This is perhaps too obvious a fact not to have been noticed before, but it was news to me.

I just read in David Thomson's splendid "The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood" that in 1924 Charlie Chaplin married a 16-year-old girl named Lolita MacMurray, whose name was later changed to Lita Grey. The marriage was a brief and insignificant blip on the Chaplin romantic radar screen -- he didn't even mention her in his autobiography -- but could Nabokov been aware, some 30 years later? Or is this simply a fascinating coincidence?

Rodney Welch

Columbia, SC