The sordid tragedy of Dorothy Stratten (1960-80) has been rehashed countless times over the past four decades. I find it less compelling for the horrific story itself than for its resonances. It comes as part of an entire web of stories (some factual, some fictional) that seem to reinforce and illuminate one another. See if you can spot the theme. There are surely hundreds of other examples. but here are a few moments in Hollywood history that underline the mood of the time:
In 1973, 13 year old MacKenzie Phillips, having already been raped by her father, is at the center of a “jailbait” subplot in American Graffiti. (MacKenzie’s stepmother, Michelle Phillips had been 18 when she married her 27 year old father.)
That same year, nude scenes were filmed with 16 year old Melanie Griffith for the film Night Moves, released two years later. Griffith had begun dating 22 year old Don Johnson when she was only 14, around the same time he appeared in the free love film The Harrad Experiment with her mother Tippi Hedren. Griffith and Johnson were briefly married in 1976, when she was 19. She then dated Ryan O’Neal, 16 years her senior. Tatum O’Neal alleges that Griffith tried to involve her in an orgy during that period. O’Neal also said that she had been sexually assaulted by her father’s drug dealer and others throughout her childhood.
As an actress of course Tatum had been in numerous inappropriate situations in Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973). Bogdanovich had left his wife Polly Platt for the 20 year old star of his first major movie The Last Picture Show, Cybil Shepherd. For her part, Platt would go on to write and produce the notorious 1978 film Pretty Baby, which inappropriately sexualized young Brooke Shields. She played a prostitute in the film. Jodie Foster had done the same in Taxi Driver (1976) and would be sexualized again in Carny (1980).
And of course, in 1977 Roman Polanski was arrested for the statutory rape and drugging of a 13 year old at the home of Jack Nicholson. Nicholson and Polanski had worked together on Chinatown (1974), which had revelations of incest and abuse at its core. Since the ’70s, many other similar accusations about the director have come to light. Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate had been guests on Playboy After Dark shortly before Tate’s murder…which brings us, which very little strain I might add, to Hugh Hefner.
In 1977 Dorothy Stratten was a 17 year old Dairy Queen employee in Western Canada. She was spotted and groomed by a lowlife named Paul Snider, a pimp, pornographer, and night club promoter, who took nude photos of her. Initially Snider was her manager, and then, in 1979, he became her husband.
Meantime, however, Dorothy had been hired to model for Playboy and became one of Hef’s proteges. She can be seen in full Bunny garb in Playboy’s Roller-Disco & Pajama Party and the movie Americathon, both in 1979. Appearances on Fantasy Island and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century led to her starring role in the campy film Galaxina (1980) with Avery Shreiber. (History would repeat itself in 1996 when another Playboy model from Western Canada, Pamela Anderson, starred in Barb Wire). In 1980, Stratten was voted Playmate of the Year. Then, Peter Bogdanovich cast her in his comedy They All Laughed. The two fell in love (she was still only 20).
Given that Stratten was still married to Snider, this proved complicated. She had been edging away from him ever since coming into the Playboy fold. He was controlling, and possessed of a sleazy style that theoretically legit Hollywood people preferred to distance themselves from, although I think we’ve more than established that the difference here is one of degree, not of kind. At any rate, Stratten was in the process of breaking it off with Snider when he fatally shot her, and then himself, in August 1980. Both were found nude at the scene of the murder.
I note here the similarity of Dorothy’s surname to that of this man, for now begins the circus. They All Laughed came out in 1981. It’s hard to know what to do about releasing a film in a case like this. The usual choice is to just eat it, withdraw the release, so you won’t seem to be exploiting a tragedy. In certain cases (e.g. James Dean’s films), a tragedy can help box office, but in the Stratten case, the death was too closely intertwined with the personal life of the director. In a certain light, Bogdanovich can even be seen as at fault, or at the very least as bearing some responsibility. The best option would have been to put the film in mothballs for a good long while. But this moment came just as Bogdanovich’s career was sliding. His previous several films had all failed. In limited release, They All Laughed had been a commercial and critical failure as well. Desperate for success, Bogdanovich spent he entirety of his personal fortune to release the film himself, gambling on public sympathy. The movie was still not a success, and now he looked worse than ever. His career never recovered. But the Stratten story continued for years.
