Speaker 1: Trigger warning. This podcast involves discussions of child sexual abuse
Speaker 1: and pedophilia. Listener discretion is advised. A couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: something interesting happened on January. The Women's March happened, And
Speaker 1: we could talk about the surrounding flaws of the Women's
Speaker 1: March all day, but it happened, and in the Women's
Speaker 1: March was huge. The reason that was was because the
Speaker 1: Me Too movement was firing on all cylinders. The beginning
Speaker 1: must argue with an investigation published in October detailing the
Speaker 1: extensive sexual misconduct and many times rape, committed by Hollywood
Speaker 1: mogul Harvey Weinstein. The story made a huge impact both
Speaker 1: in Weinstein's life he's in prison now, as well as
Speaker 1: in our culture. Women were encouraged to share their experiences
Speaker 1: of abuse objectification, and there was an outpouring of traumatic stories,
Speaker 1: some of which resulted in consequences for the perpetrators and
Speaker 1: others that did not. Most of the cases you probably
Speaker 1: remembered from around this time concerned the wealthy and powerful,
Speaker 1: but there were also countless examples of women talking about
Speaker 1: harassment or abuse they had been subjected to in their
Speaker 1: everyday lives. No matter how you feel about the movement.
Speaker 1: There's no denying it was huge, and the Women's March
Speaker 1: in January reflected that. Natalie Portman, who we discussed in
Speaker 1: our last episode, spoke at this march, getting specific about
Speaker 1: how she had not just been sexually harassed while working
Speaker 1: in Hollywood, but harassed beginning when she was a child.
Speaker 1: She says this, I turned twelve on the set of
Speaker 1: my first film, The Professional. I was so excited at
Speaker 1: thirteen when the film was released in my work and
Speaker 1: my art would have a human response. I excitedly opened
Speaker 1: my first fan mail to read a rape fantasy that
Speaker 1: a man had written me. A countdown was started on
Speaker 1: my local radio show to my eighteenth birthday, euphemistically the
Speaker 1: date that I would be legal to sleep with. Movie
Speaker 1: reviewers talked about my budding breasts and reviews. I understood
Speaker 1: very quickly, even as a thirteen year old, that if
Speaker 1: I were to express myself sexually, I would feel unsafe
Speaker 1: and that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify
Speaker 1: my body to my great discomfort. So I quickly adjusted
Speaker 1: my behavior. I rejected any role that even had a
Speaker 1: kissing scene, and talked about that choice deliberately, and interviews
Speaker 1: I emphasized how bookish I was and how serious I was,
Speaker 1: and I cultivated an elegant way of dressing. I built
Speaker 1: a reputation for basically being prudish, conservative, nerdy, serious in
Speaker 1: an attempt to feel that my body was safe and
Speaker 1: that my voice would be listened to. At thirteen years old,
Speaker 1: the message from our culture was clear to me. I
Speaker 1: felt the need to cover my body and to inhibit
Speaker 1: my expression and my work in order to send my
Speaker 1: own message to the world that I'm someone worthy of
Speaker 1: safety and respect. And at the time the speech was given,
Speaker 1: it was received extremely well. Websites like Refining nine declared
Speaker 1: the Women's March wants to change the world. Will we
Speaker 1: let it? BuzzFeed announced thousands took to the streets for
Speaker 1: massive women's marches around the world. Teen Vogue shouted from
Speaker 1: the rooftops. Women's March protesters took to the streets for
Speaker 1: many different reasons. So we did it, Feminism win. Someone
Speaker 1: tried to make me wear one of those ugly as
Speaker 1: hats right well. The next day, January one, all of
Speaker 1: those websites I just cited posted these headlines are Millie,
Speaker 1: Bobby Brown, and Jacob Sartorius. Dating or just trolling us
Speaker 1: fans think Millie Bobby Brown and Jacob Sartorius are dating.
Speaker 1: Millie Bobby Brown just insta confirmed her relationship with Jacob
Speaker 1: Sartorius and I have butterflies. You have butterflies? Okay, boomers.
Speaker 1: Millie Bobby Brown is the star of Netflix's Stranger Things
Speaker 1: and was only thirteen years old at the time. These
Speaker 1: stories are rich, and they're speculating that she was dating
Speaker 1: fifteen year old TikTok star Jacob Sartorius the day after
Speaker 1: Natalie Portman made that speech. I understood very quickly, even
Speaker 1: as a thirteen year old, that if I were to
Speaker 1: express myself sexually, I would feel unsafe, and that men
Speaker 1: would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to
Speaker 1: my great discomfort. Millie Bobby Brown just insta confirmed her
Speaker 1: relationship with Jacob Sartorius and I have butterflies, you guys.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't even the first time that this had
Speaker 1: happened to Milly Bobby Brown. When season two of Stranger
Speaker 1: Things came out on Netflix, in the Internet was flooded
Speaker 1: by grown as people commenting on how much older she looked,
Speaker 1: how she's grown up. Before Our Eyes movie reviewers talked
Speaker 1: about my budding breasts interviews. This same thing happens to
Speaker 1: nearly any child, but growing up in the spotlight. Now.
Speaker 1: I'm not claiming here that Hollywood driven feminism is the
Speaker 1: most important thing in the world. In fact, I find
Speaker 1: it to be pretty frustrated and over commercialized and lacking
Speaker 1: all intersectionality more often than not. But it's on this issue,
Speaker 1: the treatment of underage performers in particular, that I feel
Speaker 1: like it's been pretty undercovered in the media, probably because
Speaker 1: the media was one of the primary forces perpetuating it.
Speaker 1: And the dissonance of that is demonstrated through this story
Speaker 1: from just three years ago, a story that was published
Speaker 1: the day after what was supposed to have been the
Speaker 1: largest feminist reckoning of our lifetimes. The day after, Here's
Speaker 1: what my friend and yours, Marrow Wilson, who played Matilda
Speaker 1: and was in Mrs. Doubtfire, had to say about Millie
Speaker 1: Bobby Brown's exploitation back in. Commenting on a child's body,
Speaker 1: whether in a positive or negative way, in a sexualizing
Speaker 1: or pitying way, is still commenting on a child's body. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's coming from someone who has lived it. How
Speaker 1: many grown actors who endured this level of bodily and
Speaker 1: personal scrutiny need to bring this up without media forgetting
Speaker 1: the lesson literally overnight. It's pretty common knowledge what an
Speaker 1: exceptionally difficult task it's been to get a productive conversation
Speaker 1: about how we treat children in the media, whether we're
Speaker 1: talking about stranger danger or with working child stars. As always,
Speaker 1: the type of child focused on betrays those American prejudices.
Speaker 1: The focus on able bodied, upper class white children are
Speaker 1: still the stories and stars that received the most focus.
Speaker 1: And on top of that, in Hollywood, it's been historically
Speaker 1: nearly impossible to report on child exploitation, in spite of
Speaker 1: constant whispers that it takes place at an alarming rate.
Speaker 1: One of the only documentaries on this subject, Amy Berg's
Speaker 1: documentary An Open Secret, gained millions of views when it
Speaker 1: was released for free online since it had never ever
Speaker 1: found a formal distributor. Studios with money do not find
Speaker 1: making these experiences available to a wide audience to be profitable.
Speaker 1: The ability to address the issue meaningfully is further complicated
Speaker 1: by the Q and On Death cult making escalated claims
Speaker 1: that literally every powerful person in the world, they do
Speaker 1: not like is a child sex abuser, making it even
Speaker 1: more difficult to get these stories told responsibly. Make no
Speaker 1: mistake Q and on logic as it pertains to this
Speaker 1: issue especially, only makes it more difficult for actual child
Speaker 1: sex abusers to be reported on and punished. So, yes,
Speaker 1: there is a ton of responsibility on the capitalistic structures
Speaker 1: that exploit child performers and refuse to take a look
Speaker 1: in the mirror in order to protect those performers. But
Speaker 1: there's also a great deal of complicity in us, the
Speaker 1: consuming public. Because yes, it is wrong of media outlets
Speaker 1: like Refinery twenty nine teen, Vogue, and BuzzFeed to publish
Speaker 1: these stories, but a major contributing factor to why they
Speaker 1: publish these stories is because people click on them. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm not putting teenagers on blast who want to know
Speaker 1: more about start of their age. I'm talking about weird
Speaker 1: adults who see the phrase thirteen year old having a
Speaker 1: boyfriend gives me butterflies and being like, damn, got to
Speaker 1: know more about that. And I'll be honest, I've probably
Speaker 1: been this person at some point. Maybe you have to.
Speaker 1: It's so normalized in pop culture to over expose public figures,
Speaker 1: and I funk with celebrity, gossip and culture. It's fun
Speaker 1: as hell, but speculating on the love life of a
Speaker 1: middle schooler is ghoulish and his natal amportment articulated very clearly.
Speaker 1: This absolutely affects how that meddle schooler grows up and
Speaker 1: perceives themselves in the world. Some of these sites end
Speaker 1: up realizing the cognitive dissonance of the stories they've published,
Speaker 1: particularly Refinery twenty nine, and that site vowed to not
Speaker 1: comment on the bodies or romantic lives of adolescents anymore. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: other media outlets criticized the stories having been written in
Speaker 1: the first place, and guess what phrase they borrow to
Speaker 1: describe how Millie Bobby Brown was treated. Hollywood's Lowlita complex
Speaker 1: still a problematic issue for young female stars. Times finally
Speaker 1: up for Hollywood's Lolita complex. The phrase lolita complex has
Speaker 1: been used at length over the years, and has meant
Speaker 1: slightly different things depending on the year the term is
Speaker 1: coming up. Here, it's being used as the culture's tendency
Speaker 1: to over sexualized teenagers, but in earlier decades the term
Speaker 1: was more often applied to a sign blame to the teenager,
Speaker 1: making the Lolita complex something the teenager has not us.
Speaker 1: Why is she acting so sexy? We see a lot
Speaker 1: of elements of this in the nineteen nineties. You might
Speaker 1: remember that Rolling Stone magazine cover we talked about in
Speaker 1: episode six where Britney Spears is posed in a bra
Speaker 1: and tiny shorts, holding a teletubby and talking on the phone.
Speaker 1: In media of this time, no one asked Rolling Stone
Speaker 1: or the photographer why Brittany had been marketed that way. No,
Speaker 1: they asked a teenage Brittany, why was she posing like that?
Speaker 1: And what about the women who played the part that
Speaker 1: the Lolita complex borrows its name from. Are these women,
Speaker 1: who are largely underage performers at the time respond pountable
Speaker 1: for how the media frames and exploits them In no,
Speaker 1: of course not, who in the right fucking mind would
Speaker 1: do that. But with the four low leaders we'll be
Speaker 1: talking about today, they did. Filmmakers, directors and large systems
Speaker 1: of power presented these low leaders to us. But they
Speaker 1: wouldn't have done it if we, the general public, weren't
Speaker 1: going to pay for it. So today we are talking
Speaker 1: about and in conversation with four women who played Lolita.
