Sometimes you read the press releases. All that factory-line garbage — beautiful, stunning, angelic. Words printed like coupons, meant to sell another face, another body, another bottle of perfume. You shrug. You’ve seen it before.
But then there are women where even those words feel like loose change rattling in an empty tin can. Doesn’t cover it. Not even close.
Dorothy Stratten had that thing. The smile. Christ, that smile — it didn’t just hit you, it moved you. Took you someplace half-lit and private, where the jukebox is broken and your drink’s gone warm, and you’re still thinking: maybe, just maybe, the world isn’t all depression and unpaid bills. Maybe there’s something better out there.
You looked at her and thought: yeah, maybe angels walk around after all. Not the church kind with wings and harps. The kind that takes your hand and makes you forget every shitty thing about your life. Too good for this racket, too good for this planet, too good for the lot of us.
That was the magic of Dorothy Stratten. And the curse.
Los Angeles, August 1980 – Dorothy Stratten was only 20 years old when her estranged husband ended her life with a shotgun blast. A few hours earlier she’d walked into their former home hoping to settle a divorce; by nightfall, police found her nude body on the floor, her face unrecognizable from the close-range shot, a grotesque end to a Hollywood fairy tale gone wrong. Stratten had been Playboy’s Playmate of the Year, a blossoming actress on the brink of stardom – “one of the few emerging goddesses of the new decade”, as the magazine touted. But in the shadows lurked a jealous small-time hustler who had groomed her from an ice-cream shop into a centerfold, and who couldn’t stand to lose what he thought was his creation.
From Dairy Queen to Playboy Mansion
In 1978, Dorothy was an ordinary teenager scooping ice cream at a Dairy Queen in Vancouver, Canada. She was a shy 18-year-old who thought of herself as “plain,” a girl with “no aspirations other than landing a secretarial job”, by one account. That summer, Paul Snider swaggered into her life. Snider was 26, a local promoter known for flashy clothes – a mink coat, a jeweled Star-of-David necklace – and a sideline of pimping girls on the Vancouver club circuit. He spotted Dorothy behind the counter and saw an opportunity: “a naive and beautiful young woman” whom he could mold into something big. Snider laid on the charm, showering Dorothy with attention and fancy dinners, even buying her a white gown for her high school prom. “You think of him and you think of a wolf…stalking his prey,” actress Mariel Hemingway later said of Snider’s relentless flattery. Dorothy, insecure and eager to please, “unfolded in the glow of his compliments”. She believed him when he told her she was special.
Snider’s big idea was Playboy. Sensing Dorothy was “class merchandise” – too good for the seedy escort scene – he convinced her that posing nude could launch her career. It wasn’t easy; Dorothy had never undressed for anyone she didn’t know, and later admitted “it took him a little while to talk me into it”. After a couple of weeks of coaxing, Dorothy agreed. Snider arranged a professional photoshoot. In one early session at his apartment, Dorothy clung nervously to a scarf but soon became playful and “perfectly pliant,” telling the photographer “do whatever you like”. She was eager to make Snider proud. Because she was under 19, Dorothy even had to beg her mother to sign the model release for Playboy. In August 1978, with her mother’s hesitant permission, Dorothy boarded her first airplane to Los Angeles for a test shoot at Playboy’s invitation. The small-town girl had officially entered Hugh Hefner’s glittering lair.
