EAST VAN SKIN, HOLLYWOOD MURDER
The life and death of Vancouver’s most beautiful woman
In 1978, the most beautiful woman in Vancouver worked at the Dairy Queen on East Hastings. In 1979 she became a Playboy playmate. In 1980 she earned roles in Hollywood movies and appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. And then, she was murdered.
Her story starts with a cheap hustler from East Van named Paul Snider. He was the kind of guy who wore a gold belt buckle in order to draw attention to his crotch. His shirts were unbuttoned, his coats were fur, and his moustache was finely groomed. He kept his days busy by promoting car shows at the PNE but two-bit criminality was Snider’s main sources of income. In East Van he was known as the “Jewish Pimp.”
In early 1978 Snider walked into the Dairy Queen on Hastings Street and saw Dorothy Hoogstratten serving ice cream behind the counter. His initial remark is alleged to be, “That girl could make me a lot of money,” which is gross, and made worse by the fact that Snider was 27 years old and Dorothy was still in high school. He got her phone number from a coworker and called later that week.
The Hoogstratten family didn’t have much money. Her father abandoned them when Dorothy was three and her mother, Nelly, was stuck raising three children alone. At times she had to rely on welfare for support. It’s easy to understand why Dorothy was impressed when Paul Snider showed up in a black corvette. He bought her expensive gifts, cooked her dinner at his apartment, and took her out on the town like an adult. Most women Snider’s age would have seen right through his sleazy bullshit but Dorothy was nine years his junior. She fell for him.
Snider had big plans. 1978 was Playboy magazine’s 25th anniversary and they were conducting an international beauty contest to find a playmate who could commemorate their first quarter century. The winner would receive $25,000.
Snider contacted a photographer in Vancouver who had ties to Playboy magazine and asked him to shoot Dorothy naked. At first the photographer refused because Dorothy was underage. It’s unclear whether Dorothy’s mother signed the release form or if Paul forged it but, either way, the photographer ultimately acquiesced. According to Dorothy’s Playboy Playmate video, they took the photos on Wednesday, mailed them on Thursday, and by Sunday she was on a flight to Los Angeles for an interview at the Playboy mansion. It was her first time on an airplane.
She didn’t win the 25th anniversary prize but she was included in the final 16 contestants and was earmarked to be the centrefold for the August ’79 issue. Hugh Hefner recognized her beauty immediately. He was so desperate to keep her in the Playboy family that he hired her as a “Bunny” for the Playboy Club in Century City, in spite of the fact that she had no serving experience outside Dairy Queen and was three years under the legal drinking age. He described her as, “Angelic, she lit up a room, all the corny phrases were true about Dorothy.” The only imperfection that Hefner could find with Dorothy was her last name. So they shortened it. ‘Hoogstratten’ became Stratten.
Once in the hands of Playboy’s modelling agency Dorothy’s career exploded. Her look blended innocence with eroticism in a way that transcended the pinups that Playboy typically published. Job offers poured in. “She was surely more successful in a shorter period of time than any other playmate in the history of the empire,” wrote Teresa Carpenter in her Pulitzer Prize winning Village Voice feature ‘Death of a Playmate.’
The only person who didn’t seem to be basking in Dorothy’s success was her significant other, Paul Snider. Back when they first met in Vancouver, Snider seemed street-wise and mature. He could provide things Dorothy didn’t have. But in Los Angeles they were living in a basement suite beside the Santa Monica freeway and Snider was unemployed. He attempted to go out on his own a couple of times but nothing seemed to work. In 1979, he cooked up the idea of creating a male alternative to the Bunnies he had seen at the Playboy club in Century City. He found two partners and raised enough money to create the Chippendale dancers. The business was a success but Snider was forced out before he had a chance to cash in. His next idea was to use his skill as a craftsman to build a state of the art bondage rack that he intended to sell in sex shops across the city. That plan didn’t work either and the prototype ended up collecting dust in a corner of his bedroom. Los Angeles made Snider feel like a nobody. Terrified that his playmate girlfriend might leave him behind, Snider pressured Dorothy to elope. On June 1st they were married in Las Vegas.
By the time Dorothy’s August 79 issue of Playboy hit the streets, Hollywood had taken an interest. She booked speaking parts on the immensely popular TV shows Fantasy Island and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and she made her silver screen debut in Skatetown U.S.A. which, incidentally, was also Patrick Swayze’s first film. Dorothy parlayed these small successes into a leading role in a disastrous Canadian film called Autumn Born where she played an innocent youth who is kidnapped and abused by her deranged uncle. Next, she would land the starring role in Galaxania, a sci-fi parody, poking fun at the space opera genre that had blossomed in the 1970s.
