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