Hollywood Codebreakers: ‘Lolita’ Lifts the Ban on Sex Perversion
“My name is Lolita. And I’m not supposed to play with boys,” Marilyn Monroe purrs in Let’s Make Love. She pushes away the men kneeling next to her, wagging her finger in admonishment. “Mon coeur est a papa,” she tells them — my heart belongs to daddy.
The song wasn’t new, but the introduction was. Cole Porter had written “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” for the 1938 musical Leave It to Me!, where it served as a solo for stage legend Mary Martin, then making her Broadway debut. The reimagined version for Monroe in 1960 spoke to a new audience by acknowledging a polarizing cultural phenomenon: Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. The book had barely found a publisher in 1955, as Viking, Simon & Schuster, and Doubleday all took a hard pass on the explosive content. But after amassing a following in Europe and then internationally, Nabokov became a lauded, if controversial, figure in popular culture. Stanley Kubrick and his producing partner James B. Harris wanted to make a movie out of Lolita, and they started trying in 1958. But it would be four long and difficult years before their adaptation hit theaters. This achievement was only possible after multiple rounds of negotiations and the removal of the Code rule that had been the most difficult to kill: the sex perversion clause, which banned all queer relationships.
Several critics consider Nabokov’s novel the best of the 20th century, but it wasn’t an obvious fit for mainstream matinees. Lolita is told entirely from the perspective of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged college professor with a disturbing fixation on “nymphets,” his term of choice for adolescent girls. When a widow offers him lodging near his latest university job, he accepts solely to be near her 12-year-old daughter Dolores. Privately, he calls her Lolita. Humbert’s sexual obsession with Dolores turns into child sex abuse once her mother is out of the picture, though many (mostly male) critics didn’t label it that. Dolores eventually breaks free of Humbert, running off with a suitor that he later murders. Humbert is sitting in jail at the end of the novel, while Dolores is married and pregnant with her first child.
The book had been banned by many national governments — England, France, and Australia, to name a few — on grounds of obscenity. So it was understood that any filmmaker looking to adapt Lolita was in for a shitstorm. That didn’t deter Kubrick, who had already weathered plenty of controversy with Spartacus. He and Harris asked Nabokov to write the screenplay, suggesting he script one big change to pacify the PCA: make Humbert and Dolores a married couple.
Geoffrey Shurlock wasn’t as wild about the idea as the pair hoped. While he believed the marriage plot could sidestep some issues, the PCA chief was nervous about the prospect of a preteen bride. Nabokov didn’t like the concept at all. He actually quit over it, sending a letter to Harris through his wife Vera that he “decided against” the script job due to frustrating negotiations and the marriage tweak, which was “a particular stumbling block.” But he returned, after Kubrick and Harris dropped the plan and aged Dolores up instead. She would be 15, and look it.
But what teen would take the part? Tuesday Weld wanted the role badly, but was considered too old at 17. Hayley Mills’ parents wouldn’t let her act in Term of Trial, a much tamer movie about a problematic schoolgirl crush, lest she “get a ‘Lolita’ tag,” so she was definitely out. Kubrick and Harris had their answer when they saw Sue Lyon audition. The 14-year-old had done some television and modeling, but Lolita would be her first film role. “My mother had read the book and we discussed the story,” Lyon explained in a TV interview. “She knew that Mr. Harris and Mr. Kubrick do very artful pictures and that they are not a quickie film company. She had quite a bit of faith in them.”
Shurlock was less confident. When Variety asked him about the Lolita production in the spring of 1960, he said he hadn’t heard anything “and was just as happy that he hadn’t.” The censor was openly rooting for Kubrick to make the movie in France and “leave me out of it,” but neither man would get out of this mess so easily. Especially since another man was involved: Martin Quigley, the co-author of the Code. Quigley occasionally served as a consultant to studios worried over their PCA prospects, even though neither the Hollywood players nor the censors liked him that much. But he wrote the damn thing and was extremely Catholic, so who better to run interference between filmmakers, the PCA, and the Legion of Decency?
