The Real Lolita

by Sarah Weinman

  During one Lolita reread, I was reminded of the narrator of an earlier Nabokov story, “Spring in Fialta”: “Personally, I never could understand the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other . . . were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest to rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth.”

  Nabokov himself never openly admitted to such an attitude himself. But the clues are all there in his work. Particularly so in Lolita, with its careful attention to popular culture, the habits of preadolescent girls, and the banalities of then-modern American life. Searching out these signs of real-life happenings was no easy task. I found myself probing absence as much as presence, relying on inference and informed speculation as much as fact.

  Some cases drop all the direct evidence into your lap. Some cases are more circumstantial. The case for what Vladimir Nabokov knew of Sally Horner and when he knew it falls squarely into the latter category. Investigating it, and how he incorporated Sally’s story into Lolita, led me to uncover deeper ties between reality and fiction, and to the thematic compulsion Nabokov spent more than two decades exploring, in fits and starts, before finding full fruition in Lolita.

  Lolita’s narrative, it turns out, depended more on a real-life crime than Nabokov would ever admit.

  OVER THE FOUR OR SO YEARS I spent working on this book project, I spoke with a great many people about Lolita. For some it was their favorite novel, or one of their favorites. Others had never read the book but ventured an opinion nonetheless. Some loathed it, or the idea of it. No one was neutral. Considering the subject matter, this was not a surprise. Not a single person, when I quoted the passage about Sally Horner, remembered it.

  I can’t say Nabokov designed the book to hide Sally from the reader. Given that the story moves so quickly, perhaps an homage to the highways Humbert and Dolores traverse over many thousands of miles in their cross-country odyssey, it’s easy to miss a lot as you go. But I would argue that even casual readers of Lolita, who number in the tens of millions, plus the many more millions with some awareness of the novel, the two film versions, or its place in the culture these past six decades, should pay attention to the story of Sally Horner because it is the story of so many girls and women, not just in America, but everywhere. So many of these stories seem like everyday injustices—young women denied opportunity to advance, tethered to marriage and motherhood. Others are more horrific, girls and women abused, brutalized, kidnapped, or worse.

  Yet Sally Horner’s plight is also uniquely American, unfolding in the shadows of the Second World War, after victory had created a solid, prosperous middle class that could not compensate for terrible future decline. Her abduction is woven into the fabric of her hometown of Camden, New Jersey, which at the time believed itself to be at the apex of the American Dream. Wandering its streets today, as I did on several occasions, was a stark reminder of how Camden has changed for the worse. Sally should have been able to travel America of her own volition, a culmination of the Dream. Instead she was taken against her will, and the road trip became a nightmare.

  Sally’s life ended too soon. But her story helped inspire a novel people are still discussing and debating more than sixty years after its initial publication. Vladimir Nabokov, through his use of language and formal invention, gave fictional authority to a pedophile and charmed and revolted millions of readers in the process. By exploring the life of Sally Horner, I reveal the truth behind the curtain of fiction. What Humbert Humbert did to Dolores Haze is, in fact, what Frank La Salle did to Sally Horner in 1948.

  With this book, Sally Horner takes precedence. Like the butterflies that Vladimir Nabokov so loved, she emerges from the cage of both fiction and fact, ready to fly free.

  One

  The Five-and-Dime

  Sally Horner walked into the Woolworth’s on Broadway and Federal in Camden, New Jersey, to steal a five-cent notebook. She’d been dared to by the clique of girls she desperately wanted to join. Sally had never stolen anything in her life; usually she went to that particular five-and-dime for school supplies and her favorite candy. The clique told her it would be easy. Nobody would suspect a girl like Sally, a fifth-grade honor pupil and president of the Junior Red Cross Club at Northeast School, to be a thief. Despite her mounting dread at breaking the law, she believed them. She had no idea a simple act of shoplifting on a March afternoon in 1948 would destroy her life.

  Once inside Woolworth’s, Sally reached for the first notebook she spied on the gleaming white nickel counter. She stuffed it into her bag and walked away, careful to look straight ahead to the exit door. Before she could cross the threshold to freedom, she felt a hand grab her arm.

