Picturing Peter Bogdanovich. Peter Tonguette
of his introduction to Stratten. It was 1978, and although he was left breathless by her beauty, and she was intrigued with him, they would not see each other again until the following year. As he wrote in his memoir of their relationship, The Killing of the Unicorn, he assumed she was attached (in fact, she had yet to marry Snider), while she was fed misinformation about him concerning his previous relationships and the supposedly dodgy state of his career.50
When they met again, it was not Bogdanovich but Stratten who made the first move. “In ancient courting customs,” he reflected, echoing a pattern evident in many of his films, “it was the woman who pursued the man.” One day at the mansion, Stratten spotted Bogdanovich, remembered their earlier encounter, and called his name: “I turned and saw the unfamiliar bleached hair before I saw anything else.”51 Her natural radiance, he learned, had been “improved” by Playboy, but that was not all that was troubling her.
Over the course of many subsequent days and nights together, Stratten revealed to Bogdanovich that she was profoundly unhappy in both her life and work—having deep reservations about her recent marriage and finding herself increasingly uncomfortable with posing for Playboy. Stratten sought out Bogdanovich the way someone lost at sea wires SOS; she had no family in the United States and desperately few allies.
Bogdanovich provided Stratten with answers to many of her problems. He gave her what ultimately became a major role in They All Laughed and suggested she avail herself of the many non-Playboy modeling and acting opportunities that would surely come her way. Above all, he loved her, and she him.
He came to feel, he wrote, “as though we had known each other all our lives,”52 and the equality of their relationship is striking. Yes, he was older and more experienced. Yes, he showed her the sights when she arrived in New York for the first time to make They All Laughed. And, yes, she had come to him looking for help. But she was already a writer of poetry and an enthusiast of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (having acted in a production of it) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, having fully grasped their themes. They resolved to read Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot at the same time because it was Bogdanovich’s father’s favorite book. “I’m sure I had preconceived ideas about Hef’s Playmates,” he said, “but Dorothy was very spiritual, very deep.”53 And she was already aware—far more than he was—of the resentment and wickedness of men, owing both to her family background (her father having left the scene early on and her mother enduring a subsequent failed marriage) and to her own experience with her abusive husband. “I hadn’t had much exposure to men who consistently browbeat women, much less terrorized them,” Bogdanovich wrote. “But Dorothy had seen little else from men all her life.”54 By this time, Stratten had a firm wish to get a divorce from Snider.
Both Bogdanovich and Stratten were a bit out of touch: two firstgeneration North Americans with a hankering for their roots. “D. R. was a small-town girl who tried, against her better instincts, to be a ‘liberal, modern’ woman,” Bogdanovich commented in The Killing of the Unicorn, referring to her by a nickname. “Neither she nor I had ever really dealt with the difference between the Old World culture of our parents and the ruthless American way we found outside the home.” The presence of Playboy in her life was an aberration, Snider’s doing; when she met him, she was employed at a Dairy Queen and later took a job at the phone company. She told Bogdanovich that “hate” is what got her through posing for the magazine: “I mean that I hated all those men so much, and my hatred was so strong, it made a kind of invisible shield between them and me, and then I didn’t feel as naked anymore.” Even after she became famous the world over because of Playboy, she retained, at her core, an innocent quality entirely alien from it; Bogdanovich wrote of being struck, during one encounter, that she “looked as though she had stepped out of the nineteenth century.”55
Peter Bogdanovich had lasting relationships with Polly Platt and Cybill Shepherd, but in Dorothy Stratten he found a mate for life, a woman whose beauty and character rose above that of anyone he had ever known. After filming ended on They All Laughed, the two enjoyed a honeymoonlike vacation in London. “The happiest moment of my life was with Dorothy in London, under the trees near the Thames,” he said. “We started laughing from sheer happiness.”56 When Stratten made it back to Los Angeles, she felt she had to deal with her now-estranged husband, who had become a menace. She met with Snider at the residence they once shared, but she never returned to what was by then her new home—Bogdanovich’s house on Copa de Oro.
On August 14, 1980, Paul Snider murdered Dorothy Stratten and killed himself later that same day. She was twenty.
The enormity of the disaster is difficult to fathom. Imagine having two long, loving relationships that came to unhappy ends. Imagine then meeting a person, in the least likely of places, whom you find you love more than anyone who came before her and who loves you back. Imagine discovering that the love is not passing, but strong, solid, and profound. Imagine winning that improbable lottery—and imagine having it snatched from you in an instant.
Could most men endure such a reversal? For a time, it seemed as though Peter Bogdanovich might not—yet he persevered.
He heeded the counsel of Merlyn in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King: “The best thing for being sad … is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails.”57 So at the age of forty-two he set about acquiring knowledge as never before. “Her death … was either the end of Life,” he wrote, “or somehow had to be turned into the most profound form of comprehension, from which a new beginning might emerge.”58 He would reckon with the most obvious question—How did it come to be that Paul Snider murdered Dorothy Stratten?—and his research formed the basis of The Killing of the Unicorn, which was a cause célèbre when it was published in 1984.
But a more daunting question lingered: Why—not how, but why—did it happen? “I was trying to find out how we got to the place where somebody as pure and innocent and good as Dorothy could get killed,” he said. “How could that happen? What was the world about that it could produce an incident like that? Was there ever a time when that couldn’t have happened?”59
Ensconced in his house on Copa de Oro, still at work on They All Laughed, he retreated to his library in search of an answer. He pored over the collected works of, among others, Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I went looking for clues anywhere and everywhere,” he wrote.60 No light bulb went off until he recalled Orson Welles advising him in the 1970s to familiarize himself with poet, novelist, and historian Robert Graves. Back then, Bogdanovich told me, he had asked Cybill Shepherd to have a look at Graves’s books The White Goddess and The Greek Myths, which deal with the belief systems of female-worshiping cultures. Reporting back to Bogdanovich, Shepherd summarized the books’ basic thesis: “Well, before men were in charge, they say women were in charge.”
Peter Bogdanovich’s draft mailgram to Robert Graves. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.
Peter Bogdanovich’s mailgram to Robert Graves. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.
Now, however, he grasped the full implications of Graves’s insights for himself—as he would tell me, “The world that he resurrects in The White Goddess and The Greek Myths is a world where what happened to Dorothy wouldn’t have happened.” His studies gave him an appreciation for mythology, especially Greek mythology—“among the most ancient of Western religious histories,” he noted61—that resulted in characters in his films for years to come referencing ancient gods and goddesses. He was advancing not a religious idea but a moral one: a society’s health depends on what its citizens believe. Or, as he boldly asked near the end of The Killing of the Unicorn, would Dorothy Stratten’s story have been different if “from the first civilizations of the Stone Age, the date had been known as 11,980