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 in the Year of Our Lady” instead of anno Domini 1980?62
It was not enough, though, to read Robert Graves. He had to meet Robert Graves. Perhaps he sensed that Graves would be the last in a series of elderly male mentors—like Welles and Ford and Hawks, but with a difference. What Graves offered was something infinitely more valuable than listening to a director explain this shot or that cut. Maybe, through absorbing the work of a writer who loved and venerated women, Bogdanovich could preserve the memory of the woman he loved and venerated.
So in April 1981—less than nine months after Dorothy Stratten was killed—Peter Bogdanovich sent a telegram to Majorca, Spain, home to Robert Graves, his wife, Beryl, and their children.
DEAR ROBERT GRAVES:
WOULD VERY MUCH CARE TO DISCUSS WITH YOU AN EVENT OF GREAT COINCIDENCE RELATING TO YOUR CARDEA BOOK. YOU MAY PERHAPS UNDERSTAND IN PART IF I SAY THE SUBJECT HAS TO DO WITH SAILLE DUIR RUIS CIRCA I960-I980 AD AND THAT INDEED IT IS A TALE OF WILLOW, OAK AND ELDER. WOULD ALSO CARE TO DISCUSS SOME BUSINESS. PLEASE CALL COLLECT….
WITH DEEP ADMIRATION AND THANKS, PETER BOGDANOVICH63
The message was all riddles and codes. Only Graves, Bogdanovich reckoned, could decipher what he had written. “Dorothy’s murder was still fresh in the public consciousness,” Bogdanovich told me, “and I didn’t want to come out and say it was about D. R. so I put it in code that I knew he would understand on sight.”64 “Saille Duir Ruis” were letter names for “Stratten, Dorothy Ruth” in the Ogham, or Old Irish, alphabet. The letters had a secondary meaning: “Duir, the Oak, is the Tree of Triumph; Saille, the Willow, is the Tree of Enchantment, but Ruis, the Elder, is the Tree of Doom, thus poetically encapsulating Dorothy’s story.”65 In the end, although Graves no longer spoke to anyone, even his family, Bogdanovich made several voyages to Majorca to spend time in his presence, all the while burrowing deeper on his own into religion, mythology, and even numerology.
“I like the idea of boiling things down to a number,” he said, “and seeing what it means.”66 The manuscript pages of The Killing of the Unicorn—the book he was writing during this time—are lined with scribbles alluding to the ancient thirteen-month calendar: “Wednesday,” being derived from “Mercury,” is connected with Hermes and thus to the concepts “wisdom” and “wise counsel.” These fascinating jottings are the product of someone anxious to make order out of chaos.
