Naked and Dead

 

Forty-five years ago last Sunday, August 13, 1978, an eighteen-year-old girl from the Vancouver area got off a plane for the first time, at LAX. Her name was Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten. Later, an investigative reporter writing in a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece for the Village Voice would say that she was the center of the hopes, dreams, and ambitions of three men. She was. One was Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy (who may have raped her); he made her famous. One was filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, her lover; he tried to make her immortal. The third was Paul Snider, her husband; he killed her.

 

Hoogstraten, better known under the name Dorothy Stratten, was a seventeen-year-old high school student when a twenty-six-year-old man, usually described as a “nightclub promoter and part-time pimp,” Paul Snider, walked into the Dairy Queen where she worked part-time, after school. Later, in what may have been retrospective X-ray vision, everyone involved claimed to have seen through him. That he was off-putting seems indisputable, but he charmed at least one person: Dorothy. Years later, the character based on her mother, played by Carol Baker in a movie, says that someone must have forged her signature. Perhaps, but Dorothy and Paul dated, and at some point, he convinced her to pose naked for a professional photographer. As she was under nineteen, under Canadian law a parent had to sign for her when the pictures were sent to Playboy, and the name signed was her mother’s.

Playboy liked what they saw, and off she went to L.A.

She met Hugh Hefner, who arranged for her to stay at the Playboy Mansion until she could find an apartment, and gave her a job as a Bunny at one of his Playboy Clubs. She was chosen as Playmate of the Month, August 1979. Though issues hit the stand prior to the cover date, the nearly-a-year wait may have seemed slow. Everything else began to happen fast. Paul flew to L.A., and soon convinced her to go to Las Vegas for a quickie marriage. She got an agent, took acting classes, did a couple of TV shows, and had parts in several movies. Peter Bogdanovich spotted her – by then it wasn’t only the Paul Sniders spotting her, everyone took note of this extremely beautiful young woman – and offered her a starring role in a movie he was about to shoot, They All Laughed. While this was happening, she was chosen as Playmate of the Year. And, she became estranged from her husband. Paul was a control freak who hung out at her movie sets, and when he wasn’t there, called constantly. The tension was apparent to everyone who knew or worked with her. Bogdanovich convinced her to tell Paul that in New York, where they’d be shooting, it would be a closed set, and he should stay in L.A.

By the time she returned, she and Peter were lovers, and she moved into his Bel-Air mansion. She broke the news to Paul, who did not take it well. On August 14, 1980, she went to their former home, apparently to settle matters. There, he raped her. Taking a shotgun he bought from a private party the day before, he held it close to her face and shot her. According to a police timeline it was another hour before he used it on himself. His roommates returned home that night, and after a private detective he’d used to spy on Dorothy reached them, and convinced them to check on him, they opened the bedroom door and found two nude bodies and a lot of blood.

 

The piece in the Village Voice was called “Death of a Playmate.” In 1981 a made-for-TV movie called Death of a Centerfold: the Dorothy Stratten Story, starred Jamie Lee Curtis as Dorothy, Bruce Weitz as Paul, Mitchell Ryan as Hefner, and Robert Reed as “David Palmer,” the director who becomes her boyfriend. Two years later Bob Fosse’s Star 80 starred Mariel Hemingway and Eric Roberts, with Cliff Robertson as Hefner, and Robert Rees as “Aram Nicholas,” the director who becomes her boyfriend. Meanwhile, They All Laughed was released posthumously, and flopped. Bogdanovich, who collapsed when told of Dorothy’s murder, bought up the rights and released it himself. Despite critical favor, some now calling it among his best films, the movie cost him his fortune, including the mansion where he and Dorothy briefly lived together. In 1984 his account of her life and death, The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980, came out. In it he claimed that Hefner had sexually assaulted Dorothy when she was eighteen. Hefner denied it, but did concede that he shared a fatherly hug with her. Not many fathers hug their daughters when both are naked in a hot tub, but neither party is around today to discuss his parenting skills. Bogdanovich also paid for the education of Dorothy’s sister Louise, who was twelve when her sister was murdered. When she was twenty, she married Bogdanovich. They divorced thirteen years later, in 2001. Elsewhere in popular culture, Dorothy is referenced in songs by Bryan Adams, Prism, and Bush. She is the “first-born unicorn” in the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication.” More recently, she is a minor character in the miniseries Welcome to Chippendales.

 

The made for television version of the story opens with shots of Dorothy posing for her spread in Playboy. Television being what it was in 1981, she wears lingerie. The film tested the expanding freedom of TV, but nudity and foul language were still constrained. Curtis was twenty-three, and a rising star. She manages to make her performance, aging from seventeen to twenty, convincing. Her Dorothy is a victim on the verge of freeing herself from the men who victimize her, possibly including her new boyfriend and director, David Palmer. Palmer is seen as also having the urge to dictate to her, though less brutally than Paul Snider. At forty-nine, Robert Reed was twenty-six years older than Curtis. In life Bogdanovich was more than twice Stratten’s age, but the age difference between Reed and Curtis was and seems greater.

