The Real Lolita Read online

  Buxbaum hitchhiked home at the end of August. The Nabokovs, with Véra now driving, ventured northeast to Minnesota, then up to northern Ontario, for more butterfly collecting, before they finally arrived in Ithaca on September 4. Nabokov had three courses to teach that fall, but had attracted only twenty-one students, combined, a workload greeted with suspicion by his fellow professors. Even so, Nabokov wanted more money.

  Cornell’s head of the Literature Department, David Daiches, received Nabokov’s request and offered a deal: he would approve a salary raise if Nabokov took over teaching the European fiction course, Literature 311–12. Nabokov could shape the curriculum as he saw fit and pick the authors he liked most. Nabokov said yes. He began right away, scribbling notes on the back of Daiches’s letter for the course that would define his Cornell career for the next decade.

  And in spare moments, Nabokov began at last to shape the novel that had lived in his head for so long.

  NABOKOV’S RAMSDALE IS not Camden. The made-up town where Humbert Humbert insinuates himself into the lives of Charlotte and Dolores Haze is most likely located in New England, which is why Dolores is deposited in a school in the Berkshires, and why both older man and younger girl seem to know the area well. Nabokov gleaned this knowledge during his years living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But the names of the towns are similar, as is the Linden Street of Sally Horner’s childhood home and the Lawn Street where the Haze women live. Both towns shared a white, middle-class bucolic atmosphere. As would happen again and again, the Sally Horner story parallels Lolita in all sorts of surprising ways.

  Humbert Humbert came to Ramsdale by design, but moved into the Haze home at 342 Lawn Street by accident. He meant to stay nearby with the McCoos, parents to “two little daughters, one a baby the other a girl of twelve.” Lodging there, he assumed, would allow him to “coach in French and fondle in Humbertish.” But when Humbert gets there, he finds out that the McCoos’ house has burned down, and he must find someplace else to live.

  He is not pleased to be shuffled off to a “white-frame horror . . . looking dingy and old, more gray than white—the kind of place you know will have a rubber tube affixable to the tub faucet in lieu of a shower.” Humbert is further irked upon overhearing Charlotte Haze’s contralto voice ask a friend if “Monsieur Humbert” has arrived.

  Then she comes down the steps—“sandals, maroon slacks, yellow silk blouse, squarish face, in that order”—tapping her cigarette with her index finger. In Humbert’s estimation, Charlotte isn’t much: “the poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had a shiny forehead, plucked eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich.” Then he spies Dolores, and it is as if he saw his “Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses,” two and a half decades after his prepubescent romance with Annabel, as if the years “tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.” Now that the true object of Humbert’s obsession has revealed herself, Charlotte becomes a nuisance to be manipulated and endured.

  When Charlotte sends Humbert a letter, confessing she is “a passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of my life,” he senses opportunity: marry Charlotte to gain access to Dolores. Another line in Charlotte’s letter stands out: that if Humbert were to take advantage of her, “then you would be a criminal—worse than a kidnapper who rapes a child.” Charlotte, bafflingly, concludes that if he showed no sign of romantic interest in her, and remained in her home, then she would take it that he was “ready to link up your life with mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl.” (Since we’re always in Humbert’s head, we only have his word that Charlotte wrote this.)

  The American widow and the European widower marry in haste while Dolores is away at summer camp. It is, suffice to say, a bad match. What galls Humbert the most is what he describes as Charlotte’s vituperative attitude toward her daughter. The words Charlotte underlined in her copy of A Guide to Your Child’s Development to mark her daughter’s twelfth birthday: “aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate.”

  Humbert has already decided to murder Charlotte and stage it as an accident, perhaps at a thinly populated beach they visited (“The setting was really perfect for a brisk bubbling murder”). His simmering rage boils over when Charlotte informs him that she intends to send Dolores to boarding school at Beardsley, so that the two of them can take a trip to England. He resists. They argue. Then she reveals to him that she has read his notes, and knows the truth about him: “You’re a monster. You’re a detestable, abominable, criminal fraud. If you come near—I’ll scream out the window. Get back!”

