The Real Lolita

by Sarah Weinman

  It staggered me, this voluminous collection of Lolita ephemera. And yet, there was no sign of the relevant issue of Nugget. Compared to other periodicals collected and kept by the Nabokovs, Nugget was not so obscure. Its absence is telling because it is part of a larger absence in Nabokov’s archives: any reference whatsoever to Sally Horner.

  Véra Nabokov, in her letter to Al Levin, emphasized that Sally’s abduction “did not inspire the book.” Moreover, she insisted Nabokov “studied a considerable number of case histories . . . many of which have more affinities with the Lolita plot than the one mentioned by Mr. Welding.” Even if that was true, the statement was disingenuous. For only two of the “considerable number of case histories” were explicitly mentioned in Lolita: the story of G. Edward Grammer, and the story of Sally Horner.

  Nabokov must have had a reason to hold on to those two index cards and not burn them, as he had burned handwritten pages of the manuscript. He had been compelled to write notes on both cases, and in particular the death of Sally Horner. He included the parenthetical reference in the novel when he could have left out any mention altogether. Sally’s story mattered to Nabokov because Lolita would not have been finished if he hadn’t read of Sally’s kidnapping.

  The Nabokovs’ behavior could, I suppose, be attributed as much to carelessness as willful obfuscation. Stacy Schiff, Véra’s biographer, strongly advised against reading anything specific into Véra’s blanket denial to Levin. Schiff told me that Véra’s letter “reads like everything else [the Nabokovs said] about the primacy of art. It’s a realm unto itself, and everything else is on some pedestrian or insignificant level.” Véra, Schiff said, dismissed anything that could be perceived as a “mandarin influence on high art.” The everyday needed to be discarded at the altar of creative imagination.

  Except Vladimir and Véra were not careless people. His art, and her management and protection of his art, was all about command and control, about rejecting interpretations that did not fit with their vision. If art was to prevail—and for the Nabokovs, it always did—then explicitly revealing what lay behind the curtain of fiction in the form of a real-life case could shatter the illusion of total creative control.

  Véra’s denial by letter had to be definitive to make pesky tabloid reporters slink away without investigating the matter more deeply. Levin published his piece in the Post, but it was soon forgotten, setting the template for further neglect of the Sally Horner case. Andrew Field, in his 1967 critical biography Nabokov: His Life in Art, merely cited the parenthetical as “an actual case of a Philadelphia mechanic who took an eleven-year-old Camden girl to Atlantic City.”

  Alfred Appel, in his annotated Lolita published in 1970 (as well as in the revised 1991 version), dutifully footnoted the reference to her, but failed to mention Sally by name. Brian Boyd’s definitive biography of Nabokov was better, noting “‘a middle-aged morals offender’ who abducted fifteen-year-old Sally Horner from New Jersey and kept her for twenty-one months as his ‘cross-country slave’”—but misstated Sally’s age at her abduction by four years.

  Vladimir Nabokov’s otherwise scrupulous archive of Lolita-related clippings failed to include anything about Sally Horner because if it had, then the dots would connect with more force, which would upset the carefully constructed myth of Nabokov, the sui generis artist, whose imagination and gifts were far superior to others’. It’s as if he didn’t trust Lolita to stand on its own against the real story of Sally Horner. As a result, Sally’s plight was sanded over, all but forgotten.

  Twenty-Eight

  “He Told Me Not to Tell”

  Decades after Ruth Janisch gently coaxed Sally Horner to make the long-distance telephone call that freed her from Frank La Salle, Ruth was having tea with her daughter Rachel. After years of estrangement, Rachel had decided she wanted a closer relationship to her mother.

  In Sally’s story, Ruth was a heroine whose actions changed the course of a girl’s life forever. But to her children, Ruth was a more complicated, infuriating, mercurial, manipulative creature, whose actions led to long estrangements. That troubling Ruth was not yet in full bloom in 1949 and 1950. Much of her aberrant behavior was still in the future. Rachel described her mother’s life philosophy to me: Ruth would meet someone and say something along the lines of “Hello, my name is Ruth. What can you do for me?”

