The Real Lolita Read online

  Both men’s plans are the same: “He knew he would make no attempt on her virginity in the tightest and pinkest sense of the term until the evolution of their caresses had ascended a certain invisible step,” says Volshebnik’s narrator. He also sets the same stage for his seduction, in a faraway hotel, away from knowing, prying eyes, or so he thinks. The hotel, in Europe, is less shabby than Humbert’s choice of The Enchanted Hunters, but serves the same purpose: allowing the narrator to watch over the sleeping girl and make his move against her will.

  The outcome differs from Lolita. The narrator is consumed by the girl lying supine on the bed, robe half-open, and begins “little by little to cast his spell . . . passing his magic wand above her body,” measuring her “with an enchanted yardstick.” Here, again, Humbert Humbert would sneer. But then he did not have the girl look “wild-eyed at his rearing nudity,” caught out like the pedophile he is. Nor does Humbert become “deafened by his own horror” when the girl begins to scream at his rejected advances. Humbert is all about self-justification; Volshebnik’s narrator suffers no such delusion about his quarry.

  He tries to soothe the girl—“be quiet, it’s nothing bad, it’s just a kind of game, it happens sometimes, just be quiet”—but she will not be placated. And when two old women burst into the room, he flees, only to be hit by a truck, the ensuing gory mess described as “an instantaneous cinema of dismemberment.” The narrator’s fate is awful and inevitable. He is the predator hunted, captured, taken down. The girl’s big bad wolf is punished by a passing truck.

  Nabokov did not publish Volshebnik during his lifetime because he knew, as was clear to me upon reading it, that the story was not a stand-alone work but source material. It is more straightforward and less sophisticated than Lolita. As the scholar Simon Karlinsky wrote when Volshebnik was finally published in English as The Enchanter in 1986, the novella’s pleasure is “comparable to the one afforded by studying Beethoven’s published sketchbooks: seeing the murky and unpromising material out of which the writer and the composer were later able to fashion an incandescent masterpiece.”

  In other words, the story carries equal value to the creation of Lolita as did the story of Sally Horner. One was fiction; the other was truth. But art is fickle and merciless, as Nabokov explained repeatedly throughout his life. Volshebnik possesses a powerful engine of its own. It does not possess Lolita’s literary trickery and mastery of obfuscation, which continue to make moral mincemeat out of the novel’s wider readership. Here, instead, is a more prosaic depiction of deviant compulsion and tragic consequences.

  TWO OTHER WORKS are notable influences upon Lolita. Annabel Leigh, Humbert Humbert’s first love, is named in homage to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee.” The novel’s working title, The Kingdom by the Sea, is a quote from that poem, and Humbert’s memories of his Annabel, dead of typhus four months after their seaside near-consummation, echo many more of Poe’s lines. (Nabokov: “I was a child and she was a child.” Poe: “I was a child and she was a child.”)

  Lolita also owes a great deal to an influence never explicitly referenced in the text, but one Nabokov knew well from translating into Russian in his early twenties: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. As he later explained to the literary critic Alfred Appel:

  “[Carroll] has a pathetic affinity with Humbert Humbert but some odd scruple prevented me from alluding in Lolita to his wretched perversion and to those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms. He got away with it, as so many Victorians got away with pederasty and nympholepsy. His were sad scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-undressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade.”

  Perhaps a similar “odd scruple” may explain why Nabokov was quick to deny any connection between Lolita and a real-life figure he knew early on in his American tenure. Henry Lanz was a Stanford professor of motley European stock, “of Finnish descent, son of a naturalized American father, born in Moscow and educated there and in Germany.” He was fluent in many languages, an avid chess player. By World War I Lanz was in London, married, at the age of thirty, to a fourteen-year-old.

  Not long after the Nabokovs immigrated to America in May 1940, arriving in New York on the SS Champlain, Lanz arranged for Nabokov to teach at Stanford. Their friendship grew over regular chess games; Nabokov beat Lanz more than two hundred times. Over these jousts Lanz revealed his predilections—specifically, that he most enjoyed seducing young girls and he loved to watch them urinate. Four years later, Lanz was dead of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine.

