9: The Four Lolitas

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Trigger warning. This podcast involves discussions of child sexual abuse
and pedophilia. Listener discretion is advised. A couple of years ago,
something interesting happened on January. The Women's March happened, And
we could talk about the surrounding flaws of the Women's
March all day, but it happened, and in the Women's

(00:23):
March was huge. The reason that was was because the
Me Too movement was firing on all cylinders. The beginning
must argue with an investigation published in October detailing the
extensive sexual misconduct and many times rape, committed by Hollywood
mogul Harvey Weinstein. The story made a huge impact both

(00:44):
in Weinstein's life he's in prison now, as well as
in our culture. Women were encouraged to share their experiences
of abuse objectification, and there was an outpouring of traumatic stories,
some of which resulted in consequences for the perpetrators and
others that did not. Most of the cases you probably
remembered from around this time concerned the wealthy and powerful,

(01:05):
but there were also countless examples of women talking about
harassment or abuse they had been subjected to in their
everyday lives. No matter how you feel about the movement.
There's no denying it was huge, and the Women's March
in January reflected that. Natalie Portman, who we discussed in
our last episode, spoke at this march, getting specific about

(01:25):
how she had not just been sexually harassed while working
in Hollywood, but harassed beginning when she was a child.
She says this, I turned twelve on the set of
my first film, The Professional. I was so excited at
thirteen when the film was released in my work and
my art would have a human response. I excitedly opened
my first fan mail to read a rape fantasy that

(01:47):
a man had written me. A countdown was started on
my local radio show to my eighteenth birthday, euphemistically the
date that I would be legal to sleep with. Movie
reviewers talked about my budding breasts and reviews. I understood
very quickly, even as a thirteen year old, that if
I were to express myself sexually, I would feel unsafe

(02:07):
and that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify
my body to my great discomfort. So I quickly adjusted
my behavior. I rejected any role that even had a
kissing scene, and talked about that choice deliberately, and interviews
I emphasized how bookish I was and how serious I was,
and I cultivated an elegant way of dressing. I built

(02:28):
a reputation for basically being prudish, conservative, nerdy, serious in
an attempt to feel that my body was safe and
that my voice would be listened to. At thirteen years old,
the message from our culture was clear to me. I
felt the need to cover my body and to inhibit
my expression and my work in order to send my

(02:49):
own message to the world that I'm someone worthy of
safety and respect. And at the time the speech was given,
it was received extremely well. Websites like Refining nine declared
the Women's March wants to change the world. Will we
let it? BuzzFeed announced thousands took to the streets for
massive women's marches around the world. Teen Vogue shouted from

(03:13):
the rooftops. Women's March protesters took to the streets for
many different reasons. So we did it, Feminism win. Someone
tried to make me wear one of those ugly as
hats right well. The next day, January one, all of
those websites I just cited posted these headlines are Millie,

(03:35):
Bobby Brown, and Jacob Sartorius. Dating or just trolling us
fans think Millie Bobby Brown and Jacob Sartorius are dating.
Millie Bobby Brown just insta confirmed her relationship with Jacob
Sartorius and I have butterflies. You have butterflies? Okay, boomers.
Millie Bobby Brown is the star of Netflix's Stranger Things

(03:56):
and was only thirteen years old at the time. These
stories are rich, and they're speculating that she was dating
fifteen year old TikTok star Jacob Sartorius the day after
Natalie Portman made that speech. I understood very quickly, even
as a thirteen year old, that if I were to
express myself sexually, I would feel unsafe, and that men

(04:18):
would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to
my great discomfort. Millie Bobby Brown just insta confirmed her
relationship with Jacob Sartorius and I have butterflies, you guys.
And this wasn't even the first time that this had
happened to Milly Bobby Brown. When season two of Stranger
Things came out on Netflix, in the Internet was flooded

(04:41):
by grown as people commenting on how much older she looked,
how she's grown up. Before Our Eyes movie reviewers talked
about my budding breasts interviews. This same thing happens to
nearly any child, but growing up in the spotlight. Now.
I'm not claiming here that Hollywood driven feminism is the
most important thing in the world. In fact, I find

(05:02):
it to be pretty frustrated and over commercialized and lacking
all intersectionality more often than not. But it's on this issue,
the treatment of underage performers in particular, that I feel
like it's been pretty undercovered in the media, probably because
the media was one of the primary forces perpetuating it.
And the dissonance of that is demonstrated through this story

(05:23):
from just three years ago, a story that was published
the day after what was supposed to have been the
largest feminist reckoning of our lifetimes. The day after, Here's
what my friend and yours, Marrow Wilson, who played Matilda
and was in Mrs. Doubtfire, had to say about Millie
Bobby Brown's exploitation back in. Commenting on a child's body,

(05:46):
whether in a positive or negative way, in a sexualizing
or pitying way, is still commenting on a child's body. Yeah,
and that's coming from someone who has lived it. How
many grown actors who endured this level of bodily and
personal scrutiny need to bring this up without media forgetting
the lesson literally overnight. It's pretty common knowledge what an

(06:10):
exceptionally difficult task it's been to get a productive conversation
about how we treat children in the media, whether we're
talking about stranger danger or with working child stars. As always,
the type of child focused on betrays those American prejudices.
The focus on able bodied, upper class white children are
still the stories and stars that received the most focus.
And on top of that, in Hollywood, it's been historically

(06:33):
nearly impossible to report on child exploitation, in spite of
constant whispers that it takes place at an alarming rate.
One of the only documentaries on this subject, Amy Berg's
documentary An Open Secret, gained millions of views when it
was released for free online since it had never ever
found a formal distributor. Studios with money do not find

(06:55):
making these experiences available to a wide audience to be profitable.
The ability to address the issue meaningfully is further complicated
by the Q and On Death cult making escalated claims
that literally every powerful person in the world, they do
not like is a child sex abuser, making it even
more difficult to get these stories told responsibly. Make no

(07:16):
mistake Q and on logic as it pertains to this
issue especially, only makes it more difficult for actual child
sex abusers to be reported on and punished. So, yes,
there is a ton of responsibility on the capitalistic structures
that exploit child performers and refuse to take a look
in the mirror in order to protect those performers. But

(07:36):
there's also a great deal of complicity in us, the
consuming public. Because yes, it is wrong of media outlets
like Refinery twenty nine teen, Vogue, and BuzzFeed to publish
these stories, but a major contributing factor to why they
publish these stories is because people click on them. Now,
I'm not putting teenagers on blast who want to know
more about start of their age. I'm talking about weird

(07:58):
adults who see the phrase thirteen year old having a
boyfriend gives me butterflies and being like, damn, got to
know more about that. And I'll be honest, I've probably
been this person at some point. Maybe you have to.
It's so normalized in pop culture to over expose public figures,
and I funk with celebrity, gossip and culture. It's fun
as hell, but speculating on the love life of a

(08:20):
middle schooler is ghoulish and his natal amportment articulated very clearly.
This absolutely affects how that meddle schooler grows up and
perceives themselves in the world. Some of these sites end
up realizing the cognitive dissonance of the stories they've published,
particularly Refinery twenty nine, and that site vowed to not
comment on the bodies or romantic lives of adolescents anymore. Meanwhile,

(08:43):
other media outlets criticized the stories having been written in
the first place, and guess what phrase they borrow to
describe how Millie Bobby Brown was treated. Hollywood's Lowlita complex
still a problematic issue for young female stars. Times finally
up for Hollywood's Lolita complex. The phrase lolita complex has

(09:04):
been used at length over the years, and has meant
slightly different things depending on the year the term is
coming up. Here, it's being used as the culture's tendency
to over sexualized teenagers, but in earlier decades the term
was more often applied to a sign blame to the teenager,
making the Lolita complex something the teenager has not us.

