The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

^Twenty-Seven Connecting Sally Horner to Lolita

Peter Welding was a young freelance reporter in 1963, still a few years shy of thirty. A Philadelphia native, he had already built up a solid series of bylines, mostly for music magazines like Downbeat. He was also a fledgling music producer, founding Testament Records that same year to issue old and new jazz, gospel, and blues recordings. Welding had moved to Chicago to further his producing career, but not before setting out to tell a story that unfolded across the river from his hometown.

Welding was born in 1935, two years earlier than Sally Horner; no doubt her kidnapping and rescue made a large impression on him as a teenager. Welding remembered reading of Sally’s plight in his local newspapers, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Evening Bulletin, and decided to examine the parallels between Sally’s story and Lolita. He zeroed in on the same parenthetical phrase that, decades later, first caught the attention of Nabokov scholar Alexander Dolinin and, then, me. He compared specific events that occurred in Lolita to what happened to Sally. The results were published in an unusual venue: the men’s magazine Nugget, racier than Esquire or GQ but more prudent than Playboy.

Nugget had a knack for publishing stories with literary connections. It helped that its editor at the time was Seymour Krim, who was affiliated with the Beat Generation, hanging around with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady, though unlike them, he never wrote poetry or fiction. Krim also embraced the New Journalism ethos while working at the New York Herald Tribune with future stars Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Dick Schaap. Nugget, under Krim’s editorial guidance, featured stories and articles by Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Otto Preminger, William Saroyan, Chester Himes, and Paddy Chayefsky—and that was just in 1963.

Despite shooting for high literary quality, Nugget wanted to reach a mass audience—though Krim and his staffers sabotaged their own efforts by failing to stick to a regular publishing schedule. Just five issues of Nugget appeared in 1963; Nugget’s frequency during Krim’s editorial tenure might be best described as “bimonthly-ish.” Welding’s story, “Lolita Has a Secret—Shhh!” ran in the November issue.

The piece opened with a summary of both Lolita and Sally’s abduction, which Welding had gleaned entirely from news reports in his hometown papers, the Inquirer and Evening Bulletin. He recounted the five-and-dime meet-up, La Salle’s threat of juvenile incarceration if Sally didn’t go along with his plan, the basic outlines of the twenty-one-month-long cross-country trip, Ruth Janisch’s role as rescuer, and Sally’s eventual recovery.[5]

After Welding finished with his summary, he declared that the Horner case and Lolita “parallel each other much too closely to be coincidental.” Welding took particular note of Sally’s fear of being sent to reform school, which he compared to Humbert’s declaration, roughly halfway into the novel, that “the reformatory threat is the one I recall with the deepest moan of shame.” And further:

“…What happens if you complain to the police of my having kidnapped and raped you?… So I go to jail. Okay. I go to jail. But what happens to you, my orphan?… While I stand gripping the bars, you happy neglected child, will be given a choice of various dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home….”

Welding also drew a comparison between Humbert marrying Charlotte Haze to gain access to Dolores and La Salle claiming to be married to Sally’s mother. Welding further speculated that the actions of Humbert’s housekeeper at Beardsley, Mrs. Holigan, might be based on the actions of Ruth Janisch (“on the rare occasions where Holigan’s presence happened to coincide with Lo’s, simple Lo might succumb to buxom sympathy in the course of a cozy kitchen chat”).

Finally, Welding arrived at his own smoking gun: that neon-light parenthetical late in Lolita: “in this single reference [Nabokov] has all the essentials—the full names, the ages of the pair, La Salle’s occupation, the date of the abduction— neatly packaged in one sentence,” which suggests thorough familiarity rather than casual knowledge.

Eventually Welding seemed to tire of the compare/contrast—“More parallels could easily be shown, but to what further purpose?”—but he felt confident enough to conclude: “The plot line of Lolita derives in large measure from the case and is solidly based on actual fact…. The conclusion is almost inescapable: Nabokov has inserted the reference to the LaSalle-Horner story either as a conscious (or unconscious) acknowledgment of a primary source material, or as a shrewd maneuver to provide himself legal protection.”

I’m not certain what Welding meant here. He didn’t elaborate further in the piece, so I can’t know for sure, but perhaps he believed, based on this statement, that lawyers, already made nervous by Lolita’s worldwide controversy, legal challenges, and publication bans, insisted Nabokov insert the reference to avoid an additional legal issue, such as a plagiarism charge.

Welding made several mistakes in his piece. First, he got Humbert’s parenthetical comment wrong, suggesting that it was from the vantage point of Mrs. Chatfield, the mother of one of Lolita’s classmates whom Humbert meets in a hotel lobby upon his return, after more than five years away, to Ramsdale. Still, Welding understood the importance of the Sally Horner aside decades before anyone else.