Speaker 1: This is Lolita Podcast. Welcome to the penultimate episode of
Speaker 1: Lolita podcast, I'm your host Jamie loftus Today, a long
Speaker 1: foreshadowed episode, a close look at the life and careers
Speaker 1: of the women who have played Lolita on screen and
Speaker 1: on stage over the years, and how playing the part
Speaker 1: affected their life, both behind the scenes and through their
Speaker 1: treatment in the media. We're gonna focus on four performers today,
Speaker 1: the Lolita's of the stage and screen, ranging from nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty two to nine seven. These women are Sue Lyon,
Speaker 1: Chris Gilmore, Blanche Baker, and Dominique Swain. So let's start
Speaker 1: around nineteen fifty nine, talking about one of the adult
Speaker 1: stars who shaped the original sixties look of Stanley Kubrick's Lolita.
Speaker 1: There is one thing I want to mention before Sue
Speaker 1: Lyons casting in nineteen sixty and it's a piece that
Speaker 1: appeared in Esquire magazine in nineteen fifty nine by one
Speaker 1: of the most famous feminist writers of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: Simone de Boivar. My mouth can't make French. The piece
Speaker 1: is called Brigitte Bardo and the Lolita Syndrome. And okay,
Speaker 1: it's not Lolita complex, but in de Boivar's definition, it
Speaker 1: demonstrates pretty clearly what Lolita syndrome meant around the time
Speaker 1: of the book's publication. She says this of Brigitte Bardo,
Speaker 1: the bleached blonde French sex icon of the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: and sixties. Her clothes are not fetishes, and when she strips,
Speaker 1: she is not unveiling a mystery. She is showing her body,
Speaker 1: neither more nor less, and that body rarely settles into
Speaker 1: a state of immobility. She walks, she dances, she moves about.
Speaker 1: Her eroticism is not magical but aggressive. In the game
Speaker 1: of love, she is as much a hunter as she
Speaker 1: is a prey. The male is an object to her,
Speaker 1: just as she is to him. So what's being described
Speaker 1: here is very different than the Lolita syndrome that is
Speaker 1: applied to Milly Bobby Brown in the two thousand tenths.
Speaker 1: In the fifties and sixties, invoking Lolita's name indicated the
Speaker 1: cultural image were well associated with by this point in
Speaker 1: the show, that being a sexually appealing, girlish presenting person
Speaker 1: who is sexually devious and alluring. It's only in the
Speaker 1: last few years that the Lolita complex has been used
Speaker 1: to describe the habits of the media and the public
Speaker 1: applying these stereotypes. And it's with this energy that we
Speaker 1: take it into the nineteen sixties to talk about our
Speaker 1: first Lolita, the original Lolita. Sue Lion, the star of
Speaker 1: Stanley Kuber's nineteen sixty two adaptation. Later in her life,
Speaker 1: when the Adrian Line adaptation of Lolita was announced in
Speaker 1: the nineties, Lion said, this my destruction as a person
Speaker 1: dates from that movie. Lolita exposed me to temptations no
Speaker 1: girl of that age should undergo. I defy any pretty
Speaker 1: girl who is rocketed to stardom at fourteen in a
Speaker 1: sex nymphed role to stay on a level path thereafter.
Speaker 1: Lion passed in two thousand nineteen after her health had
Speaker 1: been declining for some time, but there is much to
Speaker 1: discuss about her life. Sue Lyon was born in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty six in Iowa as the youngest of five, and
Speaker 1: her father died before her first birthday. She moved around
Speaker 1: a little with her siblings and now single mother, who
Speaker 1: worked at a hospital to support the family, and they
Speaker 1: eventually landed in l A As a child, Sue modeled
Speaker 1: for J. C. Penny and auditioned her parts to help
Speaker 1: out her family. Her childhood best friend was Michelle Gilliam
Speaker 1: later Michelle Phillips from the legendary nineteen sixties group The
Speaker 1: Mamas and the Papas. Lyon had one TV appearance in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine and went on a number of auditions
Speaker 1: before landing in a room with Stanley Kubrick in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty auditioning for Lolita. Here's how she described that experience
Speaker 1: during an interview from the nineteen eighties. I went on
Speaker 1: an interview to Stanley Kubrick and Jimmy Harris. And usually
Speaker 1: in Hollywood, when you go on interviews, uh, they say hello,
Speaker 1: what's your name? Thank you very much? For by these
Speaker 1: two said things like, um, where do you date, where
Speaker 1: do you go, what do you do? What time do
Speaker 1: you come home? What did your mother think of that? Uh?
Speaker 1: Where did you buy that dress? They asked me questions
Speaker 1: that you know I would have to answer that I
Speaker 1: did answer and so when I went, but I they
Speaker 1: kept me in there for a whole hour. I was fourteen.
Speaker 1: Lion Is said to beat out eight hundred other girls
Speaker 1: for the role. She'd heard a little bit of the
Speaker 1: book at Michelle's house when she was thirteen, and the
Speaker 1: girls thought it was very scandalous. Lion only learned what
Speaker 1: the full story was about from her mother, who described
Speaker 1: it like this. Before I did the screen test, my mother,
Speaker 1: uh told me the full story and made it very
Speaker 1: clear so that I would know what was going on,
Speaker 1: and uh she wanted to make sure I didn't have
Speaker 1: any problems fits at. Mother was very protective of my feelings.
Speaker 1: Lion's mother asked their pastor if Sue should take the part,
Speaker 1: and the pastor said yes. And it's at this point
Speaker 1: that Sue became the primary breadwinner of the family at
Speaker 1: only fourteen. Many forget that Sue Lyon won a Golden
Speaker 1: Globe for playing Lolita for Most Promising Newcomer, and that
Speaker 1: she was supposed to have been poised to become an
Speaker 1: enormous star, as we discussed in our episode on Stanley
Speaker 1: Kubrick's Lolita, Lyon's history during the production and press tour
Speaker 1: of this movie, and furthermore, her contract with Stanley Kubrick
Speaker 1: and James Harris, the movie's director and producer, respectively, was
Speaker 1: not quite this simple, as writer Sarah Wineman confirmed in
Speaker 1: reporting for air Mail in the Fall of James Harris
Speaker 1: had taken Sue Lion's virginity sometime during the production or
Speaker 1: press tour of the movie. According to Michelle Phillips, Lion
Speaker 1: was fourteen and Harris thirty two at the time it happened,
Speaker 1: and Lyon was exclusively contracted to Kubrick and Harris for
Speaker 1: the next six years of her career in the style
Speaker 1: of old school Hollywood. Other sources of Wineman's described Lion
Speaker 1: as closer to six teen when this occurred, but no
Speaker 1: matter whose word you're taking, she was not the legal
Speaker 1: age of consent and James Harris was her employer. While
Speaker 1: this was not a big news story at the time,
Speaker 1: Harris's pursuit of his underage star opened her not him,
Speaker 1: up to criticism in the gossip media. Here's a column
Speaker 1: from Dorothy Kilgallan in ninety two that you might remember
Speaker 1: from a past episode Lolita Virus catching for Sue Lyon.
Speaker 1: Sue Lyon, the Pretty Star of Lolita, has bowled over
Speaker 1: her producer, James B. Harris. Her age is sixteen according
Speaker 1: to her studio, and he's an old man of thirty three.
Speaker 1: She prefers the company of mature men and James maybe
Speaker 1: her cup of tea when she's a little older and
Speaker 1: decide this proper to court her. Who is that story
Speaker 1: putting the blame on? And this piece was published just
Speaker 1: two weeks after Lyon turned sixteen. It's around this age
Speaker 1: where Sue Lyon begins to suffer from depression, which led
Speaker 1: to abusing drugs. Lyon struggled with both mental illness and
Speaker 1: a lack of an adequate support structure for much of
Speaker 1: her life, and this, compounded with the Hollywood luxury she
Speaker 1: had been inducted into, made it difficult for her to
Speaker 1: capitalize on what was undoubtedly a huge talent. It's also
Speaker 1: important to note how Sue Lion's body was promoted and
Speaker 1: framed by the press in the fallout of the release
Speaker 1: of Lolita. We talked about the cinematography of the movie before,
Speaker 1: but as we know, the marketing images for this movie
Speaker 1: were infinitely more important in terms of the legacy it left.
Speaker 1: It's these photos taken by photographer Bert Stern that live
Speaker 1: on and framed Sue Lion for the public. Here are
Speaker 1: some photos from this shoot. Sue in the front seat
Speaker 1: of a car in hard shaped glasses, lips powdered, head
Speaker 1: tilted back, Sue in the front seat, in the glasses
Speaker 1: and a denim bikini, holding an American flag close to
Speaker 1: her face. Sue in a denim shirt and sun hat,
Speaker 1: sweeping in a field of dandelions, in bed, half naked
Speaker 1: but the lollipop, in a comic book, in a lawn
Speaker 1: chair with a lollipop and a much book. A photo
Speaker 1: taken from the inside of a hotel room. Sue is
Speaker 1: in the bikini at the window, bearing the heart shaped
Speaker 1: glasses and looking right at the photographer. Pamphless in a
Speaker 1: phone booth, applying whip class and talking on the phone.
Speaker 1: And the photo you know already Sue in the heart
Speaker 1: shaped classes, sucking on a lollipop, looking right at you.
Speaker 1: And here's a sampling of how she was discussed on
Speaker 1: magazine covers at age fifteen. Lolita in the Flesh, I
Speaker 1: taught my child to act Lolita, Sue Lyon's mother talks,
Speaker 1: I'm not Lolita actress. Sue Lyon hopes people know she
Speaker 1: doesn't live her part. Sue Lion, so I'm young? Is
Speaker 1: that a crime? And egregiously on the cover of Cosmopolitan, Lolita,
Speaker 1: Sue Lion portrays the most controversial girl ever to hit
Speaker 1: the screen. Right next to the headline fasting easier than dieting. Ye.
Speaker 1: The story of Sue Lyon is a complicated one, but
Speaker 1: this is indisputable. She was presented while a minor as
Speaker 1: a sex object for the taking. In nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: Sue Lyon got married for the first time at age seventeen,
Speaker 1: to Hampton Fancher, a writer eight years her senior, who
Speaker 1: was a well known man about town at the time,
Speaker 1: dating starlets like Barbara Hershey before marrying Sue. He was
Speaker 1: working as an actor at the time of the marriage,
Speaker 1: but he's best known now as the co writer of
Speaker 1: Blade Runner and Blade Runner. When asked by The New
Speaker 1: Yorker about the marriage in Pantra had this to say,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of bad press. They accused me of
Speaker 1: being a pompous, horned dog guy interested in only in
Speaker 1: the world of yachts and private jets, which I thought
Speaker 1: was totally unfair, but they were mostly right. There were
Speaker 1: bets in Vegas about how long the marriage would last,
Speaker 1: around nine months, as Pantra tells it, which overlaps with
Speaker 1: Lyon's second film, John Houston's The Night of the Iguana.
