Review: Playboy’s 1979 Roller Disco & Pajama Party Captivates and Reminds of Bygone Era and Budding Star Dorothy Stratten - Page 3
Stratten’s beauty is overpowering even on the small screen. We know today that during the taping of this event she had her first long conversation (off camera) with one of Hollywood’s hottest directors at the time, Peter Bogdanovich. Bogdanovich fell instantly madly in love with her. Her grisly murder about one year later at the hands of her estranged husband destroyed Bogdanovich. After watching Stratten in her few interviews that exist, it’s easy to understand why.
On top of her physical beauty, Stratten’s feminine and dulcet voice is hard to describe, and it can make one melt. By all accounts, she was a thoughtful, kind and sensitive girl who was devoted to her mother and younger sister in Vancouver, British Columbia. Also, she did not seem to partake in the many Romanesque sexual dalliances at the mansion or use recreational drugs. She came from a difficult childhood having been abandoned by her father. Her mother struggled to provide for her and her two siblings. Strangely, she was not extraordinarily beautiful child, but beauty hit her hard as she turned into a woman.
Before being whisked to Los Angeles in 1978 by Playboy, Stratten never had even flown in an airplane. Like many girls in Playboy, she reportedly saw the magazine as a means to an end. No Playmate, however, had ever parlayed a pictorial into a successful Hollywood career. Most were happy to get non-speaking roles in B-films. But by the summer of 1980, Stratten was well on her way.
Stratten’s luminescent onscreen prescence in Bogdanovich’s feature film They All Laughed – released soon after her death – proves that had she lived she would have been a major movie star. Her appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in April 1980 gave every indication that she was for real. The unflappable Carson, who saw more than his share of young starlets, was clearly flustered by her otherworldy beauty. Normally women don’t look as good in person as they do in their promo photo, Carson said. But you’re different.
The sense of loss from the Roller Disco/Pajama Party extends beyond the loss of Stratten to the loss, in a sense, of one of the other guests – none other than the once much loved and admired comedian Bill Cosby. The Roller Disco/Pajama Party features a spry Cosby entertaining the crowd on the tennis courts as a doubles partner to model Cheryl Tiegs. Perhaps not all was innocent if he were lurking the grounds. Judging by the good vibes at the Mansion in 1979, however, a predator like the Cos not only would not have been tolerated but would have been at risk of losing life and limb if discovered.
To orient the reader, Roller Disco/Pajama Party may be divided into two main sections. The first half of the Roller Disco/Pajama Party features shots of the Playmates and other guests rollerskating around Hefner’s tennis court to the most popular disco music of the time. Also, a puppeteer popular in the 70s goofs on some of the guests, including a hilariously irritated former football star James Brown. There are playful bits of adlibbed conversation throughout to balance the few scripted bits.
After the sun goes down, the party shifts indoors for the pajama party. Damn, who would not want to be at this party?
At the start of the pajama party we see Stratten dancing with the man who would kill her one year later. He is dressed more like an accountant than the flashy former street pimp he allegedly was. Live entertainment in the pajama party consists of the disco icon The Village People. They lip-synch some playful disco tunes, but their catchy anthem “Ready for the 80s” has an especially sad and ironic quality here. Stratten wrote in her Playmate profile that the group was one of her favorites. She prances to the front of the stage to join the group and flirtatiously dance with them. The lyrics include such things as, “I’m ready for the eighty’s; Glad to be alive” and “In the 80s we will go far; We will realize just who we are.” Watching Stratten one can imagine her thinking “this song is about me and my own life” the way young people tend to do.
