It had crossed my mind when I first arrived, all the thoughts of abduction and murder and being tossed into the desert with nothing, absolutely nothing but the pain of my final hours written across my dead face.  I felt the possibility quite strongly, but dismissed it when I arrived at the mansion because it felt so safe here, so non-threatening.  And I have to remind myself that it isn’t this place that killed Dorothy.  It was a man.  A man from my home town, Vancouver.  But, this premature death wasn’t meant for me because I wasn’t the one who married the psychopath.

The call came in from the L.A.P.D. one evening at the mansion.  I am sitting at the dining room with Sondra Theordore and a few other girls.  We are eating a late dinner, sliced turkey with gravy and mashed potatoes and we are laughing a lot about things I’m not sure of now, and maybe wasn’t even sure of then… and we are drinking expensive champagne that Sondra has made readily available for us. Sondra, who insisted on a party that night when there was no particularly good reason to have one.

The butler walked in.  His black vest molded cleanly over a crisp white shirt and all of it neat and trim over his slight frame.  I turned and noticed him standing very still, seeming quite daft and just staring.
Staring at me.
 
His face was ashen but his eyes were alive and wild.  Something inside me spoke out.  It’s bad.  Wrong.  Something is very, very, wrong.  Then, his mouth spoke a few words that curiously flew past me at first, hit the wall, rebounded a few times throughout the room, hitting the chandelier and the mantle of the fireplace, only to come back and float awkwardly, painfully around me, seething it’s venom.  These words that no one should be allowed to utter about anyone, whether in truth or jest, in their entire lives.  Such harsh uncontrollable words that have power and might and leave you immobilized with nothing, nothing left in your spirit to give or to have or to want…

Dorothy’s been murdered.

The butler’s eyes sagged and quite involuntarily began to over-flow with tears.  Then there were screams.  Loud, painful screams that echoed in the vast room.  I thought this was the most appropriate thing to do, yes… to scream in rebellion.  I heard it, but couldn’t see much as the pain of the words crept deeper and deeper inside me.  It just didn’t seem plausible, this idea of murder… it was ridiculous really.  Laughable in a way.  For God’s sake… it just wasn’t true.  This was a prank.  It had to be a prank.  But, the tears and screams were real and that didn’t lend itself to a prank.  Surely, the curator of the deed would have shown himself by now, would have stopped this wicked plot before it got out of control.  But, it was out of control and there was no stopping it for the shock of the words had exceeded itself to a catastrophic level.

The group gathered and walked to the game room across the lawn where Hef was playing pin-ball with friends.  Someone had to tell him, because Hef would have to deal with it, talk to the police, the press, somebody.  I watched his face as the words fell on him, just as they had fallen on us moments before.  But, now there were more words to add to the first batch of words.  On the walk to the game room the butler had given us more information.
Paul Killed Dorothy and then killed himself.  Murder/Suicide.

Those two words hung over me like a heavy weight.  Murder, suicide.  I had never heard these two words uttered together before.  There had been times I’d heard of people being murdered or people committing suicide, but never committing murder and then committing suicide immediately after.  In this case, however, the suicide was not immediately afterwards.  Like bam, you’re dead and now, bam, I’m dead.  No, in this particular case, the suicide came a few hours later and what happened in-between those few hours, no one will ever know.  But there has been much speculation.  Yes, people speculated about Paul and what he did in that bloody room for two, perhaps three or even four hours after Dorothy’s head was blown off.  What could a man do with those hours as he walks about the room unable to escape the horror of what he’s done?  What can a man do besides go immediately insane, the only logical thing to do to protect oneself.  Was there remorse and regret or were the hours filled with power, domination and vindication or maybe a combination of all of it?  There is talk that Paul Snyder raped Dorothy afterwards in some demented perverted state of mind, claiming his right to her because after all, he was losing her, desperately losing his very own Marilyn Monroe, that he, yes he… had discovered and claimed and brought to L.A. to become a star.  His right of ownership including branding her as his own property because it was he that was responsible for her success and no one else, so ultimately it was only he that had the right to destroy her if and when he began to lose control.