  Sally looked up. A slender, hawk-faced man loomed above her, iron-gray hair underneath a wide-brimmed fedora, eyes shifting between blue and gray. A scar sliced his cheek by the right side of his nose, while his shirt collar shrouded another mark on his throat. The hand gripping Sally’s arm bore the traces of an even older, half-moon stamp forged by fire. Any adult would have sized him up as middle-aged, but to ten-year-old Sally, he looked positively ancient.

  “I am an FBI agent,” the man said to Sally. “And you are under arrest.”

  Sally did what many young girls would have done in a similar situation: She cried. She cowered. She felt immediately ashamed.

  The man’s low voice and steely gaze froze her in place. He pointed across the way to City Hall, the tallest building in Camden. That’s where girls like her would be dealt with, he said. Sally didn’t understand his meaning at first. Then he explained: to punish her for stealing, she would be sent to the reformatory.

  Sally didn’t know that much about reform school, but what she knew was not good. She kept crying.

  Then his stern manner brightened. It was a lucky break for a little girl like her, he said, that he was the one who caught her and not some other FBI agent. If she agreed to report to him from time to time, he would let her go. Spare her the worst. Show some mercy.

  Sally stopped crying. He was going to let her go. She wouldn’t have to call her mother from jail—her poor, overworked mother, Ella, still struggling with the consequences of the suicide of her alcoholic husband, Sally’s father, five years earlier; still tethered to her seamstress job, which meant that Sally, too often, went home to an empty house after school.

  But she couldn’t think about that. Not when she was about to escape real punishment. Any desire she felt about joining the girls’ club fell away, overcome by relief she wouldn’t face a much larger fear.

  Sally did not know the reprieve had an expiration date. One that would come due at any time, without warning.

  MONTHS PASSED WITHOUT further word from the FBI man. As the spring of 1948 inched its way to summer, Sally finished up fifth grade at Northeast School. She kept up her marks and remained on the honor roll. She also stuck with the Junior Red Cross and continued to volunteer at local hospitals. Her homeroom teacher, Sarah Hanlin, singled Sally out as “a perfectly lovely girl. . . . [A] better than average pupil, intelligent and well behaved.” Sally had had a major escape. She must have been grateful for each successive day of freedom.

  The Camden of Sally’s girlhood was far removed from the Camden of today. Emma DiRenzo, one of Sally’s classmates, remembered it as a “marvelous” place to grow up in. “Everything about Camden back then was wonderful,” she said. “When you tell people now, they look at you with big eyes.” There were pep rallies at City Hall and social events at the YMCA. Girls jumped rope on the sidewalks, near houses adorned with marble steps. Camden residents took pride in their neighborhoods and communities, whether they were among the Italians in South Camden, the Irish in the city’s North Side, the Germans in the East Side neighborhood of Cramer Hill, or the Polish living along Mt. Ephraim Avenue, lining up to buy homemade kielbasa at Jaskolski’s or fresh bread at the Morton Bakery. They didn’t dream of suburban flight because there was
no reason to leave.

  Sally lived at 944 Linden Street, between Ninth and Tenth Streets. Cornelius Martin Park lay a few blocks east, and the city’s main downtown was within walking distance to the west, and the Ben Franklin Bridge connecting Camden to Philadelphia was minutes away. The neighborhood was quiet but within reach of Camden’s bustling core. Now it isn’t a neighborhood at all. The town house where Sally grew up was demolished decades ago. What houses remain across the street are decrepit, with boarded-up windows and doors.

  Sally’s life in Camden was not idyllic. Despite outward appearances, she was lonely. Sally knew how to take care of herself but she wished she didn’t have to. She didn’t want to come home to an empty house after school because her mother was working late. Sally couldn’t help comparing her life with those of her classmates, who had both mother and father. She confided her frustrations to Hanlin, her teacher, who often walked home with her at the end of a school day.

