Not yet knowing what had happened to Dorothy, I went to bed the night of August 14, 1980, wearing my sister’s maroon robe. It smelled like her Yves Saint Laurent perfume, and it made me feel better.
I was whisked away by a member of Peter’s staff the next day. I haphazardly packed before being taken to the airport, where a chaperone flew with me to Vancouver. I had never flown first class before. The flight crew attempted to give us complimentary newspapers, which were promptly blocked from my view. I was so confused.
When I arrived at the airport in Canada, Mum was there to greet me, wearing gigantic black sunglasses, like Jackie O. I’d never seen her wear those, especially indoors. I was happy to see her, but I knew something was strange. This entire time, everyone was hiding the news from me. It was a total blackout: no television, no radio. I guess they felt that they had to tell me something, so they said Dorothy was kidnapped. I didn’t know if I was supposed to tell Mum. Was this another secret to keep?
They must’ve settled on kidnapping because at least that meant there was some hope I might see her again. I understand now, it bought them some time.
Back at the house, I was surprised to see it was full of flowers. Still, nobody told me anything. Who sent us flowers? My friends wanted to see me, but my mother wouldn’t let me go. I later realized she didn’t want them to tell me anything.
I decided to sit by the telephone and wait for Dorothy to call me. I sat there all night.
When my brother, John, showed up the next day, I gave him a gift that Dorothy had asked me to give to him. He threw it in the fireplace.
“What are you doing? What are you doing?,” I yelled while trying to put the fire out. He clearly knew something that he wasn’t telling me.
A few days later, we all flew to L.A. on the Playboy jet, with the big bunny on the side. I just thought that we were going to Dorothy’s apartment. Instead, we went to Westwood mortuary.
First I saw Peter with dark sunglasses on, sitting with his two teenage daughters, Antonia and Sashy. Then I saw Dorothy’s photograph resting on an easel. That’s when I realized that I was at my sister’s funeral. Her real name, Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten, was on the program. The name she was born with had now come full circle in death.
Peter always tried to shield me from knowing what had actually happened the day Dorothy was murdered, but he later described it fully in The Killing of the Unicorn, published four years after the event:
“On Thursday, August 14, 1980, between noon and 1:00 p.m. in the bedroom of a West Los Angeles house, Dorothy Stratten, a twenty-year-old Canadian film actress and Playboy magazine’s then-current Playmate of the Year, was tortured and killed by her estranged husband, twenty-eight-year-old Paul Snider. Before murdering Dorothy, Snider put her into a bondage machine of his own design. He then raped and brutally sodomized her. After freeing her, he fired a shotgun point-blank at the left side of her face. She was dead before the sound reached her ears.... During the next hour, Snider moved the corpse across the room to the bed and had intercourse with it at least once before writing a terse suicide note. He then turned the shotgun on himself.”
After the funeral was the burial. Mum and my brother refused to go to it. Mum said, “Dorothy’s not there, anyway.” But Hugh Hefner was there. I stood between him and Peter, and both men held my hands while Dorothy’s casket was lowered into the ground.
I flew back to Canada with John and Mum. I didn’t know why I couldn’t see Peter, not even to say good-bye. It was hard, because I finally felt that I had an adult in my life whom I could trust, who wouldn’t lie to me.
Then I didn’t see him again for what seemed like a long time.
L.B. in L.A.
I went to school the September after Dorothy was murdered, but I just couldn’t sit in the classroom. Things were strained at home. My mother couldn’t talk about Dorothy, and my brother was still angry and resentful. I had nobody to talk to about her death and all the confusing and terrible emotions it had stirred up, except for Peter, who spoke with me on the phone every day to see how I was doing.
Right after I got home from school, I would call him collect. No matter where he was or what he was doing, he would take my call. He always called me “L.B.” (Nicknaming people was Peter’s thing. He called Dorothy “D.R.” and Mum “Nell.”)
On the phone, I would cry, “I don’t like school!” He’d say, “L.B., why don’t you and Nell move to L.A., and we’ll get you home-schooled?” He invited me and my mum to live with him in Bel Air, where he could ensure my safety and atone for his own feelings of guilt over Dorothy’s murder.
Mum and I made the move, while John stayed back in Canada. I was excited to start a new life, looked after by someone I knew and felt safe with. It was a welcome change from the gloomy silence that hung over our house in Vancouver.