(09:25):
Why is she acting so sexy? We see a lot
of elements of this in the nineteen nineties. You might
remember that Rolling Stone magazine cover we talked about in
episode six where Britney Spears is posed in a bra
and tiny shorts, holding a teletubby and talking on the phone.
In media of this time, no one asked Rolling Stone
or the photographer why Brittany had been marketed that way. No,

(09:47):
they asked a teenage Brittany, why was she posing like that?
And what about the women who played the part that
the Lolita complex borrows its name from. Are these women,
who are largely underage performers at the time respond pountable
for how the media frames and exploits them In no,
of course not, who in the right fucking mind would

(10:07):
do that. But with the four low leaders we'll be
talking about today, they did. Filmmakers, directors and large systems
of power presented these low leaders to us. But they
wouldn't have done it if we, the general public, weren't
going to pay for it. So today we are talking
about and in conversation with four women who played Lolita.
This is Lolita Podcast. Welcome to the penultimate episode of

(11:03):
Lolita podcast, I'm your host Jamie loftus Today, a long
foreshadowed episode, a close look at the life and careers
of the women who have played Lolita on screen and
on stage over the years, and how playing the part
affected their life, both behind the scenes and through their
treatment in the media. We're gonna focus on four performers today,

(11:24):
the Lolita's of the stage and screen, ranging from nineteen
sixty two to nine seven. These women are Sue Lyon,
Chris Gilmore, Blanche Baker, and Dominique Swain. So let's start
around nineteen fifty nine, talking about one of the adult
stars who shaped the original sixties look of Stanley Kubrick's Lolita.
There is one thing I want to mention before Sue

(11:45):
Lyons casting in nineteen sixty and it's a piece that
appeared in Esquire magazine in nineteen fifty nine by one
of the most famous feminist writers of the twentieth century,
Simone de Boivar. My mouth can't make French. The piece
is called Brigitte Bardo and the Lolita Syndrome. And okay,
it's not Lolita complex, but in de Boivar's definition, it

(12:07):
demonstrates pretty clearly what Lolita syndrome meant around the time
of the book's publication. She says this of Brigitte Bardo,
the bleached blonde French sex icon of the nineteen fifties
and sixties. Her clothes are not fetishes, and when she strips,
she is not unveiling a mystery. She is showing her body,
neither more nor less, and that body rarely settles into

(12:29):
a state of immobility. She walks, she dances, she moves about.
Her eroticism is not magical but aggressive. In the game
of love, she is as much a hunter as she
is a prey. The male is an object to her,
just as she is to him. So what's being described
here is very different than the Lolita syndrome that is
applied to Milly Bobby Brown in the two thousand tenths.

(12:51):
In the fifties and sixties, invoking Lolita's name indicated the
cultural image were well associated with by this point in
the show, that being a sexually appealing, girlish presenting person
who is sexually devious and alluring. It's only in the
last few years that the Lolita complex has been used
to describe the habits of the media and the public

(13:12):
applying these stereotypes. And it's with this energy that we
take it into the nineteen sixties to talk about our
first Lolita, the original Lolita. Sue Lion, the star of
Stanley Kuber's nineteen sixty two adaptation. Later in her life,
when the Adrian Line adaptation of Lolita was announced in
the nineties, Lion said, this my destruction as a person

(13:34):
dates from that movie. Lolita exposed me to temptations no
girl of that age should undergo. I defy any pretty
girl who is rocketed to stardom at fourteen in a
sex nymphed role to stay on a level path thereafter.
Lion passed in two thousand nineteen after her health had
been declining for some time, but there is much to
discuss about her life. Sue Lyon was born in nineteen

(13:59):
forty six in Iowa as the youngest of five, and
her father died before her first birthday. She moved around
a little with her siblings and now single mother, who
worked at a hospital to support the family, and they
eventually landed in l A As a child, Sue modeled
for J. C. Penny and auditioned her parts to help
out her family. Her childhood best friend was Michelle Gilliam

(14:20):
later Michelle Phillips from the legendary nineteen sixties group The
Mamas and the Papas. Lyon had one TV appearance in
nineteen fifty nine and went on a number of auditions
before landing in a room with Stanley Kubrick in nineteen
sixty auditioning for Lolita. Here's how she described that experience
during an interview from the nineteen eighties. I went on

(14:41):
an interview to Stanley Kubrick and Jimmy Harris. And usually
in Hollywood, when you go on interviews, uh, they say hello,
what's your name? Thank you very much? For by these
two said things like, um, where do you date, where

(15:02):
do you go, what do you do? What time do
you come home? What did your mother think of that? Uh?
Where did you buy that dress? They asked me questions
that you know I would have to answer that I
did answer and so when I went, but I they
kept me in there for a whole hour. I was fourteen.

(15:24):
Lion Is said to beat out eight hundred other girls
for the role. She'd heard a little bit of the
book at Michelle's house when she was thirteen, and the
girls thought it was very scandalous. Lion only learned what
the full story was about from her mother, who described
it like this. Before I did the screen test, my mother,
uh told me the full story and made it very

(15:45):
clear so that I would know what was going on,
and uh she wanted to make sure I didn't have
any problems fits at. Mother was very protective of my feelings.
Lion's mother asked their pastor if Sue should take the part,
and the pastor said yes. And it's at this point
that Sue became the primary breadwinner of the family at

(16:07):
only fourteen. Many forget that Sue Lyon won a Golden
Globe for playing Lolita for Most Promising Newcomer, and that
she was supposed to have been poised to become an
enormous star, as we discussed in our episode on Stanley
Kubrick's Lolita, Lyon's history during the production and press tour
of this movie, and furthermore, her contract with Stanley Kubrick

(16:27):
and James Harris, the movie's director and producer, respectively, was
not quite this simple, as writer Sarah Wineman confirmed in
reporting for air Mail in the Fall of James Harris
had taken Sue Lion's virginity sometime during the production or
press tour of the movie. According to Michelle Phillips, Lion
was fourteen and Harris thirty two at the time it happened,

(16:48):
and Lyon was exclusively contracted to Kubrick and Harris for
the next six years of her career in the style
of old school Hollywood. Other sources of Wineman's described Lion
as closer to six teen when this occurred, but no
matter whose word you're taking, she was not the legal
age of consent and James Harris was her employer. While
this was not a big news story at the time,

(17:10):
Harris's pursuit of his underage star opened her not him,
up to criticism in the gossip media. Here's a column
from Dorothy Kilgallan in ninety two that you might remember
from a past episode Lolita Virus catching for Sue Lyon.
Sue Lyon, the Pretty Star of Lolita, has bowled over
her producer, James B. Harris. Her age is sixteen according

(17:31):
to her studio, and he's an old man of thirty three.
She prefers the company of mature men and James maybe
her cup of tea when she's a little older and
decide this proper to court her. Who is that story
putting the blame on? And this piece was published just
two weeks after Lyon turned sixteen. It's around this age
where Sue Lyon begins to suffer from depression, which led

(17:52):
to abusing drugs. Lyon struggled with both mental illness and
a lack of an adequate support structure for much of
her life, and this, compounded with the Hollywood luxury she
had been inducted into, made it difficult for her to
capitalize on what was undoubtedly a huge talent. It's also
important to note how Sue Lion's body was promoted and

(18:13):
framed by the press in the fallout of the release
of Lolita. We talked about the cinematography of the movie before,
but as we know, the marketing images for this movie
were infinitely more important in terms of the legacy it left.
It's these photos taken by photographer Bert Stern that live
on and framed Sue Lion for the public. Here are

(18:35):
some photos from this shoot. Sue in the front seat
of a car in hard shaped glasses, lips powdered, head
tilted back, Sue in the front seat, in the glasses
and a denim bikini, holding an American flag close to
her face. Sue in a denim shirt and sun hat,
sweeping in a field of dandelions, in bed, half naked

(18:55):
but the lollipop, in a comic book, in a lawn
chair with a lollipop and a much book. A photo
taken from the inside of a hotel room. Sue is
in the bikini at the window, bearing the heart shaped
glasses and looking right at the photographer. Pamphless in a
phone booth, applying whip class and talking on the phone.
And the photo you know already Sue in the heart

(19:17):
shaped classes, sucking on a lollipop, looking right at you.
And here's a sampling of how she was discussed on
magazine covers at age fifteen. Lolita in the Flesh, I
taught my child to act Lolita, Sue Lyon's mother talks,
I'm not Lolita actress. Sue Lyon hopes people know she
doesn't live her part. Sue Lion, so I'm young? Is

(19:39):
that a crime? And egregiously on the cover of Cosmopolitan, Lolita,
Sue Lion portrays the most controversial girl ever to hit
the screen. Right next to the headline fasting easier than dieting. Ye.

