Posted on 09/29/2017 8:32:34 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Hugh Hefner grieved in green silk.
One of his most promising Playboy Playmates, 20-year-old Dorothy Stratten, had been murdered, and Hefner was giving Village Voice writer Teresa Carpenter a glimpse at what he had otherwise kept private. After Stratten was shot in the face by her estranged husband on Aug. 14, 1980, Hefner issued an emotionless news release and went into a media-free seclusion.
In his trademark silk pajamas, Hefner looked somber. Carpenter described the sight as, “The incongruous spectacle of a sybarite in mourning.”
... “Death of a Playmate,” which would win a Pulitzer Prize, she also addressed Stratten’s loss on a deeper level for Hefner. He had struggled to make stars of his Playmates, and Stratten seemed destined to take him to the next level.
“There is something poignant about Hefner, master of an empire built on intimate nudes, but unable to coax those lustrous forms to life on film,” Carpenter wrote... “Dorothy exposed that yearning, that ego weakness, as surely as she revealed the most pathetic side of her husband’s nature — his itch for the big score....”
For all the high and unconstrained moments of Hefner’s life before his death Wednesday at the age of 91, the brutal killing of Stratten would remain a dark event that would follow him for years. He would later blame the cause of his stroke in 1985 on accusations flung at him by film producer Peter Bogdanovich, who had met Stratten at the Playboy Mansion and later fell in love with her.
...
Bogdanovich wrote of Hefner in “The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten.” He wrote that, “she could not handle the slick professional machinery of the Playboy sex factory, nor the continual efforts of its founder to bring her into his personal fold, no matter what she wanted.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Peter Bogdanovich hasn’t got any room to be accusing anyone of being a pervert. He was a class A pervert himself.
After his fling with Dorothy, and her murder, he moved on to Dorothy’s underage sister.
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