on The Merv Griffin Show. Over dessert, Marilyn asked about Paul. Dorothy said she thought they could work things out and remain friends. She didn't mention that she planned to see him the next day.

Snider met the shotgun owner at a construction site. The man showed Paul how to load and fire the weapon--it was a short-barreled 12-gauge Mossberg pump--and advised him to buy heavy number-four buckshot if he meant to use it for personal protection. Although he noticed that Paul was wearing a diamond bracelet, he let him talk the price down from $150 to $125. Snider put the gun in its case, put the case in the trunk of the Mercedes and drove off to buy a box of shells.

That same day Paul met with his lawyer, J. Michael Kelly, and talked about a house he wanted Dorothy to buy with him in North Hollywood as an investment for $185,000. A little later, he called Houston. "You're meeting with Dorothy tomorrow," he said. "Ask her about the house." Houston hadn't heard about any house. He thought Snider might be setting him up for something, so he decided not to talk houses with Dorothy unless she brought the subject up.

"Sometimes a Playmate dies," Paul told Bill and Susan La Chasse at their studio Wednesday night. He'd stopped by to look at publicity photographs of Patti. The La Chasses had been Paul's partners in the ill-fated Dorothy Stratten poster project. A poster had been Snider's idea for a big score; he unrealistically estimated that it might net him several hundred thousand dollars. Eventually, from New York, Dorothy had turned the project down. Paul had angrily blamed Bogdanovich.

Now, in a strangely jovial mood, he mentioned Claudia Jennings, 1970 Playmate of the Year, whose career as an actress had been cut short by a fatal car accident the previous fall. "Some Playmates get killed," he said. "Some actresses die before their films come out. When that happens, it causes a lot of trouble."

His comments were curiously inconsistent with his jocular manner, Bill thought. Paul told the La Chasses he'd just bought a shotgun. "I'm going to take up hunting," he said with a smirk.

Patti went home from her first acting lesson to find Paul standing alone in the kitchen staring into space. Later, with Lynn, they watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It was one of Dorothy's favorite films.

Thursday, August 14, 1980. At breakfast, Paul made a list of points he meant to raise with Dorothy. In addition to a cash settlement, he wanted an income. He wanted her help in obtaining a work permit. She could have a legal separation, but he didn't want a divorce. Patti vacuumed. Lynn watched television.

Bogdanovich had found out that Goldstein was following Dorothy. It infuriated him. She decided that it would be better not to tell him she was meeting with Paul. She asked Louise if she wanted to go along. Louise said no, she'd rather stay at Peter's with his two daughters. Dorothy asked her sister not to mention to anyone where she was going and then left for her ten-o'clock appointment with Bob Houston.

Dorothy and her business manager met in his conference room. They discussed the possibility of getting her a new agent. Her lawyer had suggested William Morris or Creative Artists. Houston gave her a box of checks for her new bank account and had her fill out an application for an American Express card. She asked about buying a car. Paul had sold the Jaguar XJ-S and a few of the other gifts she'd received as Playmate of the Year. He wouldn't give up their Mercedes and the 1967 Cougar she'd been driving was falling apart. She wondered if she could afford a used Fiat.

"You don't want to drive a secondhand car," Houston said. "Let me arrange a lease on a new BMW 320 i or an Alfa Romeo."

"Can I really afford that?" she asked.

"Yes."

She smiled.

"But what if I have to give all the money to Paul?" she asked, the smile fading.

"You won't have to give all the money to Paul," Bob assured her. He reminded her that the part she would be meeting Marty Krofft the next day to discuss was a $100,000 leading role. "Don't worry so much," he said. "You're doing just fine."

Paul called. Houston took the call in his office and Snider was cloying: "How are you today, Bob? Dorothy's there, huh? Oh, good. How are things going? You talk about the house yet?"

Bob told him they hadn't talked about any houses yet.

"OK," Paul said. "Well, when do you think Dorothy will be leaving there? Half an hour or so? Well, why don't you have her give me a call before she leaves?"

Back in the conference room Bob told Dorothy about the call. She said that she'd agreed to meet Paul again because he was being nice about everything and she wanted to keep it that way.

"There's really no need for you to go see him," Bob said. "It's none of my business, but you don't have to put yourself through that. It's at the stage where the lawyers should be doing the talking."

"It's better this way," Dorothy said. "I want a divorce, but I don't think Paul can handle it yet." She wanted to proceed with the property settlement and the separation now, and the divorce later. She was convinced that everything would be easier if she met and talked with him in person. "I'd like to remain his friend," she told Houston.

Dorothy called Paul to say she was on her way and then she left.