  Humbert exits the house. He notes that Charlotte’s face is “disfigured by her emotion” and remains calm. He goes back into the house. He opens a bottle of Scotch. Then, quietly, he begins to gaslight her. “You are ruining my life and yours. Let us be civilized people. It is all your hallucination. You are crazy, Charlotte. The notes you found were fragments of a novel.”

  Charlotte runs back to her room, claiming she has a letter to write. Humbert makes her a drink—or so he says—while she is gone. He realizes she is not, in fact, in her room. The telephone rings. “Mrs. Humbert, sir, has been run over and you’d better come quick.” Fate has played a trick. Instead of becoming the potential savior of her daughter’s virtue, Charlotte ends up dead. It’s also played a fast one upon Humbert: he was all set to become a murderer.

  THE DESCRIPTION OF CHARLOTTE HAZE as Dietrich-lite sounds a jarringly familiar bell when I look at pictures of Ella Horner from when her daughter disappeared in 1948. She was forty-one and often wore her hair pulled back, sometimes in a bun (a “bronze-brown bun”), and plucked her eyebrows over eyes that tended to disappear into their creases. Her other facial features—strong jawline, prominent nose, pronounced cheekbones—were reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich before she emigrated from Germany and became a Hollywood star. Based on the photographs of her that I’ve seen from before and after Sally’s kidnapping, I imagine when Ella smiled, it didn’t often reach her eyes. (Humbert on Charlotte: “Her smile was but a quizzical jerk of one eyebrow.”)

  There is another similarity, coincidence or otherwise, that ties Charlotte Haze to Ella Horner: the device of marriage to gain access to their daughter. For the fictional Humbert Humbert it was a real gambit. For Frank La Salle, it was a delusion he created to explain why he took Sally away from her mother. It was a ruse Sally had to live by in order to survive being with him in Atlantic City and Baltimore, and she would have to endure it for quite a while longer.

  Thirteen

  Dallas

  Frank La Salle took Sally Horner aside one day in March 1949 and broke the news that they were leaving Baltimore. He told her that the FBI had assigned him a new case, one that required him to move southwest to investigate. By then she’d been with him for nine months. Sally did not know, and could not know, that the real reason they were leaving Baltimore was that Camden County prosecutor Mitchell Cohen had indicted La Salle on the more serious charge of kidnapping on March 17. The new indictment meant La Salle could face between thirty and thirty-five years for taking Sally. Police had not located the pair, but this charge, on top of the original indictment, promised greater scrutiny, more resources for the hunt, and a better probability of arrest. Baltimore was no longer safe, nor was the entire East Coast. Instead of flushing La Salle out, the new charge caused him to run.

  The journey from Baltimore to Dallas is approximately 1,366 miles. Today, by car, it would take about twenty hours to drive, on I-81 and I-40. Neither of those highways existed in 1949. La Salle and Sally likely drove south on U.S. 11, traveling all the way to the highway’s end in New Orleans, Louisiana, before switching over to U.S. 80, arriving in Dallas less than two hundred miles later. However they traveled, Sally and La Salle got to Dallas around April 22, 1949. For the next eleven months, she and Frank continued to play fathe
r and daughter, sticking to the cover story that he had taken Sally away from her wayward mother to provide her with a more stable upbringing. None of their new neighbors seemed to question this. At least, not right away.

  They moved into a quiet, well-kept trailer park on West Commerce Street, about four hundred feet from Dallas’s bustling downtown core. The park was designed like a horseshoe, with trailers—including one that La Salle bought on the premises—dotted all along the curve. The park could hold as many as a hundred motor homes. The mothers mostly stayed home and the fathers worked as farmhands, for steel companies, or at gas stations. Neighbors were closer in the trailer park than they had been in Baltimore. They could pay more attention to the pair, and get to know Sally—or think they did.