(20:04):
The story of Sue Lyon is a complicated one, but
this is indisputable. She was presented while a minor as
a sex object for the taking. In nineteen sixty three,
Sue Lyon got married for the first time at age seventeen,
to Hampton Fancher, a writer eight years her senior, who
was a well known man about town at the time,
dating starlets like Barbara Hershey before marrying Sue. He was

(20:27):
working as an actor at the time of the marriage,
but he's best known now as the co writer of
Blade Runner and Blade Runner. When asked by The New
Yorker about the marriage in Pantra had this to say,
there's a lot of bad press. They accused me of
being a pompous, horned dog guy interested in only in
the world of yachts and private jets, which I thought
was totally unfair, but they were mostly right. There were

(20:48):
bets in Vegas about how long the marriage would last,
around nine months, as Pantra tells it, which overlaps with
Lyon's second film, John Houston's The Night of the Iguana.
It's one of lyons more famous roles and intersecting with
later Lolita history. The Night of the Iguana is a
Tennessee Williams movie adaptation where Sue Lyon plays a bleach blonde,

(21:09):
sexy teen who attempts to seduce an actor over twenty
years her senior, in this case Richard Burton. I can
talk to you like I'd never dream of going swimming
with Reverend Hodge gets back home. He's all. Lyon had
a difficult time with the press in what seemed like
never ending press tours from movies like Lolita and Knight

(21:32):
of the Iguana. As far as Lolita goes, she was
still promoting the movie two years after it was released,
not to mention that, following her divorce from Fancher, Lyon
was briefly linked again to James Harris, who casually said
this to a reporter in late nineteen Oh, we're not
getting married, if that's what you mean. But we were
very good friends, okay. And it's around this time that

(21:55):
Lion loses her older brother to a drug overdose and
reaches a breaking point in terms of how she was
treated both in the press and within her Hollywood contract.
She says this, in the eighties, I think Initially, before
they knew me, they felt that they were going to
build a star, and in the fashion of the old studios,

(22:17):
UH create an image and it would go on for there.
And but after they realized that and understood my motivation
for doing the film, and also I pointed out to them,
I said, you know, you've made a tremendous amount of
money off of me, and I think you owe me
the respect to be who I am. And now I

(22:40):
need to get on with the rest of my life.
I'll be happy to work again, but not every second.
I don't like people strangers asking me questions. I like
to be left alone. Really. I was once on a
television show, a talk show. My brother had just died
two days before that. The inner viewer opens his show

(23:01):
by saying, and now I was sixteen years old. He said,
did your brother kill himself? Because you played? I didn't
say a thing. I gotta had I walk up. I didn't.
I mean I had there was. I couldn't even dignify
that with with you know, don't you have good sense, sir?

(23:24):
I didn't. I had no words. I left that in
an ats typical of the reason that I can't be
a movie star. I never could. Lyon continued in movies
throughout the nineteen sixties, appearing alongside many big stars of
the time. She was in a John Ford movie, and
she was in a Frank Sinatra noir film in which
Lyon appears unconscious and a bra and panties on the poster. Also,

(23:48):
her face is barely visible, She's not even facing the camera,
also Funck Frank Sinatra. In the late eighties, Lion begins
to work in TV and TV movies. She spent some
time campaigning for Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy during his bid
for the presidency in nineteen sixty eight, and she gives
away her New York penthouse to people in need. In
nineteen seventy one, she married photographer and former NFL player

(24:11):
Roland Harrison. Their interracial marriage sparked outrage in the US,
and they moved to Spain as expatriots to live comfortably.
This marriage ended by nineteen seventy two, and it gives
Sue Lyon her only child, Nona Harrison. Roland Harrison wasn't
in the picture when Nona was a child, and so
Sue Lyon raises Nona on her own. While struggling with

(24:31):
mental illness. They go back to the US, where Sue
infamously married Cotton Adamson, who was incarcerated in a Colorado
state prison for robbery and second degree murder when they
married in nineteen seventy three. They met when Sue was
working as a volunteer in the Public Defender's office. Not
only did this marriage negatively impact Lyon's career and bring
on a wave of unwelcome press attention, but Adamson then

(24:55):
escaped prison, committed another robbery, and got arrested again before
she divorced him in nineteen seventy five. Lyon considered this
the death knell of her acting career, and after a
few more TV roles and small films, she completely retired
from Hollywood by night. It's said that her mental health
continued to worsen, and she had a failed fourth marriage

(25:15):
before marrying Richard Rudman, a radio engineer, in ninety five
who would later say he'd been something of an enabler
in Sue's life, and from here I'd like to let
Sue's daughter, Nona take over. Nona Harrison Gomez still lives
in the l A area and run the company with
her husband, Painting murals, and she's written extensively in blog
posts over the years about her very complicated relationship with

(25:39):
her mother up until and after Sue Lyon's death in
two thousand nineteen. It's through known as writings that Sue
Lyon's extensive struggles with mental illness come into sharp focus.
Here is how Nona describes the overview of her early
life on her website. Born and raised in Los Angeles,
Nonah's life began as a fairy to She was the

(26:01):
daughter of a famous actress, Sue Lyon known for Lolita,
an NFL player Roland Harris. Her father was absent for
most of her childhood, and being a biracial child, she
had questions at a very early age about why she
looked so different. By age twelve, Sue remarried and her
relationship with her mother was never the same. Nonah was

(26:22):
kicked out of her house and by the age of thirteen,
she was taken to a halfway house. That same year,
her mother placed her in an insane asylum, where she
stayed for almost three months. That kind of betrayaled by
her mother, a woman she once idolized, broke known as
spirit in a way which would take years to recover from.
Nona has written about her struggles with her mother over

(26:43):
the years and the ebb and flow of her mother
coming into and out of her life while battling a
lifelong struggle with mental illness all the way up until
her death. Here's a passage known a road in March
for never leaving l A. She's been able to hide
away from the Hollywood monsters, and I wouldn't want it
any other way. It is the biggest reason it's taken

(27:03):
me this long to finish. Protecting her is in my
d NA, no matter how much she might have hurt
me in the past, and this passage from July. We
are better strangers than we are family, and that's okay.
Every once in a while on my blog posts, I
will have someone comment about how they wish my mother
and I would be together again, and I thank them

(27:25):
for the love they have in their hearts to think
if she sees me, she would somehow be different. Yeah.
Unhealthy people do not get better, not without a lot
of work that they must choose to do. If they
stay unhealthy and become older, all they do is become
worse and more damaging. Nonah writes about how being separate
from her mother was the only way it could be,

(27:46):
but still remember sue Lyon with a great deal of empathy,
acknowledging what a large role of her mother's mental illness
had in keeping them separate. She still writes about her
mother on sue Lyon's birthday and on the anniversary of
her death, expressing a wish that her mom is in peace.
I think the way that Nona has kept this legacy
is really beautiful, and I'll link to her work in

(28:08):
the description. She's doing really great work around social justice
as well that I'm excited to share. I'll add here
for clarity that after the abuse that she was subjected
to as a child, non is certainly not under any
obligation to make amends or forgive the behavior of an
abuse of parent, and her blog details her lifetime of
navigating that trauma, and as she healed and moved forward

(28:31):
with her life as an adult and an independent person,
decided on what her boundaries would be. I don't have
to tell you that this is a very individual kind
of journey. There is no right or wrong way to
navigate trauma, particularly childhood trauma, and it's a journey that
Nona has chronicled very honestly. She also did this really

(28:52):
cool transformative social media campaign in nineteen where people would
submit pictures of themselves wearing those trade had marked Sue
Lion heart shaped sunglasses while doing something that made them
feel like their most authentic self. So a campaign basically
to honor her mom's most iconic role. It's one of
the coolest transformative uses of the heart shaped glasses I've

(29:14):
ever seen. It was really cool. Sue Lyon passed away
in a North Hollywood assisted living facility the day after
Christmas in two thousand nineteen. She survived by friends and
her daughter Nona. She was not remembered in the in
memorium reel at the Oscars less than two months after
she died. Some fucking thanks our next. Lolita is a

(29:35):
girl of the nineteen seventies. At the time, she went
by Annette Farah. Now she's known as Chris Gilmore. Gilmore
was chosen out of allegedly thousands of aspiring auditionees to
play the title role in Alan J. Lerner and John
Berry's Broadway Would be Spectacular. Lolita my love in one.

