The Real Lolita

by Sarah Weinman

  On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 17, 2007, his son fell asleep in his Mercury Grand Marquis. The car crossed the middle lane and into the median, then careened along the shoulder of Route 55, slamming into a tree. Just as Sally Horner had, fifty-five years earlier, Edward Baker, Jr., died instantly.

  THE TWO CAMDEN POLICE DETECTIVES involved with Sally Horner’s rescue, Marshall Thompson and Wilfred Dube, both retired in the mid-1960s. Dube had risen to become chief of detectives; Thompson remained a detective until his sixtieth birthday. Dube died in 1980; Thompson in 1982. Howard Hornbuckle served one more term as Santa Clara County sheriff, and retired to work as a dairy farm sales representative. He died in 1962.

  MITCHELL COHEN’S HEALTH suffered after the Sally Horner case concluded. Her rescue, and Frank La Salle’s imprisonment, took place only a few months after Howard Unruh’s massacre, an exhausting one-two combination for the Camden County prosecutor. Cohen spent three days in the hospital at the end of August 1950. Doctors ordered him to take a rest from his work; he took their advice and left Camden for a week in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

  Upon his return, and over the next eight years, there were more major crimes for Cohen to prosecute, including the ones resulting in the 1955 execution of three men for murdering a luncheonette owner during a botched robbery. Then came his next career move, when the new New Jersey governor at the time, Robert B. Meyner, appointed Cohen as Camden County Court judge. In doing so the governor displaced Rocco Palese, the judge who had sentenced Frank La Salle to prison. Controversy ensued in the form of a letter-writing campaign and newspaper editorials, but Palese eventually acquiesced and moved into private practice. (He died in 1987 at the age of ninety-three.)

  Cohen served three years on the county court bench before moving over to the appeals court for a year. He was then appointed a federal court judge by President Kennedy in 1962, and he stayed on the bench for the rest of his life. Cohen died in 1991, at eighty-six.

  AS LOLITA BEGAN its climb up the bestseller charts, Véra Nabokov continued what had become a custom for her since May 20, 1958: jotting down her private thoughts in the diary that had previously been the sole property of her husband. Véra’s notes largely indicate delight at Lolita’s success, but one subject bothered her above all: the way that public reception, and critical assessments, seemed to forget that there was a little girl at the center of the novel, and that she deserved more attention and care:

  I wish someone would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence upon the monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along, culminating in that squalid but essentially pure and healthy marriage, and her letter, and her dog. And that terrible expression on her face when she had been cheated by HH out of some little pleasure that had been promised. They all miss the fact that the “horrid little brat” Lolita is essentially very good indeed—or she would not have straightened out after being crushed so terribly, and found a decent life with poor Dick more to her liking than the other kind.

  Vera, of course, did not intend her thoughts for publication, and Vladimir Nabokov did not express these thoughts in public, either. Lolita’s success almost seemed designed so people missed the point. Its original publication by Olympia Press established its bona fides as a book too controversial for American consumption. And then, once it was finally published in the United States, the conversation centered around Humbert Humbert’s desires and his “love story” with Dolores Haze, with few acknowledging, or even comprehending, that their relationship was an abuse of power.

  As a result, that left a vacuum for decades of readers to misinterpret Lolita. It allowed for a culture of teen-temptress vamping that did not account for the victimization at the novel’s core. Sixty years on, many readers still don’t see through Humbert Humbert’s vile perversions, and still blame Dolores Haze for her behavior, as if she had the will to resist, and chose not to.

  LATER IN THE YEAR, Véra wrote in her diary about a strange evening that foreshadowed all the ways in which Lolita would be viewed as grim comedy instead of the moral indictment she’d hoped for. On November 26, 1958, Vladimir and Véra Nabokov went out to dinner at Cafe Chambord on Third Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street. The other dinner guests included Walter Minton and his wife, Polly, as well as Victor Schaller, Putnam’s head of finance, and his wife. The mood should have been celebratory in light of Lolita’s increasing success. It was not, as Véra later wrote in great detail, because the Mintons were unduly preoccupied with a Time magazine article published the previous week.