  La Salle had changed their names again. Sally was no longer known as Madeline LaPlante, but as Florence Planette. Oddly, it isn’t clear whether La Salle also used the “Planette” alias. One of their new neighbors, Dale Kagamaster, who ended up working with La Salle, knew him as LaPlante. Frank also told people that he was widowed, a change from the divorced father cover story he used in Atlantic City and Baltimore.

  The trailer park was owned by Nelrose and Charles Pfeil, who’d bought it a year earlier, after moving to Dallas from Akron, Ohio, with their three sons. Tom, the eldest, was nine years old when Frank and Sally arrived at the trailer park. He did not recall the name “LaPlante,” but thought “La Salle” seemed familiar. He also remembered “Florence’s” father as aloof, cold, standoffish. “I understand why, now,” Pfeil told me. “He had to be suspicious of everyone around him.” Tom had dim memories of Sally. “I don’t know if I could tell you I remember much of her except for talking a time or two. I was nine. I just wanted to play ball.”

  As in Baltimore, La Salle got a job as a mechanic, but kept Sally in the dark about what he was really doing all day. He also enrolled Sally in another Catholic school. This time it was Our Lady of Good Counsel Academy at 210 Marsalis Avenue in the neighborhood of Oak Cliff, about a seven-minute drive away from West Commerce Street. Like Saint Ann’s in Baltimore, Our Lady of Good Counsel no longer exists, having been absorbed into Bishop Dunne Catholic School in 1961. None of its records have survived. And also like Saint Ann’s, the school was in a predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood that is no longer so, thanks to suburban migration, systemic inequality, and poverty.

  Sally likely kept to a routine similar to the one she had in Baltimore. A bus ride to Our Lady of Good Counsel, where she began the day with morning prayers. Schoolwork wasn’t a breeze, but her grades were generally good: a copy of Sally’s report card from between September 1949 and February 1950, which La Salle kept after she brought it home, showed she received primarily As and A-minuses, with the occasional B, in geography and writing. The only time she received a lower grade—a C-plus, in languages—was in her final month at the school.

  At first their Commerce Street neighbors didn’t see anything amiss. Sally appeared to be a typical twelve-year-old living with her widowed father, albeit one he never let out of his sight except to go to school. Sally never displayed despair or asked for help. La Salle wouldn’t let her.

  Her neighbors thought Sally seemed to enjoy taking care of her home. She would bake every once in a while. She had a dog, one she apparently spoiled. La Salle provided her with a generous allowance for clothes and sweets. She would go shopping, swimming, and to her neighbors’ trailers for dinner— sometimes with La Salle, and other times by herself, when he told her he was working the case for the FBI.

  Dale Kagamaster’s wife, Josephine, thought Sally was a well-adjusted girl. “There were several times we noticed the need for the love and care of a mother but we both felt that the father was doing a good job of providing better living conditions for [her].” The consensus about Sally and her “father” was that they “seemed happy and entirely devoted to each other.” Maude Smillie, who was living in a nearby trailer, seemed bewildered by the idea that Sally had been a virtual prisoner: “[Sally] spent one day at the beauty parlor with me. I gave her a permanent and she never mentioned a thing. She should have known she could have confided in me.”

  Nelrose Pfeil was quoted in a court document several years later saying something similar: “Sally was in my home many times a day and she had access to several phones should she choose to use one. Sally had plenty of time to talk to me about being kidnaped [sic] if she had wanted to and I am sure she knew me well enough to know if she had said anything like that I would have helped her.” The only time La Salle kept Sally from playing with other children, according to Pfeil’s statement, “was when the person’s character was in question.”

  It appears the Pfeils, the Kagamasters, and other neighbors bought La Salle’s cover story about Sally. They did not notice anything amiss, even for the ten-day period when Sally dropped off the radar and didn’t attend school. She’d suffered an appendicitis attack, one that required her to undergo an operation and spend three nights at the Texas Crippled Children’s Hospital (now the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children). The other seven days, presumably, she spent at home, recuperating.