  Nabokov’s first biographer, Andrew Field, suggested that Lanz was a prototype for Humbert Humbert. Nabokov, however, denied it: “No, no, no. I may have had [Lanz] in the back of my mind. He himself was what is called a fountainist, like Bloom in Ulysses. First of all, this is the commonest thing. In Swiss papers they always call them un triste individuel.”

  Such a denial makes sense, in light of other future denials of real-life influence. Yet the months Nabokov spent being peppered with stories from a known pederast could not help but inform his fiction—and further bolster his involuntary, unconscious need to unspool this particular, horrible narrative.

  Seven

  Frank, in Shadow

  Unlike Humbert Humbert, there was nothing erudite about Frank La Salle. His prison writings are unreliable, lacking the silky sheen that is Lolita’s narrative hallmark; grammatical mistakes pepper La Salle’s rambling and incoherent oral and typewritten declamations. When he was employed, irregularly at best, he worked blue-collar jobs, a far cry from teaching foreign languages.

  La Salle was a crude, slippery figure, who lied so much in middle age that it was impossible for me to verify the facts of the first four decades of his life. One pseudonym dead-ended into another. Calls and emails to helpful, friendly archivists around the country bore no fruit, save for commiseration over my extended, failed, quest.

  Without knowing the substance of his childhood and upbringing, and whether or not his predilections asserted themselves early on, it was difficult for me to determine where he came by his long-running desire for young girls. La Salle behaved as a pedophile, but it’s hard to say whether that was his orientation—compulsion spurring opportunity—or he impulsively seized on opportunity as a means of asserting power. Whatever he was is dwarfed by what he did.

  A likely birth date is May 27, 1895, give or take a year, somewhere in the Midwest. Frank La Salle was probably not his birth name. Once, he said that his parents were Frank Patterson and Nora LaPlante. Another time he wrote down their names as Frank La Salle and Nora Johnson. He hailed from Indianapolis, or perhaps Chicago. He said he served four years at the Leavenworth, Kansas, federal prison between 1924 and 1928 on a bootlegging charge, but the prison has no record of him being there during those years. He needed a new origin story every time he changed aliases, among them Patterson, Johnson, LaPlante, and O’Keefe. As far as I could find out, the first name almost never varied.

  For someone who shrouded his life in secrecy, it seems fitting that one of his most notorious aliases was that of Frank Fogg.

  It is as Fogg that a sharper picture forms of the man later known as La Salle. In the summer of 1937, Fogg had a wife and a nine-year-old son. They lived in a trailer in Maple Shade, New Jersey. He claimed that his wife took their son and ran away with a mechanic. It’s possible that might be true. By July 14 they were gone, and just over a week later Fogg himself would become a fugitive, with a new wife in tow.

  He met her at a carnival: Dorothy Dare, not quite eighteen, with brown curly hair that framed an openhearted, bespectacled face. Born in Philadelphia, the oldest of six, Dorothy lived with her family in Merchantville, a ten-minute car trip from Maple Shade, and had graduated high school just the month before. Fights with her father over his strict parenting had grown so tense that Dorothy looked for every chance to escape. At the carnival, she found it in the man calling himself Frank Fogg.

  He w
as more than twice as old as Dorothy, but she didn’t mind the age difference. He wanted to marry her and she thought it was a terrific idea to elope. Which they did, only a few days after meeting, to Elkton, Maryland, the “Gretna Green of the United States,” where weddings happened fast with few questions asked.

  Dorothy’s father, David Dare, was livid. Though they fought, he knew Dorothy was fundamentally a good girl. Even if she was not, technically, a minor, she was young, and this Fogg fellow was clearly not. When Dare discovered that Fogg was using a fake name, and was actually married, he got local police to swear out an eight-state warrant for the man’s arrest on kidnapping and statutory rape charges on July 22, 1937. He claimed that Dorothy was fifteen, and thus a minor. The law caught up with the couple ten days later.