And then she got her big break. In January of 1980, film director Peter Bogdanovich visited the Playboy mansion to chat with his close friend, Hugh Hefner. Dorothy recognized Bogdanovich from a roller disco party they had attended a few months earlier so she approached him and they spent the rest of the evening cavorting. At some point during their long conversation, Bogdanovich decided that Dorothy should audition for a role in his upcoming film. He would later admit, “I took a small part that was in the picture and had an idea to expand it, and put an entire plot line in, all because of her.” This was great news for Dorothy but it was an even bigger deal for Hefner. Up until 1980 Hollywood had kept Playboy playmates at arm’s length. Bunnies could appear in B movies or cheap sexploitation films but real cinema was reserved for real stars. If Dorothy Stratten could land a leading role in a film directed by Peter Bogdanovich, girls all over the country might begin to see Playboy as a legitimate path to Hollywood stardom.
Hefner recognized Dorothy’s importance to his empire so he named her Playmate of the year for 1980. On top of being the first Canadian to accept the honour, she also received $25,000 in cash, a Russian fur coat worth $65,000, and a new Jaguar. They began shooting her Playmate spread in late 1979 and finished in early 1980, just in time for Dorothy to begin work on Bogdanovich’s new movie They All Laughed.
Filming began that March in New York City. Snider wanted to make the trip across the country with his wife but Dorothy refused, citing the need to concentrate on her work as an actress. In truth, she had become close with Bogdanovich during the audition process and she wanted the personal and professional relationship to flourish. She checked into the Wyndham hotel when she arrived in New York but it wasn’t long before she was spending most of her time in Bogdanovich’s room at the Plaza. Snider must have suspected something was up because he began calling the hotel incessantly. It got so bad that Dorothy was forced to have his calls screened. When he couldn’t get through to his wife, Snider took to harassing the hotel staff.
During a break in filming, Dorothy returned to Los Angeles for the public announcement of her selection as Playmate of the Year. At the climax of the ceremony, Hefner invited Dorothy onto the stage to give her acceptance speech. She thanked a long, long list of people but Snider wasn’t one of them. Many people who attended the event would later comment that Dorothy did not want Snider to be there. It was clear that their relationship was coming to an end.
Filming resumed on They All Laughed and Dorothy returned to New York. The incessant phone calls from Snider continued too. A few weeks later, she wrote her husband a letter explaining that she needed some space but he was unwilling to accept it. The harassment intensified. Unsure of how to react, Dorothy took the drastic measure of closing their joint bank account. Shortly thereafter she sent another letter informing her husband that she was seeking a separation from him. Snider responded by hiring a private detective to determine if Dorothy was having an affair.
Filming wrapped on They All Laughed in July of 1980 and Dorothy returned to Los Angeles. She rented a modest apartment in Beverly Hills to keep up appearances but in reality she had moved into Bogdanovich’s Bel Air mansion. She wanted to keep a low profile until her marital situation with Snider was resolved.
On Friday August 8th the beleaguered couple met for lunch at a restaurant in Hollywood. It did not go well. Dorothy admitted to the affair and told Snider that she was in love with Bogdanovich. They were both in tears. Dorothy introduced the notion of a financial settlement as part of the separation but their opinions differed vastly on what that sum might be. When the lunch ended, it should have been the last time they ever saw one another. Sadly, it wasn’t.
The following Sunday, Snider invited the private detective he had hired to attend a barbecue he was hosting in his backyard. The detective was still spending his days tailing Dorothy so he assumed Snider wanted some information about his wife. Instead, Snider asked the detective if he would buy a machine gun for him. The detective refused. A few days later Snider was looking through the classifieds and came across an advert selling a Mossberg 12 gauge pump shotgun. He phoned the owner, drove to the San Fernando Valley and bought the weapon with cash.
On Thursday August 14th, Dorothy met with her estranged husband to discuss the details of their divorce one last time. The private detective followed her from Bogdanovich’s mansion to Snider’s house and watched her enter the basement suite at 12:30 PM. That was the last time anyone saw her alive.
The shell of the twelve gauge entered Dorothy Stratten’s face above her left eye and killed her instantly. Police determined that her body was moved after death. Blood was found on the bondage rack prototype that Snider had built and failed to sell. Bloody hand prints were found on her buttocks and left leg. Dorothy had been sodomized. Snider’s dead body was found at the foot of the bed with strands of blonde hair clutched in his right hand. The shotgun blast had entered Paul Snider’s right cheek and exited the back of his head.
It was Hugh Hefner who broke the news to Peter Bogdanovich. He didn’t take it well. In fact, Hefner was so concerned by the drastic reaction to the tragic news that he sent an aide to Bogdanovich’s home to ensure that the bereaved man didn’t take his own life.