  Years into adulthood, some of Ruth’s children would make peace with the woman she was. Yes, Ruth had done terrible things in the past. She had looked the other way when her children were abused, physically, emotionally, and sexually, by the men in her life, be they husbands or short-lived romantic partners. Ruth had, at times, enabled that abuse by not believing her children and choosing, instead, to believe the men. One of them ended up as Rachel’s first and only husband.

  Ruth was working at a bus station in the Bay Area at that time, around the early 1960s. One of her coworkers had two sons, whom Ruth decided must meet her daughters. Ruth wanted the older boy for herself, but she thought the younger one, still a teenager, would be perfect for Rachel. Instead, the younger boy expressed no interest, and the older one gravitated toward Rachel in a way that made her wonder, much later, if there was something more calculated at play.

  Rachel grew certain that her mother had made some sordid arrangement with the older boy. That in order for him to have access to Rachel, he had to have some romantic involvement with her mother. Ruth also goaded her daughter about him at the time, saying she couldn’t possibly land a man like him. Rachel would not grasp the impact of her mother’s verbal abuse for years. Then, she thought Ruth’s behavior was normal.

  Rachel did “land” the boy, became pregnant, and she then married him in haste and moved away from home. Seventeen years, three children, numerous moves, and countless beatings, rapes, and threats to her life later, Rachel managed to break free. “It was less a marriage than extended captivity,” she said. When she dared to speak up for herself, her husband punished her. He repeated the pattern she knew too well from childhood, when confessing that something hurt her caused more hurt, psychologically from Ruth and physically from her husbands or partners.

  Once Rachel’s divorce was final, in the late 1970s, she found a job near where her mother lived. She also thought about what kind of relationship she wanted with Ruth. Because Rachel, despite the past, liked her mother. They shared a love of gardening and of books. As adult women, they could converse, if not as equals then at least on a similar plane. Rachel decided she could handle visiting Ruth at least once a week for tea. The visits were calm at first. She felt herself understanding her mother better. She felt she had enough emotional distance to appreciate Ruth, the woman, and leave the baggage of neglect and abuse behind.

  What Rachel created in this new relationship with her mother was a cocoon where old wounds could be erased. But the cocoon turned out to be an illusion. That it broke apart, Rachel realized, should not have surprised her as it did.

  One afternoon, Rachel turned up at Ruth’s house and found her mother immersed in her scrapbooks. They were a living testament to Ruth’s belief that she mattered. Subsequent visits by Rachel and other daughters led to them discovering that the scrapbooks contained items Ruth had no business possessing, items she had pilfered from her children without their immediate knowledge, but Rachel wasn’t aware of that yet. As mother and daughter sat for tea, one scrapbook lay between them. The one Ruth had been working on earlier that morning.

  Lying next to the scrapbook was an old paperback novel that Rachel didn’t recognize.

  Ruth pointed to a newspaper clipping in the scrapbook. “Do you remember this little girl?” Ruth moved her finger to the headline. “Do you remember that girl, Sally Horner?”

  “I do remember,” said Rachel.

  “And do you remember Frank La Salle, the man who kidnapped her?”

  “I do remember,” Rachel said again.

  Rachel told me that she felt herself grow cold. But Ruth did not notice, or even understand
, her daughter’s reaction.

  “Wasn’t that quite the story?” Ruth carried on. “They’re mentioned in this novel, Lolita!”

  Rachel hadn’t heard this story before. She would hear a different version of it years later from her sister Vanessa, who had read the novel—that same tattered paperback—at Ruth’s insistence. Vanessa, sixteen at the time, was puzzled at first at her mother’s insistence she read the novel. Then Ruth explained: “Lolita tells the story of a girl named Sally Horner. A girl who died just before you were born. A girl I helped rescue from a man named Frank La Salle.” This was no mere novel, but literary validation of Ruth’s sense of self, that her single act of decency had larger heroic meaning. Vanessa couldn’t help but read Lolita with her mother’s words echoing in her head. But she also couldn’t read it without thinking of the ways in which Ruth had wronged the family.