  It’s not clear if Sally had close friends her age. Perhaps her desire to be accepted by the popular girls stemmed from a lack of companionship. Her father, Russell, had died three weeks before Sally’s sixth birthday, and she’d hardly seen him much before then. Her mother, Ella, worked long hours, and was tired and distant when she was at home. Her sister, Susan, was pregnant with her first child. Sally looked forward to becoming an aunt, whatever being an aunt meant, but it made the eleven-year age gap between the sisters all the more unbridgeable. Sally was still a little girl. Susan was not only an adult, but about to be a mother.

  SALLY HORNER WAS WALKING home from Northeast School by herself after the last bell on a mid-June day in 1948. The route from North Seventh and Vine to her house took ten minutes by foot. Somewhere along the way, Sally was intercepted by the man from Woolworth’s. Sally had dared to think he’d forgotten about her. Seeing him again was a shock.

  Keep in mind that Sally had just turned eleven. She believed he was an FBI agent. She felt his power and feared it, even though it was false. She was convinced if she didn’t do what he said that she would be sent to the reformatory and be subject to its horrors, as well as worse ones conjured up in her imagination. No matter how he did it, the man convinced Sally that she must go with him to Atlantic City—the government insisted.

  But how would she persuade her mother? This would be no easy task, despite Ella’s general state of apathy and exhaustion. The man had an answer for that, too. Sally was to tell her mother that he was the father of two school friends who had invited her to a seashore vacation after school ended for the year. He would take care of the rest with a phone call to her mother. Sally wasn’t to worry—he would never let on that she was in trouble with the law. He sent the girl on her way.

  At home, Sally waited for her mother to return from work, then parroted the FBI man’s story. Ella was uneasy, and let it show. Sally sounded sincere in her desire to go to the Jersey Shore for a week’s vacation with friends, but who were these people? Ella had never heard Sally mention the names of these two girls before, nor that of their father, Frank Warner. Or if she had, Ella didn’t recall.

  The telephone rang. The man on the other end of the line told Ella he was Mr. Warner, father to Sally’s school friends. His manner was affable, polite. He seemed courteous, even charming. Sally stayed by her mother as the conversation unfolded. “Warner” told Ella that he and his wife had “plenty of room” in their five-room apartment in Atlantic City to put Sally up for the week.

  Under the force of his persuasion, Ella let her concerns slide. “It was a chance for Sally to get a little vacation,” she said weeks later. “I couldn’t afford to give her one.” She did wonder why Sally didn’t seem to be all that excited about the vacation. It was out of character. Normally her bright little girl loved to go places.

  On June 14, 1948, Ella took Sally to the Camden bus depot. She kissed her daughter goodbye and watched her climb aboard an express bus to Atlantic City. She spied the outlines of a middle-aged man, the one she took to be “Warner,” next to Sally, but he did not come out to greet her. Ella also did not see anyone else with the man, neither wife nor children. Still, she tamped down her suspicions. She wanted so badly for her daughter to enjoy herself. And it seemed, from the first few letters Sally sent her from Atlantic City, that the girl was having a good time.

  Ella Horner never dreamed that, within weeks, her girl would become a ghost. By sending Sally off on that bus to Atlantic City, she had consigned her daughter to the stuff of nightmares that would rip any mother apart.

  Two

  A Trip to the Beach

  Robert and Jean Pfeffer were newlyweds who couldn’t afford a honeymoon. So the couple, both twenty-two, settled on a day trip with their family, which included Robert’s mother, Emily, his seventeen-year-old sister, also named Emily, his nine-year-old younger sister, Barbara, and four other relatives whose names have been lost to time. The sea-cooled Brigantine Beach, a small town east of Atlantic City, was far enough away from their North Philadelphia neighborhood of Nicetown to feel like a treat, but close enough to get back home by nightfall.

  Robert, Jean, Emily senior and junior, and Barbara piled into Robert’s car on a weekend morning in July 1948 and set out for the beach. (The other four relatives had their own car.) Somewhere along Route 40, a tire blew out. Robert’s car went off the road and landed on its side.

