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

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.