Snider called Houston again about five minutes later. "Hey," he said, "I understand she's on the way. Did you get to talk about the house?"

Bob said, "No, we didn't talk about any house. We talked about a settlement, you know, a property settlement."

"Oh, good," Paul said. "OK, nice talking to you." And he hung up.

VI

Paul was alone in the house when Dorothy arrived, shortly after 12 noon. Patti and Lynn had left at 11 to go roller-skating in Venice and Paul had agreed to meet them at two. Goldstein had called Paul from a telephone in his Mercedes to make certain everything was all right.

"Dorothy's here and everything's fine," Paul told him.

Sometime earlier Snider and Goldstein had discussed wiring Paul for sound so that they could tape the meeting. Marc had suggested that Paul get Dorothy to say something about taking care of him, something they could use in a claim for financial support. Paul told Goldstein he liked the idea because he thought Thursday would be his last meeting with her. They gave up on the plan when they couldn't assemble the necessary gear.

Lynn and Patti called the house around two o'clock. No one answered. They called several more times during the afternoon. Goldstein began calling about 2:30. No response.

Nellie phoned Louise from Vancouver that afternoon. She asked to talk to Dorothy. Remembering her sister's instructions, Louise replied, "She's downstairs at the pool, Mum. She's swimming. She can't come to the phone."

Lynn and Patti returned from skating at five P.M. and noticed the two cars outside the house, Dorothy's Gal-X-Ina Cougar and Paul's Star-80 Mercedes. The door to the downstairs bedroom was closed. They assumed Paul and Dorothy wanted to be alone and went upstairs. They found Dorothy's purse in the upstairs living room. They watched the evening news. Paul's phone rang and kept on ringing and no one answered it. At 6:30 the two girls went off to have dinner together.

Steve Cushner, the doctor, Paul's housemate, came home an hour later and also noticed the closed door as he went upstairs. The ringing bedroom phone bothered him as it had bothered the girls. His German shepherd seemed restless in the back yard.

At eight that evening Lynn dropped Patti back at the house. "Call me as soon as they come out," Lynn said. "I want to know everything that happened." Lynn drove angrily to her family home in Canoga Park, jealous that Paul was still with Dorothy.

Patti and Steve watched television together in the living room upstairs and listened to the intermittent ringing of the phone. Goldstein called Cushner from his car a little after 11. "You better go down and take a look while I wait on the phone," he said. Patti was afraid to go. Cushner went down alone. He knocked and there was no response. He opened the door, saw two naked bodies, an arc of blood and tissue sprayed across the wall and ceiling, and closed the door again. He was a doctor. He knew the look of death.

The police weren't notified until 12:15 A.M. They arrived at 12:20. By then Goldstein was there, busy with Dorothy's address book.

When Lieutenant Glenn Ackerman came onto the scene soon after, he decided he was dealing with a murder-suicide, a conclusion confirmed by further investigation and the coroner's report. Paul's and Dorothy's clothes were strewed on the floor at one side of the bed. Paul's body lay nearer the door, face down on top of the shotgun in a pool of blood, his head shattered by a massive, powder-burned wound.

Dorothy's body lay across one corner of the bed, her knees on the floor, her face turned down and away from the door, so she almost appeared to be asleep. She had been killed by a shotgun blast into the left side of her face. She had raised her left hand in defense and the shot had taken off the tip of her left forefinger. Death was instantaneous.

There had been a struggle. Strands of Dorothy's long, blonde hair were found clutched in Paul's hand. She had been sexually assaulted, apparently before and after she was killed. The police believed that she had died at least an hour before Paul Snider took his own life. There were bloody handprints on her left leg, her buttocks and her left arm and shoulder. Paul's hands were covered with blood. At the end of the room beyond the two bodies sat the bondage bench Paul and Chip had built, Chip thought, as a joke. Several strips of tape hung loosely from the wall and from the TV set, used and unused, some having served as ligatures to bind her.

On the table next to the bed was a five-page letter to Paul from Lynn complaining about his brooding obsession with Dorothy and his daily exploitation of Patti as domestic help.

Hefner was playing pinball with a few friends in the Game House when the phone rang that night. His secretary, Cis Rundle, said that a man named Marc Goldstein wanted to talk to him on a matter of some urgency. Hefner didn't know anyone named Marc Goldstein and suggested she take a message. A few moments later she was back. "I think you'd better talk to him, Hef," she said. "It sounds important."

"I'm sorry to disturb you at this time of night," the curiously solicitous stranger said. "My name is Marc Goldstein and I thought you ought to be the first to know. Paul and Dorothy have been killed."

