SUE LYON, LOLITA, NABOKOV

Sue Lyon (above) was aged 14 when she played the part of Lolita in Vladimir Nabokov's story of a middle-aged man sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old.

Film director Stanley Kubrick chose Sue Lyon for his 1962 film, Lolita.

"It was the start of a descent into depression, drugs and a string of failed marriages, including one to a convicted murderer."

Cursed by Lolita

Unlike 12-year-old Lolita in the book, 14-year-old Sue Lyon was not flat-chested.



Sue Lyon was the youngest of five children born in Iowa.

Her father died when she a baby.

Her mother worked in a hospital.

Aged 11, Sue Lyons became a child model, and got small parts in TV.

In 1962, aged 14, she starred in Lolita.

In 1963, Sue Lyon began filming The Night Of The Iguana, in Mexico.

She played a seductive teenager involved with a defrocked priest played by Richard Burton.

In Mexico, Sue Lyon was accompanied by her boyfriend, Hampton Fancher, a former flamenco dancer and street thief.

When she was 16, Sue started to suffer from bouts of severe depression, which led to drug abuse.

Lyon turned 17, and married Fancher, who was 25 and had a six-year-old son.


Fancher and Lyon.

'It was totally wrong,' Fancher says.

'I was an angry young **** and chose her because of a fantasy.'

The marriage ended in a divorce court 14 months later.

Sue Lyonlost her brother, James Michael Lyon, 20, who was found dead in a car during a trip to Mexico.

In 1965 Sue Lyon and her mother were badly injured in a car crash.


Sue Lyon and Roland Harrison.

In 1971, Sue Lyon married Roland Harrison, a black photographer and football coach who had five children from a previous marriage.

Sue and Roland moved to Spain.

Sue was three months pregnant with their daughter, Nona, when they split in 1972.



In 1973, working as a voluntary social worker, Sue Lyon got to know a convicted murderer and robber named Gary 'Cotton' Adamson.

In 1974, Lyon married Adamson, who was serving a 40-year sentence at the Colorado State Penitentiary.

Lyon soon divorced him.

Lyon was diagnosed as a manic depressive and prescribed lithium.

Nona Harrison.

Sue Lyon's relationship with her daughter Nona went down hill.

As a child, said Nona had to care for her mother, who was bedridden for months.

When Nona was aged 13, Lyon threw Nona out of the family home.



In 1983, Lyon married Edward Weathers and the marriage lasted one year.

Lyon then married Richard Rudman, a radio engineer.

Nabokov, Lolita and Pale Fire

Nabokov wrote Lolita.

What do we know about the real Nabokov?

...

1. Vladimir Nabokov found boys interesting, and there are gay characters in almost all of his 17 novels.

Vladimir came from a ‘liberal’ family which contained a number of ‘gay’ characters.

When Vladimir occasionally used ‘homophobic slurs’ this did not neccessarily mean that he was not fond of young males.

With Nabokov things are not always what they seem.

...

2. Some quotes from Nabokov’s novel ‘Pale Fire’:

"When he was a dark strong lad of thirteen ... he had several dear playmates but none could compete with Oleg, Duke of Rahl. In those days growing boys of high-born families wore on festive occasions ... sleeveless jerseys, white anklesocks with black buckle shoes, and very tight, very short shorts called hotinguens ...

"Both lads were handsome, long-legged specimens of Varangian boyhood... Oleg ... stripped and shiny in the mist of the bath house, his bold virilia...

"Oleg’s last visit, when for the first time the two boys had been allowed to share the same bed, and the tingle of their misbehavior...

"A secret passage... his soft blond locks ...his golden brows ... the downy warmth of that crimson ear ... dark passageways ... stealthy intrusion ... blind pokings ... penetrations ...dusky odor ...

"Oleg walked in front : his shapely buttocks encased in tight indigo cotton moved alertly, and his own erect radiance, rather than his flambeau, seemed to illume with leaps of light the low ceiling and crowding walls. Behind him the young Prince’s electric torch played on the ground and gave a coating of flower to the back of Oleg’s bare thighs... smooth entrance ...

"You’re all chalky behind," said the young Prince ... Both were in a manly state and moaning like doves...

"He inhaled the hair oil of the pretty page who had bent to brush a rose petal off the footstool...

"The King waded into the damp ...its odor, its lacy resilience, and the mixture of soft growth and steep ground...a bare kneed mountain lad like a tawny angel...

"The boy-handsome tousle-haired girlfriend...

"Some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys...

"He saw nineteen-year-old Disa ..She had come in male dress, as a Tirolese boy...

"Gordon ... A slender but strong-looking lad of fourteen or fifteen dyed a nectarine hue by the sun. He had nothing on save a leopard-spotted loincloth... The graceful boy wreathed about the loins with ivy...

"The boy wiped his wet hands on his black bathing trunks... The boy striking his flanks clothed in white tennis shorts... The young woodwose had closed his eyes and was stretched out supine on the pool’s marble margin; his Tarzan brief had ben cast aside on the turf..."

3. In the 1950s Nabokov wrote Lolita. For six months it was the number one bestseller in America.

Nabokov liked girls, so long as they looked like boys. Lolita was the girl with the ‘puerile hips’, the girl wearing ‘shorts’.

4. A quote from Timon of Athens:

The moon's an arrant thief

And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.

5. With Nabokov things are not always what they seem.

In Pale Fire, the commentator appears to be Charles Kinbote. But, Nabokov reveals in his diary that the commentator is Prof. Vseslav Botkin, a Russian and an academic. Nabokov was Russian and an academic.

According to Nabokov, in Pale Fire :

"reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye."

Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel, Pale Fire, is about things not being as simple as they first appear.

Pale Fire, Kinbote, Zembla, Charles II, and Gradus, may be the elaborate creation of the Russian academic.

Are any of us what we appear to be?

...

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