Speaker 1: It's one of lyons more famous roles and intersecting with
Speaker 1: later Lolita history. The Night of the Iguana is a
Speaker 1: Tennessee Williams movie adaptation where Sue Lyon plays a bleach blonde,
Speaker 1: sexy teen who attempts to seduce an actor over twenty
Speaker 1: years her senior, in this case Richard Burton. I can
Speaker 1: talk to you like I'd never dream of going swimming
Speaker 1: with Reverend Hodge gets back home. He's all. Lyon had
Speaker 1: a difficult time with the press in what seemed like
Speaker 1: never ending press tours from movies like Lolita and Knight
Speaker 1: of the Iguana. As far as Lolita goes, she was
Speaker 1: still promoting the movie two years after it was released,
Speaker 1: not to mention that, following her divorce from Fancher, Lyon
Speaker 1: was briefly linked again to James Harris, who casually said
Speaker 1: this to a reporter in late nineteen Oh, we're not
Speaker 1: getting married, if that's what you mean. But we were
Speaker 1: very good friends, okay. And it's around this time that
Speaker 1: Lion loses her older brother to a drug overdose and
Speaker 1: reaches a breaking point in terms of how she was
Speaker 1: treated both in the press and within her Hollywood contract.
Speaker 1: She says this, in the eighties, I think Initially, before
Speaker 1: they knew me, they felt that they were going to
Speaker 1: build a star, and in the fashion of the old studios,
Speaker 1: UH create an image and it would go on for there.
Speaker 1: And but after they realized that and understood my motivation
Speaker 1: for doing the film, and also I pointed out to them,
Speaker 1: I said, you know, you've made a tremendous amount of
Speaker 1: money off of me, and I think you owe me
Speaker 1: the respect to be who I am. And now I
Speaker 1: need to get on with the rest of my life.
Speaker 1: I'll be happy to work again, but not every second.
Speaker 1: I don't like people strangers asking me questions. I like
Speaker 1: to be left alone. Really. I was once on a
Speaker 1: television show, a talk show. My brother had just died
Speaker 1: two days before that. The inner viewer opens his show
Speaker 1: by saying, and now I was sixteen years old. He said,
Speaker 1: did your brother kill himself? Because you played? I didn't
Speaker 1: say a thing. I gotta had I walk up. I didn't.
Speaker 1: I mean I had there was. I couldn't even dignify
Speaker 1: that with with you know, don't you have good sense, sir?
Speaker 1: I didn't. I had no words. I left that in
Speaker 1: an ats typical of the reason that I can't be
Speaker 1: a movie star. I never could. Lyon continued in movies
Speaker 1: throughout the nineteen sixties, appearing alongside many big stars of
Speaker 1: the time. She was in a John Ford movie, and
Speaker 1: she was in a Frank Sinatra noir film in which
Speaker 1: Lyon appears unconscious and a bra and panties on the poster. Also,
Speaker 1: her face is barely visible, She's not even facing the camera,
Speaker 1: also Funck Frank Sinatra. In the late eighties, Lion begins
Speaker 1: to work in TV and TV movies. She spent some
Speaker 1: time campaigning for Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy during his bid
Speaker 1: for the presidency in nineteen sixty eight, and she gives
Speaker 1: away her New York penthouse to people in need. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one, she married photographer and former NFL player
Speaker 1: Roland Harrison. Their interracial marriage sparked outrage in the US,
Speaker 1: and they moved to Spain as expatriots to live comfortably.
Speaker 1: This marriage ended by nineteen seventy two, and it gives
Speaker 1: Sue Lyon her only child, Nona Harrison. Roland Harrison wasn't
Speaker 1: in the picture when Nona was a child, and so
Speaker 1: Sue Lyon raises Nona on her own. While struggling with
Speaker 1: mental illness. They go back to the US, where Sue
Speaker 1: infamously married Cotton Adamson, who was incarcerated in a Colorado
Speaker 1: state prison for robbery and second degree murder when they
Speaker 1: married in nineteen seventy three. They met when Sue was
Speaker 1: working as a volunteer in the Public Defender's office. Not
Speaker 1: only did this marriage negatively impact Lyon's career and bring
Speaker 1: on a wave of unwelcome press attention, but Adamson then
Speaker 1: escaped prison, committed another robbery, and got arrested again before
Speaker 1: she divorced him in nineteen seventy five. Lyon considered this
Speaker 1: the death knell of her acting career, and after a
Speaker 1: few more TV roles and small films, she completely retired
Speaker 1: from Hollywood by night. It's said that her mental health
Speaker 1: continued to worsen, and she had a failed fourth marriage
Speaker 1: before marrying Richard Rudman, a radio engineer, in ninety five
Speaker 1: who would later say he'd been something of an enabler
Speaker 1: in Sue's life, and from here I'd like to let
Speaker 1: Sue's daughter, Nona take over. Nona Harrison Gomez still lives
Speaker 1: in the l A area and run the company with
Speaker 1: her husband, Painting murals, and she's written extensively in blog
Speaker 1: posts over the years about her very complicated relationship with
Speaker 1: her mother up until and after Sue Lyon's death in
Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen. It's through known as writings that Sue
Speaker 1: Lyon's extensive struggles with mental illness come into sharp focus.
Speaker 1: Here is how Nona describes the overview of her early
Speaker 1: life on her website. Born and raised in Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: Nonah's life began as a fairy to She was the
Speaker 1: daughter of a famous actress, Sue Lyon known for Lolita,
Speaker 1: an NFL player Roland Harris. Her father was absent for
Speaker 1: most of her childhood, and being a biracial child, she
Speaker 1: had questions at a very early age about why she
Speaker 1: looked so different. By age twelve, Sue remarried and her
Speaker 1: relationship with her mother was never the same. Nonah was
Speaker 1: kicked out of her house and by the age of thirteen,
Speaker 1: she was taken to a halfway house. That same year,
Speaker 1: her mother placed her in an insane asylum, where she
Speaker 1: stayed for almost three months. That kind of betrayaled by
Speaker 1: her mother, a woman she once idolized, broke known as
Speaker 1: spirit in a way which would take years to recover from.
Speaker 1: Nona has written about her struggles with her mother over
Speaker 1: the years and the ebb and flow of her mother
Speaker 1: coming into and out of her life while battling a
Speaker 1: lifelong struggle with mental illness all the way up until
Speaker 1: her death. Here's a passage known a road in March
Speaker 1: for never leaving l A. She's been able to hide
Speaker 1: away from the Hollywood monsters, and I wouldn't want it
Speaker 1: any other way. It is the biggest reason it's taken
Speaker 1: me this long to finish. Protecting her is in my
Speaker 1: d NA, no matter how much she might have hurt
Speaker 1: me in the past, and this passage from July. We
Speaker 1: are better strangers than we are family, and that's okay.
Speaker 1: Every once in a while on my blog posts, I
Speaker 1: will have someone comment about how they wish my mother
Speaker 1: and I would be together again, and I thank them
Speaker 1: for the love they have in their hearts to think
Speaker 1: if she sees me, she would somehow be different. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Unhealthy people do not get better, not without a lot
Speaker 1: of work that they must choose to do. If they
Speaker 1: stay unhealthy and become older, all they do is become
Speaker 1: worse and more damaging. Nonah writes about how being separate
Speaker 1: from her mother was the only way it could be,
Speaker 1: but still remember sue Lyon with a great deal of empathy,
Speaker 1: acknowledging what a large role of her mother's mental illness
Speaker 1: had in keeping them separate. She still writes about her
Speaker 1: mother on sue Lyon's birthday and on the anniversary of
Speaker 1: her death, expressing a wish that her mom is in peace.
Speaker 1: I think the way that Nona has kept this legacy
Speaker 1: is really beautiful, and I'll link to her work in
Speaker 1: the description. She's doing really great work around social justice
Speaker 1: as well that I'm excited to share. I'll add here
Speaker 1: for clarity that after the abuse that she was subjected
Speaker 1: to as a child, non is certainly not under any
Speaker 1: obligation to make amends or forgive the behavior of an
Speaker 1: abuse of parent, and her blog details her lifetime of
Speaker 1: navigating that trauma, and as she healed and moved forward
Speaker 1: with her life as an adult and an independent person,
Speaker 1: decided on what her boundaries would be. I don't have
Speaker 1: to tell you that this is a very individual kind
Speaker 1: of journey. There is no right or wrong way to
Speaker 1: navigate trauma, particularly childhood trauma, and it's a journey that
Speaker 1: Nona has chronicled very honestly. She also did this really
Speaker 1: cool transformative social media campaign in nineteen where people would
Speaker 1: submit pictures of themselves wearing those trade had marked Sue
Speaker 1: Lion heart shaped sunglasses while doing something that made them
Speaker 1: feel like their most authentic self. So a campaign basically
Speaker 1: to honor her mom's most iconic role. It's one of
Speaker 1: the coolest transformative uses of the heart shaped glasses I've
Speaker 1: ever seen. It was really cool. Sue Lyon passed away
Speaker 1: in a North Hollywood assisted living facility the day after
Speaker 1: Christmas in two thousand nineteen. She survived by friends and
Speaker 1: her daughter Nona. She was not remembered in the in
Speaker 1: memorium reel at the Oscars less than two months after
Speaker 1: she died. Some fucking thanks our next. Lolita is a
Speaker 1: girl of the nineteen seventies. At the time, she went
Speaker 1: by Annette Farah. Now she's known as Chris Gilmore. Gilmore
Speaker 1: was chosen out of allegedly thousands of aspiring auditionees to
Speaker 1: play the title role in Alan J. Lerner and John
Speaker 1: Berry's Broadway Would be Spectacular. Lolita my love in one.
Speaker 1: You know, the one that did this? Who is that
Speaker 1: Piper exams. I got to speak with Chris in our
Speaker 1: episode on stage adaptations of Lolita, But there's a lot
Speaker 1: more to her story that I think ties into the
Speaker 1: Lolita legacy. These days, Gilmore as a producer of indie films,
Speaker 1: most recently a slasher movie called Blood Pageant starring Beverly
Speaker 1: Mitchell and Snoop Dogg that comes out this year. She
Speaker 1: and her son collaborate often, and when I did the interview,
Speaker 1: he went down to their garage to get the original
Speaker 1: poster of Lolita My Love that has Chris Gilmore's image
Speaker 1: on it to get ready for our talk Who is
Speaker 1: really sweet? Now? Records of Gilmore's performance as Lolita in
Speaker 1: the show unfortunately don't exist. She was replaced in the
Speaker 1: show for reasons we will be recapping here by Denise Nickerson,
Speaker 1: who played Violet Beauregard and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate
Speaker 1: Factory the same year. But Gilmore's life before Lolita was
Speaker 1: just as fascinating traumatizing as her personal experience as learners
Speaker 1: Lolita was. At fourteen, she was already no stranger to
Speaker 1: the ways that the entered payment industry was willing to
Speaker 1: overseexualize someone under age because she was a child of Hollywood,
Speaker 1: with a mother who was a dancer and a father
Speaker 1: who ran late night clubs with musical acts. Her sister,
Speaker 1: Sandy Farah, later famously dated Elvis Presley. Chris's first appearance
Speaker 1: on screen was when she was only six years old
Speaker 1: on the Alfred Hitgecock Hour. She's probably secret aged or something.
