The Real Lolita

by Sarah Weinman

  At last, something woke up inside Ella’s mind. “I don’t think my little girl has stayed with that man all this time of her own accord.” Her sister, Susan, was days away from giving birth. Would Sally really choose to stay away when she was about to become an aunt? Ella finally understood the horrible truth. She called the police.

  After Detective Joseph Schultz spoke with Ella, he sent two other Camden detectives, William Marter and Marshall Thompson, to look for Sally in Atlantic City. On August 4, they arrived at the lodging house on 203 Pacific Avenue that Sally gave as the return address on her letters. There they learned from the landlady, Mrs. McCord, that Warner had been living there, and he’d been posing as Sally’s father. There were no other daughters, nor was there a wife. Just one little girl, Sally.

  The police also learned the man Ella knew as “Mr. Warner” worked at a gas station, and adopted the alias of “Frank Robinson.” When the cops went to the gas station, he wasn’t there. He’d failed to show up for work and hadn’t even bothered to pick up his final paycheck. “Robinson” had disappeared, and so had Sally. Two suitcases remained in their room, as did several unsent postcards from Sally to her mother. “He didn’t take any of his or the girl’s clothes, either,” Thompson told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “He didn’t even stop long enough to get his hat.”

  Photograph of Sally discovered at the Atlantic City boardinghouse in August 1948, six weeks after her disappearance.

  Among the items left behind in the rooming house was a photograph, one that Ella had never seen before. In it, Sally sat on a swing, feet dangling just above the ground, staring directly at the camera. She wore a cream-colored dress, white socks, and black patent shoes, and her honey-streaked light brown hair was pulled away from her face. Her eyes conveyed a mixture of fear and a bottomless desire to please. She looked like she wanted to get this moment right, but didn’t know what “right” was supposed to be, when everything was so wrong.

  It seemed likely that Sally’s kidnapper was the photographer. She was only three months past her eleventh birthday.

  Marshall Thompson led the search for Sally in Atlantic City. When that search turned up empty, he took the photo of her back to Camden police headquarters to be sent out on the teletypes. He had to find Sally, the sooner, the better, because police now knew who they were dealing with.

  For Sally’s mother, it was awful enough that the Camden police had failed to bring her daughter home. Far worse was the news they broke to Ella: the man who had called himself “Warner” was well-known to local law enforcement. They knew him as Frank La Salle. And only six months before he’d abducted Sally, he had been released from prison after serving a sentence for the statutory rape of five girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen.

  Three

  From Wellesley to Cornell

  The year 1948 was a pivotal one for Vladimir Nabokov. He had spent six years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, teaching literature to Wellesley College undergraduates and, in his spare time, indulging his passion for studying butterflies at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. After eight years in the United States, the tumult and trauma of emigration had receded. English, Nabokov said many times, was the first language he remembered learning, and the lure of America had sustained him as he fled the Russian Revolution for Germany, and then from the Nazis to Paris—a necessary step when married to a woman who was proud and unafraid to be Jewish.

  The United States, and particularly the Boston area, proved a generally happy environment for Nabokov, Véra, and their son, Dmitri, who was fourteen years old in 1948. Since they’d found a haven there, Nabokov had worked on a book about Nikolai Gogol, about whom he had decidedly mixed feelings; published a novel, Bend Sinister; and begun the version of his autobiography that would appear as Conclusive Evidence a couple of years later. (He would later rewrite it and publish it under the title Speak, Memory.)

  Nabokov had also traveled across America three times, in the summers of 1941, 1943, and 1947. (He would repeat the cross-country trip four more times.) He never drove, entrusting the task to his wife, Véra, or a graduate student. The first time, Dorothy Leuthold, a middle-aged student in his language class, had spirited the Nabokovs from New York City in a brand-new Pontiac (dubbed Pon’ka, the Russian word for “pony”) all the way to Palo Alto, California.

