The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

by Sarah Weinman

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nabokov recorded heights and weights, average age of first menstruation, attitude changes, even the “proper method of inserting an enema tip into a rectum.”

My dude

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 who wanted to enroll.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Things grew strange for Carol. She did not react right away to the death of her best friend. She got dressed, left the house, and went straight to the movie theater. “I don’t know what I saw. I don’t know what outfit I wore. But when people wanted to talk to me, I went to the movies.” Later she understood she had gone into shock.

Here, in this note card, is proof that Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case. It is proof that her story captured his attention and that her real-life ordeal was inspiration for Dolores Haze’s fictional plight.

Less clear is whether the wire report Nabokov read in August 1952 was the first time he had heard of the girl, or if he was, like all who had read the news stories in March and April 1950, stunned to realize that she’d only lived two more years after her rescue.

The note card, written on front and back, included a number of strikethroughs that ended up in the text of Lolita itself. Nabokov crossed out “middle-aged morals offender” and “cross-country slave,” both phrases that serve as Humbert Humbert’s justification to Lolita that the “bunkum” they re...

Instead, he seeded Sally Horner’s abduction story throughout the entire Lolita narrative, making it a tantalizing thread for readers to discover on their own—though the vast majority never did.

AN ALTERNATE THEORY of the ending of Lolita pops up in Nabokovian circles from time to time. It contends that Dolores Haze, rather than meeting and marrying Dick Schiller, becoming pregnant, and then dying in childbirth before she is eighteen, actually died at the age of fourteen and a half. Her short, tragic adult life is in fact Humbert Humbert’s delusion, a projected fantasy in order to create some sort of romanticized ending for the girl he defiled.

If that theory is true—Nabokov certainly never confirmed or denied—Humbert’s final visit to Ramsdale carries an extra sharpness. Just before Nabokov invokes Sally Horner and Frank La Salle in a parenthetical aside, the reliable means through which he conveys true meaning to the reader, he has Humbert Humbert walking through Ramsdale, reminiscing about his first, fateful glimpse of Dolores Haze.

Humbert says, “I said something pleasant to her, meaning no harm, an old-world compliment, what nice eyes you have, but she retreated in haste and the music stopped abruptly, and a violent-looking dark man, glistening with sweat, came out and glared at me. I was on the point of identifying myself when, with a pang of dream-embarrassment, I became aware of my mud-caked dungarees, my filthy and torn sweater, my bristly chin, my bum’s bloodshot eyes.”

He understands, briefly, “what he might really look like in the eyes of his eternal jury: children and their protectors.” The glib charm, all of the smooth veneer, is stripped away in an instant. Humbert reveals himself as the monster he knows he is.

Humbert’s epiphany is in keeping with Véra’s diary note only days after the American publication of Lolita in 1958. She was ecstatic about the largely positive press and fast sales of the novel, but was unnerved by what critics weren’t saying. “I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along.”

It is to Nabokov’s credit that something of the true character of Dolores—her messy, complicated, childish self—emerges out of the haze of his narrator’s perverse pedestal-placing.

Carol’s first experience of deep loss would mark her for the rest of her life. As she grew older and friends began to die, Carol tended to grieve in an open and wild manner that puzzled those around her. “I would hear, ‘but they were just a friend.’ I would hear that about Sally. That we should be moving right along. I wasn’t willing to move right along. I wanted to grieve. And when I finally came out of shock, I did.”