Speaker 1: See and she's supposed to steal the plans for Daddy's
Speaker 1: Secret Block. Other small rules followed, including an appearance on
Speaker 1: The Brady Bunch, but her real passion was music. I'll
Speaker 1: let her describe the kind of environment she grew up in.
Speaker 1: Oh well, well, I will tell you. I am a
Speaker 1: big Allen Jay Learner fan growing up. I was a
Speaker 1: poet Laurian in school and I loved writing. You know,
Speaker 1: I loved rhyming so so I really loved him and
Speaker 1: I was so jazz to work for him. Um, however,
Speaker 1: he wrote, I guess I don't know if your listeners
Speaker 1: will will know this, but he wrote My Fair Lady,
Speaker 1: which you know gave Audrey Hepburn her big break. And um,
Speaker 1: I knew my acting and I knew my singing. I
Speaker 1: wasn't a very good dancer. My sister was an incredible
Speaker 1: d answer, But I I kind of faked it through
Speaker 1: because everything in those days still you had to sing
Speaker 1: and dad. But um, I was discovered in my dad's
Speaker 1: club every Monday night. Everybody was discovered. I mean the
Speaker 1: Righteous Brothers got their break. Uh, Sonny and Share got
Speaker 1: their after in the day. He had seven clubs, but
Speaker 1: the one that was the most famous was called the
Speaker 1: Red Velvet. I got. I was offered a record career,
Speaker 1: first with Mercury Records back then, and then with four Star,
Speaker 1: and then my curb heard me sing and he was
Speaker 1: I think he was working on the Osman Brothers. Is
Speaker 1: about the time the Osman Brothers and the Jackson Five
Speaker 1: were really jammed. By fifteen, Gilmore was in the recording
Speaker 1: business with a record contract. This is a great opportunity
Speaker 1: to play you a song, she sang as a tween again,
Speaker 1: as it is now my personal anthem, You're a dum dumb.
Speaker 1: So Gilmore's true ambition lay in music acting. Being a
Speaker 1: connected team in the industry was more of a means
Speaker 1: to an end for her, and this made the announcement
Speaker 1: of auditions for Lolita My Love pretty goddamn exciting. This
Speaker 1: was a chance for her to make her Broadway debut
Speaker 1: in a leading role in a show by one of
Speaker 1: the most famous lyricists of his generation. Remember Learners, the
Speaker 1: guy who did Goddamn, My Fair Lady, Gigi Camelot. The
Speaker 1: clout was a near certainty. Here's how Gilmore describes the auditions.
Speaker 1: You're gonna laugh at this, really laugh at this. But
Speaker 1: I turned down any role that I thought was risque, right,
Speaker 1: And he says, you have an audition for a show
Speaker 1: called Lolita. And I went on seven auditions. And I
Speaker 1: don't know how I got into that. I didn't read
Speaker 1: the book like you. I didn't know. I just knew,
Speaker 1: you know, Alan Jay Lerner yea, and this we're kind
Speaker 1: of you know thegue. So I thought, okay. And it's
Speaker 1: a comedy, musical comedy. They have been looking on the
Speaker 1: East Coast and the West Coast for someone to be Lovelita,
Speaker 1: and they picked me and contracted me. But I wasn't
Speaker 1: allowed to say anything, and they kept them they kept
Speaker 1: the ads out that they were looking because they were
Speaker 1: keeping the publicity going. I'll also refer you back to
Speaker 1: a Vulture piece from eighteen by Sarah Weinman, who I've
Speaker 1: interviewed on the show where she talks about the auditions
Speaker 1: for Lolita My Love. Young actresses arrived with their mothers,
Speaker 1: usually saying that they quote wouldn't like to be Lolita,
Speaker 1: but would like to play the part unquote. You might
Speaker 1: remember this description of what an audition for that show
Speaker 1: was like, quote, don't wear makeup next time, said one
Speaker 1: of the producers to an audition er. I wanted to
Speaker 1: look sexy. They replied, you look sexy anyways, he said, unquote.
Speaker 1: So yeah, there's a lot of similarities to what we
Speaker 1: here described in Sue Lyon's description of Cooper auditions and
Speaker 1: I want to be Layer. This audition culture was not
Speaker 1: a phenomenon exclusive to the part of Lolita. It was
Speaker 1: completely cooked into the auditioning process for girls and women,
Speaker 1: both underage and adult, whether we're talking about the casting
Speaker 1: of Scarlett O'Hara in the nineteen thirties or casting Aerial
Speaker 1: in a Disney Live action reboot in the two thousand
Speaker 1: tents in the two thousands, but Chris Gilmore gets the
Speaker 1: part and takes a big risk by dropping her record
Speaker 1: deal in order to do so, then going to New
Speaker 1: York with her sister to begin rehearsals on Lolita My Love.
Speaker 1: We discuss a lot of her onset experiences in our
Speaker 1: episode of Lolita stage adaptations, but I want to remind
Speaker 1: you the reason she is ultimately asked to leave the
Speaker 1: production after months of script changes and behind the scenes
Speaker 1: mess And keep in mind, up until about a month ago,
Speaker 1: the only media narrative available about Gilmore's leaving the production
Speaker 1: was that she was not good enough to play the part,
Speaker 1: which was definitely not the case. Mr Learners said, you know,
Speaker 1: we have to make it more risque, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: because because I well, but I'm jumping ahead though. I go,
Speaker 1: what's what's the snaps on the top of my nightgown?
Speaker 1: What the heck this? What did they do to it?
Speaker 1: And nobody wanted to tell me, And this is a
Speaker 1: hell of a way to hit it on an actress,
Speaker 1: but you know, um, I went around and then somebody said, well,
Speaker 1: Mr Learner will come in, and so he told me, well,
Speaker 1: the snaps are in the top because you're gonna drop
Speaker 1: your nightgown. You're gonna rip it off and drop it
Speaker 1: in that scene. You know, I was singing, but this
Speaker 1: is the problem in this world, you know, I was
Speaker 1: I trained method Meisner comedy improv I added, all I
Speaker 1: I sang, and so I refused, and then I'll never
Speaker 1: forget the producer's last words. He said, well, you're too virtuous.
Speaker 1: So the choice is given to a fifteen year old
Speaker 1: that either she takes her clothes off on a Broadway
Speaker 1: stage every night, regardless of how comfortable she feels, or
Speaker 1: she doesn't to be on Broadway. They'll find a girl
Speaker 1: who will do it, and by all accounts, that's exactly
Speaker 1: what happened. This, of course, was devastating to Gilmore. She
Speaker 1: had become close with Alan Jay Lerner, was performing well
Speaker 1: in rehearsals and rolling with the script changes, and this
Speaker 1: was going to be her big break. But once she
Speaker 1: wasn't willing to play ball learn her dropped her. Gilmore
Speaker 1: describes the fallout of that experience. But then when we
Speaker 1: came back to California, UM, I heard that my understudy,
Speaker 1: that she offered to do whatever they needed to do,
Speaker 1: and she was an amazing girl. She did the she
Speaker 1: played the Blueberry. Yeah, and uh, you know, I had
Speaker 1: a lot of respect for Denise, but I couldn't understand
Speaker 1: why she accepted to do that, and so um they
Speaker 1: opened and broad on Broadway tried it out, and then
Speaker 1: I got a call just a few days later, and
Speaker 1: and uh through my agent, and my agent called us
Speaker 1: and said they want you back. And I did my best,
Speaker 1: and uh and like I like I said, Jamie, I
Speaker 1: I'm a big advocate for UM women's rights and men's
Speaker 1: rights to not be sexually harassed. Every every person you know,
Speaker 1: I'm nobody should be sexually harassed or asked to do
Speaker 1: something uh in the entertainment industry that is they're not
Speaker 1: comfortable doing. I don't know what the hell it was.
Speaker 1: But I was a very innocent young woman, but I
Speaker 1: was sexually harassed so much by so many producers. I
Speaker 1: could tell you names. You go really uh and writers
Speaker 1: and and and uh. Never by the actors amazing. The
Speaker 1: actors were always amazing and we always got along great.
Speaker 1: But it was producers, it was directors, it was writers,
Speaker 1: and not only offered roles. And I'm not saying I
Speaker 1: was sexually harassed and lolita, because I wasn't. I was
Speaker 1: offered or I was told I was going to strip,
Speaker 1: and that was a different thing. But still to me,
Speaker 1: it's infringing on a sexual harassment, you know, especially as
Speaker 1: a miner, that's absurd, that's ridiculous. And you know I
Speaker 1: and this is the irony. Okay, Jamie, you can get this.
Speaker 1: I come from this. You know this, this uptight family.
Speaker 1: You can't date. I don't care how hot that kid is.
Speaker 1: An he starting on a series. You can't have coffee
Speaker 1: with him. It's wrong, you know. Yet yet all right,
Speaker 1: they were okay with it. I mean, my father's literally said, well,
Speaker 1: why why don't you just it's it's see it's a
Speaker 1: body stocking. What's what's wrong with that? And it's like, Daddy,
Speaker 1: you threw Davy Jones out of our club because he
Speaker 1: wanted to take me out. And and you know, and
Speaker 1: here you are telling me. You're telling me that it's
Speaker 1: okay with you. If I stand in front of hundreds
Speaker 1: of people and they see everything, you know, that's okay
Speaker 1: with you. But you know, if it hadn't had the
Speaker 1: subject matter it had, if it had been straight comedy,
Speaker 1: maybe I would have gone back. You know, I didn't
Speaker 1: talk to Mr Lerner. I was very upset with what
Speaker 1: they did, because Johnny Carson wanted me on the Tonight
Speaker 1: Show to talk about what they offered me and why
Speaker 1: I quit, and they squashed that interview. But when they
Speaker 1: squashed and canceled all of the things and even the
Speaker 1: tonight show, that did it for me, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: my god, I was angry with them. I was very
Speaker 1: disappointed that Mr Lerner in there there whatever powers to
Speaker 1: be in that play, would would stop me from telling
Speaker 1: what really happened, because I saw some write ups, I
Speaker 1: saw some things that weren't what really happened. She then
Speaker 1: returned to l A with less than what she started with,
Speaker 1: having sacrificed her record contract to take the part of Lowly.
Speaker 1: She was about to turn sixteen and was back at
Speaker 1: square one. She tried to get back into acting, only
Speaker 1: to be faced with more misogyny and more setbacks. And
Speaker 1: I was a little flashy, you know. I think that's
Speaker 1: why I kept getting sexually harassed all my life, because
Speaker 1: I you know, I had very big breasts and I
Speaker 1: couldn't help it. That's how God made me, you know.
