Death of a Playmate: A True Story of a Playboy Centerfold Killed by her Jealous Husband (The Stacks Reader Series)

By Teresa Carpenter

Dorothy Stratten, a naive and beautiful young woman with an overbearing husband, becomes a superstar Playboy centerfold and part of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s inner circle. When she dumps the boyfriend and takes up with a famous movie director (Peter Bogdanovich), carnage ensues.

Including an interview with the author by imprint editor Alex Belth.

About The Stacks Reader Series
The Stacks Reader Series highlights classic literary non-fiction and short fiction by great journalists that would otherwise be lost to history—a living archive of memorable storytelling by notable authors. Curated by Alex Belth and brought to you by The Sager Group, with support from NeoText (www.NeoTextCorp.com).

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Sager Group
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781950154630

Teresa Carpenter

Teresa Carpenter, editor of New York Diaries: 1609-2009, is a former senior editor of the Village Voice where her articles on crime and the law won a Pulitzer Prize. She is the bestselling author of four books and lives in New York City with her husband, author Steven Levy, a senior writer at Wired magazine.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Bogdanovich and his people weren’t talking. But it was one of those rare assignments where everything seemed to fall right into place. Hefner gave an interview. In his version, of course, he was a father figure to Dorothy. Later he was furious at me for poking holes in that fantasy.

True crime existed well before Truman Capote’s landmark nonfiction novel In Cold Blood set the stage for the genre for decades to come—not just in terms of how stories were reported and written, but how they appealed to Hollywood as source material.

From Dog Day Afternoon to Dead Ringers, moviemakers looked for inspiration to narrative nonfiction they found in magazines, the alternative press, and newspapers, the way they once looked to Broadway and the theater for original material. Of all the true crime journalism that appeared during the New Journalism era, perhaps none was as tailor-made for a big screen adaptation than Teresa Carpenter’s brilliant, Pulitzer Prize–winning, 1980 Village Voice feature about Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, who was brutally murdered by her ex-boyfriend.

Star 80 (1983) starred Mariel Hemingway, who had well-publicized breast augmentation for the role), along with Eric Roberts, as her psycho ex. It was written and directed by the legendary Bob Fosse, in what turned out to be his final film. The movie was powerful, if uneven, Hemingway perhaps miscast, Roberts solidly in the meat of his best early work. Said film critic Roger Ebert: Devastating, violent, hopeless, and important, because it holds a mirror up to a part of the world we live in, and helps us see it more clearly.

Of course, it is a rare movie adaptation of a narrative work that lives up to the standards of the original prose, for a million different reasons. But if ever it was going to happen, perhaps the weight of the credit goes to the source material—Carpenter’s sure-handed storytelling.

Lesser writers from the tabloid set of the time relied on the blunt salaciousness of the true events to tell their versions of the events: Beautiful young woman from Nowheresville, with overbearing, screw-loose boyfriend, becomes a superstar Playboy centerfold and part of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s inner circle. When she dumps the boyfriend and takes up with a famous movie director (Peter Bogdanovich), carnage ensues.

Carpenter, on the other hand, employs restraint, precision, and detachment. The best writers of nonfiction narrative know this secret: dig deep to unearth the details and then get out of the way and let the story tell itself. Artifice seldom triumphs over the hard work of good reporting.

This understated approach, complete with droll asides and the kind of professional skepticism that was once the standard sensibility of an old-school newspaper reporter like Carpenter, helps emphasize the horror of the story. Carpenter doesn’t shy away from unpleasant details but she doesn’t lean into melodrama. She doesn’t overplay anything, which may have seemed incongruous to the style of writing popularly associated with the Village Voice at the time, the leading alternative weekly of its generation. Without essayist underpinnings or first-person musings, Carpenter plays it straight, although she’s far from square. Call it a Midwestern sense of measure, taste, and cool.

Carpenter attended the prestigious Missouri School of Journalism and spent her early reporting apprenticeship at an up-and-coming regional publication (New Jersey Monthly), where she also she met her future (and present) husband, journalist and author Steven Levy. Although Carpenter spent time covering politics and business, it was true crime that became her calling.

—Alex Belth

Alex Belth: Did you grow up exposed to any counterculture literature such as Rolling Stone, Ramparts, and New Times?

Teresa Carpenter: Afraid not. More like the Kansas City Star, Kansas City Times, and the Independence Examiner. The most exotic periodical in our household was the National Geographic. My father held an advanced degree in geography from the University of Missouri, and it was his go-to read. My mom was keen on literature. She read to me from a set of children’s classics. These had been edited to the level

Reviews for Death of a Playmate

[bekahlee10 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There is a reason this is still, over 40 years later, the definitive account of the career and murder of Dorothy Stratten. Carpenter manages to do what many seem to struggle with when writing about the tragic ends of beautiful women; she centers the woman herself and reminds the reader that she was a human being. Yes a beautiful human being, but a human being nonetheless. Carpenter expertly tells the story while tastefully but effectively skewering the men in Dorothy's life who put her on a pedestal and positioned her as a goddess whose main function was to be desired. She is able to write about Dorothy and her life without applying the soft-focus lens of the Playboy cameras, instead treating this case as what it was; the horrific end of a 20 year old woman with her whole life and career ahead of her, who left behind a loving family and friends who adored her for who she was rather than how she looked. Much of the discourse surrounding Stratten falls into the trap of focusing more on the men in her life; Hugh Hefner, Peter Bogdonavich, and her murderer/husband, Paul Snider, inevitably dissecting their interactions with one another before and after her death and seeming to take sides among them. Dorothy herself sadly gets treated more like the creature that Peter compared her to in his eventual book about her; a unicorn, something mythical and untouchable and not of this world, a vessel for the desires and conflicts of the men around her. Thus Teresa Carpenter's achievement is all the more remarkable, in that she is able to deftly remind us that the only true victim in the case was Dorothy herself and the squabbling among the men who claimed ownership of her is only a piddling distraction from the larger story. This piece is an insightful, respectful, and powerful work of journalism that should be read by anyone with even a passing interest in the case.