Hefner was stunned. The color drained from his face. He grew ashen. All activity in the Game House ceased as the awareness spread among his friends that something terrible had occurred.

"What happened?" Hefner asked after a long silence. "Is it ... a murder-suicide?" Hefner knew nothing of Paul's proclivity for violence, but it was the first thought that occurred to him.

"I dunno," Goldstein said. "It looks more like a double murder to me. I didn't see any weapon." (The shotgun was partially hidden under Snider's body.)

Hefner asked to speak to one of the policemen and Goldstein put Officer Michael Woodings on the line. Not until the police officer had given him his name and badge number did Hefner fully believe this wasn't a hideous joke, the sort of obscene prank that Paul might pull.

"What have you got there?" Hefner asked. Woodings said that the investigating officer hadn't arrived yet but it appeared to be a murder-suicide.

When Hefner put down the phone, his hand was shaking. The friends in the Game House were also Dorothy's friends and the shock of what had happened stunned them. The women were all crying and consoling one another. The men were shaking their heads in disbelief and cursing Snider. Hefner decided he'd better call Peter Bogdanovich.

"Something terrible has happened, Peter," he said when the call went through. "Dorothy is dead... ." Hefner heard a moan, heard the telephone drop. Then the line went dead. He dialed a second number at Peter's residence and a houseman answered. Hef could hear Bogdanovich sobbing in the background. "This is Hefner again," he said. "I just wanted to make sure Peter had someone with him."

Cis Rundle, who is a part-time member of the Mansion staff, knew that the crisis required more experience than she had. She called Hefner's Executive Assistant, Lisa Loving. Cis was so upset when she called that Lisa had trouble understanding her. She understood only that someone was dead. "My first thought was that something had happened to Hef," Lisa said later. "I hung up the phone, grabbed a robe to cover my nightgown and jumped in my car. I don't think it took me two minutes to get back to the Mansion. I ran two red lights. I was shaking the whole way. I left my car in the middle of the driveway with the motor still running. I ran as fast as I could to the Game House. God, I was scared. Then I saw Hef; he was standing, he was OK. I went up to him and touched his arm. It was the strangest thing. It was like his skin was moving, he was shaking so hard, and he didn't look good at all. Hef put his arm around my shoulder and told me Dorothy Stratten was dead.

"All the girls in the Game House were crying," Lisa remembered. "Cis and Victoria Cooke were holding each other. Heidi Sorenson seemed to be in a daze." Lisa suggested they all go back into the house; on the way Hefner told her what little he knew about what had happened. He wondered if he ought to call Dorothy's family in Vancouver. Lisa said the authorities would send someone to the house in person, and she would see to that.

Hefner, badly shaken, went upstairs. Lisa ordered hot tea from the kitchen, told the staff to direct all incoming calls to her and went into the dining room, where she did her best to calm the girls. Heidi, an upcoming Playmate, who was also from Canada, had started to cry and couldn't stop.

"I told them how lucky we were to have known Dorothy in the first place," Lisa would recall. "Dorothy had touched a lot of people and we were lucky to have been a part of that. She had left a great deal behind for all of us to remember."

Then Sondra Theodore and Kelly Tough arrived home after a rehearsal for The Singing Playmates. Lisa met them at the door. Sondra started laughing and hugged her.

"This time you've gone too far, Loving," Sondra said. "Just because Hef works in his pajamas doesn't mean you can come to work in your nightgown!"

"Go upstairs," Lisa told them. "Hef needs you."

"I didn't want them to wander into the dining room and see everyone crying," she said later. She thought Hefner was the one who should tell them the bad news--Sondra because she was Hefner's girlfriend; Kelly because she had known Dorothy since high school in Vancouver.

Marc Goldstein called again to talk to Hefner, but Lisa said he was unavailable and asked if she could help. Goldstein rambled on disjointedly for almost an hour. She thought he sounded strange.

"I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep," Lisa remembered, "and that I had a very long, hard day ahead of me. It was 4:30 A.M. and, as far as I was concerned, time to start waking the world of Playboy. I think I was tired of being the only one awake and working. I've never had to tell anyone about a death before, much less get them out of bed to give them the news. I called our people in New York and Chicago first; then I started in on Los Angeles: Marilyn Grabowski, the head of security, the director of public relations and on down the line. Every person I called seemed to understand what I was saying, but every one of them called me back to ask if I had really just called and to repeat what I had told them.