Hef moved past us, eyes wide in shock and pain.  Hef loved Dorothy, in a fatherly way.  He instinctively wanted to protect her from Paul because he sensed Paul’s desperate need for Dorothy’s attention and acceptance.  Hef also sensed that Paul was beginning to realize that he was losing Dorothy, and this scared him.  Everyone saw it.  Each day, little by little, Dorothy was emerging from a young sweet girl into a shining Goddess, bigger than life, with a heart as pure and good as Cinderella herself.  And Paul saw it too.  He knew the girl he had plucked from the Dairy Queen in the outskirts of Vancouver was shedding her small town persona and becoming something more, something that was much too big for Paul to contain.

I met Paul at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard at a function for Playboy.  As Dorothy roamed, talking to executives, Paul was busy scouting his next big "find".  He was looking for a new girl that he could polish up and sell to the world and be responsible for.  He was in full bloom as he approached me and then suddenly I was in an old Hollywood movie as he pointed his finger right at my face and announced that he was going to make me a big star.  Not just a star.  But a big star.  He handed me his card, which I politely took, and then excused myself.  I had no interest in Paul Snyder making me a big star.  Minutes later, I dropped his card in the trash.  As I turned, I saw him glaring at me from across the room.

Everyone knew Paul was unstable.  But, no one dreamed that Paul would kill the woman he had possessed so desperately.   No one dreamed that he would kill her and then kill himself.  But, he had a plan.  If he couldn’t have her, then no one would.

That night I dreamed of Dorothy, but she wasn’t really Dorothy, she was sort of Cher, as in Sonny and Cher.  Dorothy/Cher was wearing a big feathered costume with gold glitter on her eyes and sitting out by Hef’s pool eating juicy watermelon.  Every time she talked, the feathers got stuck in her mouth or on the watermelon and pretty soon there was red sticky juice all over the place.  (Blood?) But, Dorothy wasn’t talking to me, she was talking to her husband, Paul Snyder, who was quite small in the dream—no more than perhaps a foot or two.  I found myself wondering in the dream if Paul was really a midget and if he were, why hadn’t I noticed that before?  Then suddenly Dorothy wasn’t Cher anymore, she was Dorothy and she was crying really hard because she knew she was going to die, in fact, she knew that Paul was going to murder her that night and she was trying to sweet-talk Paul into changing his mind about her fate.  But behind the kind words was absolute fear and terror because she knew she wasn’t doing a very good job of convincing him.

It seemed possible, in the dream at least, to request a resurrection of sorts, but I didn’t know how to expedite the request in order for it to take effect.  I was convinced that the longer I waited the more impossible it would be to bring Dorothy back.  But, surely there were angels or beings somewhere who could simply rewind the days events back to the point where Paul makes his fateful decision and change it, change his mind about all of it.  Now instead of Paul feeling victimized by Dorothy’s beauty and success, he could feel happy for her and understand that their relationship had run it’s course and that Dorothy, although she would always care for Paul was indeed ready for something more.  He would understand that she didn’t need to be controlled by him any longer and longed for a free life, a life where she could experiment and relish in her achievements without him.  He could move on too, go back to Vancouver and start a night-club and meet another girl, a girl not quite as pretty but a girl who didn’t mind living under his thumb.  Or he could stay in L.A. and go to acting classes and maybe become an actor himself and languish in his own success instead of someone else’s.

But, in the dream there were no special beings that specialized in resurrections and God wasn’t available and it seemed more and more clear that Dorothy wasn’t coming back at all.  This would have to do, this hazy dream, or vision, or whatever it was, where Dorothy was alive—at least to me.

I pack my bags and book a flight to Vancouver.  Dorothy and I had taken the same plane route to get to L.A. and now I was taking it back home and she wasn’t and never would again.   Vancouver, a safer, more predictable place.  And as I’m on the plane, that safe plane, going back to the safe world where my mother still lived with Bill, where my sisters lived with their husband, where my high school friends lived with their husbands—I felt mad.   Mad that the flight attendant keeps passing me by and giving me that look that says, I really don’t have time right now so just deal with it and mad because I feel sick and my nose is running and I forgot my tissues, those tissues that I left on my bed in the guest house next to the bureau with all my clothes in it, in the room that has become mine.   And mad because I’m sneezing and fretting and God damn, I don’t feel like being on this plane and I don’t feel like going home where it’s safe and I wish the flight attendant would just give me some juice and a tissue and everything would be fine and what the hell, Dorothy.  Why did you have to go and die?
 