(29:56):
You know, the one that did this? Who is that
Piper exams. I got to speak with Chris in our
episode on stage adaptations of Lolita, But there's a lot
more to her story that I think ties into the
Lolita legacy. These days, Gilmore as a producer of indie films,
most recently a slasher movie called Blood Pageant starring Beverly

(30:17):
Mitchell and Snoop Dogg that comes out this year. She
and her son collaborate often, and when I did the interview,
he went down to their garage to get the original
poster of Lolita My Love that has Chris Gilmore's image
on it to get ready for our talk Who is
really sweet? Now? Records of Gilmore's performance as Lolita in
the show unfortunately don't exist. She was replaced in the

(30:39):
show for reasons we will be recapping here by Denise Nickerson,
who played Violet Beauregard and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate
Factory the same year. But Gilmore's life before Lolita was
just as fascinating traumatizing as her personal experience as learners
Lolita was. At fourteen, she was already no stranger to
the ways that the entered payment industry was willing to

(31:01):
overseexualize someone under age because she was a child of Hollywood,
with a mother who was a dancer and a father
who ran late night clubs with musical acts. Her sister,
Sandy Farah, later famously dated Elvis Presley. Chris's first appearance
on screen was when she was only six years old
on the Alfred Hitgecock Hour. She's probably secret aged or something.
See and she's supposed to steal the plans for Daddy's

(31:25):
Secret Block. Other small rules followed, including an appearance on
The Brady Bunch, but her real passion was music. I'll
let her describe the kind of environment she grew up in.
Oh well, well, I will tell you. I am a
big Allen Jay Learner fan growing up. I was a
poet Laurian in school and I loved writing. You know,

(31:45):
I loved rhyming so so I really loved him and
I was so jazz to work for him. Um, however,
he wrote, I guess I don't know if your listeners
will will know this, but he wrote My Fair Lady,
which you know gave Audrey Hepburn her big break. And um,
I knew my acting and I knew my singing. I

(32:08):
wasn't a very good dancer. My sister was an incredible
d answer, But I I kind of faked it through
because everything in those days still you had to sing
and dad. But um, I was discovered in my dad's
club every Monday night. Everybody was discovered. I mean the
Righteous Brothers got their break. Uh, Sonny and Share got
their after in the day. He had seven clubs, but
the one that was the most famous was called the

(32:30):
Red Velvet. I got. I was offered a record career,
first with Mercury Records back then, and then with four Star,
and then my curb heard me sing and he was
I think he was working on the Osman Brothers. Is
about the time the Osman Brothers and the Jackson Five
were really jammed. By fifteen, Gilmore was in the recording
business with a record contract. This is a great opportunity

(32:52):
to play you a song, she sang as a tween again,
as it is now my personal anthem, You're a dum dumb.
So Gilmore's true ambition lay in music acting. Being a
connected team in the industry was more of a means

(33:13):
to an end for her, and this made the announcement
of auditions for Lolita My Love pretty goddamn exciting. This
was a chance for her to make her Broadway debut
in a leading role in a show by one of
the most famous lyricists of his generation. Remember Learners, the
guy who did Goddamn, My Fair Lady, Gigi Camelot. The
clout was a near certainty. Here's how Gilmore describes the auditions.

(33:37):
You're gonna laugh at this, really laugh at this. But
I turned down any role that I thought was risque, right,
And he says, you have an audition for a show
called Lolita. And I went on seven auditions. And I
don't know how I got into that. I didn't read
the book like you. I didn't know. I just knew,
you know, Alan Jay Lerner yea, and this we're kind

(33:59):
of you know thegue. So I thought, okay. And it's
a comedy, musical comedy. They have been looking on the
East Coast and the West Coast for someone to be Lovelita,
and they picked me and contracted me. But I wasn't
allowed to say anything, and they kept them they kept
the ads out that they were looking because they were
keeping the publicity going. I'll also refer you back to

(34:21):
a Vulture piece from eighteen by Sarah Weinman, who I've
interviewed on the show where she talks about the auditions
for Lolita My Love. Young actresses arrived with their mothers,
usually saying that they quote wouldn't like to be Lolita,
but would like to play the part unquote. You might
remember this description of what an audition for that show

(34:42):
was like, quote, don't wear makeup next time, said one
of the producers to an audition er. I wanted to
look sexy. They replied, you look sexy anyways, he said, unquote.
So yeah, there's a lot of similarities to what we
here described in Sue Lyon's description of Cooper auditions and
I want to be Layer. This audition culture was not
a phenomenon exclusive to the part of Lolita. It was

(35:05):
completely cooked into the auditioning process for girls and women,
both underage and adult, whether we're talking about the casting
of Scarlett O'Hara in the nineteen thirties or casting Aerial
in a Disney Live action reboot in the two thousand
tents in the two thousands, but Chris Gilmore gets the
part and takes a big risk by dropping her record

(35:26):
deal in order to do so, then going to New
York with her sister to begin rehearsals on Lolita My Love.
We discuss a lot of her onset experiences in our
episode of Lolita stage adaptations, but I want to remind
you the reason she is ultimately asked to leave the
production after months of script changes and behind the scenes
mess And keep in mind, up until about a month ago,

(35:48):
the only media narrative available about Gilmore's leaving the production
was that she was not good enough to play the part,
which was definitely not the case. Mr Learners said, you know,
we have to make it more risque, and uh, you know,
because because I well, but I'm jumping ahead though. I go,
what's what's the snaps on the top of my nightgown?

(36:09):
What the heck this? What did they do to it?
And nobody wanted to tell me, And this is a
hell of a way to hit it on an actress,
but you know, um, I went around and then somebody said, well,
Mr Learner will come in, and so he told me, well,
the snaps are in the top because you're gonna drop
your nightgown. You're gonna rip it off and drop it

(36:29):
in that scene. You know, I was singing, but this
is the problem in this world, you know, I was
I trained method Meisner comedy improv I added, all I
I sang, and so I refused, and then I'll never
forget the producer's last words. He said, well, you're too virtuous.

(36:50):
So the choice is given to a fifteen year old
that either she takes her clothes off on a Broadway
stage every night, regardless of how comfortable she feels, or
she doesn't to be on Broadway. They'll find a girl
who will do it, and by all accounts, that's exactly
what happened. This, of course, was devastating to Gilmore. She
had become close with Alan Jay Lerner, was performing well

(37:11):
in rehearsals and rolling with the script changes, and this
was going to be her big break. But once she
wasn't willing to play ball learn her dropped her. Gilmore
describes the fallout of that experience. But then when we
came back to California, UM, I heard that my understudy,
that she offered to do whatever they needed to do,

(37:32):
and she was an amazing girl. She did the she
played the Blueberry. Yeah, and uh, you know, I had
a lot of respect for Denise, but I couldn't understand
why she accepted to do that, and so um they
opened and broad on Broadway tried it out, and then
I got a call just a few days later, and

(37:55):
and uh through my agent, and my agent called us
and said they want you back. And I did my best,
and uh and like I like I said, Jamie, I
I'm a big advocate for UM women's rights and men's
rights to not be sexually harassed. Every every person you know,
I'm nobody should be sexually harassed or asked to do

(38:17):
something uh in the entertainment industry that is they're not
comfortable doing. I don't know what the hell it was.
But I was a very innocent young woman, but I
was sexually harassed so much by so many producers. I
could tell you names. You go really uh and writers

(38:39):
and and and uh. Never by the actors amazing. The
actors were always amazing and we always got along great.
But it was producers, it was directors, it was writers,
and not only offered roles. And I'm not saying I
was sexually harassed and lolita, because I wasn't. I was
offered or I was told I was going to strip,

(39:02):
and that was a different thing. But still to me,
it's infringing on a sexual harassment, you know, especially as
a miner, that's absurd, that's ridiculous. And you know I
and this is the irony. Okay, Jamie, you can get this.
I come from this. You know this, this uptight family.
You can't date. I don't care how hot that kid is.

(39:24):
An he starting on a series. You can't have coffee
with him. It's wrong, you know. Yet yet all right,
they were okay with it. I mean, my father's literally said, well,
why why don't you just it's it's see it's a
body stocking. What's what's wrong with that? And it's like, Daddy,
you threw Davy Jones out of our club because he

(39:45):
wanted to take me out. And and you know, and
here you are telling me. You're telling me that it's
okay with you. If I stand in front of hundreds
of people and they see everything, you know, that's okay
with you. But you know, if it hadn't had the
subject matter it had, if it had been straight comedy,

(40:07):
maybe I would have gone back. You know, I didn't
talk to Mr Lerner. I was very upset with what
they did, because Johnny Carson wanted me on the Tonight
Show to talk about what they offered me and why
I quit, and they squashed that interview. But when they
squashed and canceled all of the things and even the

(40:31):
tonight show, that did it for me, you know, I mean,
my god, I was angry with them. I was very
disappointed that Mr Lerner in there there whatever powers to
be in that play, would would stop me from telling
what really happened, because I saw some write ups, I
saw some things that weren't what really happened. She then

(40:53):
returned to l A with less than what she started with,
having sacrificed her record contract to take the part of Lowly.
She was about to turn sixteen and was back at
square one. She tried to get back into acting, only
to be faced with more misogyny and more setbacks. And
I was a little flashy, you know. I think that's
why I kept getting sexually harassed all my life, because