Speaker 1: And I was very curvacous, and and you know it's
Speaker 1: not that I, you know, wore like really risque clothing
Speaker 1: or that I came on to anybody with that like lead. Look,
Speaker 1: you know, here baby, you know, but but you know,
Speaker 1: I was very innocent, but but it was just the look, right,
Speaker 1: so that looked out in my way. And and Sissy,
Speaker 1: God bless her. She did a great job with that role,
Speaker 1: so you know, nobody could do better than her. So
Speaker 1: you know, I lost it. But um, but then Ross
Speaker 1: called me back and said, I have another role. I
Speaker 1: want you in this film, and they loved your performance,
Speaker 1: so would you take this other role? It was actually
Speaker 1: the role that John Travolta was in, a very small
Speaker 1: role where the girls giving him head in the car
Speaker 1: and then she bites his you know what off. So
Speaker 1: after a while, Chris Gilmore decides it's time to switch gears,
Speaker 1: and she begins working in a profession where she feels
Speaker 1: she might be less judged. As well as to help
Speaker 1: prevent some of her own traumatic casting experiences. Chris Gilmore
Speaker 1: gets into casting herself, but again she's met with a
Speaker 1: lot of gendered resistance. That flashy rock look I had
Speaker 1: in the youth and the big breast, you know, it's
Speaker 1: still followed me everywhere I went, So people didn't always
Speaker 1: have it easy to take me seriously as a casting
Speaker 1: director or as a businesswoman. But I was. I was
Speaker 1: always a nerded heart, you know, as the poet laureate,
Speaker 1: I was like Alan Jay Learner. I get the big
Speaker 1: rhyming books and trying to make rhymes, and I love language.
Speaker 1: You know. The way my parents raised me is you
Speaker 1: help each other. The most that I've had out in
Speaker 1: my life is the the predators that have sexually harassed
Speaker 1: me rather than help me when I was giving them
Speaker 1: my talents, whether it was casting wise, writing wise, or
Speaker 1: or um or acting um, you know, making me run
Speaker 1: around a conference table, chasing me and then taking my
Speaker 1: name off of the guard gate of Warner Brothers because
Speaker 1: I ran out of the room. What about what I
Speaker 1: can give you? I'm giving you casting and writing. Why
Speaker 1: aren't you giving me some humanity and respect and kindness. Yes,
Speaker 1: I had stopped writing and casting and I'm gonna cry
Speaker 1: over this one because the world disappoints me. But still
Speaker 1: after pivoting her career, Gilmore is also mistreated as a
Speaker 1: casting director. So she becomes disillusioned and starts her own
Speaker 1: production company where she can be her own boss and
Speaker 1: she produces films. Today, Gilmore hasn't discussed Lolita My Love publicly,
Speaker 1: and I'm grateful she was willing to speak with me.
Speaker 1: She has overcome a ton of odds in her career
Speaker 1: and still reflects on her treatment during Lolita My Love
Speaker 1: as a betrayal she experienced while still a kid, by
Speaker 1: the composer, by the industry, and by the media. Nobody
Speaker 1: wanted anybody to know I quit the show. Nobody wanted
Speaker 1: anybody to know that they asked me to strip, and
Speaker 1: that that that it wasn't in my contract, And I
Speaker 1: would guess that they would squash that information. And being
Speaker 1: as strong and having you know, as much power as
Speaker 1: they did in the industry, I really don't think that
Speaker 1: the word got out there. Um what really happened. I
Speaker 1: do know that that I was squashed. Like I told you,
Speaker 1: I wanted to be on the Tonight Show. That would
Speaker 1: have been so cool. I can actually tell you I
Speaker 1: was with Johnny Carson. How iconic would that be? But um, no,
Speaker 1: you know, so that I would think that all of
Speaker 1: the information out there doesn't tell anybody. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you even read that. They begged me back, they
Speaker 1: offered me a lot more money, that wanted me back.
Speaker 1: They said, um that it was uh you know that
Speaker 1: it failed without me and that they wanted me enough
Speaker 1: to be there, you know, without the nudity. But but
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's even there, nor did I care.
Speaker 1: So Chris Gilmore survives Lolita, yes, but like Sue Lyon,
Speaker 1: her mistreatment behind the scenes and in the media end
Speaker 1: up leading her to leaving acting altogether. I want to
Speaker 1: thank her again for speaking with me, and go see
Speaker 1: Blood Pageant this year. God damn it. I also want
Speaker 1: to mention a little bit about the actor who replaced Gilmore.
Speaker 1: Denise Nickerson, as you may remember from earlier episodes, played
Speaker 1: the role of Lolita in Lolita My Love for even
Speaker 1: less time than Chris Gilmore, really just long enough for
Speaker 1: the show to flop in Boston one last time. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: her existing resume as a child actor in Dark Shadows
Speaker 1: and as Violet in Willy Wonka, as well as previous
Speaker 1: Broadway appearances were enough to hide the stain of Lolita
Speaker 1: My Love's failure. Nickerson had had it with Hollywood by
Speaker 1: the time she was twenty one, and she announced that
Speaker 1: she was retiring, only to realize that her parents had
Speaker 1: squandered every cent she'd ever made. For the rest of
Speaker 1: her life, she worked as a receptionist and an office manager,
Speaker 1: and went to conventions for Dark Shadows in willy Wonka
Speaker 1: to make ends meet. She is said to have remained
Speaker 1: extremely optimistic and good natured by all accounts, and she
Speaker 1: passed away in Aurora, Colorado after a long illness. She
Speaker 1: was friends with the actors who played for Rucas Sault
Speaker 1: and my TV all the way up until her death.
Speaker 1: Here's what Nickerson said in a two thousand interview. I
Speaker 1: had always wanted to be an attorney. However, because there
Speaker 1: were no Jackie Coogan laws in New York, my parents
Speaker 1: had spent all of my money and it was a lot.
Speaker 1: In a slow year like nineteen sixty six, I made
Speaker 1: forty six thousand dollars, but all of my money was
Speaker 1: gone and my hopes of being an ad journey were dashed.
Speaker 1: So I'm twenty one with no money to go to college.
Speaker 1: I know I need to get a job. Back then,
Speaker 1: you didn't need a college degree to get a position,
Speaker 1: and it's much harder today. But I realized that if
Speaker 1: I started at the bottom and learned through quote on
Speaker 1: the job training, I might be able to make it.
Speaker 1: I had decided I didn't want to act anymore. So
Speaker 1: the first thing I did was go cut my hair,
Speaker 1: and my agent just lost his mind, as did my mother.
Speaker 1: But I went ahead and got a job. I've really
Speaker 1: had two very different lives. I had that life and
Speaker 1: now I have this life, and I'm very blessed. I've
Speaker 1: seen both sides of the coin. Are two Lolitas of
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies. Like Sue Lyon, they both retire from
Speaker 1: the business while still in their twenties. So let's keep
Speaker 1: it moving. Let's get into the eighties and to our
Speaker 1: third Lolita, the start of the inexplicable second Broadway adaptation
Speaker 1: of Nabokov's Lolita by Edward Albe Blanche Baker. We also
Speaker 1: aired part of an interview I did with Baker in
Speaker 1: our episode on stage adaptations. But I'm excited to get
Speaker 1: into her career a little more because she is the
Speaker 1: only actor who played Lolita in a major a bulk
Speaker 1: of blessed adaptation who did so as an adult, and
Speaker 1: the ways that her story deviates from that of Lions
Speaker 1: and Gilmore's, I think are very interesting. Ye Blanche Baker
Speaker 1: appears at a very interesting intersection of two generations of
Speaker 1: Lolita imagery. We discussed the details of the Edward alb
Speaker 1: production at length in episode five, and so I won't
Speaker 1: rehash it too heavily here, but there's a lot about
Speaker 1: Blanche Baker's background that makes her unique in this saga.
Speaker 1: Blanche Baker's mother You're Gonna Love This played one of
Speaker 1: the roles that is considered to be the visual inspiration
Speaker 1: and stencil for how Sue Lian was presented in Stanley
Speaker 1: Kubrick's Lolita. So, if you will, a brief sidebar for
Speaker 1: Blanche Baker's mother, actor Carol Baker. Carol was born in
Speaker 1: nine thirty one to a poor family and worked her
Speaker 1: way up to study with famed acting coach Lee Strasburg
Speaker 1: at the Actors Studio in New York in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: Here she studies alongside the likes of Mike Nichols, Marilyn Monroe,
Speaker 1: future Cooper Clelita alumni Shelley Winters. Carol Baker studies method acting.
Speaker 1: She's a serious fucking actor that really gets into the role,
Speaker 1: and she works in commercials for a bit before starting
Speaker 1: to get roles on Broadway in her early twenties. She
Speaker 1: was then cast by Elia Kazan, who had already famously
Speaker 1: collaborated with Tennessee Williams in a streetcar named Desire to
Speaker 1: Play Baby Doll Apart, originally intended and styled very similarly
Speaker 1: to Marilyn Monroe, and Baker becomes very famous for playing
Speaker 1: the titular character in Baby Doll, who likes through Lyon
Speaker 1: in Night of the Iguana is a character in a
Speaker 1: Tennessee Williams play that is a sexy young seductress. A
Speaker 1: quick note here, although Sue Lyon and Carol Baker both
Speaker 1: played these naive ingenue roles adapted from Tennessee Williams texts here,
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to push the narrative that Tennessee Williams's
Speaker 1: work was inherently sexist. By all accounts, and judging from
Speaker 1: what I've seen of it, he wrote complicated female characters
Speaker 1: on a pretty regular basis, and while people have valid
Speaker 1: opinions on patterns in his female characters, his female parts
Speaker 1: were very well regarded in their time, and there's certainly
Speaker 1: no denying that he was not an advocate of the
Speaker 1: stereotypical Hollywood beauty embodied by Lion or Carol Baker. Baker
Speaker 1: says in an interview that Tennessee Williams was advocating for
Speaker 1: a fat actress in the role of Baby Doll, but
Speaker 1: the studios would not allow it. I'll link some more
Speaker 1: information to Tennessee Williams's life. In the description, the movie
Speaker 1: goes like this. Baby Doll Megan as she is known,
Speaker 1: is a very naive nineteen year old who marries a
Speaker 1: poor alcoholic in the Mississippi Delta, who she refuses to
Speaker 1: sleep with until she turns twenty. In the meantime, she
Speaker 1: sleeps in a crib in the living room, and as
Speaker 1: the plot goes, her sexually frustrated husband gets more and
Speaker 1: more frustrated as his crib sleeping wife flirts with other men.
