The Real Lolita

by Sarah Weinman

  Sally’s smile is wider in a second photo of her in a different fancy dress. Here she poses with a dark-haired young man wearing a suit at least two sizes too large. The boy is her apparent date, for a school dance or a church social. His name, and how the evening went, is lost to time—as is whether he was aware of what had happened to Sally.

  By Sally’s fourteenth birthday in April 1951, she looked like the typical American teenager of that period, the type to be wowed by Perry Como or Tony Bennett or Doris Day or other popular singers of the time. (In Lolita, Nabokov dutifully listed the soundtrack of Dolores and Humbert’s road trip, including Eddie Fisher’s “Wish You Were Here,” Peggy Lee’s “Forgive Me,” and Tony Bennett’s “Sleepless” and “Here in My Heart.”)

  One candid photo, likely taken by Al Panaro, hints at more complicated undercurrents in her than in a “bobby-soxer,” as Sally was sometimes referred to in the press coverage of her rescue. She wears jeans again, as she did in the greenhouse photo with Susan, but now her shirt is dark, and her curly hair is pulled back. Her lipstick looks near-black in the black-and-white photo, which suggests she is wearing a ruby-red shade. The camera has captured Sally as she emerged from her bedroom, newspaper in her right hand, expression quizzical, as if she’d been interrupted while reading the funnies. She seems to be in need of sleep, caffeine, or a combination of the two.

  A candid shot of Sally holding a newspaper.

  Though Sally adopted a mask of good-natured resilience, Al recalled his sister-in-law drifting into melancholic moods. She would be in the moment, then gone. A light would shine, and then flicker out. “She never said she was sad and depressed,” Al told me in 2014, “but you knew something was wrong.” The family discouraged discussion about her ordeal, and she almost never spoke of what happened with anyone. There were no heart-to-hearts. She underwent no psychological examinations; nor did she see a therapist. There was only Before, and After.

  At Burrough Junior High, located on the corner of Haddon and Newton Avenues, Sally, once more, excelled on the academic side. Al recalled his sister-in-law being “very smart, an A student,” and said that “it seemed like she knew a subject before it was taught.” She graduated in June 1952 with honors.

  Despite the photo of Sally with a date, her social life did not open up. She’d had trouble making friends before her abduction; afterward it became even more difficult. Classmates whispered and gossiped about her time with La Salle. Boys, emboldened and entitled, peppered her with unwanted remarks and propositions. As her classmate Carol Taylor—née Carol Starts—remembered, “they looked at her as a total whore.” Emma DiRenzo, whom Sally knew as Emma Annibale, agreed. “She had a little bit of a rough time at first. Not everyone was very nice. I think some people didn’t believe her.”

  It didn’t matter to Sally’s classmates that she had been abducted and raped. That she was not a virgin was enough to taint her. Nice girls were supposed to be pure until marriage. “No matter how you looked at it, she was a slut,” Carol said. “That’s the way it was in those days.”

  Carol met Sally in eighth-grade homeroom. Carol had street smarts; Sally did, too, but she wanted to close the door on how she got them, and escaped into the land of books. Carol lived two blocks away from the junior high while Sally had a longer daily walk of four to five blocks. Carol came from a large family—she was one of ten siblings, a far cry from Sally’s smaller pool of immediate relatives. Carol had some other friends. Sally had no one but Carol, who didn’t care a whit what anyone else thought of Sally. Carol said she was oblivious about Sally’s supposedly sullied reputation, but it’s as likely Carol chose not to behave the same way as her classmates, and not to judge Sally so harshly. Carol admired Sally’s manners, her love of books, and sophisticated outlook. Sally admired Carol’s freedom. She was as eager to be Carol’s friend as Carol was to be hers.

  Sally found refuge in the outdoors. She loved everything about being outside: the sun, swimming, and especially the Jersey Shore. As a little girl, before Frank La Salle kidnapped her, she’d spent many summer weekends at various seaside towns, like Wildwood and Cape May. After her rescue, the beach was a place where she could forget about cruel taunts and pervading despair. The Shore couldn’t solve all of her problems, but at least it provided space for her to feel happiness.

