After the recent sexual harassment revelations about Harvey Weinstein and others, I’ve been thinking a lot about Hugh Hefner. Hefner, Playboy’s founder and chief executive, lived to the (very) ripe old age of 91 before his death in September. As far as I know, there were never any Weinstein-like accusations about Hefner, maybe because it was a given that any young woman who entered the Playboy realm knew what to expect. How could it be otherwise when the Playboy brand was built on the showcasing of nubile young women stripped, shaved, airbrushed, and offered up for the male gaze? As someone who really did read Playboy for the articles, I always wondered what these women—girls, really—had to contend with when the photo shoots were over. It would only be shocking to learn that sexual exploitation was not the norm within the walls of the storied Playboy Mansion.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about one of the saddest figures in the Playboy legacy, playmate Dorothy Stratten. Stratten was tragically murdered at the age of 20 by her estranged husband, a Hefner wannabe. Unlike Hefner, she never had the luxury of growing older, having a family, or finding out what she might accomplish beyond being a beautiful object of desire.
A side element of Stratten’s story is Playboy’s attempt to promote one of its centerfold playmates to Hollywood stardom. Hefner fancied himself and his magazine as starmakers, and for many young women who conformed to the Playboy physical ideal, a showcase in the magazine’s iconic centerfold was seen as a step toward that goal. But the closest Hefner came to building a star from a centerfold was Barbi Benton, his onetime girlfriend, who played minor roles on television and was a regular on the comedy series, Hee Haw.
As Teresa Carpenter notes in “Death of a Playmate,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice article, “Most playmates who go into movies peak with walk-ons and fade away.” In contrast, Stratten was a natural on camera and in a breathtakingly short period of time, appeared on her way to being the first, full-fledged Playboy-developed movie star.
Dorothy Hoogstraten was a high school senior in Vancouver, British Columbia when she met Paul Snider in the Dairy Queen where she was working. Snider was a small-time promoter of auto shows and wet T-shirt contests, and a sporadic, not very successful, pimp. Nine years older than Hoogstraten, Snider cut a worldly figure to the inexperienced teenager. He lavished her with clothes and gifts and eventually persuaded her to pose for nude photographs, which he sent to Playboy. The magazine was immediately interested in the tall, voluptuous eighteen year old, and she was summoned to Los Angeles for test shots with a Playboy photographer. She quickly became a favorite of both Hefner and the entire Playboy team. Along with shortening her name to Stratten, Playboy set her up with an agent, and she was quickly cast in several small roles in films and on television, like this episode of Fantasy Island.
Stratten’s most prominent on-screen appearance came in Playboy’s Roller Disco and Pajama Party, an ABC television special shot at the Playboy Mansion and broadcast in November 1979 (available in its entirety on YouTube). This ghastly disco era artifact, hosted by a leering Richard Dawson, features appearances by Mansion regulars James Caan, Robert Culp, and Bill Cosby mingling with bikini-clad Playmates. Stratten is clearly the favorite and is heavily featured, roller skating in a lime green bikini and cavorting with the Village People during their onstage performance. A running gag features her ignoring Dawson’s advances before finally walking off in his arms. Her beauty and vivacity are undeniable and she is competent in her limited repartee.
Director Peter Bogdanovich, another Mansion regular, met Stratten at this party and later cast her in a featured role in his new film, They All Laughed, starring Audrey Hepburn and Ben Gazzara. It was a tremendous opportunity for the young actress whose most demanding role had so far been as the robotic title character in a science fiction spoof, Galaxina. (Part of Stratten’s salary for that film was used by Snider, now married to Stratten, to buy himself a new Mercedes with a customized license plate, STAR 80.)
During filming in New York City, Stratten and Bogdanovich began an affair that Snider, back in Los Angeles, eventually discovered. Soon, Stratten was named Playboy’s 1980 Playmate of the Year. Snider, who had failed to establish himself in Los Angeles, was well aware that he had lost her, first to the Playboy apparatus, and now to a more sophisticated and successful man. Shortly after her return to Los Angeles, Stratten met with Snider at the house they had rented together, and it was there that he murdered her and sodomized the corpse before turning the gun on himself.
The grisly story of Stratten’s killing at the hand of her estranged husband prompted a small cottage industry of books, articles, and films. In addition to Carpenter’s article, Playboy featured a lavish tribute to Stratten in its pages. Bogdanovich published The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980, which charted his relationship with the late actress and also served as an indictment of the Playboy scene (one that he took part in). A quickly assembled television movie, Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story, starring Jamie Lee Curtis as Stratten and Bruce Weitz as an older Snider, was broadcast in the fall of 1981.
But the most high-profile project to emerge in the wake of the gruesome murder-suicide was Bob Fosse’s Star 80, starring Mariel Hemingway as Stratten and Eric Roberts as Snider. Fosse acquired the rights to Carpenter’s article soon after it appeared, just months after the crime, and embarked on a nearly three-year effort to bring the story to the screen. Much of that time was spent clearing legal hurdles with Bogdanovich, Stratten’s family, and Playboy, and doing extensive research. Fosse’s research carried with it the same single-mindedness that he brought to his choreographic preparation for a new show. He studied autopsy reports, read obscure interviews with Stratten, spoke with anyone who knew or had worked with her or Snider, and scouted locations in Vancouver and Los Angeles, often the exact sites where Stratten and Snider had lived and worked. His detailed study allowed him to incorporate actual quotes into the dialogue scenes, and had an added benefit: to avoid litigation, he was required to document the source of virtually every scene and dialogue exchange in the script.
Released during the fall of 1983 in a marketplace dominated by what film critic Andrew Britton called “Reaganite entertainment,”[i] Star 80 barely registered. Blockbuster action and science fiction hits like the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series, the suburban fairy tale of Stephen Spielberg’s E.T., and the jingoistic revenge-fantasy of First Blood featuring Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo mirrored the new conservative administration that began in January 1981. Star 80 was a “downer,” a film with no payoff or resolution, dominated by a character that remains loutish and violent, despite Fosse and Roberts’s efforts to humanize him. It would have been better received in the looser, less inhibited 1970s, which proved so welcoming to Fosse films like Cabaret, Lenny, and All That Jazz.
Fosse’s film—his last before his death four years later—turned out to be his most rigorously disciplined work for the screen, and his most despairing. While All That Jazz exposed the brutal underbelly of show business, it also was alive with performance and theatricality. The show business of Star 80 was a desultory world of auto shows and wet T-shirt contests, and playmates roller skating in bikinis for the delectation of male celebrities. Stratten may have grown into a good actress, but here she is merely a vessel for male desires and ambitions, passively drifting along from Snider, to Hefner, and finally to the Bogdanovich character (here named Aram Nicholas). Fosse, a starmaker in his own realm, known for his affairs with younger women, conveys this dynamic with a knowing air.
Fosse’s film, which I write about in my upcoming book, Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical (Oxford University Press), has the rhythmic intensity of a musical as it ricochets through events in Stratten’s short, tragic life. Thirty-five years after its initial release, it remains a bracing, clear-eyed examination of a young woman’s exploitation, not only by a violent, unhinged husband, but also by powerful men at the nexus of the Playboy/Hollywood machine. In a landscape where executives, entrepreneurs, and politicians are now being exposed as serial sexual harassers and assailants, Star 80 is, sadly, more timely than ever.
[i] Andrew Britton, “Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment,” Movie, Winter 1986, 2.
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