Lolita: from abused child to erotic icon (part 3)

Trigger Warning: Mentions of physical and sexual abuse

Sue Lyon: condemned to remain Lolita

Harris and Kubrick wanted to make Lolita’s story a romance, but also went further by wanting to make Sue Lyon, Lolita’s 14-year-old interpreter, a “sex object.” Harris explained that the actress was chosen because, “we knew we must make [Lolita] a sex object […] where everyone in the audience could understand why everyone would want to jump on her.”

The producer also said, in a 2015 interview with Film Comment, “We made sure when we cast her that she was a definite sex object, not something that could be interpreted as being perverted.” The film’s recipe for iconic romance has thus two main ingredients: a sympathetic thirty-seven-year-old man and a forty-year-old sex object.

Even off-camera, the making of the film wasn’t glamorous. Sue Lyon was originally cast because she looked older than her age. The Production Code Administration advised that an actress with developed breasts should be chosen so that she would look less like a little girl on the screen and the film would not violate the Hays Code – the Motion Picture Production Code. Ironically, a few months after the release of Lolita, the Hays Code was amended to allow “sex aberrations” on screen.

In an interview with the French newspaper Libération, Sue Lyon talked about the conditions of her audition: “Usually, they ask for your name, a contact address, and goodbye. They kept me for hours, asking me what kind of music I listened to, whether I preferred sanitary pads or tampons, they were crazy.”

Kubrick, quoted in Look Magazine, himself described Lyon as “interesting to watch. [. . .] Even in the way she walked in for her interview, casually sat down, walked out. She was cool and non-giggly. She was enigmatic without being dull. She could keep people guessing about how much Lolita knew about life.”

In 1997, the actress told the Reuters news agency that making the film had even been extremely harmful for her: “My destruction as a person dates back to this feature film. Lolita exposed me to temptations that no other girl of that age should have to face.”

Journalist Sarah Weinman writes after Sue Lyon’s death that actress Michelle Phillips, Sue’s best friend at the time, found that she had returned “completely changed” after the filming of the movie, and would have confided to her “that she had lost her virginity” to producer Harris: “If events unfolded as Phillips describes, Lyon would have been 14 at the time, and Harris, 32. And she was under contract with their company for a further six years”. Contacted by the journalist for the article, Harris – then aged 92 – declined to comment. 

Even more scandalous, Sue Lyon’s first husband, Hampton Fancher, who was living with another actress at the time of Lolita’s release, admitted that seeing Sue Lyon in a promotional spread had determined him to begin a relationship with her. “His girlfriend at the time joked, ‘Here’s your next wife,’” Fancher remembers, before confiding, “but I thought, ‘You’re right, baby.’” The two actors married when Sue Lyon was 17 – two years after the film’s release – and he was 30.

Finally, an article by James Fenwick entitled “The Exploitation of Sue Lyon: Lolita (1962), Archival Research, and Questions for Film History” states “The letters [especially involving Harris and Kubrick] cited in this article indicate that Lyon was persistently reduced to, and traded as, a sexualized commodity and business asset. The archival evidence also indicates how the treatment of Lyon was most likely representative of wider systemic structural behaviors in the American film industry: powerful men controlling the lives, careers, and wealth of child stars. Harris and Kubrick were involved in negotiations to control all decisions in Lyon’s career. Harris even mentions discussions with Ray Stark at Seven Arts in which the latter wanted to ‘control’ and ‘own completely’ other female child stars, citing Tuesday Weld as an example.”