Speaker 1: Your child is me. That's why we've played the game
Speaker 1: of hard and seek. It's a game for children. Well,
Speaker 1: you don't have to go all the way home to
Speaker 1: take a nap. You could take a nap here. It's
Speaker 1: going to rain anyhow. There's a small beddy in there,
Speaker 1: crab you could call up at the slats down. It
Speaker 1: sounds weird because it is weird. But there's two things
Speaker 1: to note. First of all, Carol Baker is fantastic as
Speaker 1: Baby Doll, maybe too fantastic. But the second thing I
Speaker 1: want to tell you is that this movie was a
Speaker 1: lot more talked about for its marketing of Carol Baker
Speaker 1: than about her actual performance. Here's what I mean. Just
Speaker 1: before the movie's release, Warner Brothers approved a one ft
Speaker 1: I billboard of Carol Baker in the promotional image for
Speaker 1: Baby Doll, which was a ship united an image of
Speaker 1: a scantily clad Baker laying in a crib and sucking
Speaker 1: her thumb. This got a lot of attention, earning the
Speaker 1: movie a number of bands for indecency before its release
Speaker 1: because of how Baby Doll is styled and presented in
Speaker 1: the marketing. Similar to what happens to both movie adaptations
Speaker 1: of Lolita, this scandal turns Baker's image into an icon,
Speaker 1: and while she received incredible reviews in this movie, the
Speaker 1: press mainly focused on her body. Another through line here,
Speaker 1: Carol Baker wins the Golden Globe from most Promising Newcomer
Speaker 1: for this role, much like Sue Lyon does later for Lolita.
Speaker 1: Baker struggled within the studio system at Warner Brothers and
Speaker 1: ends up buying out her contract there and turns out
Speaker 1: great performances all throughout her twenties, though most of these
Speaker 1: lacked the high profile glamour of baby doll. In her thirties,
Speaker 1: film producer Joseph E. Levine gloms onto the act dress
Speaker 1: and pushes Baker to remarket herself as a bombshell again.
Speaker 1: She appeared naked in Playboy in nineteen sixty four and
Speaker 1: started taking on very blonde, very glamorous roles like a
Speaker 1: lukewarm received Jean Harlow biopic. Baker was not happy with
Speaker 1: these roles or this styling, and wasn't shy about saying
Speaker 1: how controlling and possessive Levine was to her during this time.
Speaker 1: She gets out of her contract with him and Paramount
Speaker 1: and later says this, in the nineteen seventies, I was
Speaker 1: under contract Joe Levine who was going around give me
Speaker 1: diamonds and behaving like he owned me. I never slept
Speaker 1: with him or anything, but everybody thought I was his mistress.
Speaker 1: And Levine is very powerful in Hollywood, so Baker speaking
Speaker 1: out against how he was treating her essentially results in
Speaker 1: her getting blacklisted from the industry. So Carol Baker, in
Speaker 1: spite of being brand O level talented, has been kicked
Speaker 1: around in controlling contracts and sexed up time and time again.
Speaker 1: So she says fuck it. She divorces her house and
Speaker 1: she takes her kids to Italy and begins working in
Speaker 1: the Italian film industry with some more freedom. It's there
Speaker 1: that she becomes a scream queen in Italian movies, slowly
Speaker 1: bailing herself out of Hollywood debt and becoming famous abroad
Speaker 1: for playing frequently murdered women who spoke Italian. Back in
Speaker 1: the US, she was teased for becoming the queen of
Speaker 1: Italian exploitation movies. But for Carol Baker, for the first
Speaker 1: time she had freedom and an income that she controlled,
Speaker 1: and this period in her career gave her a lot
Speaker 1: of confidence. Feeling better about herself, she moves her family
Speaker 1: back to the US in the seventies, returns to the
Speaker 1: stage and becomes a character actor in the eighties and nineties.
Speaker 1: Then she pivots again and becomes an author, and she's
Speaker 1: still publishing books now. She rocks, But without doubt, the
Speaker 1: role that shaped Carol Baker's career and the moment that
Speaker 1: changed how the world perceived her was that one thirty
Speaker 1: five foot billboard in Times Square that dictated how the
Speaker 1: press treated her, how the public treated her, and how
Speaker 1: men within her own industry would be allowed to treat
Speaker 1: her so much so that she had to leave the
Speaker 1: country to continue in the profession she was extremely gifted in.
Speaker 1: So that's Carol Baker and her daughter is actor Blanche Baker,
Speaker 1: who was born in late nineteen fifty six and spends
Speaker 1: her childhood watching her mother act in Italy. Blanche goes
Speaker 1: on to also study Strasbourg in New York and her
Speaker 1: career gained momentum quickly. She won an Emmy in nine
Speaker 1: at only two, started racking up roles on TV and
Speaker 1: in film, and so when the opportunity came to play
Speaker 1: Lolita in an Edward I'll be play, she couldn't say no.
Speaker 1: What sents her apart here is that she's twenty four
Speaker 1: when this happens. But the situation Blanche finds herself in
Speaker 1: echoes the role that ends up overblowing her mother's bombshell image.
Speaker 1: They were both talented and well trained actors. They both
Speaker 1: got the opportunity to play the title role in a
Speaker 1: work from the most famous playwright of their respective eras
Speaker 1: Tennessee Williams. For Carol Baker and Edward Albe for Blanche Baker.
Speaker 1: These roles are by all accounts played extremely well by them,
Speaker 1: but the inherent scandal of the production and the way
Speaker 1: that they're styled ends up overshadowing their work and interfering
Speaker 1: with their lives. This irony is not lost on Blanche Baker,
Speaker 1: and she was kind enough to speak with me about
Speaker 1: her experience in albis Lolita, which closed in the blink
Speaker 1: of an eye on Broadway. Blanche Baker's humbered, by the way,
Speaker 1: was Donald Sutherland. Here's a little of our talk. In Boston.
Speaker 1: There were protests and for some reason, I know I
Speaker 1: looked young, and there was some idea that I was
Speaker 1: really a teenager playing this role. And I used to
Speaker 1: have to cross picket lines to get into the theater
Speaker 1: starting in Boston. And to his credit, one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I I believe I stayed in touch with Jerry,
Speaker 1: who passed away recently. Um, but I'll never forget him
Speaker 1: walking me across the picket lines in uh in New York.
Speaker 1: He knew that it was difficult if I had to
Speaker 1: do this to get to my dressing room. Now, we
Speaker 1: didn't run for that long. We managed to get the
Speaker 1: poster up in Sarti's for shows that closed quickly, but
Speaker 1: for I, you know, it was a two weeks or
Speaker 1: so in New York, and he would always he walked
Speaker 1: me in, and I thought that that was just a
Speaker 1: lovely gesture. Those days, I MDB didn't post everybody's age,
Speaker 1: and that's true. All the roles I played, I was
Speaker 1: playing twelve all the time, So I really seriously said
Speaker 1: most of my early roles with like a bandage wrapped
Speaker 1: around my chest. And uh, I did the same thing
Speaker 1: I had done us the Seduction of Joe tynan Um
Speaker 1: and I was playing Alan Alda's you know daughter, I
Speaker 1: was also playing twelve, So it was just the thing
Speaker 1: I did even in Holocaust. She ages in that too,
Speaker 1: But I start off playing like nine or something, So yeah,
Speaker 1: what is that experience like, being being asked to kind
Speaker 1: of play so much younger um for so long? Was it?
Speaker 1: I'm just so happy that you get an opportunity to work.
Speaker 1: You're like, you know, I tell that to my students
Speaker 1: all the time. Sheep, that door opens a crack, you
Speaker 1: gotta go barreling through it and then it changes throughout
Speaker 1: your life. Believe me, I am not playing twelve anymore,
Speaker 1: so you us, you know, and but at the time
Speaker 1: that's sort of what I was doing, and so there
Speaker 1: was some mistake about, you know, that I was still twelve,
Speaker 1: even though I've been twelve for maybe ten years. I
Speaker 1: want to mention here at the phenomenon that Blanche is describing. Well,
Speaker 1: it's great that actors are getting work, and it's very
Speaker 1: much a job where you need to seize the opportunities
Speaker 1: you're given. This falls neatly into a trend that still
Speaker 1: persists now and relates directly to Lolita adaptations. And I'm
Speaker 1: talking about the tendency to cast people in their twenties
Speaker 1: or older to represent teenagers or younger. So thank Riverdale,
Speaker 1: Think Greece, think really any TV show about teenagers. This
Speaker 1: isn't a slight to be actors at all. But this
Speaker 1: trend does condition us to think that underage characters look
Speaker 1: much more mature than they would in real life. As
Speaker 1: this pretends to Lolita, Most adaptations age Dolores Hayes up
Speaker 1: from twelve to fourteen at least, then cast an actress
Speaker 1: slightly older than that to play her, then style her
Speaker 1: to look older than that, and in many ways that
Speaker 1: makes sense, because putting an actual twelve year old on
Speaker 1: stage in that role is extremely dangerous. But this instinct
Speaker 1: and trend shouldn't be ignored and is something I'm going
Speaker 1: to touch on in our last episode as well. I
Speaker 1: always think of the movie Eighth Grade here, where se
Speaker 1: being an actor who is thirteen playing a thirteen year
Speaker 1: old character can be very jarring for audience members since
Speaker 1: we're just not used to pop culture realistically reflecting what
Speaker 1: a child of that age actually looks and sounds like.
Speaker 1: With Lolita especially, this creates a very complicated catch twenty two.
Speaker 1: This discussion is an absolute rabbit hole, and while I
Speaker 1: feel it is obviously safer and more ethical to cast
Speaker 1: an actor of Blanche Baker's age playing younger, I have
Speaker 1: to ask myself what does this normalize for an audience member?
Speaker 1: If we believe that she is fourteen, what does that
Speaker 1: normalize for an audience member who is fourteen? On top
Speaker 1: of that, that's not to say that being an adult
Speaker 1: at the time of playing Lolita exempt Baker from severe
Speaker 1: press harassment. It absolutely did not. Here's a little more
Speaker 1: of our interview. I was going to ask about about
Speaker 1: your mom as well of what had you kind of
Speaker 1: taken away from her experience and to be able to
Speaker 1: bring in, you know, experiences like these where you're being
Speaker 1: pushed back against for reasons I have nothing to do
Speaker 1: with you. She was the unhappy. It's at the height
Speaker 1: of her career. So, um, I was wary of it,
Speaker 1: and I fell into some of the traps of it.
Speaker 1: So you're swayed by what everybody says, and everybody thinks, uh,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be tough. Um. I did take a step
Speaker 1: back eventually from the business and you know, now much
Speaker 1: happier teaching and uh, you know working when I do
Speaker 1: work with a different point of view. Yeah. So and
Speaker 1: and this was kind of around the time of Lolita
Speaker 1: that you were kind of navigating that and figuring that out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I was thrust in the spotlight, you know, even
Speaker 1: when I didn't give permission for things. I remember they
Speaker 1: put a picture from the show in Playboy magazine after
Speaker 1: I had turned down an interview, so I was like,
Speaker 1: wait a second, yeah, very small Yeah, and then, um,
Speaker 1: you know, I just wanted to be taken seriously. I
Speaker 1: know there's a lot of there are some press photos
Speaker 1: and I was in a slip and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: but that was not actually part of it. When I
Speaker 1: was in a bathrobe and I and and I brought
Speaker 1: for the bathrobe at some point, but the audience just
Speaker 1: saw my back. So in the press photos that have
Speaker 1: the slip that wasn't actually on that didn't end up
Speaker 1: being on stage. No interesting from what I've seen. The
Speaker 1: show ran for a couple of weeks, Um after Boston previews.