I prayed for Dorothy’s soul.  I prayed that in her after-life she might find peace.  I believe that each of us has a mission in this life and that mission is predetermined in the time before we are born.  If in that place, on the other side, Dorothy knew that she would be murdered in this lifetime, then there had to be good reasons for what happened.  Someone, somewhere, needed to learn from the experiences surrounding her death—maybe even I was one of those people.  And even though these reasons, may never be truly known in this life-time, they are there just the same.  Perhaps, Dorothy’s death was a lesson in the law of non-interference.  We humans are not entitled to dictate the process of any other person’s personal life mission.  We can observe and gently encourage, but we certainly can not control each other’s destiny in any way.  Maybe this is what we needed to learn through Dorothy’s death.  I had to trust that Dorothy’s soul evolution was already perfect in the eyes of God and so then who was I to judge if her death was right or wrong.
 
I don’t stay long in Vancouver.  And as much as I want to, just want to stay here forever and avoid the pain of the world, there is that stronger, more driven side of me that absolutely refuses to even address the issue.  Within two weeks I am back at the mansion.
 
Things were different now, with this turn of events, different in a way that wasn’t really obvious at first, but became more so later when things had cooled.  Sort of like 9/11, when I watched the twin towers crumble deep into the earth taking thousands of lives along with them.  The images were so utterly unbelievable that people didn’t really assimilate the enormity of the event until later… and then each day it became more and more clear that this horrible thing was indeed true and that life was determined to go on around you whether you wanted it to or not.  It was the same with Dorothy.  This beautiful person was gone, but life… just kept going as if Dorothy had never even existed.  There were traces of her around, like the grieving film director, Peter Bogdonovich who had fallen madly in love with her, was showing up at the mansion in tears, utter tears, until Hef would hug him and try in vain to make the hurt go away.  There was Dorothy’s sister, who try as she might, could never fill Dorothy’s shoes as much as Peter Bogdonovich wanted her to.

Things at the Playboy mansion were trying to return to normal when I decided to go and visit Dorothy’s grave-site.  It seemed important at the time and so my friend Lisa Welch (Miss September ’80) and I got into my little red convertible Volkswagen bug and set off for The Westwood Cemetery which was down the road from the mansion.  When we got there, we couldn’t find the grave.  We saw other people’s graves… Minnie Ripperton, Marilyn Monroe… but where oh where was Dorothy? It was a small cemetery so there wasn’t a lot of walking to do ? there weren’t fields and fields of crosses like there were across the street at the Westwood Memorial Cemetery for the fallen troops of World War One and Two and Vietnam.  This little cemetery was very small, a treasured little coup of a spot, a prize lot of land dedicated for dead cremated celebrities and a chosen few others.  If you didn’t know where it was, chances are you would never see it because it was so neatly tucked in behind several tall buildings on the edge of the busiest intersection in L.A.  So, we walked around in a big circle, searching for Dorothy, searching and searching until pretty soon it was starting to get dark and we were getting ready to leave, frustrated with ourselves.

Dorothy!  Where are you?

I turned to tell Lisa that we should go and in my haste, I bump square and hard into the only tree in the cemetery.  My head spun in pain and I wobbled deliriously, touching my head, which now apparently was oozing a steady stream of blood.  I stopped and looked at the blood on my hands, brilliant red in the dimming sunlight and then… I passed out.  I heard Lisa in the far reaches of my mind.  She was yelling at me in a strange tone of voice.  I tried to find out where she was but everything was black and void and cold.  Then I must have opened my eyes because I saw her face, a mask of frozen surprise.  I was on the ground, face in the grass.  What happened?  She wanted to know.  I mumbled something about the tree… that damned tree and then I pushed myself up onto my elbows, the blood trickling off my nose onto the grass and then—I saw it.  Right there, two inches from my face.  The plaque.  Shiny and new.  There in all it’s splendor and glory and pain.  I read the words in my mind—

DOROTHY STRATTEN
1960-l980