The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (21 page)

Traveling on the same train was Bill Oliver, a pitchman for wrestling matches, circuses, and carnivals whom Myer had hired as the twins’ advanceman. Oliver was slight of frame, short, and had thinning, hay-colored hair. He wore two-toned shoes and reeked of drugstore cologne, but he had a certain raffish appeal. The train had hardly traveled as far as San Antonio’s outer limit when Oliver positioned himself across the aisle from the twins and started working his charm. After years of seducing roadhouse waitresses, he had honed his powers of persuasion to a high art. His words oozed like taffy from a confectioner’s machine. Still new to the experience of being wooed, Daisy and Violet were easily intrigued. By the time the train reached the East, both were lovestruck. Bill Oliver was about forty, twice the twins’ age. He also had a wife in Kansas City, Missouri. But Oliver didn’t regard this as an impediment to cultivating additional relationships, especially when he was traveling.

At the time Myer hired Oliver, he spelled out what would be expected of his employee: Oliver would always be sent well ahead of the twins on the vaudeville circuit, arranging for their hotel accommodations and lining up publicity and advertising in the papers. Oliver more or less carried out all these assignments, but apparently he believed his job permitted him the freedom to continue his
advances on Daisy and Violet. Rather than being 50 miles up the train tracks in, say, Poughkeepsie when the San Antonio Siamese Twins were playing in Yonkers, most nights he could be found in the same hotel room in which the stars were staying. Needless to say, 1,500 or 2,000 miles away in San Antonio, Myer had no knowledge of these bunking arrangements.

The naïve, completely inexperienced twins were willing, at least at first, to receive their amorous nocturnal caller in a spirit of sharing. But it didn’t last. As each grew more infatuated with Oliver, they became so jealous of one another that sometimes they didn’t exchange words for days. As for Oliver, he relished having the two compete for his attention. His wife Mildred would later provide this perspective: “They both loved him. They showered him with lavish gifts—jewelry, a Reo motor car, and clothes. William had so many clothes they filled up all the closet space.”
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Mildred was a waitress who reported daily to her job at a Kansas City diner while her husband was on the road. She learned of the
ménage à trois
when, on one of Oliver’s rare and quick visits home, she went through his bags. Inside, she found a thick sheaf of perfume-scented letters in which, Mildred said, both sisters “were pouring out their love.” When she confronted her husband with the incriminating evidence, Mrs. Oliver said, “he expressed no remorse.” Instead he told Mildred that he was no longer attracted to her because he now “cared for the twins, and they for him.”
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As strained as the relationship between Daisy and Violet sometimes became over Oliver’s attention, there were periods when they declared a truce so they could present a united front in eliminating their competition. They believed that Margaret Moore, a young pianist whom Myer had hired as the sisters’ road accompanist, was one of Oliver’s conquests. There were nights when Oliver knocked on Miss Moore’s hotel room door before moving on to the Hiltons’ room.
On most of his visits to Margaret’s room, he carried flowers, boxes of chocolate, and other small gifts that had been purchased with the allowance the twins gave him. Daisy and Violet raged whenever they learned that Oliver made a stopover in Miss Moore’s room before coming home to theirs. They would pelt him with fusillades of jeweled cuff links, boxed argyle sweaters, satin pajamas, and other expensive articles they had presented to him as gifts, until he declared his contrition.

The twins’ dust-ups with their shared suitor were almost always followed by lovemaking and then drinks and dinner at the best club in town. Oliver always appeared properly chastened after these upsets and vowed he would never again stray. His pledges, however, usually ran no longer than one-dollar watches. He continued to arrange assignations with the cigarette girls, secretaries, and waitresses he met in the course of making his rounds as an advance man. Daisy and Violet couldn’t remove all the targets of Oliver’s roving eye but were able to dispatch the piano accompanist. They wired Myer in San Antonio, telling him that Miss Moore was bumbling and altogether graceless as a pianist and that for artistic reasons, they could not go on working with her. Myer accepted the complaint at face value. He fired Miss Moore and sent in a replacement, a male pianist.