Speaker 1: What was that switch from Boston to New York like
Speaker 1: that was the onslaught of publicity, So that was that
Speaker 1: was very difficult, um and um, you know, and I
Speaker 1: had to be very careful. I was a young girl.
Speaker 1: I didn't have a lot of money and stuff, and
Speaker 1: I was being followed after the show and stuff, and
Speaker 1: I had to have people meet me I were Remember,
Speaker 1: it was really not so pleasant that aspect once I
Speaker 1: was before I got on the stage and after I
Speaker 1: got off the stage. It really wasn't a heck of
Speaker 1: a lot of fun. I remember having to go to
Speaker 1: the police department with some guy who was like following me,
Speaker 1: and some guy was leaving had followed me and left
Speaker 1: things at my apartment building and oh yeah I moved,
Speaker 1: and oh yes, it was all sorts of crazy stuff.
Speaker 1: I feel like any time I went to a party,
Speaker 1: people were really looking at me, so I stopped going
Speaker 1: to parties. I really became more of a reck louse
Speaker 1: than you would imagine because I felt like I couldn't
Speaker 1: live up to what people expected. That was my own insanity,
Speaker 1: I guess um. But I felt like they would expect
Speaker 1: me to be prettier, expect me to be you know, sexy,
Speaker 1: or forget that I was an actress, and I was
Speaker 1: just very uncomfortable for a while in my own skin.
Speaker 1: It's worth mentioning Blanche Baker was said to have been
Speaker 1: amazing in this play, and that's saying a lot, because
Speaker 1: Lalita is not given much in the way of abstance
Speaker 1: to do by Albie, The New York Times said, quote,
Speaker 1: the critics were almost unanimous on one point. Blanche Baker
Speaker 1: wasn't on Genue, whose time had come unquote before the
Speaker 1: show was abruptly shut down. And it's interesting because when
Speaker 1: I read the details of the protesters to this production
Speaker 1: and where they were coming from, they were women who
Speaker 1: felt that the play was attempting to make light of
Speaker 1: child sex abuse. And I'm inclined to agree with that,
Speaker 1: but I don't see how making a young female star
Speaker 1: feel unsafe helps to prove that point. Also, hilariously, the
Speaker 1: protest group was called Women Against Pornography or whop. It
Speaker 1: just feels good to laugh. So Lolita does end up
Speaker 1: nearly forcing Blanche Baker out of the business out of
Speaker 1: sheer anxiety and frustration with the press. Where she benefits,
Speaker 1: of course, is by growing up witnessing her mother going
Speaker 1: through very similar experiences. So Blanche bounces back. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think I was very lucky because I did theater. I
Speaker 1: did Poor Little Lands and Paul Redney play in hand. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I did Sixteen Candles, which became sort of
Speaker 1: a cult classic, And here we are all these years later,
Speaker 1: and you know, I'm full time faculty at the New
Speaker 1: York Film Academy, and teaching brings me great happiness. So
Speaker 1: in the end, I feel like I had much more
Speaker 1: positive to take from it and was able to overcome, uh,
Speaker 1: that tsunami of press and fighting and all sorts of
Speaker 1: silly things that shouldn't really detract from the art. So
Speaker 1: that's Blanche Baker, and she's our Lolita of the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: which brings us to the fourth Lolita the last prominent
Speaker 1: one in pop culture canon Dominique Swain, who played Lolita
Speaker 1: in the Adrian Line movie adaptation. I've been trying for
Speaker 1: months to get ahold of Dominique to speak on this show,
Speaker 1: and it was not to be. But I'm how be
Speaker 1: the report that she's still working in movies today. She
Speaker 1: is the last of the mainstream Lowlida's in name put
Speaker 1: out into major pop culture, and there's a lot to
Speaker 1: be learned from her life and career trajectory so far.
Speaker 1: Dominique Swain was born in nineteen eighty in Malibu on
Speaker 1: the side of a freeway and began to work in
Speaker 1: the industry very young, though she maintained a fair amount
Speaker 1: of normalcy in going to school and balancing auditions as
Speaker 1: more of an extracurricular activity, at least at first. Her
Speaker 1: younger sister, Chelsea Swain, would later play one of the
Speaker 1: Lisbon sisters in Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides. In n
Speaker 1: so the family was no stranger to a gauzy lens
Speaker 1: of the late nineteen nineties being applied to an underage girl.
Speaker 1: Before Lolita, Dominique hadn't done much more than play the
Speaker 1: body double for McAuley Culkin's younger sister in The good
Speaker 1: Son In. According to interviews at the time, Dominique had
Speaker 1: stopped auditioning for commercials ad nauseum almost two years before
Speaker 1: when she was offered the audition for Adrian Lines Lolita.
Speaker 1: She auditioned, got it over twenty hundred other young actors,
Speaker 1: and became, as Line referred to her on set, My Lolita.
Speaker 1: It was her first role, and that's important. Now. I've
Speaker 1: rehashed a lot of Swain's experiences on set and in
Speaker 1: preparation for the role of Lolita in our episode on
Speaker 1: the movie, but by all accounts, she approached the role
Speaker 1: very confidently, often improvising inside of a scene. Swain seemed
Speaker 1: both full of energy and eager to please. I'll remind
Speaker 1: you of this moment inside of a chemistry test between
Speaker 1: her and Jeremy Irons. Now, a lot of the middleman
Speaker 1: like pop culture of the nine nineties are at play here.
Speaker 1: The production required that Swain and Iron's have a pillow
Speaker 1: between them in scenes where she sits on his lap,
Speaker 1: but there's photos from the set of Adrian Line regularly
Speaker 1: hugging and making physical contact with his lead star Dominique
Speaker 1: Swain could not thankfully appear nude in the movie, but
Speaker 1: she could appear in a skin tight, sheer body suit
Speaker 1: from a distance as if she's nude. There was also
Speaker 1: a running controversy on set with the cast and crew
Speaker 1: on whether Dominique was being coddled too much. Other crew
Speaker 1: members seem visibly uncomfortable with the subject matter and make
Speaker 1: excuses for it as they go. My friend experienced abuse
Speaker 1: as a child, and she's fine now. According to Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Kay's piece Lolita Comes Again from in Esquire magazine, Dominique
Speaker 1: Swain was high spirited and loved the attention that came
Speaker 1: with starring in a movie at fifteen. She once allegedly
Speaker 1: held up production a whole day because she didn't want
Speaker 1: her last scene to come. But shooting wraps and her
Speaker 1: performance in this movie is undeniable. While Lolita struggled through
Speaker 1: edits and couldn't find a distributor, Swain returned to Malibu
Speaker 1: High School and gets a role playing John Travolta's daughter
Speaker 1: in Face Soft. You know that famous movie where John
Speaker 1: Travolta and Nicolas Cage switched faces. Here's the setup of
Speaker 1: the scene. I'm about to show you they've just switched
Speaker 1: the faces. Travolta goes back home and immediately starts hitting
Speaker 1: on his teenage daughter played by Dominique Swain. So in
Speaker 1: this whole scene, she is in her underwear and the
Speaker 1: camera is panning up and down her body as John
Speaker 1: Travolta lears at her, I'll have to call you back.
Speaker 1: You're not respecting my boundaries. I'm coming in, Jane, Jamie.
Speaker 1: I don't think you heard me, Jamie. You've got something
Speaker 1: that I crave and it sounds bad, but trust me
Speaker 1: when I say it looks worse. So this part raises
Speaker 1: Swain's profile and she gets a big boost in publicity
Speaker 1: when Lolita is finally released in the US on the
Speaker 1: Showtime Network. During this press tour, she speaks eloquently on
Speaker 1: the topics that the book covers, even if those topics
Speaker 1: were not necessary really translated into the movie. For a
Speaker 1: few years after Lolita was buried in the US, Swaine
Speaker 1: appeared in a few sex driven rom coms. She plays
Speaker 1: the lead in Girl, about a teenager who decides she
Speaker 1: wants to be sexy, alongside Porsche de Rossi and Selma Blair,
Speaker 1: complete with the most thing ever a kissing between Swayne
Speaker 1: and Tara Reid, But within just two years of Lolita,
Speaker 1: she was rarely seen in a movie that didn't go
Speaker 1: straight to DVD, and in nearly all these movies, she
Speaker 1: plays a character whose storyline boils down to this. Either
Speaker 1: she is extremely sexualized from the first frame, or she's
Speaker 1: a character hell bent on losing her virginity, or her
Speaker 1: having sex in a movie triggers a tragic event or consequence.
Speaker 1: By the mid two thousand's, she was strictly in indie movies,
Speaker 1: then switched over to indie horror, where, like many before her,
Speaker 1: she gets a reputation as a scream queen that she
Speaker 1: holds onto to this day. She killed it in a
Speaker 1: small role in the movie Alpha Dog from two thous
Speaker 1: and six. But the last decade of Swain's career has
Speaker 1: brought mostly B movie titles. Titles like Boon, the Bounty Hunter,
Speaker 1: not The Overlord, Eminence Hill, not These at the Center
Speaker 1: of the Earth Camp be genre stuff that her performances
Speaker 1: are really good, and not the prestigious career that Lolita
Speaker 1: was supposed to have promised her an echo of all
Speaker 1: the Lolitas that came before her, there's more to it
Speaker 1: than her filmography dropping off in prestige projects pretty sharply.
Speaker 1: It has a lot to do with how she was
Speaker 1: received in the media and how the media framed her
Speaker 1: as a sexy party girl, as a little bit weird
Speaker 1: and encouraging her to appear naked. Swain has always been
Speaker 1: very much herself. She brought her pet Ferrett to the
Speaker 1: American premier of Lolita. She was known on the party
Speaker 1: scene in the early two thousand's, something she expanded on
Speaker 1: in a brief interview from two thousand one that calls
Speaker 1: her a reformed Hollywood party girl. I used to be
Speaker 1: crazy and just drink too much. The press kind of
Speaker 1: leaned into this sexualized partying image, and that's something that
Speaker 1: it's difficult to know how she felt about without actually
Speaker 1: talking to her. Swain is on social media and we'll
Speaker 1: do press junkets when a movie she's in is released,
Speaker 1: but she hasn't given an in depth interview about her
Speaker 1: life in years and years. I want to share some
Speaker 1: press quotes about Swain from when she was at the
Speaker 1: height of her teenage fame. Here in a piece where
Speaker 1: Dolores Hayes is described as the twelve year old nymphette
Speaker 1: who exchanges hand jobs for candy John Travolta saying to her,
Speaker 1: Jeremy Irons fake sex with her. Dominique Swain is America's
Speaker 1: least ordinary teenager. The marketing for Lolita, as well as
Speaker 1: how often she's presented sexually in the movie, certainly did
Speaker 1: a lot to shape Swain's image, just as Sue Lyon
Speaker 1: appearing in the heart shaped sunglasses shaped hers, just as
Speaker 1: sucking her thumb in a crib shaped Carol Baker's career,
Speaker 1: Swain was introduced to us as a seductress, not a
Speaker 1: squeaky clean kid the way that many fifteen year olds
Speaker 1: have been. She appeared on a number of magazine covers
Speaker 1: posing suggestively as Lolita when the movie was first released.
