CURSED BY LOLITA
Aged 14, she was plucked from obscurity to play the notorious child temptress. The result? A car crash life with drug problems, five marriages (one to a convicted murderer) and a brother said to have killed himself through shame. No wonder Sue Lyon, who died last week, always said she was . . .
ON the poster for the film that made her notorious, she peers over heart- shaped sunglasses while sucking a red lollipop. the caption provocatively asks: ‘how did they ever make a movie of Lolita?’
the answer, of course, is that they found Sue Lyon. One of the few actors in hollywood history not allowed to attend her own film premiere, she was just 14 when she was hailed as ‘the perfect nymphet’, the ideal schoolgirl to play the title role in Vladimir Nabokov’s scandalous story of a middle-aged man sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old.
It was a deeply dubious distinction that, by her own admission, would ‘destroy’ her life.
Lyon’s death at 73 was announced last week by a friend who said she had been in failing health for some time.
In fact, she disappeared from public view decades earlier. though she notched up two dozen film and tV credits in a career from 1959 to 1980, she was famous for only one of them — and it turned out to be a poisoned chalice.
When the celebrated director Stanley Kubrick plucked her from obscurity over some 800 hopefuls for his 1962 film, it certainly was a beginning — but not of the glittering career that everyone predicted. Instead, it was the start of a descent into depression, drugs and a string of failed marriages, including one to a convicted murderer.
Many female child actresses (such as Shirley temple, Judy Garland) have been damaged by unwittingly becoming underage sex objects. In the case of 14-year-old Sue Lyon, the attention was actively fostered by hollywood.
It was Nabokov who said he thought her ‘the perfect nymphet’ (a word he’d coined in his 1955 novel). Kubrick, meanwhile, described her as ‘a one-in-a-million find’ and ‘mesmerising’.
THE director — who went on to make Dr Strangelove and the Shining — added: ‘From the first, she was interesting to watch. even in the way she walked in for her interview, casually sat down, walked out. She was cool and non-giggly. She was enigmatic without being dull. She could keep people guessing about how much Lolita knew about life.’
In fact, his Lolita wasn’t allowed to be too much of an ingenue. Constrained by the industry’s moralistic ‘ production code’ and religious campaigners, hollywood shrank from depicting Dolores ‘Lolita’ haze quite as young as Nabokov had made her in his novel.
to avoid trouble with film censors, Kubrick chose Lyon — 5ft 3in tall — because she looked older than 12. Nor was she flat-chested, as in the book. however, he also made her markedly more flirtatious as she provided the love interest for english academic humbert humbert, played by 53-year-old James Mason.
But Lyon was hardly well-cast as a sexually-aware provocatrice. the youngest of five children born in Iowa, her father died when she a baby, forcing her mother to find work in a hospital.
Sue was 11 when her mother pushed her into child modelling to supplement the family’s meagre finances. Fresh-faced and with her hair dyed blonde, she got work as a catalogue model and in small tV parts.
that said, she led a relatively sheltered life. her mother was furious when she discovered that a childhood friend of Sue, Michelle Gilliam (later Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas pop group) had sneaked her daughter a copy of Lolita, which was widely banned. Lyon, who had no acting training, claimed she auditioned for Lolita as a ‘lark’.
When she got the part, her mother asked her pastor if her daughter should accept the controversial role. Strange to report, the priest reportedly encouraged her to say yes. In June 1962 — aged 14 — Lyon signed a seven-year contract, worth $78,000 a year.
Lolita was filmed in London secretly due to its difficult subject matter and Lyon was chaperoned by her mother.
In the UK, the film was rated X and off-limits to under-16s. too young to attend the premiere, Lyon was photographed sipping a soft drink.
however, she was allowed into the Oscars and, while Lolita failed to win any academy awards, Lyon became a huge overnight star before winning a Golden Globe for Most Promising Female Newcomer.
the girl who only a few months earlier boasted that she could ‘ cook, clean and sew’ now revealed she had the same hairdresser and clothes designer as the First Lady, Jackie Kennedy.
‘I’m not worried about ever being out of work again,’ she trilled, adding that her biggest ambition was to get married and have lots of children.
Some critics accused the film of turning paedophilia into a joke. Lyon played down the controversy. It wasn’t as if she’d had to sleep with her ‘old man’ co- star, she reasoned naively. But in later life Lyon wouldn’t be nearly so charitable towards the film that made her famous. her life soon span out of control as she grew frustrated with the public’s apparent inability to separate her from the teenage temptress she played.
Lyon would later claim that when she was 16 she started to suffer from bouts of severe depression, which in turn led to drug abuse, as she saw her ambitions start to wither.
In 1963, she began filming her next big film, an adaptation of the tennessee Williams play the Night Of the Iguana, in Mexico. She again played a seductive teenager, this time to a defrocked priest played by Richard Burton.
the production was fraught: Burton brought his future wife, elizabeth taylor, to the set. Lyon was accompanied by her mother and Lyon’s boyfriend,
Hampton Fancher. A former flamenco dancer and street thief, he later wrote the screenplay for sci-fi classic Blade Runner.
