The Real Lolita

by Sarah Weinman

  Cohen left the Camden County jail and went straight to the courthouse for the arraignment. The courtroom was packed with onlookers. Sally Horner took her seat at the back next to a detective assigned to guard her. She wore a blue suit, pink blouse, straw hat, and patent leather Mary Jane shoes.

  At ten minutes to noon, La Salle filed in, wearing a navy-blue suit, white collared shirt, and tie.

  As Judge Rocco Palese entered, the room rose to attention. Like Mitchell Cohen, the judge had tangled with La Salle before. Palese, then a lawyer, had worked on Dorothy Dare’s divorce petition against La Salle in 1944, even filling in for Dorothy’s main lawyer, Bruce Wallace, at one of the hearings while La Salle was still serving time for statutory rape.

  Palese, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, never disclosed this prior association with the defendant. Perhaps he did not remember. Perhaps he didn’t see a conflict because he had never engaged La Salle directly in court. Camden County’s legal world was so small that defense attorneys became prosecutors who then became judges, everyone working with everyone else. What mattered was that, right now, Frank La Salle was in Judge Palese’s courtroom.

  When the gallery took their seats again, Palese called on Cohen to begin.

  The prosecutor first outlined the story of Sally’s kidnapping and confinement. How La Salle “persuaded and enticed her” to leave her mother in mid-June 1948, and told her that his repeated rapes of her were “natural.” How Ruth Janisch “broke La Salle’s spell” in San Jose, and Sally made the fateful phone call to the Panaros. How La Salle’s long criminal record and his deviant behavior toward Sally made him, in Cohen’s estimation, “a menace to society—a depraved man and a moral leper.”

  Cohen addressed both the judge and the crowd with his final words: “Mothers throughout the country will give a sigh of relief to know that a man of this type is safely in prison. That La Salle is somewhere safe, unable to harm anyone else.”

  Judge Palese asked Cohen if he had anything further. He did.

  “If the Court please, at this time I propose to take pleas from this defendant, Frank La Salle, but before doing so I want the Court to know that I have discussed this case quite at length with this defendant, I have advised him of his right to be represented by counsel, and to have the benefit of the advice of counsel. I have warned him of the seriousness of these charges, and the length of the sentences which these charges impose.

  “Being in Court is not an unfamiliar subject to this defendant and he understands, and he has told me so, the contents of both indictments. He understands the seriousness of them and the sentences, the minimum sentences, which the Court can impose, and he has advised me he does not desire to obtain counsel either on his own or appointed by the Court. I do, however, feel, in order that this defendant may properly understand the situation that it may be best for the Court to repeat to him his rights before I take the pleas.”

  Judge Palese then addressed Frank La Salle. “Mr. La Salle, you have just heard the prosecutor advise the Court that he has talked to you and explained to you the two indictments that have been returned against you by the Grand Jury of our County, and he has indicated to the Court that you do not desire to be represented by counsel and you desire to proceed in the matter without representation, is that correct?”

  La Salle replied, “Yes.”

  “You understand the seriousness of the two indictments that have been returned against you by our Grand Jury?” Palese asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And that they carry with them rather serious sentences?”

  Again, La Salle replied, “Yes, sir.”

  Judge Palese asked how La Salle would plead.

  “Guilty,” he said, in a voice barely audible.

  The judge asked if there was anything more La Salle wished to say before he handed down the sentence.

  La Salle said, his voice still weak: “I don’t want any more publicity for the children.” (Cohen later explained to reporters that La Salle was likely nervous and meant to say “child.”)

  Just like that, the proceeding was over. The whole matter took perhaps twenty minutes, ending just after noon. But not before Palese decided upon a sentence for Frank La Salle. The judge ordered Sally’s abductor to spend no less than thirty and no more than thirty-five years in prison for the kidnapping charge. He would have to serve at least three-quarters of the full sentence before being eligible for parole. Palese also added a two-to three-year sentence for the original abduction charge, as well as an additional two to three years for violating his parole.

  Frank La Salle, after pleading guilty.