When Playboy’s West Coast photo editor Marilyn Grabowski saw Dorothy’s test shots, she was floored. “I wanted her on the next plane,” Grabowski said. “She was a total babe in the woods…unused to thinking she was really beautiful.” Dorothy’s mixture of statuesque blonde beauty and innocent demeanor made her stand out. Though she narrowly lost the contest to be Playboy’s 25th Anniversary centerfold (that honor went to another model deemed more prepared for instant fame), Hefner and his team knew Dorothy’s time would come. They made her Miss August 1979 and kept her in Los Angeles, putting her up as a Playboy Bunny at the Century City club (she was so new and young that at 18 she wasn’t even allowed to serve drinks). Suddenly, Dorothy was attending exclusive Hollywood parties, blinking under the neon haze of the Playboy Mansion’s never-ending revelry. There were celebrities, hot tubs, and flowing champagne – a wild carnival far from her Dairy Queen days. Overwhelmed and “scared” by all the attention, Dorothy clung to the only familiar thing in her new world: Paul Snider. “She was on the phone with him daily,” one Playboy staffer recalled. “She thought whatever success she was having…was totally due to Paul. She leaned on him.” In Dorothy’s eyes, Snider was the architect of her dream, and she remained loyal.
To the Hefner crowd, Snider wasn’t just out of place — he was the sewer rat floating in their champagne fountain.. The mansion’s regulars whispered that he was tacky, pushy, “small-time”. While Dorothy glided through Hefner’s genteel, silk-robed social circles, Snider lurked at the edges, exuding street-level sleaze. He’d hang around the Mansion’s infamous grotto, even pawing at other girls in plain view while Dorothy – “the most beautiful girl at the mansion” – was nearby. Eventually Hefner’s security caught Snider with another woman and banned him from the property unless Dorothy herself brought him along. Playboy’s inner circle was closing ranks around their rising star, and Snider was left out in the cold.
None of that stopped Dorothy from marrying Snider. In June 1979, barely a year into her Playboy adventure, 19-year-old Dorothy wed the 27-year-old hustler who had discovered her. Friends and Playboy colleagues tried to dissuade her – even Hefner himself opposed the marriage, sensing trouble – but Dorothy felt trapped by gratitude. “She didn’t think she could get out of it,” recalled one friend; Dorothy believed her whole new world was thanks to Paul. So she walked down the aisle with the man who had effectively pimped her into Playboy. The wedding photo from 1979 shows Dorothy radiant in white, Snider at her side with a slick grin. If you look closely, you might see the strings he had wrapped around her. Dorothy listed “jealous people” as her biggest turn-off on a Playboy data sheet, yet here she was binding herself to perhaps the most jealous man of all.
Marriage did little to legitimize Snider in Playboy’s eyes. As Dorothy’s star continued to rise, Snider’s influence waned. Hugh Hefner personally set Dorothy up with a professional manager and a money advisor, effectively sidelining Snider from her career. She began appearing on TV – a guest spot on Fantasy Island, a bit part on Buck Rogers– and snagged small roles in B-movies like Skatetown, U.S.A. and Autumn Born. By early 1980, she had a lead role in the sci-fi spoof Galaxina and was officially crowned Playmate of the Year 1980. Dorothy accepted her shiny PMOY trophy at a Mansion gala, all smiles in a gold dress, while Snider skulked in the background, stewing. She was becoming a somebody, embraced by Hefner’s glamour empire – and Snider hated it. He could feel control slipping away. “I think he really thought, ‘This is mine,’”actress Mariel Hemingway observed about Snider’s mindset. “He wanted ownership of her…He thought he made her.” The more Dorothy blossomed beyond his grasp, the more insecure and enraged Snider became behind his gaudy veneer.
Hollywood Dreams and a Fatal Triangle
Dorothy’s beauty and newfound fame opened doors in Hollywood that had nothing to do with Playboy. In early 1980, on one of her frequent visits to the Playboy Mansion, she caught the attention of Peter Bogdanovich, an acclaimed film director. Bogdanovich – 40 years old and coming off a career slump – was instantly smitten with the young Playmate. He started turning up at the Mansion often, ostensibly looking for inspiration for his next project. In truth, he was there to be near Dorothy. Before long, Bogdanovich had fallen “madly in love” with her and began crafting a movie role specifically for the statuesque blonde who had charmed him. The film would be a romantic comedy titled They All Laughed, starring Audrey Hepburn and John Ritter – a big break for Dorothy, if she could pull it off. In March 1980, Dorothy flew to New York City to film They All Laughed, leaving Snider behind in Los Angeles. It was her first time in Manhattan, a world away from both Vancouver and the Playboy Mansion. For a few months, she lived out her Hollywood dream, shooting scenes with screen legends by day and exploring the city – often on Bogdanovich’s arm – by night.