  The trio stayed in motor courts and budget hotels and other cheap lodgings that wouldn’t break the bank. The America Nabokov witnessed on these trips was eventually immortalized as the “lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country” that Humbert Humbert comments on in Lolita: “Beyond the tilled plain . . . there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud.” Though his marriage to Véra was once again stable, an affair had nearly derailed it a decade earlier, when she had gone on to Paris before him. Perhaps news of his romantic attentions to at least one Wellesley student had not reached Véra—or if it had, she did not view the dalliance as anything serious.

  Nabokov had been ill for much of the first half of 1948. He suffered a litany of lung troubles during the spring that no doctor could adequately diagnose. They thought it might be tuberculosis because of the alarming quantities of blood Nabokov coughed up. It wasn’t. The next guess was cancer. That, too, proved untrue. When doctors put a vulcanized rubber tube down his windpipe under local anesthetic to inspect his ailing lungs, all they found was a single ruptured blood vessel. Nabokov himself figured his body was “ridding itself of the damage caused by thirty years of heavy smoking.” Bedridden, he had enough energy to write, but not to teach, so Véra stood in for him as lecturer.

  After these summer trips, Nabokov was always glad to return to Cambridge. Wellesley, his academic and personal refuge, had turned down his multiple entreaties for a full-time professorship. Nor could he find full-time work at Harvard, where he’d made a quixotic bid to turn his butterfly-hunting hobby into a proper profession. But the Nabokovs’ fortunes were about to change thanks to Morris Bishop, a romance literature professor at Cornell who would remain a close friend to both Vladimir and Véra. Bishop lobbied Cornell to appoint Nabokov a professor of Russian literature, and it worked. On July 1, the Nabokovs moved to Ithaca, New York, finding solace in a “quiet summer in green surroundings.” By August, they had rented a large house on 802 East Seneca Street, one far bigger than their “wrinkled-dwarf Cambridge flatlet”—and future inspiration for the house where a man named Humbert Humbert would discover the object of his obsession.

  The summer also brought Nabokov a formative book, thanks to the literary critic Edmund Wilson, who sent Nabokov a copy of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex. He drew attention to one appendix that contained the late-nineteenth-century confession of an unnamed engineer of Ukrainian descent. The man had first had sex at age twelve with another child, found the experience so intoxicating he repeated it, and eventually destroyed his marriage by sleeping with child prostitutes. From there the man went further downhill, to the point where he flashed young girls in public. The confession, as Nabokov related in a later interview, “ends with a feeling of hopelessness, of a life ruined by hunger beyond control.”

  Nabokov appreciated Wilson’s gift and wrote him after reading the case histories. “I enjoyed the Russian’s love-life hugely. It is wonderfully funny. As a boy, he seems to have been quite extraordinarily lucky in coming across [willing girls]. . . . The end is rather bathetic.” Nabokov also directly acknowledged the impact of Ellis to his first biographer. “I was always interested in psychology,” he told Andrew Field. “I knew my Havelock Ellis rather well. . . .”

  He was, by this point, five years from finishing the manuscript for Lolita, and a decade from its triumphant American publication. But Nabokov was also nearly twenty years into his efforts to wrestle a thematic compulsion into its final form: the character who became Humbert Humbert.

  SKIP PAST THE OFT-QUOTED openin
g paragraph of Lolita’s first chapter. Chances are, even if you’ve never read the novel, you probably know it by heart, or some version of it. Move directly to paragraph two: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line.”

  In Humbert Humbert’s eyes, the girl named Dolores Haze is a canvas blank enough to project whatever he, and by virtue of his narration, the reader, sees or desires—“But in my arms she was always Lolita.” She is never allowed to be herself. Not in Humbert’s telling.

  When the reader meets her, Dolores Haze is just shy of twelve years old, born around the first of the year in 1935, making her two years and three months older than Sally Horner. She is an inch shorter than Sally and, at seventy-eight pounds, a good twenty pounds lighter than her real-life counterpart. There aren’t other facts and figures available for Sally, but Humbert measures every physical aspect of Dolores: twenty-seven-inch chest, twenty-three-inch waist, twenty-nine-inch hips, while her thigh, calf, and neck circumferences were seventeen, eleven, and eleven, respectively.