(41:16):
I you know, I had very big breasts and I
couldn't help it. That's how God made me, you know.
And I was very curvacous, and and you know it's
not that I, you know, wore like really risque clothing
or that I came on to anybody with that like lead. Look,
you know, here baby, you know, but but you know,
I was very innocent, but but it was just the look, right,

(41:38):
so that looked out in my way. And and Sissy,
God bless her. She did a great job with that role,
so you know, nobody could do better than her. So
you know, I lost it. But um, but then Ross
called me back and said, I have another role. I
want you in this film, and they loved your performance,
so would you take this other role? It was actually
the role that John Travolta was in, a very small

(42:01):
role where the girls giving him head in the car
and then she bites his you know what off. So
after a while, Chris Gilmore decides it's time to switch gears,
and she begins working in a profession where she feels
she might be less judged. As well as to help
prevent some of her own traumatic casting experiences. Chris Gilmore
gets into casting herself, but again she's met with a

(42:22):
lot of gendered resistance. That flashy rock look I had
in the youth and the big breast, you know, it's
still followed me everywhere I went, So people didn't always
have it easy to take me seriously as a casting
director or as a businesswoman. But I was. I was
always a nerded heart, you know, as the poet laureate,

(42:45):
I was like Alan Jay Learner. I get the big
rhyming books and trying to make rhymes, and I love language.
You know. The way my parents raised me is you
help each other. The most that I've had out in
my life is the the predators that have sexually harassed
me rather than help me when I was giving them

(43:07):
my talents, whether it was casting wise, writing wise, or
or um or acting um, you know, making me run
around a conference table, chasing me and then taking my
name off of the guard gate of Warner Brothers because
I ran out of the room. What about what I
can give you? I'm giving you casting and writing. Why

(43:29):
aren't you giving me some humanity and respect and kindness. Yes,
I had stopped writing and casting and I'm gonna cry
over this one because the world disappoints me. But still
after pivoting her career, Gilmore is also mistreated as a
casting director. So she becomes disillusioned and starts her own
production company where she can be her own boss and

(43:51):
she produces films. Today, Gilmore hasn't discussed Lolita My Love publicly,
and I'm grateful she was willing to speak with me.
She has overcome a ton of odds in her career
and still reflects on her treatment during Lolita My Love
as a betrayal she experienced while still a kid, by
the composer, by the industry, and by the media. Nobody

(44:12):
wanted anybody to know I quit the show. Nobody wanted
anybody to know that they asked me to strip, and
that that that it wasn't in my contract, And I
would guess that they would squash that information. And being
as strong and having you know, as much power as
they did in the industry, I really don't think that

(44:34):
the word got out there. Um what really happened. I
do know that that I was squashed. Like I told you,
I wanted to be on the Tonight Show. That would
have been so cool. I can actually tell you I
was with Johnny Carson. How iconic would that be? But um, no,
you know, so that I would think that all of
the information out there doesn't tell anybody. I don't know

(44:55):
if you even read that. They begged me back, they
offered me a lot more money, that wanted me back.
They said, um that it was uh you know that
it failed without me and that they wanted me enough
to be there, you know, without the nudity. But but
I don't know if that's even there, nor did I care.

(45:15):
So Chris Gilmore survives Lolita, yes, but like Sue Lyon,
her mistreatment behind the scenes and in the media end
up leading her to leaving acting altogether. I want to
thank her again for speaking with me, and go see
Blood Pageant this year. God damn it. I also want
to mention a little bit about the actor who replaced Gilmore.
Denise Nickerson, as you may remember from earlier episodes, played

(45:37):
the role of Lolita in Lolita My Love for even
less time than Chris Gilmore, really just long enough for
the show to flop in Boston one last time. Fortunately,
her existing resume as a child actor in Dark Shadows
and as Violet in Willy Wonka, as well as previous
Broadway appearances were enough to hide the stain of Lolita
My Love's failure. Nickerson had had it with Hollywood by

(46:00):
the time she was twenty one, and she announced that
she was retiring, only to realize that her parents had
squandered every cent she'd ever made. For the rest of
her life, she worked as a receptionist and an office manager,
and went to conventions for Dark Shadows in willy Wonka
to make ends meet. She is said to have remained
extremely optimistic and good natured by all accounts, and she

(46:21):
passed away in Aurora, Colorado after a long illness. She
was friends with the actors who played for Rucas Sault
and my TV all the way up until her death.
Here's what Nickerson said in a two thousand interview. I
had always wanted to be an attorney. However, because there
were no Jackie Coogan laws in New York, my parents
had spent all of my money and it was a lot.

(46:43):
In a slow year like nineteen sixty six, I made
forty six thousand dollars, but all of my money was
gone and my hopes of being an ad journey were dashed.
So I'm twenty one with no money to go to college.
I know I need to get a job. Back then,
you didn't need a college degree to get a position,
and it's much harder today. But I realized that if

(47:04):
I started at the bottom and learned through quote on
the job training, I might be able to make it.
I had decided I didn't want to act anymore. So
the first thing I did was go cut my hair,
and my agent just lost his mind, as did my mother.
But I went ahead and got a job. I've really
had two very different lives. I had that life and
now I have this life, and I'm very blessed. I've

(47:26):
seen both sides of the coin. Are two Lolitas of
the nineteen seventies. Like Sue Lyon, they both retire from
the business while still in their twenties. So let's keep
it moving. Let's get into the eighties and to our
third Lolita, the start of the inexplicable second Broadway adaptation
of Nabokov's Lolita by Edward Albe Blanche Baker. We also

(47:48):
aired part of an interview I did with Baker in
our episode on stage adaptations. But I'm excited to get
into her career a little more because she is the
only actor who played Lolita in a major a bulk
of blessed adaptation who did so as an adult, and
the ways that her story deviates from that of Lions
and Gilmore's, I think are very interesting. Ye Blanche Baker

(48:24):
appears at a very interesting intersection of two generations of
Lolita imagery. We discussed the details of the Edward alb
production at length in episode five, and so I won't
rehash it too heavily here, but there's a lot about
Blanche Baker's background that makes her unique in this saga.
Blanche Baker's mother You're Gonna Love This played one of

(48:44):
the roles that is considered to be the visual inspiration
and stencil for how Sue Lian was presented in Stanley
Kubrick's Lolita. So, if you will, a brief sidebar for
Blanche Baker's mother, actor Carol Baker. Carol was born in
nine thirty one to a poor family and worked her
way up to study with famed acting coach Lee Strasburg

(49:05):
at the Actors Studio in New York in the nineteen fifties.
Here she studies alongside the likes of Mike Nichols, Marilyn Monroe,
future Cooper Clelita alumni Shelley Winters. Carol Baker studies method acting.
She's a serious fucking actor that really gets into the role,
and she works in commercials for a bit before starting
to get roles on Broadway in her early twenties. She

(49:26):
was then cast by Elia Kazan, who had already famously
collaborated with Tennessee Williams in a streetcar named Desire to
Play Baby Doll Apart, originally intended and styled very similarly
to Marilyn Monroe, and Baker becomes very famous for playing
the titular character in Baby Doll, who likes through Lyon

(49:47):
in Night of the Iguana is a character in a
Tennessee Williams play that is a sexy young seductress. A
quick note here, although Sue Lyon and Carol Baker both
played these naive ingenue roles adapted from Tennessee Williams texts here,
I'm not trying to push the narrative that Tennessee Williams's
work was inherently sexist. By all accounts, and judging from

(50:09):
what I've seen of it, he wrote complicated female characters
on a pretty regular basis, and while people have valid
opinions on patterns in his female characters, his female parts
were very well regarded in their time, and there's certainly
no denying that he was not an advocate of the
stereotypical Hollywood beauty embodied by Lion or Carol Baker. Baker

(50:29):
says in an interview that Tennessee Williams was advocating for
a fat actress in the role of Baby Doll, but
the studios would not allow it. I'll link some more
information to Tennessee Williams's life. In the description, the movie
goes like this. Baby Doll Megan as she is known,
is a very naive nineteen year old who marries a
poor alcoholic in the Mississippi Delta, who she refuses to

(50:50):
sleep with until she turns twenty. In the meantime, she
sleeps in a crib in the living room, and as
the plot goes, her sexually frustrated husband gets more and
more frustrated as his crib sleeping wife flirts with other men.
Your child is me. That's why we've played the game
of hard and seek. It's a game for children. Well,

(51:15):
you don't have to go all the way home to
take a nap. You could take a nap here. It's
going to rain anyhow. There's a small beddy in there,
crab you could call up at the slats down. It
sounds weird because it is weird. But there's two things

(51:37):
to note. First of all, Carol Baker is fantastic as
Baby Doll, maybe too fantastic. But the second thing I
want to tell you is that this movie was a
lot more talked about for its marketing of Carol Baker
than about her actual performance. Here's what I mean. Just
before the movie's release, Warner Brothers approved a one ft

(52:00):
I billboard of Carol Baker in the promotional image for
Baby Doll, which was a ship united an image of
a scantily clad Baker laying in a crib and sucking
her thumb. This got a lot of attention, earning the
movie a number of bands for indecency before its release
because of how Baby Doll is styled and presented in

(52:20):
the marketing. Similar to what happens to both movie adaptations
of Lolita, this scandal turns Baker's image into an icon,
and while she received incredible reviews in this movie, the
press mainly focused on her body. Another through line here,
Carol Baker wins the Golden Globe from most Promising Newcomer
for this role, much like Sue Lyon does later for Lolita.