On set in New York, Dorothy glowed with a new confidence. She told friends she finally felt “like an actress, not just a Playmate.” She and Bogdanovich grew inseparable. The director openly doted on his muse, and the two fell into a secret affair, hiding it only loosely from the cast and crew. Colleen Camp, Dorothy’s co-star, recalled Bogdanovich confiding that he was “absolutely head over heels” for Dorothy. But Camp also pulled him aside to warn: “Peter, be careful because you have no idea who this guy is that she is separated from.” Everyone knew Paul Snider was back in LA, licking his wounds and obsessing over the wife who had slipped out of his control.
Indeed, by the summer of 1980, Snider’s life had unraveled. Without Dorothy by his side, he became a scavenger, a weasel sniffing around Hollywood’s back alleys for something he could sink his teeth into.. Money was tight; he’d been cut off from managing Dorothy’s career and any “meal ticket” she represented. In a pathetic effort to cash in on her image, Snider tried to develop a cheap poster of Dorothy to sell to her fans, a project he had envisioned when he still managed her. But when Dorothy saw the tacky poster design, she refused to sign on. It was the final insult. “That was the final shut down,” a friend noted. “He had no more income.” For Snider, Dorothy’s rejection of the poster – and of him – confirmed the bitter truth: he was nothing without her. The fancy cars, the Hollywood parties, the status he’d enjoyed as “Mr. Dorothy Stratten” were evaporating.
Snider’s jealousy curdled into obsession. He hired a private detective to follow Dorothy’s movements, desperate to know if she was with Bogdanovich. He bragged to old buddies about schemes to get Dorothy back, even as he wept in private. At the West LA house he and Dorothy had once shared (now rented to keep up appearances), a teenage friend recalls Snider strumming his guitar and writing morose love songs to Dorothy, tears in his eyes. He had also found a new girl – a 17-year-old small-town blonde, not unlike Dorothy – and moved her into the house, intending to groom her as a replacement Playmate. But that project went nowhere. Snider’s fragile ego was crumbling. “As she started to slip away, he started to realize he owned nothing,” Mariel Hemingway observed of Snider’s state of mind. The man who once strutted around in mink and gold now spent nights bawling on the couch, a loaded sense of doom hanging in the air.
In late July 1980, Dorothy and Bogdanovich returned to Los Angeles from their New York film adventure. Dorothy was happier than ever – in love with a new man, excited about her movie, and ready to finally cut ties with Snider. She quietly moved in with Bogdanovich at his Bel Air mansion, effectively making her separation from Snider official. On August 8, 1980, Dorothy agreed to meet Snider in person for the first time in months. She chose the neutral ground of their former house in West L.A. Perhaps she felt a pang of guilt or just a sense of duty to face him. Snider was supremely confident he could win her back, as if his old charms would somehow still work. But the reunion was brief and heartbreaking – for Snider, at least. Dorothy, mustering the courage, told him the truth: she was in love with Peter Bogdanovich and wanted a divorce. Whatever candle Snider was burning blew out in that moment. He agreed, seemingly calmly, to meet again in a few days to work out a financial settlement for the divorce. Dorothy, ever gracious, likely promised to make sure he wasn’t left with nothing. Snider nodded along, outwardly subdued. But inside, the rejection was volcanic. That afternoon, after Dorothy walked away, Snider returned a handgun he had borrowed – a weapon he’d intended to use against Bogdanovich until losing his nerve – and immediately fixated on getting a new gun.