More baffling to me was his omission of Sally Horner’s fate from the article. Was Welding unaware that Sally died in a car accident a decade earlier? Could the “shrewd maneuver” line have referred to possible grounds for Sally to sue, had she been alive? In omitting Sally’s death, he missed an opportunity to compare her fate to Charlotte Haze’s death by car accident. What was beyond Welding’s grasp, though, was the direct proof Nabokov knew all about Sally Horner, since the transcribed and reworked wire report that is part of his archives at the Library of Congress was not available to the public in 1963.

Lastly, Welding theorized, with the careful, awkwardly worded hedge, that “it is not unlikely to suppose” that Nabokov did not begin to work on Lolita “until 1950, under the stimulus of the stories of the LaSalle-Horner case. All evidence, in fact, would seem to support this position.” This is false, since Nabokov’s own December 1953 diary entry, celebrating the completion of the manuscript after five years of work, refutes Welding. We also know this supposition is false thanks to the existence of The Enchanter.

However, 1950 was around the time Nabokov came close to junking what was still then called The Kingdom by the Sea. Welding was off base but his suppositions make sense: whenever Nabokov first learned of what happened to Sally Horner, that knowledge helped him to transform a partial manuscript primed for failure into the eventual, unlikely, staggering success of Lolita. If such knowledge was publicized, it would not look good for Nabokov—rightly or wrongly—to be seen as pilfering from a real girl’s plight for his fictional masterpiece.

THE NOVEMBER 1963 ISSUE of Nugget came and went without much notice. It attracted nowhere near the attention of the release of the film version of Lolita a month later, or the millions of sales garnered by the novel to date. But one person did pay attention: a New York Post reporter named Alan Levin.

Levin eventually became an award-winning documentary filmmaker, working with his son, Marc, and with Bill Moyers, on films shown by PBS and HBO. But he cut his journalistic teeth for the Associated Press and then joined the Post in the late 1950s, where his reporting on organized crime garnered him a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

It’s not clear whether Levin, thirty-seven at the time, found an advance copy of the November issue of Nugget on his own or if someone tipped him off. However he got ahold of Welding’s story, Levin knew there was one of his own to write—could it be true that Lolita owed its plot to a sensational kidnapping? And if it was true, what would the great Vladimir Nabokov have to say on the matter?

Levin posted a letter to Nabokov on September 9, 1963, which arrived in Montreux, Switzerland, just four days later. The official Nabokov response, written and signed by Véra, reached Levin soon thereafter. Levin’s story for the Post—“Nabokov Says ‘Lolita’ Is More Art Than Life”—ran on September 18, 1963, a day after Levin received Véra’s letter.

The article began with a provocative lede: “Is it possible that Humbert Humbert was a 50-year-old Philadelphia auto mechanic and his nymphet, Lolita, an 11-year-old from Camden, NJ?” Levin quoted just enough of Véra’s letter to make the Nabokov case plain, and enough of Welding’s Nugget piece to answer the question. But it’s helpful to read Véra’s letter to Levin in full, as it offers a fascinating window into her (and Nabokov’s) thought process. Her response also carries an air of protesting too much:

Véra’s letter showcases the many roles she played as “Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov”: defender of her husband, curator of a singular line of vision about Nabokov’s work that put his creative genius above everything else, and master obfuscator when presented with anything that dented the Nabokov myth. Véra, again, showed herself to be the consummate brand manager for Vladimir. Any speculation that Lolita could be inspired by a real-life case went against the single-minded Nabokovian belief that art supersedes influence, and so influence must be brushed off.

How the Nabokovs handled Levin’s letter, and by extension Welding’s article for Nugget, is a window into their maddening, contradictory behavior when anyone probed Lolita’s possible influences. They denied the importance of Sally Horner but acknowledged the parenthetical. They mentioned a “considerable number” of case histories, but only Sally’s is described in the novel.

Véra’s stubborn insistence that the Sally Horner story “did not inspire the book” is akin to trying to drown out a troublesome argument with the braying of one’s own voice. Though it worked, since Levin did not push back—at least, not that we know of.

That Véra claimed the Nabokovs had not seen the Nugget piece is odd on several counts. First, the author’s main archive at the New York Public Library contains over half a dozen boxes’ worth of newspaper clippings about Lolita, starting from its original 1955 publication by Olympia Press through its American publication by Putnam in 1958, well into the 1960s and early 1970s. The Nabokovs subscribed to several clipping services based in New York and Paris. They seemed to have kept every review in every possible language they spoke or read—English, French, German, Italian, Russian—whether good or bad, critical or full of praise, defending its content or wishing the book banned from the earth.

There is also an entire box of clippings related to the Lolita film, beginning with who would be cast to play Dolores Haze. The Nabokovs even kept a copy of the August 1960 issue of Cosmopolitan, featuring Zsa Zsa Gabor, at the ripe old age of forty-three, dressed up as twelve-year-old Lolita in a straining baby-doll nightgown, an apple in her hands, licking her lips in equal parts faux-innocence and come-hither enticement. And other fashion and girlie mags from France and Italy, each with photo shoots of starlets garbed in Lolita-like frocks as a pictorial audition for a film part they desperately wanted to play.

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.