By PETER BOGDANOVICH (William Morrow & Co.; 1984)
The Peter Bogdanovich – Dorothy Stratten – Paul Snider case has long been a subject of great fascination to myself and many others. Dramatized, faithfully and otherwise, in the TV movie DEATH OF A CENTERFORLD: THE DOROTHY STRATTEN STORY (1981) and the feature films STAR 80 (1983) and IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES (1984), the case was a sordid one, involving the late filmmaker Bogdanovich becoming romantically involved with PLAYBOY playmate Stratton, who ended up horrifically murdered by her estranged husband Snider.
DEATH OF A CENTERFOLD 1981 (Trailer)
THE KILLING OF THE UNICORN is a grief-fueled remembrance of Stratten by “the director who loved her.” Those who knew Stratton tend to recall her as, variously, a sweet-natured pothead and a much-exploited genius, while the traumatized Bogdanovich describes her as “the noblest person I ever met, the kindest and the gentlest.” Furthermore, theirs was apparently one of the great love stories of all time, despite the fact that Bogdanovich was twice as old as Stratton and only knew her a few months.
As recounted here, the Vancouver bred Stratten took up with Snider, a sleazy club promoter, at age 17. It was Snider who inducted her into the PLAYBOY universe, with Stratten becoming the August 1979 Playmate of the Month and a fixture at the Century City based PLAYBOY club. In the spring of 1980, she commenced an affair with Bogdanovich (whose preference for statuesque blondes was legendary, with he having previously dumped his wife of nine years for Cybill Shepard) on the set of his film THEY ALL LAUGHED (1981). Shortly thereafter she obtained a legal separation from Snider, who went into a coke-fueled tailspin. On August 14, during a meeting about property taxes at the home Snider and Stratten shared, he shot her and himself with a recently purchased shotgun.
Bogdanovich, understandably, wasn’t in his right mind when he wrote this book, and so can be forgiven for its hyperbolic and often misguided nature. Looking for someone, anyone, to blame for Stratton’s death (the one who caused it being dead himself), Bogdanovich takes PLAYBOY honcho Hugh Hefner to task, proclaiming that “If the shadowy Hefner-side of the pyramid had never existed, Dorothy would not have died.” Sure, but then she would have never met Bogdanovich, a confident of Hefner at the time, or had any kind of career at all (Bogdanovich later admitted he went overboard with the Hefner bashing).
Even more outrageous are the final chapters, in which Bogdanovich, who wasn’t known for his charity toward the fairer sex (just ask his first wife Polly Platt), delivers an extended feminist rant that would, and apparently did, make the late Andrea Dworkin proud. Bogdanovich thanks Dworkin in the introduction for her “passion, wisdom and sacrifice to the cause of women’s rights,” and for the “most beautiful” letter she wrote him.
Bogdanovich, for the record, married Stratton’s 20 year old sister Louise in 1988 (according to Hefner, the two initially got together when she was 13). Following his demise in 2022 he was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, right next to the grave of Dorothy Stratten.