Snider’s behavior in the days that followed was that of a man possessed by dark intentions. On August 9, he tried to buy a firearm at a store but was turned away due to his Canadian citizenship. He begged his private detective to purchase him a machine gun for “home protection” (the detective refused). He scoured classified ads for used guns, driving out to meet sellers in distant suburbs. His desperation was palpable. Finally, on August 13, 1980 – the exact two-year anniversary of Dorothy’s arrival in Hollywood – Paul Snider got his hands on a 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun. He bought it under the table from a private seller, paying cash. That night, he casually told friends he was “going to take up hunting”, even musing about how Playboy had handled the deaths of other Playmates like Claudia Jennings, who’d died in a car crash the year before. The dark irony hung in the air as he joked that editors would pull a dead Playmate’s nudes from the next issue if they could. His friends didn’t grasp it fully then, but Snider was essentially announcing what he was about to do.
Murder in the Afternoon
August 14, 1980 began for Dorothy Stratten like a typical Los Angeles summer day. That morning, she met with her business manager to discuss the financial terms she would offer Snider in their split. Ever compassionate, Dorothy wanted to leave him a fair settlement – after all, Paul had helped launch her career. She even withdrew $1,100 in cash to bring as a good-faith down payment for him. Her manager, perhaps sensing unease, suggested Dorothy let her lawyer handle the messy meeting. But Dorothy shook her head; it would go easier if I deal with Paul myself, she said. “He’s being nice about everything… I’d like to remain his friend,” she explained. That doomed optimism – the inability to see the evil in someone she thought she knew – sealed her fate. “She just had that little flaw… not being able to see the evil in people,” a friend lamented later.
Around noon, Dorothy arrived at the small house on W. 20th Street in West Los Angeles – the place she once shared with Snider, now his den of desperation. She parked her Mercury Cougar out front; Snider’s black Mercedes was in the driveway, sporting the vanity license plate “STAR 80” (a vulgar boast referencing his Playmate wife’s glory – a moniker fate would soon make infamous). Inside, the two housemates who still lived there had been conveniently sent away for the day. Snider had planned for privacy. Dorothy walked into the home, and the door closed behind her. It was just the two of them, for the first time in a long time.
What exactly transpired in the next hour can only be imagined, and perhaps it’s for the best that the walls keep their secrets. The forensic timeline suggests that within minutes, an argument or scuffle erupted. Dorothy’s purse was later found dumped out on the living room couch, as if she had been rifling through it or clutching it before things moved to the bedroom. At some point, Paul Snider revealed the 12-gauge shotgun he had obtained the night before. He likely trapped Dorothy in the bedroom – she may have tried to flee, but the hallway was too short, the door too close. In that cramped bedroom decorated with Playmate posters, Snider’s simmering rage exploded. He raped Dorothy – a final assertion of power over the woman who no longer wanted him. Then he pressed the shotgun’s muzzle flush against her beautiful face and pulled the trigger. The blast was deafening in the small room. It was sometime in the early afternoon of August 14th. Dorothy Stratten died instantly, her promising life obliterated in an act of grotesque possessiveness.
Snider didn’t emerge from that bedroom alive, either. After murdering Dorothy, he lingered in the house for several hours, alone with her lifeless body. It’s chilling to ponder: did he sit there next to her, one arm around his slain wife in some twisted lover’s pose, before finally turning the gun on himself? When the roommates returned home early that evening, they noticed the eerie silence. Dorothy’s car was still parked outside, but no voices, no movement inside. They assumed perhaps the couple had reconciled and wanted privacy, so they waited, watching TV to dull their unease. By 11 PM, with nothing but dead quiet from behind Snider’s closed bedroom door, they decided to check. The door was locked. One roommate mustered courage and forced it open.