  In the summer of 1952, Sally was looking forward to starting Woodrow Wilson High School. At fifteen, she looked far older than her years. She wanted to make more friends and find a boyfriend.

  Then, one weekend in the middle of August, she took another trip to Wildwood.

  Twenty

  Lolita Progresses

  The Nabokovs couldn’t afford to road-trip across America during the summer of 1950, but the next summer Vladimir and Véra left Ithaca in June, at the end of Cornell’s spring semester. Vladimir had turned in his grades for his European fiction class, and they gave up the lease on the house on East Seneca Street, their home the last three years, having found cheaper accommodations for the fall.

  By the time Véra turned their aging Oldsmobile off U.S. Highway 36 at St. Francis, Kansas, on June 30, the pattern was set: hunt for butterflies for as many hours as a given day allowed, depending on their stamina and the weather. On rainier days—which dominated the trip—or when fatigue set in, usually in afternoons, Nabokov worked on the manuscript he was still calling The Kingdom by the Sea.

  Véra and Nabokov chasing butterflies.

  Nabokov worked in the passenger seat of the Oldsmobile, away from the noise coming through the motel room walls and insulated from the floods and storms that curtailed his exercises in lepidoptery. Dmitri, now seventeen, joined his parents in Telluride, Colorado—he was coming from Harvard, where he’d finished up his first year—and took over the driving duties, too. The family wended their way through the Rockies, Wyoming, and West Yellowstone, Montana, before returning to Ithaca at the end of August.

  Weeks of butterfly-hunting in the Rockies, often shirtless with his chest exposed to the sun, had little immediate effect upon Nabokov’s health. The accumulated exposure didn’t cause any issue until he returned to Cornell, when a nasty case of sunstroke finally hit, confining him to bed for two solid weeks. “Silly situation . . . to be smitten by the insipid N.Y. sun on a dapper lawn,” Nabokov noted in his diary. “High temperature, pain in the temples, insomnia and an incessant, brilliant but sterile turmoil of thoughts and fancies.”

  The Nabokovs changed their itinerary for the summer of 1952. They began their journey in Cambridge, Massachusetts, rather than Ithaca, because Vladimir had taken up a teaching post at Harvard for the spring semester (he was on sabbatical from Cornell). A mitigating factor in moving back to the Cambridge area was to be closer to Dmitri, continuing his studies at Harvard.

  Vladimir, Véra, and Dmitri, driving the same Oldsmobile as in earlier years, landed in Laramie, Wyoming, at the end of June, about ten days after departing Cambridge. They stayed in the state hunting butterflies all along the Continental Divide. They traveled through Medicine Bow National Forest (“using the abominable local road”) to Riverside in time for the Fourth of July (where “some noisy festival is underway”) and, by early August, arrived in Afton.

  All the while Nabokov continued to scribble down notes on index card after index card, adding to the novel that had bedeviled him for so long. He had spent the previous year sharpening his observations of quotidian matters. He noted down all sorts of minutiae, the better to portray the American prepubescent girl at the heart of his novel with greater accuracy. Nabokov recorded heights and weights, average age of first menstruation, attitude changes, even the “proper method of inserting an enema tip into a rectum.”

  He also jotted down teen magazine slang—which is why phrases like “It’s a sketch” or “She was loads of fun” appear in Lolita and sound right, not tin-eared. To create the character of Miss Pratt, the Beardsley school head, Nabokov interviewed a real school principal under the guise of having a (fictional) daughter wh
o wanted to enroll.

  But he did not make as much progress on Lolita as he wished while wandering along the Continental Divide. The academic year had exhausted Nabokov more than he realized. He saved most of his energy to scour for blues, including a successful sighting of Vanessa cardui. In due course it was time for the Nabokovs to return east. Dmitri had gone back to Cambridge earlier, leaving his parents to travel by themselves along two-lane highways. The couple likely needed two weeks to make the 1,850-plus-mile trip back to Ithaca. They reached the town, and another new rental home, on September 1, 1952.