In the days that followed the murder, Bogdanovich arranged for all of Dorothy’s family — mother, father, stepfather, brother, and kid sister Louise — to come to Los Angeles so they could attend the funeral and pay their respects at Westwood Memorial Park. Bogdanovich vowed to help the entire Hoogstratten family in any way he could but specifically he promised to take care of Dorothy’s little sister, Louise. Also, he told them that he would begin writing a book about Dorothy’s life as soon as post-production on They All Laughed was complete.
Bogdanovich spent the next few months in the editing suite watching Dorothy on screen, alive and well, laughing her way through his movie. Hefner thought the experience of seeing this video of her everyday may have driven him “a little crazy.” When he finally completed They All Laughed the studios wanted nothing to do with the film. Who in their right mind would release a light-hearted romantic comedy starring a woman who had been brutally murdered by her estranged husband? So, Bogdanovich bought the negatives back from the studio for five million dollars and distributed the film himself. He did not have the benefit of an advertising budget. The film was a box office disaster.
Back in Vancouver things were deteriorating for the Hoogstrattens too. Dorothy’s mother, Nelly, was overcome with grief. Intervals of incessant weeping with long bouts of silence were causing her marriage to crumble. Meanwhile, Louise was struggling to adjust to the eighth grade at Banting middle school in Coquitlam. The loss had made her somber and aloof. Her classmates noticed.
In 1981 Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story was released. It was a cheap TV movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis which felt like a ‘too-soon’ exploitation of a tragic death. Bogdanovich and the Hoogstratten family sued the film’s producers for using excerpts from Dorothy’s unpublished memoir without their consent.
In light of their collective emotional turmoil it made perfect sense when Bogdanovich invited Nelly and young Louise to move down to Los Angeles, take up residence in his mansion, and help him write the book about Dorothy’s life. But when they arrived things got weird. Bogdanovich bought the Hoogstrattens new wardrobes and enrolled them in tap dancing classes. He arranged for Louise to undergo plastic surgery to repair her protruding jaw. Inexplicably, the 12-year-old’s nose was also altered during the procedure. Childhood friend Julie Fisher told People magazine, “You can see in the snapshots I took of us over the years. She has a new nose now. More like Dorothy’s.”
Nelly and Louise stayed in the Los Angeles mansion for a year before moving back to Vancouver in 1982, but Bogdanavich remained a part of their lives long after that. According to Playboy’s Elizabeth Norris, Bogdanovich had a phone installed in Louise’s bedroom in Vancouver so he could speak with her every night before she went to sleep. When Louise had a vacation from school, she would visit Bogdanovich in Los Angeles. Sometimes her mother would travel with her, sometimes Louise would go alone.
In late 1983 another film depicting the life and murder of Dorothy Stratten was released called Star 80. It seemed less exploitative and was more wellreceived than the first biopic but it made the odd creative decision to focus on Snider instead of Dorothy. After watching the film Bogdanovich became determined to set the public record straight.
His book The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten was released in 1984. It was immediately panned. The negative reception was predictable because the book’s release coincided with the emergence of rumours about a romantic relationship between Bogdanovich and Louise Hoogstratten. Cindy Adams in the New York Post wrote, “I know you know Dorothy Stratten was the 1980 Playmate whose lover was Peter Bogdanovich. What you might not know is Dorothy had a sister, Louise. What you for sure don’t know is Louise’s new beau is Peter Bogdanovich… Louise is a teenager.”
The fallout from Bogdanovich’s book wasn’t over. Upon learning that he had been portrayed as a central cause of Dorothy’s death, Hugh Hefner was hospitalized with a stroke. On April 1st 1985, Hefner called a press conference to correct the record. While at the lectern he used a few choice words to discredit Bogdanovich. “There was pursuit of Dorothy’s entire family… followed by the seduction of the sister as a pathological replacement of Dorothy that has continued from that time to the present.”
Bogdanovich and the Hoogstratten family brought a five million dollar slander suit against Hefner for having insinuated that a sexual relationship took place. Curiously, the suit was dropped as soon as depositions began. Hefner suspected it was because they didn’t want the truth to come out. The depositions remain sealed.
Two years later Louise Stratten made her silver screen debut in a Peter Bogdanovich film with the mind-boggling title: Illegally Yours. It was roundly savaged by critics and largely ignored by audiences. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, one might identify this flop as the end Bogdanovich’s career as an A list hollywood director. He made other films but they never received the critical acclaim of his early work. It’s possible that rumours of a sexual relationship with the teenage sister of his murdered lover damaged his professional reputation.
On December 30th 1988, Peter Bogdanovich and Louise Stratten were married. He was forty-nine and she was twenty. None of Louise’s family members were in attendance. The small ceremony took place at the Wedgewood hotel in downtown Vancouver, less than five kilometres from the Dairy Queen on East Hastings where Paul Snider met Dorothy Hoogstratten ten years earlier.