At the start of the 1928 vaudeville season Daisy and Violet discovered that everything in the business had changed. Two years earlier, the first talking pictures started being screened to large audiences. In their earliest incarnation, the new movies were crude affairs, blaring out dialogue and music to the audiences for a few minutes and then falling silent for the next half hour. But because of their novelty—and because people in even the smallest towns could now not only see, but hear such big stars as Al Jolson—the talkies became an immediate sensation. Hundreds of vaudeville theaters around the country
immediately became wired for sound. They began drastically cutting their offerings of live entertainment or did away with it altogether. Thousands of jugglers, dog trainers, ventriloquists, and buck-and-wing dancers were banished to oblivion. After decades of being the most popular form of entertainment in America, vaudeville was dying.

Because they possessed household names, Daisy and Violet were not among the vaudevillians who were immediately finished off, but even their engagements began to decline. For the first time in years, they were sometimes unemployed for stretches of as long as two or three weeks. And because fewer theaters were still presenting live entertainment, the twins were now only able to command $400 or $500 a week compared with the $4,000 a week they had been earning only the season before. Myer Myers, still back at the ranch in San Antonio, was panicking at the sharp drop in the twins’ earnings.

As devastating an impact as the talkies were having on the twins’ employability, the new motion pictures weren’t the only reason for the drastic fall-off in the Hiltons’ bookings and pay. Three years earlier when Myer had fired Terry Turner, the producer, promoter, and publicist had vowed that he would find a way to settle the score. Now, Turner had put a plan in place to carry out his threat.

Turner brought a new attraction to vaudeville that, at least in its concept, was a near perfect cloning of the Hilton sisters act. He had found another set of Siamese twins, Margaret and Mary Gibb of Holyoke, Massachusetts. The sisters, who had been exhibits in the Wonderland Circus Sideshow on Coney Island, were homely and had none of the Misses Hiltons’ talent or charm. But Turner didn’t view these deficiencies as serious drawbacks. He turned the pair over to Ray Traynor, Daisy and Violet’s onetime musical director, and instructed him to start grooming them for the stage.

Traynor was more than challenged by the assignment. The Gibb sisters were eager pupils, but according to their tutor, they lacked the
capacity to master any human activity much more complicated than respiration. Traynor had this memory: “Mary and Margaret were no more trainable than jellyfish. I’d arrange a song in the key of G and one of them would sing it in B-flat and the other in D-minor. They weren’t any better as dancers. They had enough trouble walking together, let alone doing something like a simple fox trot. They stepped all over each other.”
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A teacher of infinite patience, Traynor did not give up on them.

The Gibb sisters were fifteen in 1927 when they made their theater debut. In its broadest features, their show was a mimeo-graphed copy of the Hiltons’ act, complete with singing duets, piano recitals, and a closing that brought Mary and Margaret together in a dance with two young men. So pitifully lacking in entertainment value were the Gibbs sisters’ stage appearances, the critics were hard pressed to write anything that would not make them appear to be bashing the unfortunate children.
Variety
, probably the most diplomatic of the newspapers present for the sisters’ debut, summed up their act in tautological terms:

Such notices contrasted sharply with the raves Daisy and Violet drew at their debut when most critics hailed them as the most sparkling act to appear on Broadway in at least a decade.