  Two days later, just after noon on April 5, La Salle began his sentence at Trenton State Prison.

  BECAUSE FRANK LA SALLE pleaded guilty, Sally did not get to testify against him. In Mitchell Cohen’s office after the hearing, she asked, once more, letting go of the earlier courtroom stoicism and blinking back tears, when she could go home. With the case finished, and Frank La Salle going to prison, surely she could return to her mother right away?

  Cohen sympathized with Sally, and told her so. There seemed no reason to keep her in the state’s custody when the case was finished and La Salle incarcerated, but the wheels of bureaucracy turned at their own pace, not his. Judge Palese was the one who would have to decide when she could be released into Ella’s custody again. Palese did so the very next day.

  At noon on April 4, 1950, Cohen summoned Sally and Ella to his office for what he later told the press was a “lengthy conference” in which he delivered the news both of them wanted to hear the most. He also offered mother and daughter some advice. They were free, of course, to return to 944 Linden Street, but he thought it best they “went away from this area, changed their names and began life anew.”

  The extensive media coverage meant all of Camden, and much of Philadelphia and the surrounding towns, knew what had happened to Sally. Cohen worried the girl might be judged harshly for the forcible loss of her virtue, even if that reaction was in no way warranted. Cohen also urged Ella to seek the advice of the Reverend Alfred Jass, director of the Bureau of Catholic Charities, “in directing Sally’s return to a normal life.” Ella was a Protestant, but clergy was still clergy, and Sally’s recent attendance at Catholic schools may have influenced Cohen’s choice of religious advisor.

  Sally and Ella got home at 1:45 P.M. Waiting reporters and photographers shouted questions and snapped pictures as they walked through the front door, Ella shielding her daughter. Ignoring the shouts, she shut the door firmly behind them.

  From that afternoon on, the Horner women were private citizens. They were no longer at the mercy of the legal system, or the national press. The rest of the world could leave them alone.

  In some fashion, it worked out that way, but their new-found calm did not last for long.

  Eighteen

  When Nabokov (Really) Learned About Sally

  Vladimir Nabokov spent the morning of March 22, 1950, much as he would every morning for the next month: bedridden and pain-plagued from the same neurological malady that had afflicted him a decade earlier, in the months leading up to his arrival in America. “I have followed your example and am in bed with a temperature above 102 degrees,” Nabokov wrote Katharine White, his editor at the New Yorker, on March 24. “No bronchitis but grippe with me is invariably accompanied by the hideous pain of intercostal neuralgia.”

  White had also been ill and advised Nabokov to prize rest above work. Nabokov rested, but did not stop working. Just as he had written The Enchanter while bedridden a decade earlier, so now did he complete two late chapters of Conclusive Evidence, the first version of the autobiography that became Speak, Memory. But as Nabokov told James Laughlin, his editor at New Directions, a month later, he did not “get back to normal conditions” for weeks. That summer, he and Véra did not travel across America to hunt butterflies, as they had done the previous year and on three earlier occasions. Not enough time, not nearly enough money, and too man
y deadlines loomed as his health slowly mended.

  It’s easy to imagine that, as he was laid up in bed at home in Ithaca with limited capacity to work, Nabokov picked up a copy of the local newspaper and came across the news of a kidnapped girl rescued in California after almost two years of cross-country captivity. It is not difficult to believe Nabokov, whom Véra described in their diary as being fascinated by true crime, paid avid attention from his sickbed as each day brought fresh news about Sally’s rescue and Frank La Salle’s crimes.

  Here, in newspaper accounts of Sally Horner’s plight, was a possible solution to a long-standing problem with the manuscript that would become Lolita: how to create the necessary scaffolding for all of the ideas rattling around in his mind, the decades of compulsion, and the games he wished to play with the reader.

  Robert Roper, the author of Nabokov in America, was certainly convinced that Nabokov “read newspaper reports of a sensational crime” around the time of Sally’s rescue. He told me, “I think reading about Sally was momentous for [Nabokov]. He was on the verge of abandoning his project when the March 1950 stories appeared, and it was as if the world were providing him with justification and template for writing his daring little sex novel. He cribbed so much from the story.”