  Cops arrested La Salle, still using the Fogg alias, in Roxborough, Pennsylvania, where he’d found a job, and took him to jail in Haddonfield, New Jersey. The charge: enticing a minor. Bail: withheld. Police simultaneously picked up Dorothy in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Wissahickon, where the couple had rented a room, and also brought her to jail. The two had a surprise for the arresting officers: Dorothy was not a minor, their Elkton marriage was legit, and Frank had the certificate, dated July 31, to prove it.

  “He told me the truth,” Dorothy cried, nervously fingering the shiny gold ring on her left hand. “I know he did. He couldn’t have been married before. But if he did—oh, I’d just want to die!” Not long after uttering those words, Dorothy was released from jail, and slipped away from her parents, not yet ready to give up on her new husband, Frank.

  The next morning, La Salle appeared in Delaware Township court. Dorothy was not there; nor did anyone know her whereabouts. Her father, however, was very much present. When he spotted La Salle, he punched the other man in the jaw. Dare grew even more furious when the presiding judge, Ralph King, dismissed the charges against La Salle, after the man testified that Dorothy had gone with him of her own will, and that they were lawfully married.

  “I’ll lock you up if you aren’t careful,” King warned Dare after he raised his voice in court one too many times demanding La Salle be held. But in the end, Dare got his wish, because the court wasn’t done with Frank.

  A day after the eight-state warrant had gone out on the wire, there was a hit-and-run accident near Marlton. A car resembling the one La Salle drove collided with a car owned by a man named Curt Scheffler. The driver of the first car fled the scene. La Salle, in court, denied he had been the driver. Justice of the Peace Oliver Bowen disagreed. On August 11, 1937, La Salle was fined fifty dollars and sentenced to fifteen days in jail. He also received an additional thirty days’ sentence after failing to pay a two-hundred-dollar fine for giving false information. When he got out of jail, Dorothy was waiting. They picked up their marriage where it had been interrupted, and, apparently, the next few years were happy ones.

  Dorothy and Frank, who cast off the Fogg alias and was La Salle once more, moved to Atlantic City. Their daughter, Madeline (not her real name), was born in 1939, and the young family were living at 203 Pacific Avenue when the Census came knocking a year later. So, too, did police, who this time arrested La Salle on bigamy charges. Few details are available—was it the earlier wife or a different woman?—save that La Salle wriggled out of it with an acquittal.

  Two years later, when Madeline was three, Dorothy sued Frank for desertion and nonpayment of child support. Dare family lore had it that Dorothy discovered her husband in a car with another woman, and grew so enraged she hit the other woman over the head with her shoe.

  What was passed down as a dark but amusing family story turned out to hide a more sinister truth. What Dorothy Dare discovered about her husband first came to light in the wee hours of March 10, 1942.

  THREE CAMDEN POLICE OFFICERS walked into a restaurant on Broadway near the corner of Penn and spotted a girl sitting alone in a booth. Women sitting by themselves in public at three in the morning still stand out. Imagine what the cops thought in the early 1940s when they stumbled across a twelve-year-old girl all on her own so late in the night.

  When acting sergeant Edward Shapiro and patrolmen Thomas Carroll and Donald Watson asked the girl what she was up to, “being out alone at such an hour,” she evaded their questioning. So the policemen took her back to headquarters, where a city detective would ask the questions.

  Under gentle coaxing by police sergeant John V. Wilkie, the girl opened up. She admitted she’d been out that night because she “had a date with a man about 40 years old.” The man’s name, she said, was Frank La Salle. He’d given her a card with the phone number and address of the Philadelphia auto body shop where he worked.

  In his report, Wilkie wrote that the girl said La Salle had “forced her into intimacies.” The girl almost certainly used plainer language. She also told Wilkie that La Salle made her introduce him to four of her friends by threatening to tell her mother what she had done with him.