  By that time, Nabokov had read a new story about Sally Horner, one that would change the direction of Lolita so much it’s surprising to think the novel could have existed without it.

  Twenty-One

  Weekend in Wildwood

  Carol Starts, Sally Horner’s best friend, summer of 1952.

  Carol Taylor no longer remembers why she and Sally decided to go down to Wildwood that summer weekend in 1952. It was mid-August in Camden, a time of relentless heat and humidity. Nobody had air-conditioning, and heading to the Jersey Shore was an easy way to find some relief.

  Carol and Sally were both working summer jobs as waitresses at the Sun Ray drugstore in nearby Haddonfield. They were best friends. They were fifteen. They were just a few weeks away from their first freshman class at Woodrow Wilson High. Why not head down to Wildwood for a quick getaway?

  The girls saved up their pennies for bus fare and headed south on Friday, August 15, an hour-and-a-half-long ride covering just over eighty-six miles. They got there in the late afternoon. Wildwood bustled with the energy of all the young people making similar weekend pilgrimages for sun, sand, beach, and nightlife. Carol and Sally also carried fake identification cards saying they were twenty-one years old. This would lead to confusion later on.

  Sally and Carol weren’t drinkers. Sally did not touch alcohol at all, while Carol only occasionally sipped some beer or wine. The fake IDs weren’t about boozing. If you wanted to dance, you had to go to clubs like the Bamboo Room, the Riptide, or the Bolero, and you needed to be over the age of twenty-one to get in. Every other Camden high school kid had a fake ID. Plus it was so easy: go to City Hall, get a card-sized version of your birth certificate, adjust the birth date, bleach it out then dye it green with vegetable food coloring, get it laminated, and voilà, a genuine-looking false identification card.

  Sally and Carol hit the beach, and after that danced the night away. Then, on Saturday, the friends’ plans split apart. For that was when Eddie met Sally.

  EDWARD JOHN BAKER drove down to Wildwood nearly every summer weekend in 1952. When Sally Horner met him, he must have seemed like a boy for whom fun was something not just to be had, but to be lived.

  In photographs from his high school yearbooks and local newspapers, Baker’s eyes dance with merriment. It’s there even in the classic high school graduation head shot: while other classmates try for seriousness belying their years, Baker, his dark hair tousled and his eyebrows raised, makes the thought of putting away childish things seem eminently unreasonable. The sparkle in his eye lurks in group photos of the many school musical groups he played with, from the senior jazz band to the string orchestra to the treble clef quartet. In all those shots, Baker holds his trusty soprano saxophone like the proverbial piper ready to entice those eager to follow him wherever he may go.

  Edward Baker’s high school graduation photo, 1950.

  Photographs lie, of course. They are but millisecond-long glimpses of a more complicated set of feelings, emotions, interactions. One should be careful of reading too much into them. But photos are all that remain, since Baker—Eddie in his youth—isn’t around anymore to say what was in his mind at the time. He died in 2014, age eighty-two, still living in his hometown of Vineland, New Jersey.

  What is clear from those photos of Baker is why Sally found him attractive at a time when she was finally ready to feel such things. Edward Baker was tall, dark, and twenty to Sally’s mature-not-by-choice fifteen. She didn’t tell Baker her real age; she said she was seventeen, and Baker said later he “thought she probably was. She looked it.” Carol said that Sally was “bananas” for him as soon as she saw him.

  Sally had confided in Carol throughout their yearlong friendship, and especially over that summer, about her loneliness and longing for a boyfriend. How that seemed impossible in Camden, where too many people knew about her kidnapping. Where she was viciously mocked by boys and girls alike. Branded a slut. Shunned.

  Baker was a tonic to all that. Just the right amount of older, taller, handsomer. She wasn’t about to correct him if he believed she was seventeen, or tell him that the new school she was about to start in the fall was Woodrow Wilson High. Perhaps she hoped Baker could pry her away from the darkness. Or perhaps Sally merely wanted a weekend diversion.

  After meeting at the beach on Saturday, they spent the afternoon and evening together, and on Sunday morning they went to church. “She impressed me as a darn nice girl,” said Baker. “She was good-looking, reserved . . . and was apparently a church-goer.”

