Word: humberts
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...Lolita in 1958. But one evening he dreamed that he was reading the screenplay; overnight, Nabokov came to the age of consent. An offer of $150,000 did not exactly dissuade him, and he agreed to do the script himself. James Mason was cast as obsessive old Humbert Humbert, with Sue Lyon, then 14, in the title role of the stepdaughter who seduced him. Everybody said the adaptation could not be done, and they were right. But the pallid, bowdlerized film did gross about 21 times its $1,900,000 cost...
...what about a cast? Producer Twain thought, rightly (after the film), that James Mason was wrong for Humbert. Richard Burton was an early choice, but after one musical (Lerner's Camelof), Burton decided: "I have no desire to repeat this fascinating but exacting experiment." In his place will go John Neville, 45, a first-rank British actor. "When I was first approached," he admits, "my feeling was that I didn't see how it could be done with taste...
...trust Lerner." (Presumably, Coco Chanel also trusts Lerner.) The title role, naturally, is far more ticklish. The novel described Lolita as a "mixture of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity." And, as Humbert said, "you have to be an artist and a madman with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in order to discern by certain ineffable signs the little deadly demon among the wholesome children...
...them." Every summer they coursed up and down Arizona, Utah, Wyoming and Oregon in search for the feeding grounds of Nabokov's beloved "blues." Between butterflies, Vladimir sat beside Vera jotting on 3 by 5 cards. His notes were about a man named Humbert Humbert. General Motors, so far as anyone knows, has paid scant heed to the historic fact that much of Lolita was written in a '52 Buick...
...Humbert's sad obsession with twelve-year-old Dolores Haze went off in the U.S. of the late '50s like a shot in church. At first, U.S. publishers were afraid to touch it. Vera was afraid Nabokov might lose his job at Cornell if they did. When it finally came out, reviewers, not yet used to such material in "serious literature," flew into rages of indignation and feigned boredom. New York Times Critic Orville Prescott, in particular, earned a gargoyle's niche in literary history by exclaiming, "Dull, dull, dull." But Lolita in due course was recognized as the masterpiece...