What they saw didn’t seem real. “It looked like it was a horror movie – a staged horror movie – like mannequins and fake blood,” one roommate said later, the image forever burned in her mind. The scene was pure carnage: Dorothy and Paul both naked, sprawled on the floor, blood everywhere. The 12-gauge shotgun lay on the bed, its purpose completed. Dorothy’s once angelic face was devastated beyond recognition. Snider had killed himself a few hours after murdering her, firing the second shell into his own head. In perhaps his final act of control, Snider had even positioned a makeshift “love shrine” in the room: he’d affixed its mirror to the ceiling and arranged photos of Dorothy around their bodies, as if to frame the slaughter in some narcissistic tableau (an element so lurid it was later immortalized in a Hollywood film). The roommates stumbled back, screaming. The police arrived to a blood-soaked tragedy that was already hours old. Investigators determined that Stratten had been raped and sodomized, then killed by a point-blank shotgun blast to the face, sometime around 12:30 PM. Snider likely sat with the corpse for over an hour before finally ending his own miserable life. The time of the murder-suicide was pegged in the afternoon – broad daylight, windows closed, nobody to hear the thunderclap of the gun. Dorothy never had a chance.
In the carnage, detectives could read the awful symbolism of the crime. One described Snider’s final statement as “putting up not one but two middle fingers” to everyone he blamed for losing control of Dorothy – Hefner, Bogdanovich, the Hollywood machine. If he couldn’t have her, nobody would. It was the ultimate act of a pathetic coward who saw murder as the way to assert his dominance one last time. Dorothy Stratten – the naïve dreamer from Vancouver who came to Los Angeles on a promise – became yet another name on the long list of young women chewed up by lust, fame, and the entitlement of a psycho boyfriend.
The Aftermath: Shockwaves and Reflections
News of Dorothy’s death sent shockwaves through Hollywood and the Playboy world. She had been a rising star – a centerfold-turned-actress who seemed destined for bigger things – and suddenly she was gone, in an unimaginably brutal fashion. For Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire, the tragedy was an unmitigated PR disaster. Here was the Playmate of the Year, murdered by a jealous estranged husband, confirming every dark suspicion about the predatory underside of Playboy’s glamour. Hefner and his entourage, normally media-savvy, went to ground. “The loss of Dorothy Stratten sent Hefner and his family into seclusion,” one account noted. Playboy’s public statement was sanitized and hollow: “The death of Dorothy Stratten comes as a shock to us all… her professional future was a bright one,” read a canned quote in the press, as if she had died of an illness and not been slaughtered. Behind the scenes, Playboy’s editors scrambled. On the morning Dorothy’s body was found, they urgently tried to pull her images from the upcoming October issue, but it was too late – the magazine had already gone to print. They yanked her from the cover of the 1981 Playmate calendar and canceled a Christmas promotion that had featured Dorothy posing nude with Hefner himself. The company was desperate to distance itself from the ugly reality that one of its “family” members had met such a violent end.
Dorothy’s death was especially chilling to those within Playboy because she had been special. Other Playmates had come to tragic ends – a few “expired violently” as one writer put it. In the 1970s, Claudia Jennings, a former Playmate of the Year, died in a car crash; another, Willy Rietveld, overdosed on drugs. These incidents caused whispers and “chagrin” at Playboy, but they were written off as unfortunate anomalies. Dorothy Stratten was different. She was the Eighties’ First Playmate of the Year, the one pegged to be a crossover superstar. “Playboy has not really had a star… They thought she was going to be the biggest thing they ever had,” recalled her agent. Hefner himself had openly compared Dorothy to Marilyn Monroe, believing she could be their Hollywood darling. Unlike Monroe’s self-destructive spiral, Dorothy wasn’t troubled or “broken” by fame – she thrived in it and wanted more, until an outside evil took it all away. Hefner bristled at any suggestion that Playboy’s fast lane had led Dorothy to doom. The blame, Hef insisted, lay solely with one man: “a very sick guy [who] saw his meal ticket slipping away… that made him kill her,” Hefner said, rejecting the cliché that wild Hollywood living had done her in. In part, Hef was protecting his brand. But he wasn’t wrong about Snider – the horror sprang from his twisted psyche, not from Dorothy’s own choices.
