I’m going to start by saying that I haven’t read Nabokov’s Lolita. But my impression is that it has influenced a number of movies because, I suspect, rich and powerful men can call it literature and use the behavior of the main character to justify their secret (or perhaps not so secret) leanings towards pedophilia. So, sorry, just not interested.

When asked, Nabokov denied that his novel was inspired by this true-crime story which was big news at the time.

In 1948, the little girl pictured on the cover above, Sally, went to a dime-store in Camden NJ and shoplifted a notebook (costing a nickle) on a dare by girls at school. Unfortunately this childish crime had been witnessed. By a pedophile. A man who followed her, claimed he was an FBI agent, and threatened her with reform school unless she did exactly what he told her to. She was 10, an honor student, her family was poor, her mother raising her small family on her own. Sally didn’t know better.

She did what he said: letting him know how to get in touch with him.

And then, for several months, nothing happened. She must have felt relieved. She volunteered at local hospitals, participated in Jr. Red Cross, kept up her grades. Finished 5th Grade. Helped her older sister who was pregnant with her first child. Sat around the house, waiting for her mom to come home from work.

And then the man reached out again, now he wanted something more: she had to go to Atlantic City with him for a weekend on FBI business. He told her what story to tell her mom (a friend’s father and mother were taking the two girls to the seashore). He talked to her mom by phone, confirming the “invitation.” He seemed courteous, charming, polite. Her mom felt bad that she couldn’t take Sally on vacation on her own. The mother took her daughter to the Camden bus depot, put her on the bus, noticed the man who greeted her, noticed he didn’t have a wife or daughter with him, but told herself everything would be fine.

She didn’t see her daughter again for two years.

At first, there were phone calls. Then the phone calls stopped. The mother’s letters to the address at the shore were returned unopened. Her daughter wrote one letter, then that stopped, too. Sally’s older sister’s due date was quickly approaching and Sally had been so excited about becoming an aunt: something was wrong. Sally’s mother finally went to the police.

The police revealed what the mother had feared: there was no wife, no little girl who was Sally’s friend. There was just a man and her daughter. But they weren’t there anymore: the man had left so quickly that he had abandoned a paycheck, as well as suitcases full of clothes and personal items.

But he had taken Sally with him.

And the police knew the man’s name: Frank LaSalle.

They knew his name because he had served six months in jail for statutory rape of five other little girls.

The story hit the papers and people began to come forward. A father, who Frank had helped with a broken car. His “daughter” Sally and the father’s little girl had played together. The girl had asked to spend the night with Sally but her parents said no but there had been that time that the girl had accompanied Sally and her “dad” to their apartment, a quick errand to pick up something, that lasted almost 2 hours. What had happened that day…?

Frank took Sally to Baltimore, using rape, threats, treats to terrify her into following his instructions. He enrolled her in Catholic school under an assumed name. She did her best to please him, to stay invisible. When the investigation heated up, they drove to Dallas, where they lived in a trailer park for almost a year. Another assumed name. Another Catholic school. Neighbors said that she seemed like a well-adjusted girl, who liked taking care of her father’s home for him, who was always polite.

The neighbors said later that they would have helped Sally if she had confided in them, if she had trusted them. The author makes a good point: it’s easy to say that in retrospect, but they suspected nothing, thought Frank and his “daughter” had a close relationship – so, would they have believed?

But then a new character enters the story: Ruth, a young mother of three in a troubled marriage, traveling from trailer park to trailer park with her family¹. She spends a few weeks in Dallas and picks up that something is wrong with Sally. Her smiles seem forced; she doesn’t seem to have any friends.² And Frank seems controlling, keeping Sally near him when she’s not at school. When Ruth and her family move to California, she writes to Frank, suggests he should move there near them, where work is more available. And he agrees, pulling Sally out of school.

One day, while he’s out looking for a job, Sally skips school and confides the truth to Ruth. Ruth hands her the phone and shows her how to make a long distance call. After calling her home and her sister’s home and no one was home, she finally reached her brother-in-law at work, told him where she was, and asked him to send the FBI. Then Sally sat down, terrified at what she had done, and wondered what Frank would do when he found out.

Arrested, LaSalle insisted that he was Sally’s father but the gig was up. Sally testified against LaSalle in a court, then returned home, where she was reunited with her mother, her sister, and met her niece. She went back to school. Although she maintained good grades, she had trouble making friends, tarred by gossip about her time with LaSalle, girls avoiding her and boys assuming she was easy.

One weekend, just before starting high school, Sally and her one friend scraped together enough money from their summer jobs as waitresses to escape to the beach for the weekend. That weekend, Sally met a boy, a good looking boy who didn’t know her story and seemed to like her. They danced, talked, went to church together on Sunday, walked the boardwalk all afternoon. He had a nice car and offered her a ride home. It was dark, almost midnight, by the time they hit the highway towards home.

Blinded by the lights of an oncoming car, the boy couldn’t avoid a collision, and Sally was killed.

There’s more to this book than Sally’s story – which I have abbreviated here. Weinman did extensive research, unveiling the story of Sally’s mother, the secrets that she kept from Sally about her real father and their past; about Frank’s past; about the Camden detective who refused to give up searching for Sally.

And, interspersed with Sally’s story is Nabokov’s. His time in Russia. His butterfly-collecting cross-country trips with his wife. His health woes. His obsession with true crime.

And the theme that wove through his longest piece of writing, of men who like to have sex with little girls.

Although he insisted that he had never read Sally’s story, and there is no concrete proof that he did, the author finds circumstantial evidence in the end of his writer’s block just after Sally’s story was revealed, in remarks he made to biographers and editors, in the two notecards where he jotted down ideas that mention crimes of a similar nature, one of which mentions Sally’s name.

And it leaves me to wonder: why was it so important to Nabokov that Lolita is not based on Sally’s story?

Because that would make it too real?

It couldn’t be because of the controversy, the risk of finding a publisher, since Nabokov already had trouble finding a publisher. It wasn’t until the 6th anniversary of Sally’s death that Lolita was finally published in America.

But somehow, admitting it was grounded in a true story, that couldn’t be admitted. Perhaps that would make the book a little too real – instead of being a man’s daring fantasy, that would turn it into a crime against a child, and perhaps that would hurt book sales.

The author does a great job weaving these stories together. Each narrative forms a tale unto itself, compelling to read. Sometimes when books interlace stories, it’s jarring but here they build on each other, propelling you to keep reading.

If you enjoy reading true crime – or are curious about the story that Nabokov’s most popular novel is based on – this is a book you’ll enjoy.

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1. Ruth, the author says, is a troubling character on her own, moving from man to man, and not believing her own children when they accused some of these men for abusing them. One of the children tells the author that Frank LaSalle also abused her, in the short time the family had lived near him. Ruth is perhaps the most interesting person in this whole book. ↩︎
2. Although there was one friend at school that Sally confided in, not that she had been kidnapped but that she and her “father” engaged in intercourse. The “friend” told her that was a sin and she should stop. Right. ↩︎