"After that, the phone never stopped ringing. Newspapers called asking for a statement. The county coroner called requesting information on Dorothy's next of kin. At about eight a.m., Mansion office staffer Judi Bradford came in. Her eyes were still puffy with sleep. Her brother works for a radio station; he'd called and told her the news. She came immediately. I was sitting at my desk feeling a little numb. She said, 'Are you still here, or here again?' Then she saw that I was still wearing my nightgown. She hugged me and said, 'Oh, (continued on page 242)Dorothy Stratten(continued from page 238) God, why did this happen? Why dear, sweet Dorothy?' We held each other for a moment. I cried for the first time that long night."

VII

Early Friday morning, a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman pulled his car into Nellie's driveway in Coquitlam. She saw him through her kitchen window and watched him getting out. John, she thought as she went to her front door; what's he done? Maybe his license has expired. Something to do with the car. The Mountie knocked on the door. Nellie opened it. He stepped inside and removed his hat. "Your daughter's been shot, ma'am," he said.

Nellie didn't know what to do. She went back into the kitchen and started washing dishes. The Mountie didn't know what to do, either. He followed her into the kitchen and started drying them.

"You mean she's dead," Nellie said after a while.

"Yes, she's dead."

He didn't mention Paul's suicide. Nellie thought, I hope they put Paul away for the rest of his life. And then and later, she thought: She was so young.

Dorothy would have celebrated her 21st birthday on February 28. 1981. She died exactly two years and one day after her arrival in L.A.

The staff at Playboy's West Coast Photo Studio began arriving well before working hours that Friday morning. Most had been awakened early by phone calls informing them of Dorothy Stratten's death. Susan Hall, Marilyn Grabowski's assistant, sat by the phone in the still-darkened reception area. Marilyn called her into her office. Susan had never seen her look so distraught.

"Someone has to take Louise back to Vancouver," Marilyn told her. "I want you to do it."

Louise, little Louise, Susan thought. She'd forgotten about Louise. "All right," she said. "Tell me what needs to be done."

She was told that a limousine would be waiting at the Bogdanovich home, where Louise had been staying. The plane reservations had already been made. She was to leave at once.

As Susan started out the door, the phone rang. It was Lisa Loving.

"Louise doesn't know what's happened," Lisa said. "Her family requests that we let them tell her when she gets to Vancouver."

"OK," Susan said, staggered. "Shit."

She looked for something to distract a 13-year-old and found a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House on a bookshelf. She also took a notebook and pens--they could draw, play dots, ticktacktoe. Anything.

She reached Bogdanovich's house in minutes. The limousine was already there.

The young man who took care of the children met her at the door. "You know she doesn't know," he said as he ushered her through the house.

Louise was packing furiously. She turned, saw Susan and recognized her. She glared. "What are you doing here? Where's Dorothy?"

"Well, what did they tell you?"

"That Dorothy had to go away and I'm supposed to go back to Vancouver."

"Oh, now I know, too. Well, I'm to make sure you get back OK."

"Why didn't she call? Nothing's happened to her, has it?" Louise was angry. "She was supposed to call yesterday."

"Well, I don't know. She probably didn't have time. I don't know exactly what's going on--just that I'm to be your escort home."

Louise studied Susan for a long moment, then resumed her packing.

"I flew down by myself. I don't need an escort," Louise announced. She studied Susan suspiciously. "Is anything wrong?"

"No. Everything's OK. But we'd better hurry or we'll miss our plane."

Susan would forever love Bruno, the limousine driver, for his reassuring calm. He didn't play the radio. He didn't talk. His look through the rearview mirror lent her support as Louise continued to pummel her with questions.

"Are you sure Dorothy is safe?"

"I'm sure."

"You know she went to see Paul yesterday. I told her not to, but she wanted to go. That man is crazy. I hate him. I was afraid he'd kidnaped her or something."

"No, she hasn't been kidnaped."

"And you're sure she's OK."

"Yes. A lot of people love Dorothy. She will always be OK."

Louise thought about that. "It's not like her not to call," she said then. "I've been so scared. Even Peter seemed scared. This morning he looked sick. You know, Dorothy was supposed to take me shopping."

At the airport, Bruno took care of the luggage and kept Louise close at hand. So far, so good. They moved through the ticket line, one agonizing step at a time.

Susan noticed a woman studying Louise. Sensing trouble, she sent Bruno and Louise to sit down while she waited for the tickets.

The woman approached her. "That's Dorothy Stratten's sister, isn't it?" she asked.

"Yes," Susan said pleasantly, in the hope she would disappear. "She doesn't know what happened. Please don't say anything."

"I'm with Hoffman Travel," the woman said. "I thought I recognized her. I saw them together when she flew in last Saturday." She said she'd do what she could to help.

