While fond of Dorothy and generally concerned for her welfare, he also seems to have considered himself the gatekeeper of the aspiring Playmates career, sexual and romantic decisions. Hefner's mythos as a benevolent quasi father figure to fun loving nubiles is also peeled away, providing a more complex portrait of a caterer to the stars, insecure about his own footing and legacy among Hollywood power players. Dorothy's father is also mentioned in passing, a man who managed to attend her funeral but chose to abandon his family and be absent for the majority of his daughter's life - a sad but powerful testimony that the absence of a parent's love and support can have long term emotional consequences on children. Contemporary media also sexualized her death (as they did with Sharon Tate and continue to do beautiful women, such as Reeva Steenkamp ) by running suggestive images of her next to graphic narratives of the crime. Playboy continued to run and profit from Dorothy's nude images for years after the murder. Playboy's sexually emancipated Bunny literally and figuratively had no clothes: women being mass merchandised as sexual commodities, down to their exact breast-waist-hip measurements and brief profile, did not give them agency and never will. Nonetheless, his indictment of the commodification and hypersexualization of women's bodies still strikes a chord in an era when younger women are encouraged to believe that they are "empowering" themselves in the adult industry (while making profits for well known corporations/panderers). He himself admits that he was complicit in some of the bacchanalian activities of the seventies era, though not to extent of Snider, Hefner and company, but his attempts at gaslighting some of his own behavior are a bit ridiculous. The devastation, myopia, justifications and accusations are all here, and other readers have mentioned Bogdanovich's tendency to cast hypocritical stones. In the end, I still have ambivalent feelings about this work. Most come to this book, ostensibly about Dorothy (Hoog)Stratten, after other avenues, the damning "Death of a Playmate" article by Teresa Carpenter and Bob Fosse's disturbing and underrated Star 80.
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