Still, there was plenty of soul-searching and finger-pointing in the aftermath. Some within Playboy acknowledged that the company had failed to protect Dorothy. Miki Garcia, a former Playmate-turned-executive, revealed that she had warned Hefner a year prior about Snider’s dangerous background – “dope peddling and pimping” up in Canada – but Hefner’s office ignored the memo. “Hef didn’t care,” Garcia said bitterly. “She was his meal ticket.” Playboy management preferred not to pry into a Playmate’s personal life as long as business was good. In Garcia’s view, Dorothy’s murder was a “final straw” that laid bare the organization’s toxic culture – a world where beautiful young women were coddled and shown off, but also objectified, vulnerable to exploitation by any man with a key to the Mansion. After Dorothy’s death, Playboy’s priority was not introspection but damage control. Garcia recounts getting a 6:30 a.m. call instructing her to silence the other Playmates: “Call all the Playmates and make sure they do not speak to any newspaper people.” The company closed ranks, enforcing a code of silence around the tragedy. Dorothy’s murder had exposed something rotten beneath the glossy centerfolds, and that scared the hell out of them.
For those who loved Dorothy – her family, her friends, Peter Bogdanovich – the pain was intimate and profound. Bogdanovich, upon hearing the news from Hefner in a midnight phone call, reportedly collapsed in shock and had to be sedated. He later described Dorothy as “an angel in a city that didn’t deserve her.” Wracked with grief and guilt, Bogdanovich withdrew from directing for years. He would eventually channel his sorrow into a book, The Killing of the Unicorn (1984), a scathing indictment of Playboy’s role in Dorothy’s fate. In a controversial twist, Bogdanovich also married Dorothy’s younger sister Louise some years later, perhaps a desperate attempt to hold onto a piece of Dorothy’s spirit. It was an eerie epilogue that even Hollywood couldn’t have scripted.
Dorothy’s tragic story was too sensational – and too symbolic – for popular culture to ignore. Within months, TV crews and writers swarmed to retell it. Two dramatizations hit screens in quick succession: Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story (a 1981 TV movie) and Bob Fosse’s feature film Star 80 (1983). Fosse’s film, starring Mariel Hemingway as Dorothy and Eric Roberts as an unnervingly accurate Paul Snider, took its title from Snider’s vanity license plate – that grim “STAR 80” talisman of his ego. In a macabre turn, Fosse even filmed the murder scene in the exact apartment where Dorothy died, recreating the horror on location for the sake of stark realism. Dorothy’s life and death had become art imitating life (or death), enshrining her as a cautionary tale on celluloid. Songs were written in her memory, and articles – like Teresa Carpenter’s “Death of a Playmate,” which won a Pulitzer – delved into the cultural sickness surrounding her case. For a fleeting moment, Dorothy Stratten’s name was on everyone’s lips, a blonde martyr of the very sexual revolution that had promised to liberate her.
And then, as is Los Angeles tradition, life moved on. New Playmates graced the magazine covers; new scandals supplanted the old. But some legacies remain. In Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery, not far from Marilyn Monroe’s crypt, Dorothy Stratten’s grave bears an epitaph chosen by Bogdanovich – a passage from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them… it kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.” The words capture a truth as cold and brutal as Dorothy’s story. She was good and gentle and brave in her own naive way, and the world – in the form of Paul Snider and the callous forces that empowered him – broke her beyond repair. Dorothy’s rise from Dairy Queen to Playboy starlet might have been improbable, but her fall was all too predictable: another young woman sacrificed on the altar of fame and greed, remembered not for the movies she might have made or the life she hoped to live, but for the ugliness that ended it. In the end, Dorothy Stratten was chewed up and spat out by a Hollywood that never really cared – a bright, brief flame snuffed in the dark, leaving only ashes and lessons no one wants to learn.
