“No, no, no,” Lawford said, leaning back in his chair and lighting a cigarette. “Not tonight. When we’re all back in Los Angeles. I’ll pick you up and we can drive there together—strength in numbers. Frank respects you, and it will be over quick, then we can go have a good time.”

Charlie thought about it. He didn’t really have to do this. Since December, he’d been on a mission he had no desire to carry out, one a different Kennedy was forcing him to undertake. And now this? There was nothing appealing about the proposition.

“I’m sorry, Peter,” he said, “I’m afraid I have some business I need to attend to that day.”

“What day?” Lawford asked, shocked.

“Any,” Charlie said. “Any day.”

Clearly not unfamiliar with hitting the limits of his charm, Lawford looked sideways at Charlie. “Okay, friend, tell me what you’d like in exchange.”

Charlie scratched his head. “There is literally nothing you have that I want,” he said. He looked around the room for his wife, finally spotted her absorbed in conversation with Janet Leigh. And then he had an idea.

“Well, actually, there is something I’d like from you,” Charlie said. “But you cannot tell anyone—not even Frank.”

Chapter Eighteen

Los Angeles, California

March 1962

“We have three young daughters ourselves, so I feel strongly about protecting children from material intended only for mature audiences,” Stanley Kubrick told Charlotte Goode, who raised a skeptical eyebrow. “That said, when Nabokov’s novel came out, I knew I had to bring it to the screen.”

After days of having her calls go unreturned, Margaret had found Goode at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre at a film premiere, on the wrong side of the rope blocking off the red carpet. She didn’t want to interrupt her work, so she stood next to her quietly as she talked with Kubrick.

“But didn’t you shoot the film in England to escape American censors?” Goode asked.

Kubrick looked to his right, hoping someone would rescue him, but alas, the MGM public relations escorts were tending to the needs of Peter Sellers, James Mason, and Sue Lyon, the teenager who played the eponymous nymphet. The paparazzi and fans called out to her by the name of her character. “Lolita!” they cried. “Lolita! Over here!” The actress swiveled seductively and it broke Margaret’s heart. A teenage girl given so much immediate short-term fame in exchange for unnamed sacrifices was just plain wrong. It made Margaret wonder where Violet was and whether Goode would ever be of any help. She kept asking, and Goode kept saying she hadn’t found anything yet.

“No,” Kubrick said. “Shooting it over there was more about control. It’s nice to have the studio an ocean away.”

“What were you worried about them controlling?” Goode asked. “The degree to which you put a twelve-year-old girl in perverted situations?”