Bruce Weitz was thirty-eight, and looks like a forty-year-old man trying to pass himself off as in his twenties. Weitz is best known as Belker, from Hill Street Blues, the growling cop. He makes a good villain, but it’s damned near impossible to imagine Jamie Lee Curtis’ Dorothy ever getting together, never mind staying, with his Paul. He is angry, nasty, and whenever he tries to schmooze someone, so obviously fake success is unimaginable. Just to make sure we, the audience, know how bad he is, nearly every character in the movie warns her not to go to the house, the day she goes to the house. Not since she played Laurie in Halloween, have so many people warned her not to go in the house. It was the audience for Halloween, so she had an excuse for ignoring us, but this time around they might as well have put up a neon sign in the driveway: “Dorothy, don’t go in here.” Not for her benefit, but for ours. In some screenwriting circles this is known as foreshadowing.

 

Quick, which picture won the most Academy Awards without winning Best Picture? The answer is Cabaret, which won eight, but was up against The Godfather. Bob Fosse got a measure of revenge by beating Francis Ford Coppola as Best Director, becoming the only person to win an Oscar, a Tony (“Pippin”), and an Emmy (“Liza With a Z”) the same year. Fosse, a legendary dancer, choreographer, and stage director, only directed five movies. At least three are now considered among the greats. Aside from Cabaret he made Sweet Charity, a major flop, though it now gets 82% approval from Rotten Tomatoes, and Lenny, acclaimed as one of Dustin Hoffman’s best performances. His semi-autobiographical All That Jazz is another great. So is his final film: Star 80.

Like its television predecessor, under the credits were are treated to Dorothy’s photo shoot. Unlike on TV, she is not wearing negligee. We also get a voiceover of Dorothy describing how the shooting of her centerfold spread took five months, and thousands of photos. And as the credits end, there is a jarring transition. We don’t quite know, yet, where we are, but wherever it is, it’s disturbing. We will gradually realize we are in the bedroom with Paul, during the hour between her murder, and his suicide. The juxtaposition of sex, and violence, will recur through the film. We won’t see more of Dorothy than is already revealed; Fosse doesn’t show us “pink,” as they used to say back then, but he shows everything else. The murder scene, though, comes to us as a horrible striptease.

 

Had Star 80 not been made, Death of a Centerfold might be remembered as a memorable effort. It was made, and is so much better than its predecessor the earlier movie is best forgotten. Fosse’s screenplay, and his direction, are vastly superior, but it’s the performances which most matter. Mariel Hemingway has worked steadily as an actress since she was a kid, but after a promising start, never became the star that Jamie Lee Curtis became. So, one might expect an unfavorable comparison with Curtis. It’s the other way around. Her Dorothy is stunning. At twenty-one, she was two years younger, but she had a little girl voice, so is utterly convincing as the teenaged Dorothy. Curtis plays innocent, but Hemingway seems innocent. As good as she is, Eric Roberts is better. Much better. This is really his movie. Roberts has more credits than any actor working today, over seven hundred and constantly growing. Because he has done so much, and so much unworthy of him, and also because of drug problems when he was younger, he is an underrated actor. In truth, though his sister Julia is far more famous, Eric is the great actor in the family.

 

Roberts is only five years older than Hemingway, so his Paul is a more plausible pairing for her Dorothy. Unlike Weitz, he manages to make Paul simultaneously repulsive, and convincingly charming. We believe that Dorothy falls in love with this guy, god help her. Weitz played a phony who dared others to call him that. Roberts’ Paul is a phony who is desperately needy, who seems to beg others not to call him that. Weitz was cocky, whereas Roberts is filled with self-loathing, constantly judging himself. Underneath, he is angrier than the other version, but it is a slow, simmering anger, a volcano which will take time to build up to its eruption.

 

It would be easy to dismiss Star 80 as one more exploitation of Dorothy Stratten. Maybe it is. It’s also a condemnation of the world in which she died. I think a movie can be both. Perhaps that sort of contradiction makes for great art. Where “Centerfold” makes an easy play for feminism, with its Dorothy ready to assert he independence, “Star” is far more subtle. It operates in subtext, not text. A key set of scenes clues us in. During her final hour, inside the house (filmed, by the way, inside the actual house) we see that Paul has turned his room into a disturbing shrine. There is a poster of Dorothy’s head which takes up an entire wall, with smaller shots, many nudes, of her around the room. Meanwhile, we cut to an office in the Playboy Mansion. Earlier we saw Hefner and his assistant reviewing strips of film taped to a bulletin board, peering at them like microscope slides, as they discover the existence of a girl from Vancouver and decide that “maybe” she could be a playmate. Now, they are once again looking at film strips, this time, of a girl from Iowa, and again saying that perhaps they should summon her. Alternating with Hef and with Paul is Aram, the Bogdanovich character. He is in an editing room, tinkering with a scene from his movie. We see Dorothy, but in the clip she is at the end of a darkened hall. We know it must be her, but she is dim and small, her identity stripped away, merely an image imprisoned on film.

 

These small moments occur in a larger context. Dorothy Stratten’s brief moments in the spotlight, in the late seventies, and the making of the movie in the early eighties, were an era of decadence and hedonism even Hollywood would come to see as obsessive. Exposed bodies are everywhere, in strip clubs, at wet T-shirt contests, at wet jockstrap contests, around the pool at the Playboy Mansion, in Paul’s room as he practices bodybuilding poses, in scenes Dorothy films for her roller derby movie, and of course in the recurring images of Dorothy and others naked in pictures. There are no drugs, though in dialogue we find a reference to cocaine. Otherwise, the Oz Dorothy finds herself in, is hypersexualized, cynical, and soulless. Paul Snider may be a small-time hustler, but he is a nobody, in the scheme of things. In this Oz the wizards behind the curtain may promise Dorothy many things, but none will take her home again.