  Yet there is no direct proof that Vladimir Nabokov learned of Sally Horner’s abduction and rescue in March 1950. There was no story in the papers he was most likely to read—the Cornell Daily Sun, the college newspaper, or the New York Times. Similarly, there’s no direct proof he glanced at the Camden or Philadelphia papers, the ones that carried the best details and the most vivid photos. Neither his archives at the New York Public Library nor those at the Library of Congress contain newspaper clippings about Sally. Any connection dances just outside the frame.

  However, there is plenty of indirect proof that Nabokov knew about Sally Horner and her rescue. The circumstantial evidence is there in Lolita. And I believe he would never have fully realized the character of Dolores Haze without knowing of Sally’s real-life plight.

  LET’S FIRST CONSIDER HOW, roughly at the halfway point of Lolita, Humbert Humbert threatens Dolores into complying with him. He tells her that if he is arrested or if she reveals the true nature of their relationship, she “will be given a choice of varying dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home. . . .” Humbert’s ultimatum echoes La Salle’s repeated threats to Sally Horner, reported in the newspapers in March 1950, that if she did not do what he said, she would be bound for juvenile hall.

  But earlier in the same scene, the comparison between Humbert and Frank La Salle is even more explicit: “Only the other day we read in the newspapers some bunkum about a middle-aged morals offender who pleaded guilty to the violation of the Mann Act and to transporting a nine-year-old girl across state lines for immoral purposes, whatever they are. Dolores darling! You are not nine but almost thirteen, and I would not advise you to consider yourself my cross-country slave. . . . I am your father, and I am speaking English, and I love you.”

  As Nabokov scholar Alexander Dolinin pointed out in his 2005 essay linking Sally Horner to Lolita, Nabokov fiddled with the case chronology. The cross-country journey in Lolita begins in 1947, an entire year before Sally Horner’s abduction. At that time, Sally would have been nine going on ten, matching the age Humbert cites to his Lolita instead of the age she was when Frank La Salle abducted her. It is clear to Dolinin that “the legal formulae used by [Humbert Humbert] as well as his implying that he, in contrast to La Salle, is really Lolita’s father, leave no doubt that the passage refers to the newspaper reports of 1950. . . .” In other words, the circumstantial evidence is right there in the text that Nabokov did, in fact, read about Sally Horner in March 1950, rather than retroactively inserting her story into Lolita several years after the fact.

  To throw off the scent, or perhaps to amuse himself, Nabokov assigned details of La Salle to other characters. Dolores’s eventual husband and the father of her child, Dick Schiller, is a mechanic. Meanwhile, Vivian Darkbloom—an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov—has a “hawk face,” a phrase akin to the description of La Salle as a “hawk-faced man” in the March 1950 coverage of Sally’s rescue. And as Dolinin underscored, references to Dolores’s “Florentine hands” and “Florentine breasts” seem to point as much to Sally Horner’s legal first name of Florence as they do to Botticelli.

  Sally’s captivity lasted twenty-one months, from June 1948 to March 1950. At the twenty-first month mark of their connection, Lolita and Humbert land at Beardsley, where Humbert realizes that he no longer has the same hold on the girl he once possessed. He worries Dolores has confided the true nature of her relationship with her “stepfather” to her school friend, Mona. And that in doing so, she might be cherishing “the stealthy thought . . . that perhaps after all Mona was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose [Humbert] without getting penalized herself.”

  Dolores’s potential confession to Mona echoes Sally’s actual confession of her abuse at Frank La Salle’s hands, first to the unnamed school friend, and later to Ruth Janisch. And just as Sally’s escape comes about because of her long-distance phone call to her family, so, too, does Dolores make a mysterious phone call—immediately after fighting with Humbert— and then announces, “A great decision has been made.” She doesn’t flee him for another month, but the setup is already in place.

  Then there is Humbert’s aside in Lolita’s final chapter. He states that he would have given himself “at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges.” The exact sentence Frank La Salle received.