Speaker 1: She's licking her finger on the cover of Esquire. She's
Speaker 1: looking into the camera while Jeremy Irons kisses her hand
Speaker 1: on the cover of Viva. A little later in her career,
Speaker 1: she does a few bikini covers for for Him magazine.
Speaker 1: When she's twenty, the headline easy Tiger, Dominique Swain is
Speaker 1: on the Loose. She then became the youngest person ever
Speaker 1: to pose naked for Peter in two thousand one, at
Speaker 1: the age of twenty one, looking over her shoulder in
Speaker 1: a classroom scene, She's written I'd rather go naked than
Speaker 1: where for, over and over on the blackboard Bart Simpson style. Again,
Speaker 1: I'm not shaming her for doing this at all. What
Speaker 1: I'm trying to comment on is how the media was
Speaker 1: framing this young actor. Here's an interview she did at
Speaker 1: the time of the petis bread. Are people reacting to
Speaker 1: the the poster um? Not really in the way that
Speaker 1: one might hope. Some of my some of my my
Speaker 1: and my boyfriend's mutual friends called and um and they
Speaker 1: were like, oh, yeah, your girlfriend's hot. How did you
Speaker 1: get her exactly? Okay, Um, you know what. It's been
Speaker 1: cute talking, but let's go check out the poster. Okay.
Speaker 1: This is an interview that's available on YouTube, and the
Speaker 1: comments on these interviews, regardless of whether the interview is
Speaker 1: from or two eighteen, always say lolita or some weird
Speaker 1: shit like this. Yuck. The audience is so creepy, like
Speaker 1: yelling and howling at her. She is kind of flirtatious, though.
Speaker 1: Here's another interview from two thousand two where Dominique jumps
Speaker 1: into the host's arms at the beginning of the interview,
Speaker 1: and describes her own personality in the context of auditioning
Speaker 1: for Lolita they were casting in l A, Okay, I
Speaker 1: was I was like trying out for Barbie Doll commercials
Speaker 1: when I was twelve years old and it wasn't working out. Um,
Speaker 1: I have a little bit too much enthusiasm. Even her
Speaker 1: commercial launching yourself with at the auditions, you know it
Speaker 1: doesn't go over very well. Um, they don't think that
Speaker 1: they have to catch you. And then here's how she
Speaker 1: describes the parts that she was getting at this time,
Speaker 1: this being a reference to two thousand two's New Best Friend. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I play this like sex crazed seventeen year old maniac.
Speaker 1: So here's a comment from below this video. She is flirty,
Speaker 1: just like Lolita. I don't know how Dominique Swain feels
Speaker 1: about this portion of her life now, but she was
Speaker 1: very much a contemporary of the teen dream squad of
Speaker 1: the nineties that I would loop in. Actors like Alicia Silverstone,
Speaker 1: Drew Barrymore, gentlem Alone, Rose McGowan, terror Read, Selma Blair,
Speaker 1: Christina Ricchie, Natalie Portman, and on and on and Dominique
Speaker 1: Swain deserved a career of that caliber. But I'm arguing
Speaker 1: here that being lolitified as an introduction to public life
Speaker 1: is a massive thing to get out from underneath. So
Speaker 1: and continues on to be a genre film actress and
Speaker 1: continues to work today. Her co star Jeremy Irons hasn't
Speaker 1: wanted for work since. Granted, he was an established actor
Speaker 1: when he took the role of Humbert Humbert, but consider
Speaker 1: that he has had multiple instances of saying very offensive
Speaker 1: things about women and the queer community that we're barely
Speaker 1: reported on, and he's continued to work as the ultimate
Speaker 1: villain uninterrupted, most recently being nominated for his work in Watchman.
Speaker 1: Nor did James Mason struggle to find work after Lolita
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty two. He was in control of his
Speaker 1: career to a much greater extent. He was already established.
Speaker 1: He was not being aggressively pursued by the person who
Speaker 1: decided what he was doing with his life, as happened
Speaker 1: with Lyon. Donald Sutherland didn't suffer the bout of stalking
Speaker 1: and pressed backlash from having been in Lolita that Blanche
Speaker 1: Baker did. John Neville, who played Humbert in Lolita, my
Speaker 1: love was never faced with the choice of exposing himself
Speaker 1: on stage or losing his job. There is always an
Speaker 1: unfair burden put on the Lolita in the equation, which
Speaker 1: is really just an extension of how our culture treats
Speaker 1: the character of Dolores Hayes. Dominique Swain, like Sue Lyon,
Speaker 1: did have a wild youth and generated the occasional exploitative
Speaker 1: TMZ headline, but neither of them were given the amount
Speaker 1: of grace that their male co stars would have been.
Speaker 1: Anytime Swain has come up in the news for anything
Speaker 1: good or bad, the lead is Lolita actress Dominique Swain,
Speaker 1: attaching a stigma to her name before you even know
Speaker 1: what the story is about. Yes, Lolita is Swain's most
Speaker 1: famous role, but as we know from the Long Island
Speaker 1: Lolita case, the term Lolita is generally applied to young
Speaker 1: women who we are supposed to be thinking of as devious.
Speaker 1: Going off of her performance in Lolita alone, Dominique Swain
Speaker 1: is a massively talented person and the last Lolita did
Speaker 1: not get a fair shot. The good news is that
Speaker 1: she is well and happy, and it's not too late
Speaker 1: to give her the types of parts she's proven she
Speaker 1: could handle since she was fourteen. One last quick thing here,
Speaker 1: Dominique went on a show called Celebrity Ghost Stories in
Speaker 1: the two thousand's and she did give this iconic quote,
Speaker 1: It's one thing to have a ghost, it's entirely another
Speaker 1: thing to have a ghost who hates women and maybe
Speaker 1: trying to kill you. And um, I'm never gonna stop
Speaker 1: quoting that. That is incredible. And then after Dominique swain,
Speaker 1: no more Lolita's. Except that's not exactly true, is it.
Speaker 1: We've talked about Millie Bobby Brown having the term applied
Speaker 1: to her just three years ago. At the beginning of
Speaker 1: this episode, Natalie Portman had this label of playing lolita's,
Speaker 1: the subtext being the underage fixation of adult male desires
Speaker 1: in her early roles in the nineties. Alio was treated
Speaker 1: this way at the beginning of her fame with age
Speaker 1: Ain't Nothing but a number. Brooke Shields was treated like
Speaker 1: a lolita in the seventies when she was allowed to
Speaker 1: pose for Playboy Naked at ten years old. Britney Spears
Speaker 1: had the lolita label applied to her because of how
Speaker 1: she was styled at the height of her early fame.
Speaker 1: Both Dakota and l Fanning have started in Lolita themed
Speaker 1: perfume shoots while underage, and Dakota Fanning started in a
Speaker 1: movie where her character is brutally raped when she was twelve.
Speaker 1: Shirley Temple was styled as if she were stripping for
Speaker 1: adult male stars in movies when she was under ten
Speaker 1: years old. And let's be honest, the reason that I'm
Speaker 1: using these examples is because you know who these actors
Speaker 1: are and their careers, if not their lives, were able
Speaker 1: to overcome the stigma applied to them by this logic,
Speaker 1: they're the lucky ones, and that's not the norm. The
Speaker 1: Sioue lions of the world don't get the benefit of that.
Speaker 1: So just because the fury of a new Lolita adaptation
Speaker 1: hasn't reached the mainstream in any meaningful way in nearly
Speaker 1: twenty five years, doesn't mean that the story and the
Speaker 1: stigma and the cultural myth assigned to its title character,
Speaker 1: a character who never really existed, doesn't still exist. It's
Speaker 1: very much here in the way that we talk about abuse,
Speaker 1: in the way that we misabuse in communities where the
Speaker 1: story is well remembered, and in callous conversations where the
Speaker 1: term Lolita is deployed in place of child. I think
Speaker 1: deserved and is to blame for the abuse they suffered.
Speaker 1: So what do we do about that? Opinions vary the
Speaker 1: closer I've studied this work, and I've studied it very closely.
Speaker 1: I don't think the answer is to pretend that Lolita
Speaker 1: never happened and hope that the world follows suit, because
Speaker 1: I definitely won't, and I think it's almost a disservice
Speaker 1: to not attempt to face the monster that our culture
Speaker 1: has created, and that whether we realize it or not,
Speaker 1: we have probably been complicit in at some point. So
Speaker 1: many people have avoided knowing the truth of the text
Speaker 1: because of this very flawed cultural narrative that hasn't just
Speaker 1: misled us, it has harmed people, and avoiding that reality
Speaker 1: has done nothing to combat it. Who we have yet
Speaker 1: to see, and who it is necessary that we see,
Speaker 1: is Dolores Hayes. So no, there is no Lolita curse.
Speaker 1: The lives of the four Lolitas I described to you
Speaker 1: today are all very different. Their commonalities lie in being
Speaker 1: sexualized and overblown by the media and the public, and
Speaker 1: many of them dealing with abuse before and after taking
Speaker 1: the role. This is not something exclusive to the role
Speaker 1: of Lolita. It's the story of many, many young entertainers
Speaker 1: thrust into the spotlight as a sex object without any protection.
Speaker 1: Next week is the last episode of this show, and
Speaker 1: it's going to be a lot of things. It's going
Speaker 1: to be people who I've spoken to throughout this series
Speaker 1: speaking on their thoughts on the future of Lolita. It
Speaker 1: will be conversations with female and non binary filmmakers I
Speaker 1: really love on what they think is missing in pop
Speaker 1: media addressing child sex abuse. It's a look at movies
Speaker 1: that have been made about child sex abuse in the
Speaker 1: last fifteen years, and it's me figuring out what the
Speaker 1: funk to do with everything we've learned here. So if
Speaker 1: you've been with me this far, thank you so much,
Speaker 1: and let's see where all this lands next week on
Speaker 1: Lolita Podcast. It to Podcast is an I Heart Radio production.
Speaker 1: It is written and hosted by me Jamie Loftus, produced
Speaker 1: by Sophie Lichtman, beth Ann Macoluso, Miles Gray, and Jack O'Brien.
Speaker 1: It is edited by Isaac Taylor. Music is from Zoe
Speaker 1: Blade and our theme is from Brad Dickert. My guest
Speaker 1: voices this week are Julia Claire on A host nie A,
Speaker 1: Sophie Lichtman, Daniel Goodman, Miles Gray, and Isaac Taylor. See
Speaker 1: you next week.