Until the rumors started. We may have been safe from a predator like Paul Snider, but we weren’t entirely safe from Hollywood society, which seemed to turn against Peter after Dorothy’s murder.
Nonetheless, I quickly came to love living with Peter. With Peter, Dorothy could be who she truly was, without having to be glamorous. They brought out the best in each other. And I felt he cared for me, as Dorothy had.
First I saw Peter with dark sunglasses on. Then I saw Dorothy’s photograph resting on an easel. That’s when I realized that I was at my sister’s funeral.
He threw me into learning about movies—he always called them “pictures”—in the editing room at his house. He taught me how to splice 35-mm. film and construct it. We watched many, many classic films together. He gave me a lot of books to read. Peter even got me and Mum tap-dancing lessons! We had been watching a lot of Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers movies! My mum and I had a ball, as the sound of our tap shoes resounded throughout the house.
But in Hollywood, people were talking, even within Peter’s circle. For example, Colleen Camp, whom Peter had cast in They All Laughed, told Peter, “It’s not good for them to be living with you.”
Peter, who was getting pissed off by all the gossip and criticism, told her, “I don’t give a fuck what people are saying.”
Peter couldn’t protect me all the time, however. I remember being asked to a screening of Star 80, Bob Fosse’s graphic movie about my sister’s death. Mariel Hemingway was cast as Dorothy, and Eric Roberts played Snider. (Dorothy’s murder also spawned a TV movie called Death of a Centerfold, starring Jamie Lee Curtis as my sister.)
I remember sitting alone with Fosse in the screening room as he pressed me on whether he had gotten it right. I was only 13, forced not only to relive Dorothy’s murder but to give “notes” to the celebrated director. In retrospect, I think it was a kind of child abuse.
Soon, Peter stopped wanting to see certain people he had known for a long time. He became more isolated. There was no grief counseling in those days, at least not for me, so we worked on healing ourselves. We watched movies in Peter’s screening room—a lot of Cary Grant—and we listened to music, everything from Sinatra to Mozart. When he was working on his book about Dorothy, The Killing of the Unicorn, I was not to disturb him, but I would leave a flower outside of his closed door that I picked from the garden.
Even though I was 29 years younger than Peter, I started to think of him as being my contemporary because we were sharing and talking like equals. Or maybe I was an old soul in the sense that I just knew certain things instinctively. When we talked, there was no real feeling of an age difference, at least on my part.
As we grew closer, I began to feel jealous whenever he’d talk to other women. I don’t know if that was when I started to have a crush on him—a crush that would develop into love.
I remember feeling overlooked when Peter was busy doing interviews at the 1981 Venice International Film Festival for his movie They All Laughed. Was he ashamed of me? In Bel Air, I was an equal, but in the outside world, he was treating me like a child, or so I felt.
One night I ran away from our hotel in St. Mark’s Square. Peter came bounding after me. When he caught up with me, he grabbed me and said, “I’m not going to abandon you. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going to desert you.”
After the murder, Peter had no hesitation about laying the tragedy at the feet of Hefner and the Playboy lifestyle. He wrote about that in The Killing of the Unicorn, but he had to take that out of the book before it was published to avoid a lawsuit. The original manuscript, with all that he had to say against Hefner, is now among Peter’s archives at the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana in Bloomington.
Hefner was angry that Peter was blaming him for creating the atmosphere that had led to Dorothy’s killing. So he started spreading the rumor that I was being groomed by Peter, which is ironic, coming from Hefner, who built his whole empire on turning young women into sexually available “bunnies” for him and his friends.
Another result of the tragedy was that Peter grew increasingly paranoid about safety. He had heard that Snider had also been planning to kill him, and there were rumors swirling that other criminal figures may have been involved. As anyone who’s lived in L.A. knows, there are often helicopters sweeping the skies above the city, but I remember on more than one occasion Peter was convinced that the helicopters were after him. It seemed to me that Peter was having a full-blown nervous breakdown. It was a scary time, and I started to feel like a prisoner.
Peter hired a bodyguard for us, but it turned out that the bodyguard had been secretly employed by Hefner to report back to him about our private lives. When Peter found out, he was justifiably furious. The stress was too much for him, so it was decided that I would go back to school in Canada. I remember crying on the flight, staring out the window, all the way home. I wondered if Dorothy could hear me.
