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

^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 pleasure, 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.

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:

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 uncomfortable 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.

The Lolita Complex was a crude cash-in, written by a veteran writer from the paperback porn mills who began his career while in prison for check fraud. Trainer’s book did enough business for him to write a 1969 sequel, The Male Lolita, in which the faux–case history format shifted focus to young boys in power-imbalanced relationships with women. And Trainer’s literary contributions might have stayed forgotten save for an improbable twist: in its Japanese translation, The Lolita Complex became a foundational text for the development of manga and anime, particularly the “lolicon” subgenre where little girls with big doe eyes are depicted as objects of desire and in explicit sexual situations. (“Lolicon” is a portmanteau of “Lolita Complex.”)

Thirty years after The Lolita Complex, another unauthorized sequel took a different approach, retelling Lolita from Dolores Haze’s perspective. Lo’s Diary, by the Italian journalist Pia Pera, proved to be a missed opportunity. Instead of getting at the truth of Dolores Haze’s dark plight, of showing her the way even Nabokov hinted at—as a clear victim, struggling to survive and maintain some sort of agency when she could never have enough power—Pera’s version of Lolita depicted her as a brazen seductress, her behavior more reminiscent of Veda, the young (but not underage) daughter in James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce. Lo’s Diary also suffered from years of litigation with the Nabokov estate, which blocked its publication in English until 1999.

Two years earlier, Adrian Lyne’s film remake of Lolita arrived out of its own legal quagmire, having faced almost as many censorship issues as did Stanley Kubrick’s. Lyne’s film, scripted by Stephen Schiff, is quite faithful to Nabokov’s novel. Jeremy Irons is almost too perfectly cast as Humbert Humbert (he later lent his voice to the audiobook edition of the novel issued on Lolita’s fiftieth anniversary). Dominique Swain is starkly believable as Dolores, holding her own against Irons’s all-encompassing talent, and Frank Langella shines as Clare Quilty.

The cultural climate had shifted back and forth between liberal progressiveness and conservative backlash in the intervening thirty-five years, but in 1997 the appetite for a new film version was particularly low. Lyne had tried and failed to make the film for years. Once he had finally finished shooting, he faced fresh legal issues, after the passage of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, which made illegal any visual depictions of children having sex with adults—whether or not a child was involved.

Lyne battled lawyers seeking significant cuts to the film and struggled to find a distributor, which delayed Lolita’s opening in North American theaters by more than a year. The theatrical run was tiny (to qualify for the Academy Awards) and a prelude to an airing on the cable television network Showtime. This Lolita, as a result, did even poorer box office business than its predecessor. Once more, the general public did not have much appetite for seeing Lolita on-screen, as opposed to imagining her within the covers of a book.

More than sixty years on, the appetite for adapting Lolita or reviving earlier adaptations has likely subsided for good. It is difficult to see how it could be done, especially given the growing polarization of the political climate. The dark heart of Lolita, and the tragedy of Dolores Haze, may now be too much to transform into entertainment. It’s wiser, and saner, to remember the little girl at the center of the novel, and all of the real girls, like Sally Horner, who suffered and survived.