  The article, unbylined but written by staff writer and future Los Angeles Times gossip columnist Joyce Haber, was ostensibly about the public reception of Lolita. Haber opened with an account of Nabokov at a Putnam-sponsored reception for the novel, where he, according to Haber, “faced a formidable force of 1,000 literature-loving women.” After quickly dispensing with the positive and negative critical reception for Lolita, Haber let loose on Rosemary Ridgewell, the showgirl-turned-literary-scout, with carefully calibrated bile.

  Haber described Ridgewell as “a superannuated (27) nymphet . . . a tall (5 ft. 8 in.) slithery-blithery onetime Latin Quarter showgirl who wears a gold swizzle stick around her neck and a bubbly smile on her face. Well may she bubble.” Ridgewell merited Haber’s attention for tipping off Minton to Lolita’s existence after reading excerpts in the Anchor Review. But the cause of Haber’s ire was that she and Ridgewell were Walter Minton’s mistresses at the same time. No wonder she felt compelled to douse her rival in the prose equivalent of hydrochloric acid.

  Véra Nabokov would learn some of these details at the Cafe Chambord dinner, where she sat next to Walter Minton’s wife, Polly. The younger woman—”a pretty girl, rather unhappy”—immediately began to unburden herself to Véra, whom she’d never met. The “frightened, bewildered” Polly looked upon Lolita as a source of pain and problems in her marriage to Walter. Where once the couple was happy, Polly confided, since the novel’s arrival in their lives her husband “began to see a lot of people and get mixed up.”

  Polly let slip to Véra that she first learned of her husband’s involvement with Ridgewell through the “horrid” Time article. Véra was, apparently, unnerved by Polly’s confession, but had the wherewithal to observe in her diary: “Poor Polly, small-town little girl, craving for so many pounds of ‘culture’ gift-boxed and tied with a nice pink bow!” Véra did not know Rosemary, but based on what Polly told her and the Time article, she judged her as “a pretty awful, vulgar but flashy young female.”

  Odd as this encounter was for Véra, the evening devolved further. After Victor Schaller and his wife bid the Nabokovs and the Mintons adieu, Dmitri turned up, driving his 1957 MG sports car. Polly, enthralled, requested a ride, and Dmitri obliged. Vladimir and Véra took a cab to their hotel, accompanied by Minton, who proceeded—within earshot of the driver, and perhaps unprompted—to admit his affairs with both Ridgewell and Haber.

  “Between his two little harlots,” Véra wrote, “M[inton] ruined his family life.” Minton swore both affairs were over, that he had “made it up to Polly,” and presented Rosemary “in a very unsavory light, a little courtesan, almost a ‘call girl,’ trying to collect as much money as she could from Walter and spouting nonsense about Lolita.”

  When the trio arrived at the hotel, Polly and Dmitri were still MIA. The Nabokovs and Minton “waited and waited,” Véra recording this phrase and then crossing it out. When the duo finally appeared in the hotel lobby, Dmitri informed his parents “with a sly smile” that he and Polly had driven to his apartment, because she had wished to see it. The next day, Véra wrote, “Minton told V., ‘I hear Dmitri gave Polly a good time last night.’” Véra did not know what to make of Minton’s comment. “I wonder if this sort of thing is normal or typical of today’s America? A bad novel by some O’Hara or Cozens [sic] suddenly come to life.”

  The dark comedy of the evening did indeed resemble a John O’Hara story or
James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed, which had been a bestseller the year before. What Véra Nabokov witnessed, and grew so disturbed by that she was compelled to write about it in her diary, seemed like a harbinger of all the ways in which American culture would corrupt Lolita and misunderstand Nabokov’s meaning. If those closest to the Nabokovs were behaving strangely, who else might this novel have the power to corrupt?

  LOLITA WAS A PROPER HIT. The more the novel sold, the more people ventured an opinion, whether they had read it or not. Comedians turned Lolita into late-night fodder (Groucho Marx: “I’ll put off reading Lolita for six more years until she turns eighteen”; Milton Berle: “First of all, let me congratulate Lolita now. She is thirteen”), another signal of Lolita reaching a level of success far beyond literary spheres.

  Nabokov enjoyed the attention. He gave interviews to journalists and appeared on talk shows on both sides of the Atlantic. A cartoon featuring Lolita in the July 1959 issue of Playboy amused him enough that he mentioned it to his American publisher, and Véra noted in her diary how she and Vladimir delighted in the jokes broadcast on television.

