Picturing Peter Bogdanovich. Peter Tonguette

offered was something infinitely more valuable than listening to a director explain this shot or that cut. Maybe, through absorbing the work of a writer who loved and venerated women, Bogdanovich could preserve the memory of the woman he loved and venerated.

      So in April 1981—less than nine months after Dorothy Stratten was killed—Peter Bogdanovich sent a telegram to Majorca, Spain, home to Robert Graves, his wife, Beryl, and their children.

      DEAR ROBERT GRAVES:

      WOULD VERY MUCH CARE TO DISCUSS WITH YOU AN EVENT OF GREAT COINCIDENCE RELATING TO YOUR CARDEA BOOK. YOU MAY PERHAPS UNDERSTAND IN PART IF I SAY THE SUBJECT HAS TO DO WITH SAILLE DUIR RUIS CIRCA I960-I980 AD AND THAT INDEED IT IS A TALE OF WILLOW, OAK AND ELDER. WOULD ALSO CARE TO DISCUSS SOME BUSINESS. PLEASE CALL COLLECT….

      WITH DEEP ADMIRATION AND THANKS, PETER BOGDANOVICH⁶³

      The message was all riddles and codes. Only Graves, Bogdanovich reckoned, could decipher what he had written. “Dorothy’s murder was still fresh in the public consciousness,” Bogdanovich told me, “and I didn’t want to come out and say it was about D. R. so I put it in code that I knew he would understand on sight.”⁶⁴ “Saille Duir Ruis” were letter names for “Stratten, Dorothy Ruth” in the Ogham, or Old Irish, alphabet. The letters had a secondary meaning: “Duir, the Oak, is the Tree of Triumph; Saille, the Willow, is the Tree of Enchantment, but Ruis, the Elder, is the Tree of Doom, thus poetically encapsulating Dorothy’s story.”⁶⁵ In the end, although Graves no longer spoke to anyone, even his family, Bogdanovich made several voyages to Majorca to spend time in his presence, all the while burrowing deeper on his own into religion, mythology, and even numerology.

      “I like the idea of boiling things down to a number,” he said, “and seeing what it means.”⁶⁶ The manuscript pages of The Killing of the Unicorn—the book he was writing during this time—are lined with scribbles alluding to the ancient thirteen-month calendar: “Wednesday,” being derived from “Mercury,” is connected with Hermes and thus to the concepts “wisdom” and “wise counsel.” These fascinating jottings are the product of someone anxious to make order out of chaos.