She made some calls, then led Louise and her escort to a VIP lounge from which the television set, radio and all newspapers had been removed. The woman arranged for Susan and Louise to board early. The plane was cleared of newspapers and they were seated at the front of the first-class section, with no one else seated nearby.

The flight was difficult for Susan. She tried not to actually lie to Louise but phrased her words so that later they'd have a deeper meaning. By the time they landed, Louise seemed convinced that Dorothy was OK. Susan told her that she could call her any time. She knew that Louise was about to be wrenched from the false security that had been created for her. Then she'd be even more confused and shocked, because earlier in the day, at Bogdanovich's, she'd known.

They deplaned in Vancouver. All of Louise's family was there and she was delighted. She hugged her brother. Nellie took Susan's hand to thank her. She looked steadily into Susan's eyes, so that Susan had to look directly into hers. They were Dorothy's eyes, deep and sincere. When Louise turned away, Nellie showed her grief for just a moment. Susan would never forget that look.

As Susan started toward her return flight, Louise ran after her. Hugged and kissed her. Then she told Susan to take good care of herself.

VIII

Dorothy's death was front-page news throughout the United States, in Canada and abroad. Colleen Camp, an actress who worked with Dorothy in They All Laughed, saw her picture in an Italian newspaper in Brindisi, an Italian seaport on the Adriatic. She was traveling with director François Truffaut. "Why, that's Dorothy," she said. Then she noticed the word morta in the headline.

In Los Angeles, the first sketchy radio reports Friday morning simply said that a Playboy model and her husband had been found dead in their West L.A. home. By 11 o'clock the murder had acquired a righteous motive. The media were reporting erroneously that "police said Paul Snider was despondent over his wife's decision to pose nude in Playboy." Walter Cronkite set the record straight on the CBS Evening News:

"A beautiful young woman living what was described as a Hollywood fairy tale," Cronkite said. "But fairy tales don't always have happy endings. Sometimes they turn ugly and violent. This time, say police, the tragedy apparently was written by a husband despondent over the breakup of his marriage."

Incredibly, newspaper columnist Liz Smith used the occasion to attack Bogdanovich:

"Some of those who witnessed Peter Bogdanovich's ongoing love affair with Dorothy Stratten are blaming the movie director for not protecting the Playmate of the Year from being killed....

"Bogdanovich, everybody's favorite megalomaniac, drew almost violent reaction from one bitter insider: 'He knew that her husband was threatening to kill her, but he refused to back off. Personally, I think the husband shot the wrong person.'"

The Chicago Tribune and others, noting Dorothy's gal-x-ina license plates, found a connection with the much-trafficked cliché "Life in the fast lane" and condemned Playboy and Hollywood indiscriminately for Dorothy's death.

A more discerning examination came from scholar and columnist Max Lerner, a friend of Hefner's who had known Dorothy and Paul. Lerner told their story briefly in his column and then concluded:

"One thinks of Dreiser's American Tragedy, but there has been a shift. The upward-mobile Paul killed not the woman who stood in the way of his career (as in Clyde's case) but the one on whom his hopes for his own life had been centered.

"This is part of the glowing new America that has opened careers for women like Dorothy and threatens their men."

On Saturday, as the California public administrator inventoried Dorothy's and Paul's possessions, Marc Goldstein hung around the house making small talk. He had ransacked the premises, finding the box of number-four shells in the garage, finding papers and correspondence in drawers and closets, finding Paul's underlined copy of Napoleon Hill's hoary classic Think and Grow Rich and an issue of Unity's Daily Word. Thursday's word had been: "I begin this day with a spirit of enthusiasm, knowing that all things are working together to bring forth good."

"I've got her poetry in here," Goldstein bragged, patting his camera. "I've got everything on film." He had photographed the contents of Dorothy's agenda book. He took the books and papers he'd collected and stashed them in his car.

"I'm gathering evidence for Paul," he announced. "I owe it to Paul and Dorothy."

A young bodybuilder arrived to pick up a weight bench he'd ordered. When he saw all the activity, he asked Goldstein what was going on. "Paul shot his wife and killed himself," Goldstein said.

"Why did he do that?" the startled man asked.

"She didn't want him to sell you the weight bench," Goldstein said, laughing hysterically.

Paul Snider's father arrived in L.A. to claim his son's body. He also tried to claim the Star-80 Mercedes but had to return to Vancouver without it.

Burl Eldridge informed Bob Houston that Nellie wanted Dorothy buried in the United States. It was a country she had learned to love, he said, and the place where she had been the happiest.