Myer Myers was infuriated by Turner’s introduction of a second Siamese twins act to the stage world. But Turner was not quite through. A year or so after he launched the Gibb girls, he presented yet another set of conjoined twins, Simplicio and Lucio Godino, twenty-one-year-old brothers from the Philippines. The brothers were
startling to behold: One twin was six inches shorter than the other and the brothers were tightly pinned together back to back. Because of the disparity in their heights, the taller brother was forced to do all the walking, bending forward at his waist and carrying his twin on his back. Jim Moore described the spectacle this way: “The one that was walking [was] bent over just a little bit.… The [other] one … lying up on his back [looked] like a giant spider with arms waving and feet going. It was very grotesque.”
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As astounding a sight as the Godino Siamese twins were, their act drew crowds everywhere. Yet, the people flocking into the theaters seemed less curious about Lucio and Simplicio than about the two women appearing with them, their Filipina wives Natividad and Victoria. The women were sisters, with undulant figures and long black hair. They were not unattractive, nor were they inhibited. At each performance, Natividad and Victoria gigglingly revealed what happened when the lights went out at night and Lucio, Simplicio, Natividad, and Victoria were under the sheets together, with arms and legs everywhere. So great was the box office appeal of the Godinos that Turner was able to book them into New York’s Palace. Myer became apoplectic when he learned of Turner’s coup. Even during the Hilton sisters’ first two years in vaudeville, when they were at the height of their popularity, they had never gotten an engagement at the Palace.

Although the Godinos were a great sensation with the public, their show failed to receive endorsement from the professional critics. The reviewer for
The Billboard
fairly fumed at the breaches of taste in the brothers’ act, stating that the most offensive part of the show came when Lucio and Simplico’s “swarthy brides” joined their husbands and talked about their sex lives. The reviewer snapped:

But if there were bluenoses who stayed home because of the published claims of the show’s smuttiness, they were far outnumbered by people who were lured to the performances precisely because the brothers and their wives were so candid in describing the mechanics of their couplings and quadruplings. To help insure that the houses were packed wherever his Godino brothers appeared, Turner also presented screenings of the triple-X film,
The Miracle of Birth
.

Before being hired as the chief publicist for Marcus Loew’s theater and movie empire, Turner had been a city editor at the
Baltimore News
. Because of the cozy relationships he retained with his cronies in the world of journalism, great rivers of printer’s ink flowed everywhere he presented his Siamese twins. In Newark, New Jersey, for example, the daily
Star
completely gave over its front page to the Gibb sisters, including three photographs and three stories, one of them with an eight-column-wide headline announcing their arrival in the city. Observed
The Billboard
:

However great the dissimilarities were between the glossy shows of the San Antonio Siamese Twins and the coarse spectacles of the Godinos and the Gibbs, the Hiltons were being steamrolled by the juggernauts that Turner had assembled. Myer was helpless to do anything about it. Terry Turner was one of the best-connected men in show business. While he was placing his Siamese twins inside the
show temples of bigger cities like Chicago, Boston, and St. Louis, Daisy and Violet, when they were working at all, were now most often relegated to the small opera houses of towns like Waukegan, Illinois, and Fort Mason, Iowa.

The gaps in Daisy and Violet’s bookings had become so extended by the 1929–30 show season that the two spent most of their time at home in San Antonio, leaving only occasionally to cover the few engagements that Ben Benson, their new contracting agent, was able to scare up.

Myer had become more sullen than ever. What happened to the standing-room-only crowds, the fabulous pay, the adoring press? Could the party be over already? In a big way, Myer himself was responsible for the unraveling of his fortunes. Out of greed, he hadn’t been able to bear giving Terry Turner a percentage of the Hiltons’ box office receipts and had dismissed him. If he hadn’t dumped the promoter, Turner never would have assembled the Gibb and Godino Siamese twins acts that robbed the Hiltons of their uniqueness as a stage attraction. But Myers couldn’t admit to his mistake. Instead, he held Daisy and Violet accountable for the decline in their bookability. He fought with them constantly. Great expenses were involved in maintaining the ranch, he told them. There was a domestic staff to pay: maids, butlers, a chauffeur, a handyman. How did they expect him to maintain the family’s standard of living when they brought in so little money?

Late in the summer of 1930, Myer phoned Ben Benson to find out what bookings had been secured for the twins for the season ahead. The report from the contracting agent wasn’t good. He hadn’t yet lined up any engagements, and because the country was now in the midst of the Great Depression, theater managers were predicting that the coming season would be the grimmest ever.
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