  Lolita’s appeal extended to fashion magazines and film, with dissonant, even bizarre results. These depictions were largely knowing, winking parodies, playing up the overt sexuality of certain blond bombshell personas in the guise of younger girls. The most blatant reference to Nabokov’s creation, equal parts amusing and disturbing, appeared in the film Let’s Make Love, which features Marilyn Monroe singing a version of Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” after announcing: “My name . . . is Lolita. And I’m . . . not supposed to . . . play . . . with boys!”

  Another bizarre stunt affected the Nabokovs more personally. Their son, Dmitri, had moved to Milan to pursue an opera-singing career. But it was getting access to his famous father that left Dmitri open to strange requests. A local magazine covinced him to judge a contest where the winner would pose as Lolita for a fashion shoot to be held at his own apartment. Dmitri, reflecting on his youthful stupidity, recalled that the “decidedly post-pubescent aspiring nymphets, some with provincial mothers in tow,” had invaded his apartment for two solid days.

  Newspaper coverage of the contest reached Dmitri’s father, who was upset enough to send a telegram to his son asking for the contest to be stopped. “The publicity is in very bad taste,” Nabokov wrote Dmitri on October 7, 1960. “It can only harm you in the eyes of those who take music seriously. It has already harmed me: because of it I cannot come to Italy since the reporters would immediately pounce on me there.” Nabokov was especially disappointed in Dmitri for letting “this unhealthy ruckus” overshadow his own career. Dmitri learned his lesson. From that point on, he would defend Lolita’s honor rather than corrupt it. But the contest mess was further proof of the ways in which perceptions of Lolita moved from tragedy to carnival.

  BY THIS POINT Nabokov had completed a screenplay draft of Lolita for Stanley Kubrick. Nabokov had initially turned it down—“by nature I am no dramatist, I am not even a hack scenarist”—but while on an extended European vacation at the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960, he relented. On January 28, temporarily ensconced in Menton, France, Nabokov wrote his friend Morris Bishop that he changed his mind about adapting Lolita because “a pleasing and elegant solution of the problems involved suddenly dawned on me in the gardens of Taormina.”

  Contract from Kubrick and his producing partner, James Harris, in hand, the Nabokovs ventured west to Los Angeles, arriving in March. Vladimir holed up for the next few months to complete the screenplay. The first draft, finished in August 1960, ran more than four hundred pages long. That draft was not used, and neither were subsequent ones Nabokov wrote before he and Véra sailed back to Europe in November. Kubrick rewrote the screenplay substantially before shooting the film the following year, though Nabokov was still given sole screenplay credit when the film was released in 1962 and he was subsequently nominated for an Academy Award.

  What most surprised me about the original Lolita screenplay draft, which I read at the Berg archives of the New York Public Library, were two names that appeared in a second-half scene that did not survive in the film version, or in Nabokov’s published screenplay in 1973. The names are perhaps coincidental, but they didn’t seem that way to me. It felt more like unfinished business; that Nabokov was not through mining Sally’s kidnapping for his creative pursuits.

  In the scene, Humbert Humbert mentions a “Gabriel Goff,” who is the subject of a gala in Elphinstone. “Goff, a black-bearded railway robber, held up his last train in 1888, not to rob it but to kidnap a theatrical company for his and his gang’s entertainment. The stones in Elphinstone are full of Goff faces, bearded pink masks, and all the men have grown more or less luxuriant whiskers.” Goff happened to be the maiden name of Sally Horner’s mother, Ella.

  Later in the scene, Nabokov makes a repeated reference to a “Dr. Fogg,” a doctor deemed to be the best to treat Dolores’s illness. It turns out “Fogg” is a disguise for Clare Quilty, who uses that alias but arrives on the scene wearing the mask of the railway robber, Gabriel Goff. Fogg, of course, was an early alias of Frank La Salle.

  I could chalk up the use of these names to Nabokov’s merry-trickster side, noting that “Goff” and “Fogg” are inversions of each other. The presence of doubles and masks certainly bolsters this theory. But because the Sally Horner parenthetical reference was excised from the film script—there was no reason to preserve a textual reference for a visual medium, after all—this name-inversion trick read to me as if Nabokov wanted to preserve the link to Sally’s story in some fashion.

