Dorothy Stratten’s Hollywood Horror Story |
Exactly two years and one day after young, beautiful aspiring actor Dorothy Stratten left Canada for Los Angeles, she was raped and murdered by Paul Snider, the same man who launched her brief career by convincing her to pose for nude photos he then sent to Playboy editor Hugh Hefner. It’s an unbearably sad true Hollywood story—but as Lili Anolik writes, it’s easy to tell it without focusing on Stratten and Snider at all. “She, the heroine, is as preternaturally beautiful as she is pathologically pure-hearted: virtue incarnate. He, the villain, is a slimeball-cum-greaseball-cum-cornball: vice incarnate,” she writes in a reconsideration of their lives and deaths. “And so the instinct of the tellers is to push to the wings these cardboard cutout leads, pull to center stage the fully rounded supporting players, complicated and contradictory men who inspire the greatest dramatic and psychological interest”: not just Hefner, but also Bob Fosse and Peter Bogdanovich, who fell for Stratten as well.
Elsewhere in HWD, Lindsey Underwood profiles Golden Globe winner Teyana Taylor for VF’s latest cover story; we reveal which Globes looks VF readers liked best—and introduce our red-carpet leaderboard, which we’ll be updating after each major awards ceremony; Wagner Moura opens up about his Globes look and what The Secret Agent’s warm reception means to him; and Joachim Trier proves you can go home again, in the latest conversation for our “What Is Cinema?” series. |
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