  Nineteen

  Rebuilding a Life

  Sally Horner was only two months past her eleventh birthday when Frank La Salle spirited her away from Camden. She returned home less than two weeks before turning thirteen on April 18. “When she went away she was a little girl,” Ella murmured on the day she was finally reunited with her daughter. “Now she is practically a young lady.” Sally had seen the country and how different so many other places were from Camden. She had been forced to grow up in the cruelest way possible, knowledge foisted upon her that could not be suppressed.

  How the family marked her birthday isn’t known, since no one, aside from Sally’s niece, Diana, is alive to recall—and Diana was only twenty months old at the time. But a family outing to the Philadelphia Zoo, captured on a minute-long film clip shot by Sally’s brother-in-law, Al Panaro, appears to provide a possible answer. It is the only known surviving footage of Sally.

  In it, Sally seems dressed for spring, wearing the same outfit that she had on the plane from California, as well as to court the day that Frank La Salle pleaded guilty to her kidnapping. Her sister, Susan, has on a cream or white coat covering a pale blouse and dark skirt, while Diana is dressed in a pink two-piece suit.

  Sally walks, shoulders hunched, beside Susan. At one point she pushes her niece in a white-handled stroller. She moves slowly, with hesitation, but it’s not clear whether that’s how she really moved or if the film clip was preserved at a slower speed.

  In a close-up, Sally’s face is angled to the left. Her expression is tentative, suggesting she still feels vulnerable out in public. That even though she is among her family, among those she loves, she isn’t ready to let down her guard.

  She does not look at the camera once.

  THERE WERE OTHER PRESSING MATTERS as Sally Horner readjusted to life with her family, in Camden and elsewhere. She had been taken at the tail end of sixth grade; in the fall she would start eighth grade at Clara S. Burrough Junior High School, and was eager for what promised to be a fresh start. When she had gone to school during her captivity period, her energy was focused on surviving each day with Frank La Salle instead of dreaming about what she might want to be when she grew up. Now that Sally was free, she could think of what she wanted, for her own future. “She has a definite ambition,” the San Jose detention center matron had said a few days
after Sally’s dramatic rescue. “She wants to be a doctor.”

  Ella, who had been out of work, needed to find a new job to support not only herself, but also a daughter who, through no fault of her own, was far closer to womanhood than any thirteen-year-old was supposed to be. Ella’s repetition to the press of the phrase “whatever Sally has done, I can forgive her” points to her discomfort about the abuse Sally suffered, or even her lack of comprehension.

  There was no vocabulary, in 1950, to describe the mechanism or the impact of Sally’s victimization, where the violence was psychological manipulation, not necessarily brute force. Where the innocent-seeming facade of the father-daughter dynamic masked repeated rapes, unbeknownst to almost everyone around her. For Ella, who was struggling to pay the bills, put food on the table, and keep the lights on in the house, the details of Sally’s captivity may have been too much to bear. As was the idea of starting over where no one knew what had happened to her. The stigma they knew must have seemed a better choice than the uncertainty of what they didn’t know.

  Taking Cohen’s advice under consideration, Ella opted for a compromise: Sally would spend the summer of 1950 with the Panaros in Florence, while Ella remained in Camden. No one changed their names, and no one would discuss what happened to Sally for decades.

  Over the summer of 1950, Sally Horner allowed herself to feel safe. She looked after Diana when Susan and Al Panaro had to work in the greenhouse, and sometimes Sally tended to the flowers and herbs as well. One family photo shows Sally in the greenhouse next to Susan, wearing dungarees, a white shirt, and a dark cardigan, her curly hair tousled around her face and chin, her mouth open as she is caught in mid-conversation with her sister.

  Sally Horner and her older sister, Susan Panaro, in the family greenhouse.

  Other photographs from the same time suggest that living at the Panaros did Sally some good. One shows Sally standing by herself, clad in an elaborate pale-hued frock suitable for going to church or an afternoon social event. She’s smiling at the camera, though her eyes carry remnants of the shyness she displayed while being filmed at the Philadelphia Zoo.