Then we see her growing. She doesn't grow into a great actress, but she is intelligent and competent and she does learn to fit into the new world of the Playboy Mansion, movie sets, dating young directors, being seen around town. For Paul, however, there are no rewards, only the constant reinforcement of his own lousy self-image. "He has the personality of a pimp," Hefner tells Stratten, not unkindly. She thinks he is talking about Paul's wardrobe.
"I think Dorothy was a real mole," Hemingway said. "She holed up in her own life for a long time. Even though she led a kind of tough life, raised herself, worked from an early age and all that stuff, she had no knowledge of the world at all. She was a pushover for someone like Paul, who praised her and made plans for her."
And then she moved on, from Paul to men who were better connected, who understood how things work. In "Star 80," one of the men, Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, is identified, and played by Cliff Robertson as a benevolent father figure. The other man, a young director, may be modeled on filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, who was in love with Stratten at the time of her murder. But that character is given a fictional name.
"Everybody wants to be responsible for somebody." Hemingway said. "Especially somebody naive and immature and beautiful. They want to be able to say, I had my hand in, I'm part of the reason she's a success.' But you know what I think? I think that by the end, Dorothy wanted to be free from everybody. She had started out knowing nothing, and by the time she learned enough to see what was happening, she just wanted to get away from all the ties. Hefner and . . . the director . . . were doing exactly what Paul was doing, just in a more controlled way."
Did you ever have any meditations in the middle of the night, I asked her, about the different paths that you and Dorothy took? There might have been a night, a few years ago, when Dorothy was sitting in the Playboy Mansion looking at you in "Manhattan" and thinking, "Why can't I get in a Woody Allen movie? I'm prettier than Mariel Hemingway . . . " And then the irony is that there finally was a movie all about Dorothy Stratten, but she had to be murdered to inspire it.
"I didn't think of her a lot. I tried to look at this role as a totally fictional character, which had been written, and which I was going to play. I looked at some videos of her, and I looked at 'They All Laughed,' the movie she made, but mostly I tried not to think about the fact that I was playing somebody who had been alive."
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