(52:42):
Baker struggled within the studio system at Warner Brothers and
ends up buying out her contract there and turns out
great performances all throughout her twenties, though most of these
lacked the high profile glamour of baby doll. In her thirties,
film producer Joseph E. Levine gloms onto the act dress
and pushes Baker to remarket herself as a bombshell again.

(53:04):
She appeared naked in Playboy in nineteen sixty four and
started taking on very blonde, very glamorous roles like a
lukewarm received Jean Harlow biopic. Baker was not happy with
these roles or this styling, and wasn't shy about saying
how controlling and possessive Levine was to her during this time.
She gets out of her contract with him and Paramount

(53:26):
and later says this, in the nineteen seventies, I was
under contract Joe Levine who was going around give me
diamonds and behaving like he owned me. I never slept
with him or anything, but everybody thought I was his mistress.
And Levine is very powerful in Hollywood, so Baker speaking
out against how he was treating her essentially results in
her getting blacklisted from the industry. So Carol Baker, in

(53:50):
spite of being brand O level talented, has been kicked
around in controlling contracts and sexed up time and time again.
So she says fuck it. She divorces her house and
she takes her kids to Italy and begins working in
the Italian film industry with some more freedom. It's there
that she becomes a scream queen in Italian movies, slowly
bailing herself out of Hollywood debt and becoming famous abroad

(54:13):
for playing frequently murdered women who spoke Italian. Back in
the US, she was teased for becoming the queen of
Italian exploitation movies. But for Carol Baker, for the first
time she had freedom and an income that she controlled,
and this period in her career gave her a lot
of confidence. Feeling better about herself, she moves her family
back to the US in the seventies, returns to the

(54:36):
stage and becomes a character actor in the eighties and nineties.
Then she pivots again and becomes an author, and she's
still publishing books now. She rocks, But without doubt, the
role that shaped Carol Baker's career and the moment that
changed how the world perceived her was that one thirty
five foot billboard in Times Square that dictated how the

(54:58):
press treated her, how the public treated her, and how
men within her own industry would be allowed to treat
her so much so that she had to leave the
country to continue in the profession she was extremely gifted in.
So that's Carol Baker and her daughter is actor Blanche Baker,
who was born in late nineteen fifty six and spends
her childhood watching her mother act in Italy. Blanche goes

(55:21):
on to also study Strasbourg in New York and her
career gained momentum quickly. She won an Emmy in nine
at only two, started racking up roles on TV and
in film, and so when the opportunity came to play
Lolita in an Edward I'll be play, she couldn't say no.
What sents her apart here is that she's twenty four
when this happens. But the situation Blanche finds herself in

(55:44):
echoes the role that ends up overblowing her mother's bombshell image.
They were both talented and well trained actors. They both
got the opportunity to play the title role in a
work from the most famous playwright of their respective eras
Tennessee Williams. For Carol Baker and Edward Albe for Blanche Baker.
These roles are by all accounts played extremely well by them,

(56:05):
but the inherent scandal of the production and the way
that they're styled ends up overshadowing their work and interfering
with their lives. This irony is not lost on Blanche Baker,
and she was kind enough to speak with me about
her experience in albis Lolita, which closed in the blink
of an eye on Broadway. Blanche Baker's humbered, by the way,

(56:26):
was Donald Sutherland. Here's a little of our talk. In Boston.
There were protests and for some reason, I know I
looked young, and there was some idea that I was
really a teenager playing this role. And I used to
have to cross picket lines to get into the theater

(56:48):
starting in Boston. And to his credit, one of the
reasons I I believe I stayed in touch with Jerry,
who passed away recently. Um, but I'll never forget him
walking me across the picket lines in uh in New York.
He knew that it was difficult if I had to

(57:10):
do this to get to my dressing room. Now, we
didn't run for that long. We managed to get the
poster up in Sarti's for shows that closed quickly, but
for I, you know, it was a two weeks or
so in New York, and he would always he walked
me in, and I thought that that was just a
lovely gesture. Those days, I MDB didn't post everybody's age,

(57:31):
and that's true. All the roles I played, I was
playing twelve all the time, So I really seriously said
most of my early roles with like a bandage wrapped
around my chest. And uh, I did the same thing
I had done us the Seduction of Joe tynan Um
and I was playing Alan Alda's you know daughter, I

(57:54):
was also playing twelve, So it was just the thing
I did even in Holocaust. She ages in that too,
But I start off playing like nine or something, So yeah,
what is that experience like, being being asked to kind
of play so much younger um for so long? Was it?
I'm just so happy that you get an opportunity to work.

(58:16):
You're like, you know, I tell that to my students
all the time. Sheep, that door opens a crack, you
gotta go barreling through it and then it changes throughout
your life. Believe me, I am not playing twelve anymore,
so you us, you know, and but at the time
that's sort of what I was doing, and so there

(58:37):
was some mistake about, you know, that I was still twelve,
even though I've been twelve for maybe ten years. I
want to mention here at the phenomenon that Blanche is describing. Well,
it's great that actors are getting work, and it's very
much a job where you need to seize the opportunities
you're given. This falls neatly into a trend that still

(58:58):
persists now and relates directly to Lolita adaptations. And I'm
talking about the tendency to cast people in their twenties
or older to represent teenagers or younger. So thank Riverdale,
Think Greece, think really any TV show about teenagers. This
isn't a slight to be actors at all. But this

(59:20):
trend does condition us to think that underage characters look
much more mature than they would in real life. As
this pretends to Lolita, Most adaptations age Dolores Hayes up
from twelve to fourteen at least, then cast an actress
slightly older than that to play her, then style her
to look older than that, and in many ways that

(59:42):
makes sense, because putting an actual twelve year old on
stage in that role is extremely dangerous. But this instinct
and trend shouldn't be ignored and is something I'm going
to touch on in our last episode as well. I
always think of the movie Eighth Grade here, where se
being an actor who is thirteen playing a thirteen year

(01:00:03):
old character can be very jarring for audience members since
we're just not used to pop culture realistically reflecting what
a child of that age actually looks and sounds like.
With Lolita especially, this creates a very complicated catch twenty two.
This discussion is an absolute rabbit hole, and while I

(01:00:24):
feel it is obviously safer and more ethical to cast
an actor of Blanche Baker's age playing younger, I have
to ask myself what does this normalize for an audience member?
If we believe that she is fourteen, what does that
normalize for an audience member who is fourteen? On top
of that, that's not to say that being an adult

(01:00:45):
at the time of playing Lolita exempt Baker from severe
press harassment. It absolutely did not. Here's a little more
of our interview. I was going to ask about about
your mom as well of what had you kind of
taken away from her experience and to be able to
bring in, you know, experiences like these where you're being
pushed back against for reasons I have nothing to do

(01:01:07):
with you. She was the unhappy. It's at the height
of her career. So, um, I was wary of it,
and I fell into some of the traps of it.
So you're swayed by what everybody says, and everybody thinks, uh,
it's gonna be tough. Um. I did take a step

(01:01:29):
back eventually from the business and you know, now much
happier teaching and uh, you know working when I do
work with a different point of view. Yeah. So and
and this was kind of around the time of Lolita
that you were kind of navigating that and figuring that out. Yeah,
because I was thrust in the spotlight, you know, even

(01:01:50):
when I didn't give permission for things. I remember they
put a picture from the show in Playboy magazine after
I had turned down an interview, so I was like,
wait a second, yeah, very small Yeah, and then, um,
you know, I just wanted to be taken seriously. I
know there's a lot of there are some press photos

(01:02:12):
and I was in a slip and stuff like that,
but that was not actually part of it. When I
was in a bathrobe and I and and I brought
for the bathrobe at some point, but the audience just
saw my back. So in the press photos that have
the slip that wasn't actually on that didn't end up
being on stage. No interesting from what I've seen. The