Hefner sent Elizabeth Norris to Vancouver with tickets to fly Dorothy's family to L.A. for the funeral. Not only Nellie and Burl, Louise and John would be attending but also Simon Hoogstraten, the natural father whom Dorothy had wanted so much to impress. Hoogstraten had first learned of his daughter's success when he read Vancouver newspaper reports of her death.

The family flew to Los Angeles to attend the funeral at Westwood Memorial Cemetery. The site had been chosen by Bogdanovich. It is, coincidentally, where Marilyn Monroe's body is also interred. This was as close as Dorothy would ever get to her dream.

The funeral was held privately on Friday, August 22, eight days after Dorothy's death. Four limousines took Dorothy's family, Hefner, Bogdanovich and his two daughters, Elizabeth Norris, Marilyn Grabowski, Mario Casilli, Bob Houston, her lawyer Wayne Alexander and agent David Wilder into the park. The gates were briefly locked for the 3:15 P.M. service.

At the funeral Nellie met Hefner for the first time. She noticed that his hands were cold and could see that he was still as shocked as she was. Mario didn't know what he was going to say to Louise; she resolved the problem by hugging him. The minister recited the 23rd Psalm and verses from the books of John, Ephesians and Romans. Twice, referring to the Biblical author of two of those books, he had to use the name Paul. Everyone winced.

At her family's request, Dorothy's body had been cremated. Peter had wanted Dorothy buried, and to spare his feelings the urn was placed within a full-sized coffin for burial. After the service, Nellie and Burl stood together, well away from the gravesite. She couldn't watch the burial. At graveside, the others, each in turn, threw a single rose onto the lowered coffin before it was covered with earth. Tears were running down Louise's and John's faces. Hefner put his arms around both of them and held them tight.

There was a wake afterward at Peter's house, but Hefner was too emotionally drained to attend. The others drank and talked of Dorothy and watched her rushes from They All Laughed in the screening room downstairs. Nellie couldn't watch the film. She and Peter stayed upstairs and talked, and cried a little more. The next day the family had lunch at the Playboy Mansion. They toured the grounds. Nellie stood apart from the others in the Aviary. She had tears in her eyes, but she was smiling. Elizabeth Norris went to her. "I'm so pleased to see the place where Dorothy was so happy," Nellie said. "This is where Dorothy felt safe and really loved." The family flew back to Vancouver.

Some Jehovah's Witnesses went to see Nellie the week after she returned to Canada. They had heard about her daughter's death, they told her. Nellie said she believed Dorothy was in heaven and they said no, she was still in the ground. "People aren't resurrected until the Day of Judgment," they insisted.

"But what makes you so sure of that?" Nellie asked.

"It says so in the Bible," they explained. Nellie went and got her Bible. "Ah," they said, "that's an old-fashioned Bible." They read to her from their up-to-date Bible, quoting a verse here and a verse there, to prove that Dorothy would remain where she was buried until the end of time.

Nellie listened amazed. When they finished she said, "Here, I can do that, too." She found the verse that says, Judas went and hanged himself, and then she found the verse where Jesus says, "Go, and do thou likewise." "You see," she said, "Jesus wants us to go and hang ourselves." The Jehovah's Witnesses looked at her very strangely. Then they gathered their materials and went away.

Later, Nellie would fall into fitful sleep, only to awaken in the middle of the night, crying. Dorothy is dead, she would tell herself in the dark, Dorothy is dead.

She trusted Paul, Nellie thought, and he betrayed her. You want to save your children from so many things, but you can't. God, who knows everything, must know why she was killed. There must be a reason.

If she had only played the actress with him that afternoon, Nellie thought. Pretended. But she couldn't. She was too honest.

Nothing seemed to matter anymore. Nellie listened to other people talk and none of it mattered. Crying: "It should have been me. I would have been glad if it had been me. Dorothy was so young, so young."

Back in California, Hefner was remembering Dorothy. He was certain the last two years of her life had been the happiest she had ever known. She had been growing at an incredible rate, not only professionally but as a person. The first decisions she ever had a chance to make for herself were those she made in pursuit of her career and her future after coming to L.A. She was just beginning to be a complete human being, escaping from the pain of near poverty and acquiring the ability to take care of herself and her family. Unfortunately, the sickness that was Paul Snider followed her. He used her, without concern or compassion for what was best for Dorothy. When he couldn't use her anymore, he killed her.

For a long time Hefner had maintained that society's traditional values, secular and religious, were designed to keep women in a state of subjugation. Now, finally, women were being liberated--economically, socially and sexually. They were discovering alternatives, coming into their own. That was the issue that had proved too much for Paul Snider. He couldn't stand to see Dorothy become an independent human being, with a mind of her own, a body of her own, a life of her own.