  Something did change in Sally, though, after the operation. She grew more pensive. Josephine Kagamaster observed that the girl did not move like a “healthy, light-hearted youngster.” She’d heard La Salle say the girl “walks like an old woman.”

  ON THE SURFACE, Sally acted as free as she had been in Camden, before Frank La Salle took her away from everyone she loved. She might have been left alone for long stretches at a time, stayed late at a neighbor’s house watching television, and been on her own in the hospital for several nights. But if she told the truth, who would believe her story? Who would believe she had been abducted when, to all appearances, Frank La Salle was her father, and a loving one at that? And even if someone did believe her, could they help, or would they put Sally in greater peril?

  Later, Josephine Kagamaster, Nelrose Pfeil, Maude Smillie, and others said they would have helped Sally had she chosen to confide in them. But they made such declarations with the benefit of hindsight, months or years after Frank La Salle’s diabolical crimes were exposed to the public. At the time, they were living ordinary and happy lives. The idea that a young girl and an older man would be in a cruel parody of a father-daughter relationship seemed inconceivable, unimaginable. And no matter what they believed about what they would have done, Sally did not confide in these neighbors. She did not feel she could trust them.

  But Sally did talk to someone, a woman named Ruth Janisch, and she believed what the girl had to say. Though Ruth’s motivations were more complex than anyone knew, her belief in the girl eventually emboldened Sally to make the most important decision of her life.

  Fourteen

  The Neighbor

  Ruth Janisch and her family arrived at the Commerce Street trailer park around December 1948. They had spent most of the 1940s traveling a particular geographic loop, following the employment her husband, George, found repairing televisions or working in bowling alleys. It began in San Jose, where Ruth and George met and married, then moved up to Washington, where she’d grown up, tracked east to Minnesota, the home of George’s parents, and finally on to Texas, situated more or less in between. The Janisches bought a caravan somewhere along the way and made it the family home.

  Periodically, the trailer ran into trouble. On Thanksgiving 1948, it broke down on the way to Dallas, somewhere in the desert. New Mexico, perhaps, or Arizona. George and his elder stepson, Pat, went looking for help, leaving the rest of the family stranded by the road. Ruth and her other children— another boy from an earlier marriage, and two girls sired by George—figured that if they were stuck by the road, they might as well have Thanksgiving dinner while they waited.

  They fetched chairs from a closet in the trailer and set up outside. Ruth cooked up an impromptu meal of pancakes and beans, which she served inside the broken-down trailer. The children lined up to get their meal and then ate outside in
the baking desert sun. Ruth warned the children not to stay outside for too long. She was nervous that rattlesnakes might bite them if the kids lingered.

  Eventually George and Pat returned with the part they needed to fix the trailer, and they drove on to Dallas, setting up camp at the Commerce Street site. A few months later, in April 1949, a man in his fifties and a girl he said was his daughter moved into the trailer next door. The Janisch girls immediately took to the girl, who introduced herself as Florence Planette. She was twelve, practically grown up, but she was willing to give them her attention. The little girls were five, six, and seven, and regarded her with a mixture of awe and envy.

  Ruth may well have regarded the girl’s father with extramarital interest. That’s her children’s theory now. Whatever her motives, Ruth noticed something askew in the relationship between Sally Horner and Frank La Salle that had eluded everyone else who interacted with them. What Ruth saw between the older man and the young girl spurred her to the single gesture that defined her as a decent human being, an act she would relive for the rest of her days and memorialize in scrapbooks. That act did not make her a heroine in the eyes of her children. But it would bring her a level of attention she spent the rest of her life trying to find again.

  Ruth Janisch may have been suspicious of Frank La Salle because she wasn’t in the habit of trusting people. She craved love she never found. She got pregnant so often she was in a perpetual state of exhaustion, dealing with babies and children. George always found work, but the money he brought in was hardly enough for an ever-expanding family. When her children misbehaved, it was all too easy for Ruth to fall back into the patterns she learned as a child, berating them the way her mother had berated her, telling them they were worthless, useless, or worse.