(01:02:33):
show ran for a couple of weeks, Um after Boston previews.
What was that switch from Boston to New York like
that was the onslaught of publicity, So that was that
was very difficult, um and um, you know, and I
had to be very careful. I was a young girl.
I didn't have a lot of money and stuff, and

(01:02:54):
I was being followed after the show and stuff, and
I had to have people meet me I were Remember,
it was really not so pleasant that aspect once I
was before I got on the stage and after I
got off the stage. It really wasn't a heck of
a lot of fun. I remember having to go to
the police department with some guy who was like following me,
and some guy was leaving had followed me and left

(01:03:16):
things at my apartment building and oh yeah I moved,
and oh yes, it was all sorts of crazy stuff.
I feel like any time I went to a party,
people were really looking at me, so I stopped going
to parties. I really became more of a reck louse
than you would imagine because I felt like I couldn't
live up to what people expected. That was my own insanity,

(01:03:38):
I guess um. But I felt like they would expect
me to be prettier, expect me to be you know, sexy,
or forget that I was an actress, and I was
just very uncomfortable for a while in my own skin.
It's worth mentioning Blanche Baker was said to have been
amazing in this play, and that's saying a lot, because
Lalita is not given much in the way of abstance

(01:04:00):
to do by Albie, The New York Times said, quote,
the critics were almost unanimous on one point. Blanche Baker
wasn't on Genue, whose time had come unquote before the
show was abruptly shut down. And it's interesting because when
I read the details of the protesters to this production
and where they were coming from, they were women who
felt that the play was attempting to make light of

(01:04:22):
child sex abuse. And I'm inclined to agree with that,
but I don't see how making a young female star
feel unsafe helps to prove that point. Also, hilariously, the
protest group was called Women Against Pornography or whop. It
just feels good to laugh. So Lolita does end up

(01:04:42):
nearly forcing Blanche Baker out of the business out of
sheer anxiety and frustration with the press. Where she benefits,
of course, is by growing up witnessing her mother going
through very similar experiences. So Blanche bounces back. Yeah, I
think I was very lucky because I did theater. I
did Poor Little Lands and Paul Redney play in hand. Um,

(01:05:06):
you know, I did Sixteen Candles, which became sort of
a cult classic, And here we are all these years later,
and you know, I'm full time faculty at the New
York Film Academy, and teaching brings me great happiness. So
in the end, I feel like I had much more
positive to take from it and was able to overcome, uh,

(01:05:29):
that tsunami of press and fighting and all sorts of
silly things that shouldn't really detract from the art. So
that's Blanche Baker, and she's our Lolita of the nineteen eighties,
which brings us to the fourth Lolita the last prominent
one in pop culture canon Dominique Swain, who played Lolita

(01:05:50):
in the Adrian Line movie adaptation. I've been trying for
months to get ahold of Dominique to speak on this show,
and it was not to be. But I'm how be
the report that she's still working in movies today. She
is the last of the mainstream Lowlida's in name put
out into major pop culture, and there's a lot to
be learned from her life and career trajectory so far.

(01:06:12):
Dominique Swain was born in nineteen eighty in Malibu on
the side of a freeway and began to work in
the industry very young, though she maintained a fair amount
of normalcy in going to school and balancing auditions as
more of an extracurricular activity, at least at first. Her
younger sister, Chelsea Swain, would later play one of the
Lisbon sisters in Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides. In n

(01:06:36):
so the family was no stranger to a gauzy lens
of the late nineteen nineties being applied to an underage girl.
Before Lolita, Dominique hadn't done much more than play the
body double for McAuley Culkin's younger sister in The good
Son In. According to interviews at the time, Dominique had
stopped auditioning for commercials ad nauseum almost two years before

(01:06:58):
when she was offered the audition for Adrian Lines Lolita.
She auditioned, got it over twenty hundred other young actors,
and became, as Line referred to her on set, My Lolita.
It was her first role, and that's important. Now. I've
rehashed a lot of Swain's experiences on set and in
preparation for the role of Lolita in our episode on

(01:07:19):
the movie, but by all accounts, she approached the role
very confidently, often improvising inside of a scene. Swain seemed
both full of energy and eager to please. I'll remind
you of this moment inside of a chemistry test between
her and Jeremy Irons. Now, a lot of the middleman

(01:07:46):
like pop culture of the nine nineties are at play here.
The production required that Swain and Iron's have a pillow
between them in scenes where she sits on his lap,
but there's photos from the set of Adrian Line regularly
hugging and making physical contact with his lead star Dominique
Swain could not thankfully appear nude in the movie, but

(01:08:07):
she could appear in a skin tight, sheer body suit
from a distance as if she's nude. There was also
a running controversy on set with the cast and crew
on whether Dominique was being coddled too much. Other crew
members seem visibly uncomfortable with the subject matter and make
excuses for it as they go. My friend experienced abuse

(01:08:27):
as a child, and she's fine now. According to Elizabeth
Kay's piece Lolita Comes Again from in Esquire magazine, Dominique
Swain was high spirited and loved the attention that came
with starring in a movie at fifteen. She once allegedly
held up production a whole day because she didn't want
her last scene to come. But shooting wraps and her

(01:08:47):
performance in this movie is undeniable. While Lolita struggled through
edits and couldn't find a distributor, Swain returned to Malibu
High School and gets a role playing John Travolta's daughter
in Face Soft. You know that famous movie where John
Travolta and Nicolas Cage switched faces. Here's the setup of
the scene. I'm about to show you they've just switched

(01:09:09):
the faces. Travolta goes back home and immediately starts hitting
on his teenage daughter played by Dominique Swain. So in
this whole scene, she is in her underwear and the
camera is panning up and down her body as John
Travolta lears at her, I'll have to call you back.

(01:09:29):
You're not respecting my boundaries. I'm coming in, Jane, Jamie.
I don't think you heard me, Jamie. You've got something
that I crave and it sounds bad, but trust me
when I say it looks worse. So this part raises
Swain's profile and she gets a big boost in publicity
when Lolita is finally released in the US on the

(01:09:51):
Showtime Network. During this press tour, she speaks eloquently on
the topics that the book covers, even if those topics
were not necessary really translated into the movie. For a
few years after Lolita was buried in the US, Swaine
appeared in a few sex driven rom coms. She plays
the lead in Girl, about a teenager who decides she

(01:10:13):
wants to be sexy, alongside Porsche de Rossi and Selma Blair,
complete with the most thing ever a kissing between Swayne
and Tara Reid, But within just two years of Lolita,
she was rarely seen in a movie that didn't go
straight to DVD, and in nearly all these movies, she
plays a character whose storyline boils down to this. Either

(01:10:33):
she is extremely sexualized from the first frame, or she's
a character hell bent on losing her virginity, or her
having sex in a movie triggers a tragic event or consequence.
By the mid two thousand's, she was strictly in indie movies,
then switched over to indie horror, where, like many before her,
she gets a reputation as a scream queen that she

(01:10:54):
holds onto to this day. She killed it in a
small role in the movie Alpha Dog from two thous
and six. But the last decade of Swain's career has
brought mostly B movie titles. Titles like Boon, the Bounty Hunter,
not The Overlord, Eminence Hill, not These at the Center
of the Earth Camp be genre stuff that her performances
are really good, and not the prestigious career that Lolita

(01:11:15):
was supposed to have promised her an echo of all
the Lolitas that came before her, there's more to it
than her filmography dropping off in prestige projects pretty sharply.
It has a lot to do with how she was
received in the media and how the media framed her
as a sexy party girl, as a little bit weird
and encouraging her to appear naked. Swain has always been

(01:11:38):
very much herself. She brought her pet Ferrett to the
American premier of Lolita. She was known on the party
scene in the early two thousand's, something she expanded on
in a brief interview from two thousand one that calls
her a reformed Hollywood party girl. I used to be
crazy and just drink too much. The press kind of

(01:11:58):
leaned into this sexualized partying image, and that's something that
it's difficult to know how she felt about without actually
talking to her. Swain is on social media and we'll
do press junkets when a movie she's in is released,
but she hasn't given an in depth interview about her
life in years and years. I want to share some
press quotes about Swain from when she was at the
height of her teenage fame. Here in a piece where

(01:12:21):
Dolores Hayes is described as the twelve year old nymphette
who exchanges hand jobs for candy John Travolta saying to her,
Jeremy Irons fake sex with her. Dominique Swain is America's
least ordinary teenager. The marketing for Lolita, as well as
how often she's presented sexually in the movie, certainly did

(01:12:41):
a lot to shape Swain's image, just as Sue Lyon
appearing in the heart shaped sunglasses shaped hers, just as
sucking her thumb in a crib shaped Carol Baker's career,
Swain was introduced to us as a seductress, not a
squeaky clean kid the way that many fifteen year olds
have been. She appeared on a number of magazine covers
posing suggestively as Lolita when the movie was first released.