In 1981, Larry Wilcox (of CHiPs) optioned the story and produced the TV movie The Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story starring Jamie Lee Curtis (then known entirely as a horror star) and Bruce Weitz of Hill Street Blues as Snider. The completely fictional TV movie The Calendar Girl Murders (1984), seems relevant here as well. That one stars early career Sharon Stone, and features Robert Culp as the Hef character, with Tom Skerritt, Alan Thicke, Barbara Parkins, Barbara Bosson (also of Hill Street), and Robert Morse.
In 1983 Bob Fosse directed Star 80 (named after Snider’s vanity plates), and this was my first exposure to Stratten’s story. At first blush it seems an odd subject for the choreographer/director to take up, but to me it makes perfect sense, or at least as much sense as his directing Lenny several years earlier had. Fosse had come out of burlesque; the worlds of stripping and of pin-up photography are inextricably linked. Fosse had also been sexually abused and exploited as a child performer. I can see this material speaking to him. Though the darkness of the story (and the fact that Fosse directed it like a horror movie) turned a lot of people off. To make it even more meta, it starred Mariel Hemingway, who had played the underaged love interest in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979). Two years earlier, Tony Roberts’ character had quipped in Annie Hall, “Twins, Max! 16 years old. Can you imagine the mathematical possibilities?” The shadow of pedophilia would hang over Allen’s career for decades, as well. Anyway both of Hemingway’s older sisters claimed to have been abused by their father. Margaux, who’d also posed for Playboy, committed suicide in 1996.
Star 80 was Fosse’s last film. It also featured Eric Roberts as Snider, Cliff Robertson as Hefner, as well as Carroll Baker, David Clennon, Josh Mostel, Jordan Christopher, and Roger Rees, as a fictionalized version of Bogdanovich, as the latter indicated that he would sue if he found himself misrepresented in the film.
Bogdanovich told his own version of the story in the 1984 book, The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960–1980. The book has been described as “relentlessly self-serving”, as it projects all of the animus and blame on Hefner. Hefner had a stroke the following year, attributing it in large part on stress caused by the book. And Bogdanovich merely looked like he was attempting to profit from the tragedy, which did nothing to revive his career. (Mask released the following year, did much more for him professionally).
But we are far from done. Because in 1988, Bogdanovich married Dorothy’s 20 year old younger sister Louise Stratten (b. 1968). Bogdanovich was nearly 50 years old at the time, and had been paying for the younger Stratten’s education since she was a tween. Hefner accused Bogdanovich of interfering with the girl when she was as young as 13, directly after Dorothy’s murder. Even if that were not so, it seems a violation of trust not unlike the Woody Allen/ Soon-Yi case, which came to light four years later.
To suggest that nothing connects all these stories, as I can imagine some people might, is to be disingenuous in the extreme. Obviously, I’m not here to point a finger exclusively at the venality of Hollywood, since there are just as many appalling stories of exploitation and pedophilia arising out of, oh, Christian religious sects, for example. Whether a society is hedonistic or hypocritical seems to make no difference (there is no third option for a society, at least there never has been in all of recorded history). Most of us agree that 13 is too young, and that 16 is also too young, and that no age whatsoever is old enough for intimacy with a father figure (real, or adopted). And where is the line of demarcation for sex traffickers? We include the likes of Snider in that category, obviously. Many would consider it a bit much to include Hefner or the movie directors who sexualize minors, but I’m not sure where the line ought to begin. The law is clear, and the majority of the public seems consistent in its disapproval of powerful older men preying on the young for their own gratification. In light of which, shouldn’t the behavior be more rare?
And as for murder, it’s coming from the same place, isn’t it? It’s expressing ownership of a human being, to dispose of howsomever the powerful may please. There is a combined selfishness and objectification, and a calculation that certain lives don’t matter as much as certain other lives. Most men seem not to care very much unless it touches them personally, the old “as a mother’s son…a wife’s husband…a father of daughters…and a brother of sisters” line of horse shit. The rest of the time though, it’s all, “Sixteen year old twins, Max! Imagine the possibilities!”
(Travalanche) 
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