  JAMES MASON SIGNED ON as Humbert Humbert, while Peter Sellers and Shelley Winters were cast as Clare Quilty and Charlotte Haze, respectively. The final piece of the Lolita film puzzle was choosing the girl to play Dolores Haze, a search avidly covered by newspapers and magazines around the world. One gossip item speculated that Mason’s eleven-year-old daughter, Portland, might be cast. Tuesday Weld, already an established television and film star at seventeen, was a serious contender, much to Nabokov’s chagrin (“a graceful ingenue but not my idea of Lolita”), but she declined the role, famously saying, “I didn’t have to play Lolita. I was Lolita.”

  When Sue Lyon, age fourteen, was ultimately cast, it was with Nabokov’s enthusiastic approval. He did not want a girl so near to Lolita’s true age for the film, and he agreed with Kubrick that a girl who looked closer to sixteen, as Lyon did, would circumvent the censors. Lolita could not go forward with an “X” rating, or worse, no rating at all. When Lyon began shooting Lolita in 1961, European newspapers followed her around taking photographs of her on set, buying food, or taking a nap. Typical paparazzi behavior, but it seemed that much more invasive because they were chasing a teenager playing the love interest of a much older man.

  However Kubrick, as director, and Nabokov, as author, envisioned the reception of Lolita the film upon its release in the summer of 1962, they were disappointed. The infamous Bert Stern photograph of Lyon, sucking on a lollipop and wearing heart-shaped glasses, shaped public perception. So did the tagline “How Did They Ever Make a Movie of Lolita?” which caused a number of critics to answer: they didn’t. Lyon was too old, unconvincing save for the scenes where she has transformed into the pregnant Mrs. Dick Schiller. Kubrick blamed the censors for his creative misfire. Nabokov, more generously, judged Kubrick’s vision “a first-rate film with magnificent actors.” While the movie did all right at the box office—$9.25 million grossed on a $2 million budget—the critical reception cast a pall.

  As time went on, Lolita was adapted repeatedly—again as a 1997 film, as a 1981 play by Edward Albee, as a 1990s Russian-language opera, and even as a musical. The history of these adaptations, nearly all by middle-aged men, indicate how far out of touch they were from the novel’s core depiction of sexual abuse. Reading Lolita allowed people to make their own judgments, rightly or wrongly. Seeing or hearing her sing, dance, or speak provoked far more uncom
fortable responses, which led to a host of failed projects. That anyone, let alone those with a financial stake, could think visual and theatrical depictions of Lolita would be successful seems laughable in hindsight.

  The most ludicrous idea was Lolita, My Love, the 1971 musical version. And yet it boasted an A-list group of creators, with lyrics and libretto by Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the smash hit My Fair Lady, and a score by John Barry (of James Bond theme fame). Nabokov, who could hardly abide music, gave his approval for the musical because even he was aware of Lerner’s and Barry’s past successes. But the result never reached Broadway. Savage reviews of the original Boston production closed it down in early 1971, and a revived version staged in Philadelphia a couple of months later—starring future Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory star Denise Nickerson, not yet thirteen, as Dolores—yielded more disappointing notices. Nabokov had once told a disapproving interviewer that Lolita, My Love was “in the best of hands.” Once the musical failed, he never spoke of it again.

  Lolita also spawned unauthorized sequels that, in different ways, demonstrated Nabokov’s mastery of difficult material, which suffered in the hands of far less talented writers. The Lolita Complex, published in 1966 by an ex-con named Russell Trainer, purported to “investigate the activities of real-life Lolitas and Humberts and offers insights into an important social problem” through “case histories, professional opinions, court transcripts, interviews and police records.” Trainer even thanked several of these medical professionals by name, but I could not verify that any of them existed. They are likely as fictitious as Nabokov’s invented John Ray, Jr., who supplied the parodic introduction to Humbert Humbert’s memoirs. Nabokov not only drew from Havelock Ellis’s history of sexual deviants, but also reacted to the pervasive influence of Sigmund Freud—whose psychoanalytic theories he detested. “I think he’s crude. I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me,” Nabokov huffed in a 1965 interview.