(01:13:05):
She's licking her finger on the cover of Esquire. She's
looking into the camera while Jeremy Irons kisses her hand
on the cover of Viva. A little later in her career,
she does a few bikini covers for for Him magazine.
When she's twenty, the headline easy Tiger, Dominique Swain is
on the Loose. She then became the youngest person ever
to pose naked for Peter in two thousand one, at

(01:13:27):
the age of twenty one, looking over her shoulder in
a classroom scene, She's written I'd rather go naked than
where for, over and over on the blackboard Bart Simpson style. Again,
I'm not shaming her for doing this at all. What
I'm trying to comment on is how the media was
framing this young actor. Here's an interview she did at
the time of the petis bread. Are people reacting to

(01:13:49):
the the poster um? Not really in the way that
one might hope. Some of my some of my my
and my boyfriend's mutual friends called and um and they
were like, oh, yeah, your girlfriend's hot. How did you
get her exactly? Okay, Um, you know what. It's been

(01:14:10):
cute talking, but let's go check out the poster. Okay.
This is an interview that's available on YouTube, and the
comments on these interviews, regardless of whether the interview is
from or two eighteen, always say lolita or some weird
shit like this. Yuck. The audience is so creepy, like

(01:14:33):
yelling and howling at her. She is kind of flirtatious, though.
Here's another interview from two thousand two where Dominique jumps
into the host's arms at the beginning of the interview,
and describes her own personality in the context of auditioning
for Lolita they were casting in l A, Okay, I
was I was like trying out for Barbie Doll commercials
when I was twelve years old and it wasn't working out. Um,

(01:14:55):
I have a little bit too much enthusiasm. Even her
commercial launching yourself with at the auditions, you know it
doesn't go over very well. Um, they don't think that
they have to catch you. And then here's how she
describes the parts that she was getting at this time,
this being a reference to two thousand two's New Best Friend. Um, yeah,

(01:15:15):
I play this like sex crazed seventeen year old maniac.
So here's a comment from below this video. She is flirty,
just like Lolita. I don't know how Dominique Swain feels
about this portion of her life now, but she was
very much a contemporary of the teen dream squad of

(01:15:37):
the nineties that I would loop in. Actors like Alicia Silverstone,
Drew Barrymore, gentlem Alone, Rose McGowan, terror Read, Selma Blair,
Christina Ricchie, Natalie Portman, and on and on and Dominique
Swain deserved a career of that caliber. But I'm arguing
here that being lolitified as an introduction to public life
is a massive thing to get out from underneath. So

(01:16:00):
and continues on to be a genre film actress and
continues to work today. Her co star Jeremy Irons hasn't
wanted for work since. Granted, he was an established actor
when he took the role of Humbert Humbert, but consider
that he has had multiple instances of saying very offensive
things about women and the queer community that we're barely
reported on, and he's continued to work as the ultimate

(01:16:21):
villain uninterrupted, most recently being nominated for his work in Watchman.
Nor did James Mason struggle to find work after Lolita
in nineteen sixty two. He was in control of his
career to a much greater extent. He was already established.
He was not being aggressively pursued by the person who
decided what he was doing with his life, as happened

(01:16:41):
with Lyon. Donald Sutherland didn't suffer the bout of stalking
and pressed backlash from having been in Lolita that Blanche
Baker did. John Neville, who played Humbert in Lolita, my
love was never faced with the choice of exposing himself
on stage or losing his job. There is always an
unfair burden put on the Lolita in the equation, which

(01:17:02):
is really just an extension of how our culture treats
the character of Dolores Hayes. Dominique Swain, like Sue Lyon,
did have a wild youth and generated the occasional exploitative
TMZ headline, but neither of them were given the amount
of grace that their male co stars would have been.
Anytime Swain has come up in the news for anything
good or bad, the lead is Lolita actress Dominique Swain,

(01:17:25):
attaching a stigma to her name before you even know
what the story is about. Yes, Lolita is Swain's most
famous role, but as we know from the Long Island
Lolita case, the term Lolita is generally applied to young
women who we are supposed to be thinking of as devious.
Going off of her performance in Lolita alone, Dominique Swain

(01:17:45):
is a massively talented person and the last Lolita did
not get a fair shot. The good news is that
she is well and happy, and it's not too late
to give her the types of parts she's proven she
could handle since she was fourteen. One last quick thing here,
Dominique went on a show called Celebrity Ghost Stories in
the two thousand's and she did give this iconic quote,

(01:18:09):
It's one thing to have a ghost, it's entirely another
thing to have a ghost who hates women and maybe
trying to kill you. And um, I'm never gonna stop
quoting that. That is incredible. And then after Dominique swain,
no more Lolita's. Except that's not exactly true, is it.

(01:18:31):
We've talked about Millie Bobby Brown having the term applied
to her just three years ago. At the beginning of
this episode, Natalie Portman had this label of playing lolita's,
the subtext being the underage fixation of adult male desires
in her early roles in the nineties. Alio was treated
this way at the beginning of her fame with age
Ain't Nothing but a number. Brooke Shields was treated like

(01:18:51):
a lolita in the seventies when she was allowed to
pose for Playboy Naked at ten years old. Britney Spears
had the lolita label applied to her because of how
she was styled at the height of her early fame.
Both Dakota and l Fanning have started in Lolita themed
perfume shoots while underage, and Dakota Fanning started in a
movie where her character is brutally raped when she was twelve.

(01:19:12):
Shirley Temple was styled as if she were stripping for
adult male stars in movies when she was under ten
years old. And let's be honest, the reason that I'm
using these examples is because you know who these actors
are and their careers, if not their lives, were able
to overcome the stigma applied to them by this logic,
they're the lucky ones, and that's not the norm. The

(01:19:34):
Sioue lions of the world don't get the benefit of that.
So just because the fury of a new Lolita adaptation
hasn't reached the mainstream in any meaningful way in nearly
twenty five years, doesn't mean that the story and the
stigma and the cultural myth assigned to its title character,
a character who never really existed, doesn't still exist. It's

(01:19:56):
very much here in the way that we talk about abuse,
in the way that we misabuse in communities where the
story is well remembered, and in callous conversations where the
term Lolita is deployed in place of child. I think
deserved and is to blame for the abuse they suffered.
So what do we do about that? Opinions vary the

(01:20:17):
closer I've studied this work, and I've studied it very closely.
I don't think the answer is to pretend that Lolita
never happened and hope that the world follows suit, because
I definitely won't, and I think it's almost a disservice
to not attempt to face the monster that our culture
has created, and that whether we realize it or not,
we have probably been complicit in at some point. So

(01:20:39):
many people have avoided knowing the truth of the text
because of this very flawed cultural narrative that hasn't just
misled us, it has harmed people, and avoiding that reality
has done nothing to combat it. Who we have yet
to see, and who it is necessary that we see,
is Dolores Hayes. So no, there is no Lolita curse.

(01:21:00):
The lives of the four Lolitas I described to you
today are all very different. Their commonalities lie in being
sexualized and overblown by the media and the public, and
many of them dealing with abuse before and after taking
the role. This is not something exclusive to the role
of Lolita. It's the story of many, many young entertainers
thrust into the spotlight as a sex object without any protection.

(01:21:24):
Next week is the last episode of this show, and
it's going to be a lot of things. It's going
to be people who I've spoken to throughout this series
speaking on their thoughts on the future of Lolita. It
will be conversations with female and non binary filmmakers I
really love on what they think is missing in pop
media addressing child sex abuse. It's a look at movies

(01:21:44):
that have been made about child sex abuse in the
last fifteen years, and it's me figuring out what the
funk to do with everything we've learned here. So if
you've been with me this far, thank you so much,
and let's see where all this lands next week on
Lolita Podcast. It to Podcast is an I Heart Radio production.
It is written and hosted by me Jamie Loftus, produced

(01:22:06):
by Sophie Lichtman, beth Ann Macoluso, Miles Gray, and Jack O'Brien.
It is edited by Isaac Taylor. Music is from Zoe
Blade and our theme is from Brad Dickert. My guest
voices this week are Julia Claire on A host nie A,
Sophie Lichtman, Daniel Goodman, Miles Gray, and Isaac Taylor. See
you next week.

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9: The Four Lolitas

1. Stuff You Should Know