LATER IN THE YEAR, Véra wrote in her diary about a strange evening that foreshadowed all the ways in which Lolita would be viewed as grim comedy instead of the moral indictment she’d hoped for. On November 26, 1958, Vladimir and Véra Nabokov went out to dinner at Cafe Chambord on Third Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street. The other dinner guests included Walter Minton and his wife, Polly, as well as Victor Schaller, Putnam’s head of finance, and his wife. The mood should have been celebratory in light of Lolita’s increasing success. It was not, as Véra later wrote in great detail, because the Mintons were unduly preoccupied with a Time magazine article published the previous week.
The article, unbylined but written by staff writer and future Los Angeles Times gossip columnist Joyce Haber, was ostensibly about the public reception of Lolita. Haber opened with an account of Nabokov at a Putnam-sponsored reception for the novel, where he, according to Haber, “faced a formidable force of 1,000 literature-loving women.” After quickly dispensing with the positive and negative critical reception for Lolita, Haber let loose on Rosemary Ridgewell, the showgirl-turned-literary-scout, with carefully calibrated bile.
Haber described Ridgewell as “a superannuated (27) nymphet… a tall (5 ft. 8 in.) slithery-blithery onetime Latin Quarter showgirl who wears a gold swizzle stick around her neck and a bubbly smile on her face. Well may she bubble.” Ridgewell merited Haber’s attention for tipping off Minton to Lolita’s existence after reading excerpts in the Anchor Review. But the cause of Haber’s ire was that she and Ridgewell were Walter Minton’s mistresses at the same time. No wonder she felt compelled to douse her rival in the prose equivalent of hydrochloric acid.
Véra Nabokov would learn some of these details at the Cafe Chambord dinner, where she sat next to Walter Minton’s wife, Polly. The younger woman—”a pretty girl, rather unhappy”—immediately began to unburden herself to Véra, whom she’d never met. The “frightened, bewildered” Polly looked upon Lolita as a source of pain and problems in her marriage to Walter. Where once the couple was happy, Polly confided, since the novel’s arrival in their lives her husband “began to see a lot of people and get mixed up.”
Polly let slip to Véra that she first learned of her husband’s involvement with Ridgewell through the “horrid” Time article. Véra was, apparently, unnerved by Polly’s confession, but had the wherewithal to observe in her diary: “Poor Polly, small-town little girl, craving for so many pounds of ‘culture’ gift-boxed and tied with a nice pink bow!” Véra did not know Rosemary, but based on what Polly told her and the Time article, she judged her as “a pretty awful, vulgar but flashy young female.”
Odd as this encounter was for Véra, the evening devolved further. After Victor Schaller and his wife bid the Nabokovs and the Mintons adieu, Dmitri turned up, driving his 1957 MG sports car. Polly, enthralled, requested a ride, and Dmitri obliged. Vladimir and Véra took a cab to their hotel, accompanied by Minton, who proceeded—within earshot of the driver, and perhaps unprompted—to admit his affairs with both Ridgewell and Haber.
“Between his two little harlots,” Véra wrote, “M[inton] ruined his family life.” Minton swore both affairs were over, that he had “made it up to Polly,” and presented Rosemary “in a very unsavory light, a little courtesan, almost a ‘call girl,’ trying to collect as much money as she could from Walter and spouting nonsense about Lolita.”
When the trio arrived at the hotel, Polly and Dmitri were still MIA. The Nabokovs and Minton “waited and waited,” Véra recording this phrase and then crossing it out. When the duo finally appeared in the hotel lobby, Dmitri informed his parents “with a sly smile” that he and Polly had driven to his apartment, because she had wished to see it. The next day, Véra wrote, “Minton told V., ‘I hear Dmitri gave Polly a good time last night.’” Véra did not know what to make of Minton’s comment. “I wonder if this sort of thing is normal or typical of today’s America? A bad novel by some O’Hara or Cozens [sic] suddenly come to life.”
The dark comedy of the evening did indeed resemble a John O’Hara story or James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed, which had been a bestseller the year before. What Véra Nabokov witnessed, and grew so disturbed by that she was compelled to write about it in her diary, seemed like a harbinger of all the ways in which American culture would corrupt Lolita and misunderstand Nabokov’s meaning. If those closest to the Nabokovs were behaving strangely, who else might this novel have the power to corrupt?
LOLITA WAS A PROPER HIT. The more the novel sold, the more people ventured an opinion, whether they had read it or not. Comedians turned Lolita into late-night fodder (Groucho Marx: “I’ll put off reading Lolita for six more years until she turns eighteen”; Milton Berle: “First of all, let me congratulate Lolita now. She is thirteen”), another signal of Lolita reaching a level of success far beyond literary spheres.
Nabokov enjoyed the attention. He gave interviews to journalists and appeared on talk shows on both sides of the Atlantic. A cartoon featuring Lolita in the July 1959 issue of Playboy amused him enough that he mentioned it to his American publisher, and Véra noted in her diary how she and Vladimir delighted in the jokes broadcast on television.
Lolita’s appeal extended to fashion magazines and film, with dissonant, even bizarre results. These depictions were largely knowing, winking parodies, playing up the overt sexuality of certain blond bombshell personas in the guise of younger girls. The most blatant reference to Nabokov’s creation, equal parts amusing and disturbing, appeared in the film Let’s Make Love, which features Marilyn Monroe singing a version of Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” after announcing: “My name… is Lolita. And I’m… not supposed to… play… with boys!”
Another bizarre stunt affected the Nabokovs more personally. Their son, Dmitri, had moved to Milan to pursue an opera-singing career. But it was getting access to his famous father that left Dmitri open to strange requests. A local magazine covinced him to judge a contest where the winner would pose as Lolita for a fashion shoot to be held at his own apartment. Dmitri, reflecting on his youthful stupidity, recalled that the “decidedly post-pubescent aspiring nymphets, some with provincial mothers in tow,” had invaded his apartment for two solid days.
Newspaper coverage of the contest reached Dmitri’s father, who was upset enough to send a telegram to his son asking for the contest to be stopped. “The publicity is in very bad taste,” Nabokov wrote Dmitri on October 7, 1960. “It can only harm you in the eyes of those who take music seriously. It has already harmed me: because of it I cannot come to Italy since the reporters would immediately pounce on me there.” Nabokov was especially disappointed in Dmitri for letting “this unhealthy ruckus” overshadow his own career. Dmitri learned his lesson. From that point on, he would defend Lolita’s honor rather than corrupt it. But the contest mess was further proof of the ways in which perceptions of Lolita moved from tragedy to carnival.
BY THIS POINT Nabokov had completed a screenplay draft of Lolita for Stanley Kubrick. Nabokov had initially turned it down—“by nature I am no dramatist, I am not even a hack scenarist”—but while on an extended European vacation at the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960, he relented. On January 28, temporarily ensconced in Menton, France, Nabokov wrote his friend Morris Bishop that he changed his mind about adapting Lolita because “a pleasing and elegant solution of the problems involved suddenly dawned on me in the gardens of Taormina.”