![]() ![]() For a time he was the successful promoter of automobile and cycle shows at the Pacific National Exhibition. The two things it seemed he could never get enough of were women and money. His dark hair and mustache were groomed impeccably and women on the nightclub circuit found him attractive. Embarrassed by being skinny, he took up body building in his late teens and within a year had fleshed out his upper torso. His parents split up when he was a boy and he had to fend for himself from the time he quit school in the seventh grade. Snider grew up in Vancouver’s East End, a tough area of the city steeped in machismo. Snider’s main sin was that he lacked scope. Since the murder he has been excoriated by Hefner and others as a cheap hustler, but such moral indignation always rings a little false in Hollywood. It is not so difficult to see why Snider became an embarrassment. And on August 14 of this year he apparently took her life and his own with a 12-gauge shotgun. When Paul Snider balked at being discarded, he became her nemesis. Later, as she moved out of his class, he became a millstone, and Stratten’s prickliest problem was not coping with celebrity but discarding a husband she had outgrown. He is the one who plucked her from a Dairy Queen in Vancouver, British Columbia, and pushed her into the path of Playboy during the Great Playmate Hunt in 1978. The “very sick guy” is Paul Snider, Dorothy Stratten’s husband, the man who became her mentor. A very sick guy saw his meal ticket and his connection to power, whatever, slipping away. “The major reason that I’m … that we’re both sittin’ here,” says Hefner, “that I wanted to talk about it, is because there is still a great tendency … for this thing to fall into the classic cliché of ‘smalltown girl comes to Playboy, comes to Hollywood, life in the fast lane,’ and that was somehow related to her death. “They thought she was going to be the biggest thing they ever had.” “Playboy has not really had a star,” says Stratten’s erstwhile agent David Wilder. She was surely more successful in a shorter period of time than any other playmate in the history of the empire. She played the most perfect woman in the universe in an episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. A small running part as a roller nymph in Skatetown U.S.A. A fleeting walk-on as a bunny in Americathon. Far from being brutalized by Hollywood, she was coddled by it. She was delighted with her success and wanted more of it. ![]() She gave rise to extravagant comparisons with Marilyn Monroe, although unlike Monroe, she was no cripple. She was not just any playmate but the “Eighties’ First Playmate of the Year” who, as Playboy trumpeted in June, was on her way to becoming “one of the few emerging goddesses of the new decade.” But beyond that, Dorothy Stratten was a corporate treasure. For one thing, Playboy has been earnestly trying to avoid any bad national publicity that might threaten its application for a casino license in Atlantic City. Both caused grief and chagrin to the self-serious “family” of playmates whose aura does not admit the possibility of shaving nicks and bladder infections, let alone death.īut the loss of Dorothy Stratten sent Hefner and his family into seclusion, at least from the press. Claudia Jennings known as “Queen of the B-Movies,” was crushed to death last fall in her Volkswagen convertible. Wilhelmina Rietveld took a massive overdose of barbiturates in 1973. Other playmates, of course, have expired violently. So they pulled her ethereal blond image from the cover of the 1981 Playmate Calendar and promptly scrapped a Christmas promotion featuring her posed in the buff with Hefner. During the morning hours after Stratten was found nude in a West Los Angeles apartment, her face blasted away by 12-gauge buckshot, editors scrambled to pull her photos from the upcoming October issue. One, certainly, which masked the turmoil her death created within the Organization. A dispassionate eulogy from which one might conclude that Miss Stratten died in her sleep of pneumonia. But equally sad to us is the fact that her loss takes from us all a very special member of the Playboy family.” As Playboy’s Playmate of the Year with a film and a television career of increasing importance, her professional future was a bright one. To date, his public profession of grief has been contained in a press release: “The death of Dorothy Stratten comes as a shock to us all …. The incongruous spectacle of a sybarite in mourning. ![]() He is wearing pajamas and looking somber in green silk. It is shortly past four in the afternoon and Hugh Hefner glides wordlessly into the library of his Playboy Mansion West. ![]()
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