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So, to repeat: Nobody in his right mind would call Bogdanovich a pimp. Except, also to repeat: He made movies. Was, in fact, a director of movies, and inherent in that word—director—is power, authority, control. When a director cast his female lead, wasn’t he choosing a woman he believed conformed or could be coaxed into conforming to his dream? That was the dynamic between Bogdanovich and Shepherd—Pygmalion and Galatea. David Newman recalled going to visit Bogdanovich, encountering Shepherd: “She came out of the bedroom, sat on Peter’s lap. Peter goes, ‘Hi, honey,’ nuzzling, [as] I sat there…. She said, ‘I’m going off to UCLA to see—’ She opened the schedule. ‘…There’s an Allan Dwan at three o’clock, and at five-thirty, should I stay and see that Frank Borzage?’… He’d go out of the room, and she’d roll her eyes, and go, ‘He just wants me to know everything about the movies.’… She was being tutored to be a Peter Bogdanovich girlfriend.”
When Bogdanovich got together with Dorothy in early 1980, he’d hit the skids. There’d been four flops in a row, two of which starred Shepherd, who’d dumped him for a parts manager at a car dealership in Memphis. It was a fresh decade, though, and he was looking for a fresh start, a fresh leading lady, discovery, muse, hope.
Carpenter’s piece was highly influential. Because it was first. Because it won a Pulitzer. (By default, after Janet Cooke’s sob-story story about an eight-year-old Black dope fiend—“Don’t nobody here hardly ever smoke no herb”—for The Washington Post was revealed as bogus.) And because it delivered a moral that readers already knew by heart: Hollywood is no place for virtuous young ladies. (Regular people love to disapprove of the show business people they can’t get enough of.) Hefner’s and Bogdanovich’s response was identical: incredulity and horror followed by the need to get the true version—that is, the Hefner version and the Bogdanovich version—out there and fast.
The supporting players in the fairy tale were about to become the tellers of the fairy tale.
Hefner commissioned an article for the May 1981 issue of his magazine. “Richard Rhodes and the editors of Playboy,” read the byline. “The deal was Hefner wanted to edit and contribute to the story,” says Rhodes, “and I was wary of that. He would call me up at two in the morning. So, I was writing the story with him looking over my shoulder. And I had made an agreement with Arthur Kretchmer [Rhodes’s editor] that if Hefner interfered sufficiently and edited the story sufficiently, they’d take my name off it. We finally compromised on ‘by Richard Rhodes and the editors of Playboy.’ ”
A few months later, in the fall of ’81, Bogdanovich sold a proposal for a memoir about his time with Dorothy. “It’s a story which must be told,” he said to a reporter, “and I’ll tell it.”
But Carpenter wasn’t passing the microphone just yet. She’d sold the rights to “Death of a Playmate” to Hollywood. (Perhaps not the only Dorothy-related rights sold to Hollywood. The private detective Snider hired to tail Dorothy and Bogdanovich, Marc Goldstein, had, according to a suit filed by Bogdanovich and the Stratten estate, stolen Dorothy’s diaries and other personal effects, sold them to a studio. Goldstein claimed no probable cause; the suit was dismissed. Goldstein, however, was named “technical adviser” on the 1981 NBC TV movie Death of a Centerfold.) For the privilege of retelling her magazine piece in movie form, Carpenter was reportedly paid $130,000. As Hefner wryly noted: “So much for the exploitation of Dorothy Stratten.”
It’s Showtime!
The adaption would be called Star 80, a reference to the vanity plate on the Mercedes Snider bought Dorothy with her money. (According to Louise, Snider’s family harassed Dorothy’s mother, insisting she give them the Mercedes, claiming it was their rightful property. Their reasoning: Snider was still legally Dorothy’s husband; Dorothy died before Snider—because he shot her first, himself second—and therefore her assets went to him; and then, when he died, to them.) Bob Fosse would write and direct.
Fosse, a supporting player, even if he was entering the fairy tale when it was already over. Fosse, yet another complicated and contradictory man. Fosse, the final teller.
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Lili Anolik
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