  Dolores’s mother, the former Charlotte Becker, and her father, Harold Haze, were living in Pisky, a town somewhere in the Midwest best known for producing hogs, corn, and coal, when their daughter was born. Conception, however, took place in Veracruz, Mexico, during the Hazes’ honeymoon. Another child followed in 1937, the year of Sally’s birth, but that offspring, a blond-haired boy, died at two. Sometime thereafter—Humbert is vague on details—Harold also perished, leaving Charlotte a widowed single mother. She and Dolores move east to Ramsdale, and set up house at 342 Lawn Street, where both mother and daughter will encounter a man who will alter their lives irrevocably and with monumental consequences.

  When he first sees her, Humbert Humbert describes Dolores in poetic terms: “frail, honey-hued shoulders . . . silky supple bare back . . . chestnut head of hair” and wearing “a polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest” that shields her breasts from Humbert’s “aging ape eyes.”

  Humbert confides to the reader that when he was nine, he met a girl named Annabel Leigh, also nine. They embarked on a friendship with strong romantic overtones and multiple rendezvous by the beach. Then Annabel fell ill and died prematurely, the idyll forever cut short. Her death imprinted a type, and a predilection, upon Humbert for the rest of his days. Girls who fall between the ages of nine and fourteen. Girls whose “true nature,” according to Humbert, bore little resemblance to real life. Girls he characterized as “little deadly demons.” Girls immortalized, forevermore, by him as well as his creator, as nymphets.

  Humbert Humbert was describing a compulsion. Vladimir Nabokov set out to create an archetype. But the real little girls who fit this idea of the mythical nymphet end up getting lost in the need for artistic license. The abuse that Sally Horner, and other girls like her, endured should not be subsumed by dazzling prose, no matter how brilliant.

  Four

  Sally, at First

  The seeds of Sally Horner’s kidnapping grew out of choices made by her mother. Ella kept secrets about the circumstances of her daughters’ births and the death of Sally’s father. Sally never knew of them. Susan may have, but if so she never spoke of them to her family. Digging up these secrets transformed me into an accidental forensic genealogical detective. I spent so many months stuck on Sally’s origin story and the clash between what was reported and what really happened because I thought it would help me better understand Ella’s behavior.

  Her decisions, with respect to Sally’s disappearance, hold her up to severe scrutiny by the modern world. She let her daughter go off with a stranger she’d only spoken to by telephone. She grew more distant, perhaps more baffling, to her family, let alone to neighbors. She fit the pejorative “difficult” bill so often affixed to women who don’t fit within neat little boxes. But in 1948, with little money and fewer resources available to Ella as a single mother, she functioned within her own limited framework. Her best was not good enough for Sally, but it was all she knew based on the life she’d lived up until she saw her daughter off at the Camden bus depot.

  SALLY WAS HER NICKNAME. No one is alive to remember why, or who used it first, or how it stuck. Her legal name, listed on the certificate announcing her birth at Trenton Hospital on April 18, 1937, was Florence, no middle name, Horner. Her mother, the former Ella Katherine Goff, took the baby back to the home she shared with Russell Horner in Roebling, New Jersey. The house at 238 Fourth Avenue is long gone, replaced by a more modern town house a stone’s throw from the River Line train station to the east, and several blocks south of the Delaware River.

  Ella’s older daughter, Susan, also lived with the Horners, though Russell was not her father. Eleven years earlier, at the age of nineteen, Ella had had some sort of relationship with an older man of about thirty. When the subject came up, Ella told her family that she and Susan’s birth father, whom she never named, were married, but that he passed away. Susan knew her father’s real name, William Ralph Swain, because she listed it on her marriage license. She likely knew little else.

