Sarah Weinman - The Real Lolita - The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

She reestablished relations with La Salle in the final year of his life, visiting him in Trenton State Prison along with her children, preschoolers at the time. He made model boats for the kids and leather pocket books for Madeline and her husband. When he was up for parole, sick with lung and heart problems, Madeline volunteered to have him live at her house should he be released early. That did not happen.

“When I looked at him, I could see a lot of myself in his face,” Madeline said. “My husband picked it up right away.” For those last months, Madeline did not clutter her relationship with questions of what La Salle had done to land him in prison. “We talked as father and daughter would talk,” Madeline told me. “There wasn’t a strain. He was just Dad. Truth be told, I never thought about whether he was guilty or not guilty.”

Just as John Ray, Jr., became the conduit for Humbert Humbert’s so-called confession, Madeline, unwittingly, became the keeper of Frank La Salle’s version of the story. When I mentioned the word “abduction” to Madeline, she interrupted me with some force. “That’s not the way he described it to me,” she said. She then proceeded to parrot the version La Salle had presented in his appeals—a version the court had soundly rejected as fantasy.

FRANK LA SALLE never saw the outside world again. He appealed his sentence one final time, in 1962, and was again denied. He died of arteriosclerosis in Trenton State Prison on March 22, 1966, sixteen years into his sentence. He was, according to his death certificate, two months shy of turning seventy. The certificate listed him as “Frank La Salle III,” the first time he ever used this sobriquet. That he died with his age shrouded in mystery and under a false name fits with the entire life of a man determined to conceal terrible truths.

Two weeks after Sally Horner’s death, on September 2, 1952, another sensational crime reported by the Associated Press caught Vladimir Nabokov’s attention, and he filled another of his note cards. Unlike Sally’s story, which merited a single parenthetical in Lolita but was seeded throughout the novel, this case got an entire paragraph at the beginning of chapter thirty-three. Humbert Humbert has returned to Ramsdale. Before making himself known in his former haunt, he stops off at the local cemetery, where he wanders as he ruminates upon his past. During his peregrinations, he stumbles across a particular sight:

On some of the graves there were pale, transparent little national flags slumped in the windless air under the evergreens. Gee, Ed, that was bad luck—referring to G. Edward Grammar, a thirty-five-year old New York office manager who had just been arrayed on a charge of murdering his thirty-three-year-old wife, Dorothy. Bidding for the perfect crime, Ed had bludgeoned his wife and put her into a car. The case came to light when two county policemen on patrol saw Mrs. Grammar’s new big blue Chrysler, an anniversary present from her husband, speeding crazily down a hill, just inside their jurisdiction (God bless our good cops!). The car sideswiped a pole, ran up an embankment covered with beard grass, wild strawberry and cinquefoil, and overturned. The wheels were still gently spinning in the mellow sunlight when the officers removed Mrs. G’s body. It appeared to be a routine highway accident at first. Alas, the woman’s battered body did not match up with only minor damage suffered by the car. I did better.

Nabokov cleverly phrased it so that the reader isn’t clear if Humbert actually stumbles across the murderer’s grave or if he is merely thinking about the case as he looks at the graves. It has to be the latter, because Ramsdale is supposed to be somewhere in New England, an area Nabokov knew very well. The G. Edward Grammer case happened in Baltimore, a city Nabokov did not know at all. Nabokov’s misspelling of Grammer’s last name was deliberate, an opportunity for the noted literary prankster to sneak in another joke. It was also a sly reference to Humbert’s professed intention, earlier in Lolita, to teach French grammar to Ramsdale’s local children.

The text of Nabokov’s surviving note card about the G. Edward Grammer case is close to, but not exactly, the final version. It includes the phrases “Gee Ed, that was bad luck” as well as “god bless our good cops!” But another wry aside about “Mrs. Grammar’s new automobile” and Grammer’s murderous actions did not make it into the final text: “ought to have doctored it first, Ed!”

One could see how this story, in tandem with Sally Horner’s death, served as important inspiration for Nabokov. The Grammer case was a media sensation, capturing public attention for being an almost perfect murder. Grammer very nearly got away with it—except the Baltimore police noticed some details that did not add up, like a pebble jammed underneath the accelerator pedal.

The crime unfolded much as Nabokov described in Lolita . On the evening of August 19, 1952, Ed Grammer was getting ready to go back to New York City after a weekend with his wife and both of their daughters. Dorothy and the kids had moved to Parkville, a suburb of Baltimore, to care for her bereaved mother, while Ed remained in their Bronx apartment. The Sunday night routine was for Dorothy to drive Ed in their big blue Chrysler to Baltimore Penn Station, where he would give his wife some money for the week and catch the 11:28 P.M. train. For a few days after the “accident,” Grammer insisted that Dorothy had dropped him off as usual, and that the last he’d seen her alive was at the train station.

But the facts didn’t add up. The witnesses who saw the Chrysler speed down the hill along Taylor Avenue and sideswipe a telephone pole turned out to be patrolmen. For the victim of a car accident, Dorothy was astonishingly little-bruised in the areas they expected to be bruised, whereas her head had clearly been bashed in. There was blood in the driver’s seat but the spatter wasn’t substantial enough to suggest she had been killed on impact. More curious: Dorothy’s purse and glasses were missing. When the pebble was discovered, pushing the accelerator forward, what seemed an accident transformed into murder, confirmed when Grammer confessed, at last, to Baltimore County police.

The fishbowl atmosphere intensified when reporters sniffed out the prospect of a mistress, which provided a motive for Dorothy Grammer’s murder. But when they found her, she turned out to be a United Nations communications officer named Matilda Mizibrocky who swore she didn’t know her beau was married, and they didn’t print her name right away. Even the court hid her under the pseudonym of “Mary Matthews” so that she wouldn’t be hounded further, and her testimony possibly tainted. It didn’t work. Grammer’s defense team was livid that the court tried to shield Mizibrocky from them, too, and hinder their ability to prepare their case.

It isn’t clear if Nabokov followed the news after Grammer’s arrest. The trial showcased further lurid details, and Grammer’s execution by hanging in 1954 became an added spectacle because it was initially botched. But the main affair—husband murders wife, passes it off as car accident—was enough inspiration for him. The Grammer case clearly echoed the untimely death of Charlotte Haze, struck by a car after running away from the argument with Humbert where she learns of his true designs on her daughter.

The final line of the Grammer paragraph in Lolita reads with further chilling force. Grammer could not conceal his crime from the world after all. Humbert Humbert, systematically raping Dolores Haze for nearly two years on a cross-country odyssey, could, and did. No wonder he concluded: “I did better.”