  Staring at the scrapbook, Rachel knew she had to speak up now or she would never be able to say the words again.

  “Mom, there’s something I need to tell you. Something I never told you. Frank La Salle didn’t only molest Sally. He also molested me.”

  ONE AFTERNOON while Sally Horner was at school, Frank La Salle invited Rachel over to his trailer. At age five, Rachel wore her white-blond hair in pigtails, a ribbon adorning the left plait. She put on her favorite striped black-and-white dress every chance she got. One portrait of Rachel from that time depicts her as the ideal of innocence. Her smile is trusting, guileless. Her expression is pliant, hinting at a gullible streak that would plague her repeatedly in adulthood.

  She might have been by herself, or with one of her sisters. What she most recalled was that Frank was nice to her. He seemed to understand what Rachel wanted. That she saw what Sally had—toys, games, a father’s love—and didn’t have them. Not the toys. Not the games. And her father, George, was a remote presence, more comfortable with adults than with his children.

  Of all the things Sally possessed, what interested Rachel most were her crayons and coloring books. They reminded Rachel of an earlier stay at a Minnesota hospital when she was three, quarantined for months with rheumatic fever. She went to school at the hospital because she wasn’t allowed to go home. There were troubles, both at home and in the hospital, the kind so traumatizing Rachel would not remember them for decades without the trigger of unexpected smells and brief image flashes. But what came back to her now was the memory of her parents visiting with big smiles and good cheer, and of learning how to draw with crayons.

  Frank made Rachel a deal: She could play with anything of Sally’s. Anything at all. But she had to do favors for him first.

  “Essentially, what he wanted from me was to give him a blow job,” Rachel said. “So I did.”

  Rachel remembered a single incident. There may have been others that she blocked out. She didn’t remember it until after she was married, and her husband wanted the same thing. The sexual act seemed disgusting to the newly married Rachel, and it would take her years to learn it flowed from normal, healthy desire.

  She only realized the enormity of what Frank had done to her when she stumbled across a pamphlet at the local library, long after the end of her marriage. The pamphlet was about child molestation. Its title: “He Told Me Not to Tell.”

  Frank La Salle had told Rachel not to tell. But Rachel would have stayed silent regardless. The girl’s earlier hospital experience taught her not to trust adults. They could abandon you for months. They could leave you alone and never tell you when you might come home. And when you did come home, you didn’t know what awaited. Whether it was a safe haven or a recurring nightmare.

  While telling the story to me nearly forty years after the fact, Rachel would recall that when she told her mother what La Salle had done, a barrier went up right away between herself and Ruth. Like an electrified fence where venturing too close might lead to a surprise shock. She felt her mother shut down. Rachel decided to change the subject to safer territory. She had taken a risk and it did not work. When that happened, as it had so many times in her past, the best thing to do was to be like a turtle. Retreat within the shell and never reveal your vulnerable self again.

  Afterwards, she and Ruth would never be as close. (There would be other visits, including a reunion of all but one of Ruth’s children in 1998, six years before Ruth died.) Rachel sensed her mother must have known, on some level, why there was a new breach between them. Perhaps, Rachel theorized, her mother had helped Sally Horner because she knew she could not save her own children from nearby monsters. But letting her thoughts run in this direction was too much for Rachel. She suspected Ruth never allowed herself to contemplate her complicity in the damage done to her own children.

  No wonder Ruth acted as if the conversation never happened. The subject never came up between them again. Neither did Lolita.

  Twenty-Nine

  Aftermaths

  Sally Horner’s premature death cast a pall on the lives of those who knew her best and loved her most. Ella, who did not display much of her inner turmoil while Sally lived, buried it completely after her daughter’s death. She could not think of another way to handle it besides burying her emotions, but at least she did not have to bear her grief alone. The Panaros remained nearby. Ella could watch her granddaughter, Diana, grow up.