Hefner was angry that Peter was blaming him for creating the atmosphere that had led to Dorothy’s killing. So he started spreading the rumor that I was being groomed by Peter, which is ironic, coming from Hefner.
Years later, Hefner apologized to me. This was after Peter and I were married and living in New York City, and I had turned 30. Hefner had just separated from Kimberley Conrad, a Playmate from Alabama. He was now single, with a lot of girlfriends.
I had written him a letter asking to see him, because I needed closure. Hefner seemed happy to hear from me and invited me to the Playboy Mansion.
When I arrived, I was struck by how everything seemed so much smaller than it had seemed when I was 12. The game room, which I’d remembered as full of pinball machines (with Hefner’s face on them) and big bowls of M&M’s and jelly beans all lined up by color, looked a little shabby. The furniture and fabrics had not changed. Everything was in the exact same spot.
I peeked into the Red Room, and the Blue Room. Back then, I thought they were cute little guest rooms. This time, it hit me: these are the rooms where Hefner’s friends had sex with the bunnies. The bedsheets were tattered and stained and smelled of alcohol, sex, and cigarettes.
Hefner suddenly showed up. I was standing next to him, and I realized that I had never seen him in normal clothes before. He always wore that dressing gown over pajamas. The pipe was gone, too. I remembered seeing him on roller skates at a roller-disco party. Now he was shuffling his feet and drinking a Pepsi.
When he saw me, Hefner started to cry.
“God, you sounded so much like your sister on the phone,” he said. He went on to tell me how important Dorothy had been to the Playboy “family,” and how she was poised to become a big star.
Hefner led me out the door to the tennis court, which also seemed small, and I remembered that’s where the roller-skating took place. How small and tawdry everything looked now.
Hefner apologized, saying, “My biggest regret was I shouldn’t have banned Paul [Snider] from the mansion. It was the only thing he had left, being able to come there. He felt like everything was taken from him and when he came to the mansion for the Midsummer Night’s Dream party accompanied by a friend, he was turned away.”
It was the last straw.
April Fool’s
Peter and I were married for 13 wonderful years. Eventually, however, I felt that I needed to go out on my own and spread my wings. I had never held a job, or managed my own household, and it felt like the right time to try. We decided to separate.
The first thing I needed to do was to find a job.
Oddly enough, given our history, it was Hefner whom I first asked for help finding employment.
When I showed up at the Playboy Mansion, Hefner said he had unpublished photographs of Dorothy, taken just before her murder. He showed them to me, and they were amazing: Dorothy posing as Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, and Marlene Dietrich. Hefner said, “Why don’t we do an issue where you can write something for it and we’ll bring it out?” Soon after that, he offered me a job—not as a model but working in the magazine’s archives. I took it.
In 2001, Peter and I separated, and I later initiated divorce proceedings, partly because of another relationship I had entered into, and partly because I felt I had to be on my own. The divorce came through in April of 2004. We called it our “April Fool’s joke.” In fact, Peter bought me an engraved box with a dried flower inside, and “Happy April Fool’s” engraved on it, with our divorce date. Breaking up really is hard to do.
But the marriage was never really over. Peter and I continued to see each other and to work together on some of his films.
Peter had lost his home in Bel Air and much of his fortune after the release of They All Laughed, which he felt had been badly edited. That movie was so close to his heart. It featured Dorothy in a comic and charming role that she was luminous in. (It was also one of Audrey Hepburn’s last performances.)
Peter bought the movie back from Time-Life Films, re-editing and distributing it himself. The experience pretty much left him broke. “I lost my shirt,” Peter lamented. He never quite recovered from it financially and said it was the biggest mistake of his life. But I know he did it because of his love for Dorothy.
Peter moved to New York, trying to re-invent himself. He wrote several books and got some good television work. He started acting more and took on a recurring role as Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, the therapist of Tony Soprano’s therapist in The Sopranos. He loved acting and wished he had done more of it over the years.
In 2018, we flew to Lyon for its 10th Lumière festival, which was honoring Peter. There were flags hanging from streetlamps and gigantic billboards of Peter and his movies.
He’d invited me and Mum to join him as his guests, as well as Antonia, Sashy, and their children, his grandkids. His sister, Anna, was invited, too, but she couldn’t make it.