Bogdanovich threw himself into post-production work on They All Laughed. Editing the film surrounded him with images and memories of Dorothy. He chose an epitaph from A Farewell to Arms for the red-granite stone that was set on Dorothy's grave:

Dorothy Stratten

February 28, 1960--August 14, 1980

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.

We love you, D.R.

The media continued to show interest in the story of Dorothy Stratten's life and death. Bogdanovich was pressed for interviews. He decided not to give any, at least until They All Laughed was finished and released. He meant the picture to be his own personal tribute to Dorothy. In lieu of interviews, he issued the following statement several weeks after her death:

"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.--Peter Bogdanovich."

Playboy people helped Dorothy's family however they could during the difficult weeks following the funeral. Elizabeth Norris sent John Hoogstraten the Houston Astros shirt and cap given Dorothy when she threw out the first ball at the Astrodome, and pictures of Dorothy wearing them. John replied:

Dear Elizabeth: Thank you very much for the baseball shirt and the pictures. The shirt fits me perfect. We couldn't find the hat though, unless Louise doesn't want to give it to me.

I am up in Dawson Creek now. Today was the first day in my course. I haven't seen too much of the town yet, but from the campus the hills are a golden prairie color with patches of green trees. It's really beautiful country. It's getting ready for winter now. Last night we had a light snow.

At home things are still the same. Mom is having a hard time accepting what happened, and now me going away to school. She was very happy that I got the chance though.

I was thinking of sending Hugh Hefner a letter thanking him for all that he's done for us. I was wondering if I might send it to you, Elizabeth, and you could forward it. I can imagine all the mail he must get. My letter could sit around for a long time.

Well, it's getting late. I'm saying hi from everyone at home as well as myself. We all love you. Take care. Love, John.

Nellie was shocked to discover that Paul Snider's family had filed a claim against the assets of Dorothy's estate. It seemed incredible to her that the Sniders intended to benefit financially from the murder of her daughter by one of their own. She called Hefner in panic. If Dorothy died first, then the Sniders might claim the entire estate--with Dorothy's assets passing to Paul on her death and to his next of kin when he killed himself an hour later. "In all of this, there must be some justice," Nellie cried. Hefner agreed and promptly hired lawyers to represent Dorothy's family in the fight.

Marc Goldstein smelled a profit in the story. He talked to several writers about assembling a book on the death of Dorothy Stratten. He had a file full of documents, he said--private correspondence, pages from her personal journal, poetry she had written to Paul and more.

After talking to Goldstein, a correspondent for The Globe, a sleazy Canadian tabloid, wrote a story for the October 14 issue titled "slain playmate linked to celebrity callgirl racket," with the subtitle "Was She Murdered to Keep Her Quiet?" It was Goldstein's original double-murder fantasy repackaged with a fictional callgirl story added for extra reader interest.

But more legitimate entrepreneurs were also showing interest in exploiting the Stratten story. Goldstein caught the attention of Larry Wilcox, co-star of the popular television series CHiPs. In November, MGM announced that Wilcox would produce The Dorothy Stratten Story for NBC-TV, with Marc L. Goldstein as technical advisor for a reported fee of $41,000.

Other publications were planning articles about Dorothy, including New York's Village Voice, California's New West and several U. S. and Canadian newspapers. Hefner met with Teresa Carpenter, who was researching a cover story for the Voice. He was anxious to put to rest the notion Dorothy died because Playboy or Hollywood exploited her. "That appeals to a popular prejudice of our time," Hefner said, "but it simply isn't so. Playboy and Hollywood were an escape for Dorothy--from poverty and from the subjugation she suffered in a relationship with a very sick guy. When Snider saw his meal ticket and his connection to power slipping away, he killed her."

If Hefner had hoped for objective reportage from Teresa Carpenter and The Village Voice, he was due for a disappointment. Death of a Playmate proved to be a viciously anti-Playboy, anti-male diatribe in which Carpenter linked Snider, Bogdanovich and Hefner as three of a kind. Since Carpenter had no evidence to support such an assertion regarding Hefner, she simply fabricated facts ("His chief preoccupation nowadays is managing the Playmates") and invented imaginary motivations ("Yet with all of those beautiful women at his disposal, he has not one Marion Davies to call his own. Dorothy exposed that yearning, that ego weakness ..."). On the other hand, Carpenter perceived Snider to be "one of Playboy's most honest apostles. He acted out dark fantasies never intended to be realized. Instead of fondling himself in private, instead of wreaking abstract violence upon a centerfold, he ravaged a Playmate in the flesh." Snider's sin, Carpenter concluded, "his unforgivable sin, was being small-time."