  The Pfeffers climbed out, shaken and in shock. No one was hurt, thank goodness, but the car was far too damaged to continue. As Robert stood there, wondering how much it would cost to get the car towed and fixed, a station wagon pulled up. A middle-aged man got out of the front seat, and a girl he introduced as his daughter stepped out from the passenger side.

  From there the story Robert Pfeffer told both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Camden Courier-Post turns strange, riddled with unsolvable inconsistencies. People turn up where they shouldn’t. Chronologies bend out of shape. What’s clear is that he was so disturbed by what happened that July morning that he alerted law enforcement and, when they didn’t listen, the newspapers.

  The man told the Pfeffers his name was Frank and that his daughter’s name was Sally. (Robert later recalled the man used La Salle as a last name, but it’s unclear if that was really the case.) La Salle offered to take the young couple to get help. Robert and Jean agreed. They got into the back of La Salle’s station wagon, and La Salle, with Sally beside him, drove them to the nearest roadside phone. Robert called his father and told him about the accident and the Good Samaritan who had come to their aid. He also asked his father to come pick up his wife and daughters.

  There was a hamburger joint at the rest stop, and La Salle, Sally, Robert, and Jean stopped for a quick bite to eat. The waitress seemed to be familiar with Frank and Sally, addressing them by name. Robert figured they must be regulars. After the meal, everyone returned to the wreck and La Salle offered to drive the entire family to Brigantine Beach so their day trip wouldn’t be spoiled. He also said he would take care of towing and fixing the car. The Pfeffers accepted.

  Sally and Barbara, only two years apart in age, hit it off right away. They went swimming together and played on the beach. La Salle told the Pfeffers that he operated a gas station and garage in Atlantic City, that he was divorced, and that Sally lived with him on summer vacations. Sally behaved as if nothing was amiss. She referred to Frank as “Daddy” and treated him with affection. “She told us how good he had been to her,” Pfeffer said.

  Later that day, Sally suggested that her “dad” could drive her and Barbara back to their place to clean themselves up. They lived on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, just ten minutes away by car.

  The minutes passed, then became an hour, then an hour and a half. The Pfeffers, waiting at the beach, started to worry. What was taking so long? Robert’s father had arrived, and he offered to squeeze everyone into his car and drive into Atlantic City to see what was going on. Why had they let Barbara go off with strangers, even if one of those strangers was a friendly, blue-
eyed little girl? Minutes into the drive, they saw La Salle’s station wagon coming toward them, with Sally and Barbara sitting together in the backseat.

  They headed back to the wrecked car, which La Salle attached to the back of his station wagon. The group, divided between La Salle’s vehicle and Robert’s father’s car, drove to the Atlantic City garage where La Salle claimed he worked and dropped off the damaged vehicle to be fixed. The body shop, Robert noted, was across the street from a New Jersey State Police station.

  Before the Pfeffers went back to Philadelphia, Sally invited Barbara to come stay with her for a weekend. La Salle said they’d love to have the girl visit. The family did not take them up on the invite.

  Several days later, the Pfeffers would have even more reason to remember their extended encounter with the middle-aged man and the girl he claimed was his daughter.

  EVERY TIME ELLA HORNER began to wonder if she had done the right thing in sending Sally off to Atlantic City, a letter or a call—always from a pay phone—arrived to assuage her guilt and soothe her mind. Sally seemed to be having a swell time, or so Ella convinced herself. Perhaps she felt some relief, too, at having a reprieve from the expense of feeding and entertaining her little girl, which stretched her puny paycheck beyond its limits.

  At the end of her first week away, Sally told her mother she wanted to stay longer so she could see the Ice Follies. Ella reluctantly gave permission. After two weeks, Sally’s excuses for staying in Atlantic City grew more vague, but Ella thought her daughter still sounded well. Then, at the three-week mark, the phone calls stopped. Ella’s letters to her daughter came back with “return to sender” stamped on the front.

  On July 31, 1948, Ella was relieved to receive another letter. Sally wrote to say she was leaving Atlantic City and going on to Baltimore with Mr. Warner. Though she promised to return home to Camden by the end of the week, she added, “I don’t want to write anymore.”