Although Lyon had only just turned 17, she drew attention from local Mexican men while Fancher interfered so much with filming that he was banned from the set.
LYON found Burton hard work, complaining that he bullied Taylor and drank so much at night that next morning the ‘alcohol literally oozed out of his pores’. He ‘gave off a terrible odour — playing a scene with him could be most unpleasant’.
Fancher later recalled how a former girlfriend had showed him an advert for Lolita, the one with Lyon sucking on a lollipop, and told him: ‘ Here’s your next wife.’
He added: ‘ And I laughed — because I knew it was true. In my mind I said, you’re right that’s my next wife, I’d bet everything.’
He was correct. Engineering a meeting with Lyon over dinner, they married months later in September 1963. She was 17, he was 25 and already had a six-year-old son.
‘It was totally wrong,’ Fancher recalled. ‘ She was in a horrible situation, a kid who was expected to grow up in all kinds of ways she couldn’t manage. I was an angry young **** and chose her because of a fantasy. And I was vilified. But I probably deserved it.’
The marriage ended in a divorce court just 14 months later, with Lyon citing ‘ mental cruelty’. She told the judge that ‘I was alone and miserable’ most of the time.
She later said it had been ‘a difficult year’, the worst part of which was losing her brother, James Michael
Lyon, 20, who was found dead in a car during a trip to Mexico.
Although he was a diabetic, police believed he’d died from an overdose, and rumours spread that he’d committed suicide out of shame over his sister’s Lolita role. When a TV interviewer mentioned it, Lyon walked out in disgust.
night of The Iguana was a box office hit but the critics were not kind to Lyon, damning her acting as ‘painfully awkward’.
Further family tragedy came in 1965 when Lyon and her mother were badly injured in a car crash. The actress suffered serious head, neck and back injuries that meant she had to periodically use a wheelchair for two years.
Her next film, 7 Women, directed by John Ford, saw her in a complete U-turn from the role that made her famous, this time playing a missionary. But nothing she did could re-capture her success with Lolita. other screen appearances included the 1967 thriller Tony Rome with Frank Sinatra, and the 1971 drama Evel Knievel, about the motorcycle daredevil.
By the time Lyon made her last film, the 1980 horror flick Alligator, she was reduced to playing an unnamed TV reporter.
In 1971, she married Roland Harrison, a black photographer and football coach who had five children from a previous marriage.
Mixed-race marriages were still controversial in the U.S. and the uproar prompted them to move to Spain. She was three months pregnant with their daughter, nona, when they split the following year. She later blamed racism among other problems.
Lyon had nobody to blame but herself for the hoo-ha over her next marriage just a year later, however.
As acting work dried up, she became a voluntary social worker and got to know a convicted murderer and robber named Gary ‘Cotton’ Adamson in 1973.
Unfortunately for their romance, he was serving a 40-year sentence at the Colorado State Penitentiary. They married in prison, with Lyon veiled and dressed in white.
She campaigned for prison reform and applied unsuccessfully for conjugal rights with her husband.
Lyon met him while working as a volunteer in the public defender’s office. She assumed he had been wrongly convicted until he broke out of prison and was captured in a shoot-out with police after he’d robbed a bank.
Lyon, by now working as a nightclub waitress in Denver, divorced him, but later claimed she’d been pressured into doing so by a censorious film industry.
By 1980, her acting work was so sporadic that she was working variously as a men’s clothing shop assistant, secretary, receptionist and teacher’s assistant.
SHE WAS diagnosed as a manic depressive and prescribed lithium. Her relationship with daughter nona reportedly disintegrated.
As a child, said nona, she’d had to care for her mother, who was bedridden for months, only for Lyon to throw her out of the family home when nona was 13.
A fourth marriage to one Edward Weathers in 1983 lasted just a year and, almost immediately afterwards, she married Richard Rudman, a radio engineer.
The couple retreated to a life of obscurity in a small cottage in the Hollywood Hills. Lyon changed her name and rarely left her home, which was guarded by a high fence and a rottweiler.
She put on weight and, with her lank hair and thick spectacles, became unrecognisable from her Lolita heyday. But she said Rudman had ‘given me the closest thing to a normal life’. He in turn said she had ‘finally found peace and wants to keep it that way’, adding: ‘She never wants to hear the name Lolita again.’
The depth of her anger emerged in 1995 when British director Adrian Lyne started work on a new Lolita film starring Jeremy Irons. In a rare interview, Lyon said that playing the schoolgirl subject of an older man’s paedophile fantasies ruined her life.
‘My destruction as a person dates from that movie,’ she said. ‘Lolita exposed me to temptations no girl of that age should undergo. I defy any pretty girl who is rocketed to stardom at 14 in a sex nymphet role to stay on an even keel.’
And Sue Lyon — who fled the spotlight 40 years ago — was surely one of rapacious Hollywood’s most inevitable victims.