Nellie's response to the Carpenter comparisons was contempt. "That's not true," she said. "Hefner helped Dorothy and the family." She found it beyond belief that people credited Dorothy's success to others but blamed Dorothy for her own murder. Nellie saw the accusation in people's eyes, the accusation that her daughter was dead because she'd appeared in Playboy, because she was a bad girl. It was yet another cruelty added to the pain of her daughter's death. "People here say that it was too much for her," Nellie said. "Well, she was doing fine. It was too much for Paul."

Teresa Carpenter's Death of a Playmate was illustrated with several photographs, including a semi-nude of Dorothy shot when she was under the age of consent (19 in Vancouver). The article was syndicated in newspapers throughout America and abroad. Motion-picture rights went to director Bob Fosse for a price reportedly in excess of $125,000. Dorothy's family received no part of those revenues. So much for the exploitation of Dorothy Stratten.

Dorothy's exceptional beauty, her rapid rise to fame and her premature, violent death are the stuff that cult figures are made from. Early evidence suggests that a Dorothy Stratten cult may be emerging. In feature stories following her murder, newspapers referred to Dorothy as a "goddess for the Eighties" and there were frequent comparisons to the tragic life and death of blonde superstar Marilyn Monroe. Back issues of Playboy with photographs of Dorothy were reportedly much in demand in used-book stores. Galaxina premiered in Kansas City on the day Dorothy died. In the weeks that followed, the film was advertised across the country as "Introducing Dorothy R. Stratten, Playboy's Playmate of the Year." It did unexpectedly strong business at the box office. One young fan, the son of Mansion secretary Cis Rundle, explained, "The movie was nothing special, but Dorothy was a queen." The TV docu-drama and Bob Fosse film were both referred to in the Hollywood trade papers as "hot properties."

In a sincere tribute, the rock group Prism recorded a single for Capitol Records called Cover Girl and included it in a greatest-hits LP, All the Best from Prism, dedicated "To Dorothy":

Five years in eighteen monthsShe got everything all at onceShe moved out, that's when he moved inCover girl, it's such a damn wasteYou were more than just a pretty faceI never thought I'd never see you again.I saw her picture on the six o'clock newsJust read about the cover girl bluesGoodbye my cover girl.

© 1980 Capitol Records--Emi of Canada Limited

From the outset, Hefner had been concerned with not exploiting the tragedy. He ordered a reprinting of the cover of the 1981 Playmate Calendar, replacing Dorothy's picture with that of another Playmate, at a cost of $180,000 and a delay in the on-sale date of several weeks. He similarly scrapped a Christmas subscription ad, a Christmas card and several other promotional pieces that featured pictures of the 1980 Playmate of the Year.

Dorothy's final, favorite pictorial on the famous blondes of Hollywood was pulled from a holiday issue. It had seemed too soon after her death and the pain of her passing was still acute for too many at Playboy. The pictorial was rescheduled for the March issue with plans to accompany it with an editorial tribute. But the passage of time didn't dim her memory, or the hurt of it, and the pictorial was once again postponed. Instead, Hefner commissioned an indepth biography for the May 1981 issue, so that Playboy readers would know and remember Dorothy as she was. It was his way of saying, We love you, D.R.

IX

Some time after the first black weeks of loss and bitterness, Nellie remembered a play Dorothy had talked about on one of her visits to Vancouver. Nellie mentioned the play to Peter and he sent her a copy. It was Our Town by Thornton Wilder. Dorothy had learned the part of Emily to read at casting calls. Emily grows up in Grover's Corners, marries, dies young in childbirth. Dorothy had loved the role. She'd told Nellie about it and recited her lines.

In the cemetery where she is buried, Emily greets the others of Grover's Corners who have died. She isn't ready to give up life and she asks the stage manager who narrates the play to let her go back for a little while. The dead warn her against returning to life. She won't like it, they tell her. It isn't wise. Emily goes anyway, back to her 12th birthday, and reunites with her mother and father, and tries with mounting urgency simply to make everyone see everyone, to make everyone stop and look. But, busy with living, they don't, and Emily calls to the stage manager:

"I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another.... Take me back--up the hill--to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look."

Nellie read the lines she heard for the first time from her daughter:

"Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners ... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking ... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths ... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you."

Dorothy had then said to her, Nellie remembered, "You know, Mum, if we knew that we were going to die, let's say tomorrow, God bless us, we'd absorb everything we could in the few hours we had left. Everything! We wouldn't waste time."

"Dorothy's family thought Paul was rude, self-centered and obnoxious, and they said so."

"People responded not only to Dorothy's beauty but also to her naivete, warmth and charm."