  The five girls were Loretta, Margaret, Sarah, Erma, and Virginia.* From the available records, it’s not clear which of them was the one in the diner, but based on their birth dates, it was likely Loretta or Margaret. (Sarah, the oldest, had just turned fifteen.) All of them lived in Camden County, either in the city or in nearby Pennsauken. All of them were named in a 1944 divorce petition by Dorothy Dare as having “committed adultery” with her husband.

  When police brought the other girls in to be questioned, Wilkie reported, each of them also told of “how they had been raped by La Salle.”

  SERGEANT WILKIE SWORE OUT a warrant for Frank La Salle’s arrest, alerting police in Philadelphia of the twelve-year-old girl’s sickening allegation. But when police showed up at La Salle’s workplace, he wasn’t there. They didn’t find him at his last known address, either. Who knows how La Salle learned the police were coming for him, but he had fled. What’s more, police learned, he’d gone back to his earlier alias of Fogg. They dug up an address in Maple Shade, then received word that he, Dorothy, and Madeline had moved back to Camden.

  Police got a tip La Salle and his family now lived at a house on the 1000 block on Cooper Street. They kept the place under constant surveillance, hoping he might turn up. On the evening of March 15, a car pulled up in front of the house. The car had a license number linked to La Salle.

  Detectives rushed into the house. They found and arrested a nineteen-year-old man who claimed he was La Salle’s brother-in-law. But no La Salle. “We found out later,” Wilkie said, “that as detectives walked up the front steps, La Salle made his escape out the back door.”

  For nearly a year, La Salle eluded the law. An official indictment for the statutory rape of the five girls came down on September 4, 1942. Tips streamed into Camden and Philadelphia police placing him in New Jersey, and sometimes in Pennsylvania, but nothing panned out—not until the beginning of February 1943, when cops got a tip that La Salle now lived at 1414 Euclid Avenue in Philadelphia, in the heart of where Temple University stands today.

  On February 2, police descended upon the house and found La Salle, alone. They arrested him, taking him back to Camden to be arraigned. The Camden city court judge who signed the indictment and oversaw the February 10 hearing was a man named Mitchell Cohen. The two men would meet again, seven years later, in even more explosive circumstances.

  La Salle pleaded not guilty to the multiple rape indictments from the Camden grand jury, but on March 22, 1943, he changed his plea to non vult, or no contest. The presiding judge, Bartholomew Sheehan, sentenced La Salle to two and a half years on each rape charge, to be served concurrently at Trenton State Prison.

  Mug shot of Frank La Salle taken upon the start of his prison sentence for the statutory rape of five girls, 1943.

  WHILE LA SALLE was incarcerated, Dorothy and Madeline had moved back to Merchantville to be closer to Dorothy’s parents. She moved quickly to divorce him, filing a petition on January 11, 1944, stating that La Salle had “committed adultery” with the five girls beg
inning on March 9, 1942—the night the first girl reported her rape to police—and “at various times” between that date and February 1943, when La Salle was finally arrested. Frank wrote her frequently from prison—a habit he would repeat later in life—but if he meant to persuade Dorothy to stay married to him, he was not successful.

  La Salle was paroled on June 18, 1944, after fourteen months in prison. He took a room at the YMCA on Broadway and Federal, registered for the draft, and got his Social Security card. He also had to register with the city as a convicted criminal; a blurry photo from June 29, 1944, shows a middle-aged man with gray hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a squint. He wore a more subdued expression than in the prison intake photo from March 1943, where he’d smirked at the camera, seemingly free from worry or care.

  La Salle found work as a car mechanic in Philadelphia, but found himself in repeated trouble with the law. An indecent assault charge was dropped on Halloween, but the following August, he got caught at Camden’s Third National Bank trying to pass off a forged $110 check. He was indicted the following month and swiftly convicted for “obtaining money under false pretenses.” His divorce from Dorothy also moved toward completion that same month. The family court judge awarded full custody of Madeline to her mother on August 21. The divorce was final on November 23.

  La Salle returned to Trenton State Prison on March 18, 1946, to serve eighteen months to five years on the new charges. The clock also began again on the balance of the statutory rape sentence. La Salle finished up both those sentences in January 1948, and was paroled again on the fifteenth of that month.