  Ella had good reason to keep Swain’s existence a secret, and never mention him by name. Records indicate he was married to someone else when Susan was born, contrary to the “yes” ticked off on Susan’s birth certificate, indicating her legitimate status. Nor could I find any existing marriage record between Swain and Ella, though one may turn up in the future—vital records are irregularly stored from city to city, state by state. To confuse matters further, the 1930 census listed Ella’s last name as Albara, which she used for at least a half dozen more years. The census record also listed her as being married, but I could not track down any marriage record between Ella and a man named Albara.

  Ella raised Susan on her own, with occasional help from her parents, Job and Susannah Goff. One subject they all fretted about was how long it took Susan to learn to speak. She’d had some sort of head injury as a baby, and did not begin talking in earnest until she was five, by which time she and her mother had moved to Prospertown to be closer to Ella’s parents, who were growing older and more infirm.

  That’s where Ella met Russell Horner, a widower with a son, also named Russell. Horner began to court her, and some of their meetings were recorded by the local papers, as was the custom of the day. On December 9, 1935, the Asbury Park Press noted that Ella and Russell were “recent visitors to friends in Lakehurst.” The paper also reported on June 8, 1936, that Ella and Susan visited Russell and his son (both names were spelled as “Russel”) in New Egypt, and noted a solo visit by Ella to the town on August 8. Ella and Russell were not husband and wife, though. It seems Ella had repeated the pattern begun with Swain. While Russell’s first wife, the mother of his son, had died, he had married a second time and never bothered to divorce the woman. By the end of 1937, Russell and Ella were living as husband and wife at the Fourth Avenue house in Roebling.

  As for Russell Junior, he married two months before Sally Horner’s birth. Sally never knew of her half brother’s existence. Neither her mother nor Susan mentioned him.

  Ella and Russell’s domestic arrangement was as short-lived as their earlier relationships. By the time Sally was about three, the situation had grown volatile. Russell had a drinking problem, which did not mix well with his job as a crane operator, and he could be abusive to his wife and her daughters. Susan remembered the beatings her stepfather gave her mother, memories she did not allow herself to think about until close to the end of her own life. Sally, much younger when her parents split up, may have been spared the worst of these memories.

  Eventually, Ella fled her relationship. She took Susan and Sally to Camden, where they moved into the town house at 944 Linden Street. Russell became itinerant, drifting from town to town around southern New Jersey, looking for and not finding work. He lost his driver’s license when caught taking a shortcut along some railroad tracks. By the beginning of 1943, he was living at his parents’ far
m in Cassville. On March 24, he hanged himself from the rafters of the garage. Horner left a note for his mother in the kitchen, directing her where to find his body. According to the state police, he “had been despondent over ill health for some time.”

  Police told the Asbury Park Press that Russell had been married twice and was “estranged from his current wife,” though they did not say whether the wife in question was Ella. But the address listed on Russell’s death certificate was the address where he’d lived with Ella and the girls in Roebling. And the name of his daughter, “Florence,” is handwritten just below the address line.

  Sally was not quite six years old when her father committed suicide. It isn’t clear how much she knew of her father’s history and manner of death. Later, when it became necessary to clarify her parentage, she said, “My real daddy died when I was six and I remember what he looks like.”

  After Russell killed himself, Ella, already living as a single mother, was truly on her own. Her mother, Susannah, had passed away in 1939, while her father, Job, died in January 1943, just two months before Russell killed himself. Ella had to go to work as a seamstress.

  Susan, by now sixteen, had left school and was working a factory job. That summer, Susan met Alvin Panaro, a sailor on leave, at a friend’s party. Though Al was three years older, he was immediately smitten, but the Second World War was on and they were too young to marry. Al hailed from Florence, near the same part of town where Susan and Sally had once lived. His parents owned a greenhouse, and planned for Al to take over responsibility running it once he was finished with the navy, once he was home for good. It was also understood he might not get that chance; even the navy carried a high casualty risk.