The festival hosts put us up in a big hotel suite: Mum and Peter and me, just like old times. I felt that we had come full circle to the beginning of our relationship. His daughters arrived with their kids, and after dinner, they all came bounding into our suite.
And then, Peter suffered a terrible fall in his hotel bathroom. He could barely walk and was in great pain. The ambulance arrived, and Peter was taken to a nearby hospital. We found out that he’d shattered his femur, and they had to stabilize it with a metal rod.
When Peter woke up after surgery, he was understandably miserable. “I can’t even enjoy a tribute! The gods are against me,” he said, which became one of his favorite lines. I took a cab from the hotel to the hospital twice every day to be at his bedside.
The tribute happened without him. But Peter still managed to be upbeat, funny, and welcoming to the festival-goers who made a pilgrimage to Peter’s hospital room. Holding court, he regaled them in French, and quoted Shakespeare, signing books from his bed. “If I can’t go to them, they can come to me!” he said. We ended up staying an extra week, before flying back home.
We had planned to go to New York and stay in my apartment, but the doctor in Lyon had said, “Go straight to L.A. Don’t stop. New York’s too hard.”
When Peter woke up after surgery, he was understandably miserable. “I can’t even enjoy a tribute! The gods are against me,” he said.
Bill Peiffer, Peter’s longtime friend and business manager, met us as we were getting off the plane. They put Peter on a gurney, and he was quickly wheeled through the airport. He held my hand the whole time as Bill and I walked fast to keep up with him. They got him into an ambulance and took him directly to rehab, where another doctor was waiting.
When Peter was released from rehab, they recommended he go somewhere with a pool, because swimming would be therapeutic for him, and they warned that he would have trouble with stairs. They suggested that we put Peter on the waiting list for the Motion Picture retirement home, but I knew Peter would feel that he was being put out to pasture. It would kill his spirit. His mind was sharp, and he had more music in him.
There was one obvious solution.
“Peter, I want you to stay with me,” I told him. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it, because there’s stairs, and I certainly don’t have a pool. But we can figure this out.”
I thought of putting in a stair lift, but Peter didn’t want that. “I’m not an old fart,” he said. Instead, we put up ballet barres along the stairs so Peter would have more support.
Maria, a lovely woman who had been Peter’s housekeeper years ago, was looking after us. When Mum came for an extended visit, we were all back to where we’d first started, a lifetime ago.
We talked about getting married again. Lots of Hollywood marriages are a sham, but for us it was our divorce that was the sham. We were never out of each other’s lives. To look out for me and to safeguard his legacy, Peter had written a new will, in which he left me all of his intellectual property: the books, the scripts, the hundreds of file cards he kept since he was a boy about all the movies he had seen. I was to be the steward of all that hard work and devotion to the movies. We were excited about going to have it signed and notarized in January after the holidays, since he had postponed it due to a wave of the coronavirus.
But Peter died, unexpectedly, on January 6, 2022, just two days before he was to sign his will.
He had been working on a podcast using his interviews with important directors he’d sought out in his youth: Hawks, Hitchcock, Ford, Cukor, Sam Fuller, even Jerry Lewis. He made it as far as taping a few episodes, with Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro, and a few others. There was some of the old excitement in the air, and Peter was thrilled to be back at work on a project he loved and believed in.
We spent part of our last year together co-writing a screenplay about the Gershwin brothers and the making of Porgy and Bess, titled “Our Love Is Here to Stay.”
Because Peter died a few days before he was going to sign his new will, all his work (except for the Gershwin screenplay) would now go to his two daughters. For me, life isn’t cinema, and its endings are not always happy ones.
Now, with Peter gone and Mum back in Canada, I’m pretty much alone in Los Angeles with my little dog, Cindy. Late at night, when it’s just Cindy and me on a long walk, I can’t help but think back on the extraordinary life Peter and I shared.
Sometimes I look up at the moonlit sky—which Peter would go out into the middle of the street to bow to, something he’d learned from Robert Graves—and say, “Peter, give me a sign. Where’s the buoy that will tell me where I am?”
Then I return to myself and realize, it’s up to me now. Don’t worry, Peter. I’ve got this!
Louise Stratten is a writer, producer, actress, and the founder of the Dorothy Stratten Foundation. She was a frequent collaborator with Peter Bogdanovich
Sam Kashner is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. Previously a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author or co-author of several books, including Sinatraland: A Novel, When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, and Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends
