Goodbye, Lolita

December 26, 2019. Sue Lyon dies at 73. We all remember her as Lolita. She's one of those actresses who became the role and the role became her. 
According to her good friend, Phil Syracopoulous, Ms. Lyon's health had been in decline for some time.


"Lyon’s followup to Lolita was a co-starring role opposite Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr in the John Huston-directed 1964 feature The Night Of the Iguana. She went on to appear in two dozen movies and TV shows, Tony Rome and 7 Women. Her last screen credit was the 1980 horror movie Alligator." Evil Knievel notably."

"Before Stanley Kubrick’s covergirl in heart-shaped glasses made eyes at movie-goers and readers alike, Vladimir Nabokov had his own intentions for the cover of Lolita: “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.”
I remember Sue Lyon.

She made her mark on me, too. So much so, Lolita is memorialized in my book, Jackson in the chapter, "Eudora." My own Lolita, Jody Luther, remembers her face-to-face meeting with Eudora Welty.

"I was a little bit late to meet Melvin at the library, but I stood outside looking at the place anyway. It was far different from Tyrrell which was a strange Romanesque and Victorian Gothic building. The Jackson Library was gray and industrial. The building featured so many huge sunken glass windows, I couldn’t count them all. Each recessed facade was framed by its own balcony ledge. It reminded me of Beaumont High, prison-like, but with outer space mixed in. 

Right at that very instant, I ran into a lady who was exiting the building. She

dropped a big stack of books that went everywhere. I bent down to help her retrieve them and tried to apologize. That I remember. But, even more memorable was the lady. I was squatted down on the sidewalk with Eudora Welty.
 She was even taller in real life than the pictures in her books. She was wearing a housedress, simple to the extreme and a day coat.  On her, the clothes looked so elegant, like what ladies wore in black and white photographs I’d seen of New York City people.

I tried to apologize and she just laughed. Like a regular person. Here I was standing on the street with Eudora Welty and it could have been anybody. The breeze blew a lock of her short curly hair and she waved it away like it was bothering her. For that one special moment, we looked at each other the way you look at somebody and know you’re face to face with the same. It felt strange, like going through someone’s dresser drawers, but even more private. She seemed like the kind of person with whom you could sit and enjoy the quiet of the day as the colors change and not even have to talk. Like a blood harmony.
One of the books she had dropped was Lolita. That surprised me. I hadn’t read it, but I had seen the movie with Peter Sellers. Both our hands rested on the book. The cover was a modern art picture of a girl in a black bikini. The girl was kneeling and there were green jungle plants all around her. An image of a man stood and watched her. He held his hat in the painting and his dressy suit looked out of place. For a second, our hands touched. She had very long arms, Miss Welty did. She saw me looking at the book and for just a moment she smiled like

it was our secret.

I wanted to ask her so many things. I wanted to tell her I was a writer, too, but I was afraid. I knew my stories weren’t good enough to tell her or to tell anyone. I wished I was a better writer so I could talk to her, but I couldn’t even think of anything to say. I wondered if she was friends with other writers. Did she know Harper Lee? Then, and I’m not even sure it really happened or if it was only my imagination, she said to me, “You must always write for it.” She looked right into my eyes and I was mesmerized, like when something exotic happens to you.

I wanted to ask her what she meant. Did she ever come to a dark spot where she couldn’t think of the words? Did she like living in Jackson? She must since she lived there her whole life. How did she think of things to write about?

My momentary brush with a literatus was over as soon as it started. Before she was gone, she smiled at me like she knew something about me, something secret. I found out later that she lived in the same neighborhood we lived in and shopped at the same Jitney Jungle. I would walk by her house and look for her, but I never saw her again. Just her garden chair. There must have been a thousand colors of camellias. And her roses."

Goodbye, Sue Lyon.

You made a lasting impression.