One of the biggest issues to sort out was the relationship between Humbert and Dolores. It was the entire story, and thus entirely unavoidable, but how far could they go? The original script contained a “seduction scene” where Dolores sticks her tongue in Humbert’s ear and suggests something through whispers that causes him to yell, “Mon dieu!” Quigley strongly cautioned against the first part, while Shurlock suggested they simply fade out before the eccentric exclamation. Kubrick and Harris followed their recommendations. But there were other suggestive or intimate moments scattered throughout the film — lines about “having a cavity filled” and a “limp noodle,” as well as the entire opening credits sequence, which was just a close-up of Humbert painting Dolores’ toenails. All these bits would somehow stay in the picture, and point towards the movie’s curious method of softening the source text: make it a wacky romance.
As Harris later said in an interview, “To us, the story’s most interesting part was it was a bizarre love story and the craftiness was: what do we have to gain exception censorship and defeat if we get into Humbert Humbert’s predilection for little girls? Why bring that in at all? Why not make this a love story?” Harris and Kubrick lost Humbert’s lifelong obsession with nymphets, never once including the word in the movie. They also cast comedian Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty, the man Humbert later murders, and gave him a lot more to do. The finished product was all suggestion of Humbert and Dolores’ disturbing relationship, with no explicit encounters and lots of jokes to smooth things other.
But even with this bizarre interpretation, there was no denying that this fell under the Code’s “sex perversion” clause, which was still intact in 1961. Countless movies had challenged it, and as producers prepared still more, the rule was starting to look a little ridiculous — an archaic relic of the old, hardline Breen administration. United Artists president Arthur Krim made a special plea to Shurlock on behalf of his upcoming films including Advise and Consent (an Otto Preminger political drama about a closeted senator who’s blackmailed over his sexuality) and The Children’s Hour (a Broadway drama about a lesbian rumor that destroys two schoolteachers’ reputations — and claims one of their lives), and here the PCA chief saw an opportunity. Shurlock actually agreed it was time to ditch the sex perversion clause, but he apparently hadn’t figured out the best way to broach the issue. Scholars Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons suggest he “perhaps used Lolita to pry a revision from board members.” Because the MPAA did review the Code in October 1961, on Shurlock’s request, and ultimately revise it to allow the PCA to “consider approving references to sex aberrations, provided any references are treated with care, discretion, and restraint.” Lolita, along with The Children’s Hour and Advise and Consent, were cited in a New York Times report as films specified in Shurlock’s request.
With the amendment approved, Lolita faced a much easier review process. The seduction scene had been trimmed and toned down, and Kubrick had carefully staged Humbert’s murder of Quilty to minimize the violence. The PCA approved the film in January 1962, and while the Legion of Decency took a little more persuading, they ultimately issued a special classification for Lolita — as long as the film was tagged for adults only. No one under the age of 18 would be admitted.
The movie opened the following summer, with a now famous poster of Sue Lyon in red heart-shaped sunglasses, licking a heart-shaped lollipop. The tagline asked, “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” — setting New York Times critic Bosley Crowther up for the snarky rebuttal: they didn’t. Crowther wasn’t the only reviewer who took issue with the film. Variety called it “shapeless,” comparing the movie to “a bee from which the stinger has been removed.” Nabokov was kinder to Kubrick, but claimed the production team had departed wildly from his script. Lolita still had its champions, and ultimately went to the Venice Film Festival as the U.S. selection. (This later became a point of contention, since it was a British-American production.)
But while there’s plenty to argue over what Lolita did or did not accomplish, its controversial reputation did help eliminate the lingering restrictions on “sex perversion” — for if they could make a movie like Lolita, who could reasonably object to a film with queer characters?
Films with sex worker characters were also on the table. We’ll focus next on a 1963 romantic comedy about a cop and a Parisian prostitute. Producer Hal Wallis called Irma La Douce “the filthiest thing I have ever seen on screen,” but the PCA still passed this Billy Wilder romp, with the “adults only” tag that was increasingly signaling the need for a film classification system. We’ll discuss Irma and Lord X next week on Hollywood Codebreakers.
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