  A year before Sally died, Ella had connected with a new partner: Arthur Burkett, a Camden native five years her junior, who moved into 944 Linden Street. They decamped for Pennsauken, five miles away, within a year of the car accident that killed Sally, and in the early 1960s migrated west to Palo Alto, California—less than an hour’s drive away from the San Jose trailer park where Sally had been rescued. Burkett found work as a groundsman for a local college, and Ella and Ott, as he was called, made their union legal in January 1965.

  Five years later, Burkett was dead. His tractor had overturned on him as he cut grass on a steep hill on the college grounds. While he was recuperating from the accident, doctors discovered he had gastric cancer, which had already spread to his liver. Without any other ties to Palo Alto, after he died Ella returned to New Jersey to be closer to her family.

  When she visited her family, she never spoke of what happened to Sally. She didn’t speak much of the past at all. There didn’t seem to be much purpose in revisiting painful memories with a generation that hadn’t been born when the worst had happened. Ella preferred to play cards—gin rummy was a favorite—or talk about what books she liked to read. Mystery novels, in particular.

  Ella’s silence about what happened to her younger daughter carried over to the next generation. Diana didn’t learn the truth that her dead aunt Sally had been kidnapped until she was in her teens. She didn’t remember the exact details of the conversation she had with her father about Sally, but she recalled it didn’t last long. A mere recounting of the basic facts: that before her aunt died, she had been taken by a stranger posing as her father. The rest was left up to Diana’s imagination.

  Diana was only four years old when Sally died. Her parents were chiefly concerned with making sure their daughter had a happy childhood, and hiding their hurt, however deep the wounds ran. Just as Susan didn’t speak much about her younger sister, neither did Al speak of his experiences in World War II. It seemed easier to keep the past behind a locked door and to keep silent on family tragedy.

  “I still can’t believe something like this happened in my family,” Diana told me. “I never got to know my aunt Sally. I also wish I could have been able to support my mom during that awful period.”

  By this point, the Panaros had had a son, Brian, born in 1968, twenty years after Diana. Susan and Al had given up on the greenhouse well before Brian’s birth (a surprise pregnancy after several additional miscarriages made the likelihood of another child seem all the more remote). They had also left New Jersey for South Carolina, with Ella joining them for a time, though they would return to their home state in the mid-1970s. Susan became a full-time homemaker. She spent ample time gardening—for pleasur
e, not for income—volunteering with her church, and with her family.

  When the Panaros returned to New Jersey, Ella settled back in New Egypt, where she had spent much of her childhood and early motherhood. She then moved to a nursing home in Pemberton, where she died in 1998 at the age of ninety-one. Susan died in 2012, and Al passed away in February 2016.

  “DID YOU SAY THAT SALLY HORNER was the inspiration for Lolita?” Carol Starts said at the beginning of our first conversation in December 2016, once I’d explained why I was calling her out of the blue. Her incredulity was palpable. So, too, was her admiration for her long-deceased best friend.

  “I was so unbelievably impressed by her. Sally taught me a great deal. After she was gone, I went through modeling classes to be a ‘lady.’ Because that’s the way Sally was. I wanted to be like her. So I was. I went through those classes, how to walk and sit and stand and so forth. I paid attention to actions, movements, how to dress, and thoroughly enjoyed it because I could be just like Sally. I was on the wrong side of the tracks. I didn’t have much mentorship prior to her.”

  The strong impression Sally made endured for Carol’s entire life. She left Camden for California at eighteen to marry her first husband. She kept his last name of Taylor—she was glad to shed her maiden name, which had caused her no end of teasing at school—married and divorced three more times, and had four children. Carol died on October 30, 2017, in Melbourne, Florida, where she lived with one of her daughters. She was eighty years old.

  EDWARD BAKER GOT ON with his life after the accident that killed Sally. He was drafted into the army in the summer of 1954 and spent more than eight months at Schweinfurt, Germany, where he celebrated his twenty-third birthday. Upon returning to Vineland, he married, had a son he named Edward Jr., and worked as a machinist, with side interests in riding and fixing motorcycles and watching NASCAR. Both father and son volunteered substantial amounts of time with the local YMCA. But several years before Edward Baker’s death in 2014, fate had another twist in store for him.