"...most male designers have never broken the umbilical cord and what they design is linked to their relationship with their mother...."

But maybe you agree with David Thomson of the New Republic, who in the December 27, 1993 review of the book Hollywood on the Couch: A Candid Look at the Overheated Love Affair Between Psychiatrists and Moviemakers queries:

"So it is easy to echo Nabokov's scorn for the 'Viennese Quack.' Yet is not Lolita compelling because of its pursuit of a taboo? And don't we know that 'the first little throb' of Lolita crept up on Nabokov in 1939 with the novel The Enchanter? Does the fact that Woody Allen made a fool of himself, and victims of a few people, disqualify the marvels of Radio Days and The Purple Rose of Cairo? Don't we thrive, rather, on such contradictions?"

"...explains in the rawest terms how Woody Allen's off- screen dalliance with Soon-Yi Farrow is but a blatant imitation of art, specifically Nabokov's Lolita. He then furnishes a list with hysterical commentary, of arty films that warn older men not to mess around with teenyboppers."

In this book it is claimed, without the necessity for supporting evidence, that Charlie Chaplin had a 14-year-old mistress named Lilita Grey who served as the original for Nabokov's Lolita.

The reviewer describes this book as:

"A benchmark in the art of paste-pot bio--and winner of the Plan Nine from Outer Space Award as the worst movie book ever written."

"...a tiny, bald man with black-rimmed Mr Magoo spectacles ... motivated by nothing more complicated than a love of deal-making, a sport at which he was an expert. He was a compelling combination of a street hustler and a charming, conspiratorial, very refined friend."

"....books and movies were bought and sold on impulse over vintage champagne and caviar."

Mr. Lazar was a strange man--he was terrified of germs. We are offered an anecdote illustrating this fact:

"He was once stranded in a gentleman's lavatory in Las Vegas with Howard Hughes, who had a similar phobia. Both men were waiting for someone else to come in, so that they could leave. Neither would touch the door handle."

"Cole Porter, Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra, Walter Mathau, James Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Nicholson, Michael Caine, and ... Richard Nixon."

"encouraged her to read Nabokov's Lolita when [she] was of an age that allowed [her] to identify with Lolita."

"[He] would have said it was an important piece of literature that's about a number of other things than what it's supposed to be on the surface."

"(the) choreographer to the great," the "elegance and passion" of his latest work showing him "as dazzlingly a man of the theater as ever. It is the sheer craft, the mastery of means, that alone tell Petit's age and experience: no young choreographer today could be as daring, and tread the creative high wire with such aplomb."

"Petit's dramatic taste has often seemed haunted by death, and never more frankly so than in Camera Obscura which closes the bill. This is a trio whose emotional situation was sparked off by Nabokov's novel Laughter in the Dark. Petit subtitles it 'Love is Blind,' and the love of the wealthy Albinus (Patrick Dupond) for a sluttish cinema usherette, Margot (Marie Claude Pietraalla), is blind in its obsession, as in the fact that he is deprived of sight after a car accident. Albinus becomes aware of Margot's passion for the youn Rex (Nicolas Le Riche). He seeks to shoot him but is instead shot by Margot.

It is not his grubby narrative that occupies Petit, but its inner world of sexual obsession. To convey it, the choreography becomes more frank, more greedily sensual, than anything I have seen from him before, the dramatic scheme more allusive and more potent. The score, assembled from Schoenberg piano works, is ideally resonant. Performances, like the feelings they convey, are incandescent: Pietragella, presented as irresistible flesh is superb. Dupond catches all Albinus' sexual hunger; Le Riche admirably shows Rex's luscious physical allure as well as his miserable lack of courage."

In closing, a quick citation to an article that may not appear in the usual literary sources:

Feeney, Ann. "Lolita and Censorship: A Case Study," Reference Services Review 21:(1992), pp. 67-74, 90.

While nothing new for the Nabokov scholar is uncovered, and a comparison between Ice T and Nabokov is perhaps unwelcome, nevertheless, the article provides an excellent introduction to the undergraduate interested in intellectual and artistic freedom. The annotated bibliography directs the reader to sources ranging from Boyd's Vladimir Nabokov: the American Years to the Jean Kerr "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" parody of a Ladies Home Journal column in which Lolita and Humbert's relations are explored.