  If something more happened between Saturday night and Sunday morning, Sally did not confide in Carol. Sally did, however, ask a gigantic favor from her best friend after she and Eddie returned from church: Would Carol be okay heading back to Camden on her own? If she was, Sally would go with Baker in his glossy black Ford sedan to his hometown of Vineland and catch a bus from there.

  “She really, really, wanted to go home with him,” recalled Carol. “She thought he was so nice.”

  Carol said sure, she didn’t mind. She had no reason to get in the way of her best friend’s infatuation. Baker seemed all right, not someone who would do Sally harm. Besides, other friends of Carol’s were in Wildwood that weekend, too, and they had room for Carol in their car.

  The ride home to Camden was tranquil for Carol. The following morning would be nothing of the sort.

  ED BAKER PULLED onto the highway with Sally Horner in the passenger seat. Her spirits must have been high as they began the trip to Vineland. They’d spent all of Sunday together, just like they had on Saturday. She was dead gone on him, and he seemed to feel the same way about her. That evening, she’d met Eddie for supper, after which they walked along Wildwood’s bustling boardwalk. Away from the carnival barkers and the screaming children, they spied a free bench and sat down. They talked and talked, and perhaps even kissed, and then headed for his car well after dark. She didn’t want to say goodbye just yet.

  The trip from Wildwood to Vineland normally took about forty minutes. Perhaps, given that it was after eleven o’clock at night, Ed Baker wanted to drive a little faster. Perhaps they were rushing to get Sally to the station before the last bus left for Camden. Or maybe their plans were not so innocent, and they didn’t want anyone else to know.

  As the clock neared midnight, Ed Baker and Sally Horner were seventeen miles north of Wildwood. A car approached from the opposite direction of the two-lane highway, and Baker shifted his headlights to low beam. He kept both hands on the steering wheel to hold the car in the center of the road. Through the glare, Baker caught a glimpse of something off to the side, but not fast enough to avoid a collision.

  Sally never felt a thing.

  JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on Monday, August 18, 1952, the New Jersey State Police arrived on the scene of a four-vehicle highway accident on lower Woodbine Road where the county line divided North Dennis from Woodbine. (The entire stretch is now part of Highway 78.) Baker had barreled into the back of a parked truck, owned by Jacob Benson, which proceeded to crash into another parked truck, owned by John Rifkin. The impact caused Rifkin’s truck to be thrown into the highway, where it was hit again by the car directly behind Baker’s Ford.

  State Trooper Paul Heilfurth told the Wildwood Leader that if the multi-car crash had happened three minutes later, it “would probably have been more serious.” That’s because Benson’s truck was about to be towed by Rifkin’s truck, and
both men were safely away from the vehicles when Baker plowed into them.

  Those three extra minutes saved the men’s lives. Baker broke his left knee, needed fifteen stitches to close a gash on his right arm, and was cut up and bruised.

  The car crash killed Sally Horner instantly.

  Rescue crews took more than two hours to free Sally’s body from the wreckage. Her head had been crushed by the truck’s tailgate, which had come through the windshield when the vehicles collided. Police discovered the fake ID that claimed Sally was twenty-one. Initial news reports misreported her age as a result. Once they realized who she was and that she had been in the news before, Sally’s true age emerged.

  The death certificate, issued by Cape May County three days later, listed the cause of Sally’s death as a fractured skull from a blow to the right side of her head. She’d broken her neck; other mortal injuries included a crushed chest and internal injuries, as well as a right leg fracture above the knee. The coroner didn’t bother with an autopsy.

  The damage to her face was so severe that the state police felt Ella would be too traumatized to identify her daughter. Instead, Al Panaro went to the morgue. “The only way I knew it was Sally,” he said, “was because she had a scar on her leg. I couldn’t tell from her face.”

  CAROL STARTS WAS WOKEN UP on the morning of August 18 by the sound of her mother yelling, “There’s someone on the phone for you!” There was only one phone, located in the living room. Carol got herself up and rushed out to take the call. The person on the line sounded official, like a policeman or a detective.