The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (22 page)

Myer couldn’t imagine how things could become any more dire.
Then, on a November day, a process server knocked at his door and handed him a subpoena. With Edith looking over his shoulder, Myer’s hands started shaking as he read the document. He tore out of the house screaming.

Edith ran after her husband, hysterical herself, pleading with him to calm down before confronting the twins. Myer found Daisy and Violet in the greenhouse. He was more agitated than they had ever seen him.

“You tramps!” he shouted. “You sluts! You cheap whores! You’ve ruined us! You’ve ruined everything!”

The subpoena was still in his shaking hand. The papers named Daisy and Violet as co-respondents in a lawsuit. They were being ordered to appear in the district court of Kansas City, Missouri, on February 15, 1931, to answer a complaint that, “by wiles and deceits,” they had conspired together to alienate the affections of a married man, William L. Oliver. The lawsuit naming the twins had been filed by Mildred Oliver, the advanceman’s wife of fourteen years. She was demanding a quarter of a million dollars in damages.
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T
he newspapers had a field day with the revelation that world-famous Siamese twins were being sued for luring a married man into their love nest. Not since Fatty Arbuckle was accused in the rape and murder of actress Virginia Rappe had they been able to run with a story that had as many juicy ingredients as the lawsuit against Daisy and Violet Hilton. Because the sisters were at its center, the scandal had celebrity. And because a threesome necessarily had to be involved whenever one or the other sister was engaged in lovemaking, the story had kinky sex. And because it wasn’t just another tart, but Siamese twins that had the role of the “other woman” in the affair, the story had the twist of a Moliére farce.

The
Kansas City Times
referred to the case as a “four-sided love triangle.” The
American Weekly
, then the country’s most widely read periodical, breathlessly headlined its story as “A Serio-Comic Situation of Courtship and Jealousy, Unmatched In the History of the Courts.” The
Weekly
account, which ran on for yards, not only included pictures of Daisy, Violet, Bill Oliver, and Mildred, but also a photograph of the sprawling Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired mansion that had been built with the twins’ earnings.

Wherever two or more men gathered—in saloons, in barbershops, on the assembly lines—they passed around newspapers and magazines with pictures of Daisy and Violet posing in bathing suits or
voguishly decked out in cloche hats and raccoon skin coats. Always the men put the same questions to one another: Would you? Could you? Why not?

Oliver took his place in the popular imagination as something of a folk hero. As a man of forty who could service two twenty-year-old girls simultaneously, it was assumed he must have a libido that was always firing on twelve cylinders. What was even more impressive, some believed, was that Oliver was able to make love to one sister while at the same time keeping peace with the nonparticipating sibling at his elbow. One columnist observed:

But if Oliver really had any secrets for keeping potentially warring rivals in harmony, he wasn’t going on the record with them. By the time the lawsuit against the twins became public, he not only cleared his belongings from the house he shared with his wife, but he had also skipped out on Daisy and Violet. He moved in with yet another woman, his mother, in Decatur, Illinois. Mother Oliver shooed away the reporters who came to her porch and intercepted all the phone calls from newspapermen. She would only tell the callers that because Mildred had libeled her son’s good name, he had suffered a nervous breakdown and was unable to talk to anybody.

Daisy and Violet felt betrayed by Oliver. After the three-way affair had become tabloid fodder, he abruptly ended all contact with the two, refusing to take any phone calls from them or respond to the notes they mailed to his mother’s house. What had happened to the declarations he made during their hotel room trysts when he assured them that his love for them was so great he did not care how the world would view their romance? What had happened to his assurances that the three would always be together?

Especially heartbreaking to Daisy and Violet was that just before the lawsuit set off a national buzz, they had taken the first steps in a plot Oliver concocted that he promised would enable the three to slip away from Myer and Mildred. Oliver told them if they could travel far enough away, perhaps to a redoubt somewhere in the South Pacific, they would be forever beyond the reach of their controlling, life-sucking parasites. Carrying out such a plan would not be inexpensive, he warned, and while he wished the situation was otherwise, he himself lacked any getaway funds.

Goaded by Oliver, Daisy and Violet approached Myer and told him they wanted to make a substantial withdrawal from their trust fund. They didn’t, of course, reveal that they needed the money to run away with their lover. Instead they told him they wanted to buy matching diamond bracelets for themselves, and also a diamond necklace for Edith. They had already done some window shopping, they said, and calculated they would need about $7,000 to make the purchases.

“We don’t want anything cheap,” Daisy told Myer. “We want something really nice.”
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Under the plan, once the twins took possession of the diamond bracelets, they would promptly pawn them and, with the cash they received, travel with Bill Oliver to some distant place. Undoubtedly because Daisy and Violet told Myer they wanted to buy Edith a diamond necklace at the same time they acquired bracelets for themselves, he agreed to the trust fund withdrawal. The twins, however, weren’t prepared for the way in which Myer would alter their plan. Instead of allowing Daisy and Violet to pick out the jewelry, he himself did the shopping. He returned to the ranch with two bracelets and a necklace, bragging that he had made a great deal. He claimed the jewelry had cost a total of $6,600—$4,700 for the bracelets, and $1,900 for Edith’s diamond pendant. It would later be reported by the Hausendeck Jewelry Store that the three items had not cost $6,600 as Myer had claimed, but $4,125.
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He had pocketed $2,475 for himself. The twins never got to execute their escape plan. Before they even had a chance to pawn their bracelets for travel funds, Mildred Oliver filed her suit against them and their lover fled to Decatur to hide in his mother’s house.

Harry Hertzberg was tall and skinny, and even though he spent much of his time in the Texas sun, his complexion never lost its pasty
color. The gloominess of Hertzberg’s outward aspect contrasted sharply with his passions. He had two of them: carnivals and circuses.

Said writer Peyton Green: “He would welcome the train in the railway yards, fěte the performers, hang around until the last tent was struck, and then stand by the siding until the last cage car pulled out at three o’clock in the morning.”
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Hertzberg’s madness for circuses extended to his material interests. During the early part of the century, he spent half a million dollars collecting big top relics.
⁴
Eventually he amassed a collection of more than 20,000 items.

So it wasn’t surprising that he had viewed the transplantation of the Hilton sisters to San Antonio as the most noteworthy event in local history since the bloody fight for freedom at the Alamo. He simply adored them. After befriending the pair, he took every opportunity to look in on them during their rehearsals in the downtown studios of Mrs. Fred Jones and Bee and Mimi Pomme, the twins’ voice and dance coaches, respectively.

Hertzberg, one of the wealthiest men in San Antonio, was also an attorney and a member of the Texas bar, although he never practiced law for more than a year or two. Hertzberg did, however, freely offer legal advice to Daisy and Violet, and his counsel gave them their first bit of hope that they might some day be able to gain their freedom from Myer Myers. Hertzberg told the twins that if they believed Myer was exercising unreasonable control over their lives, they could petition the courts for emancipation. He also assured them that even though Myer had status as their legal guardian, there were no provisions under the law by which he could ever have them deported or institutionalized.

Myer had been in a state of near catatonia from the day the twins received the subpoena to appear in court. While he himself was not named as a party in Mildred Oliver’s quarter-million-dollar alienation of affections suit, he worried about what might happen to him
if she prevailed in the case. He worried that he might be ordered by the Kansas City courts to surrender everything in his name, including the ranch and all his other properties, since all his assets had largely been acquired with the twins’ earnings. It was critical that Daisy and Violet mount the strongest defense possible against Mildred Oliver, he concluded. He began asking friends for their recommendations of the ablest defense lawyer in San Antonio. One name came up again and again: Martin J. Arnold.

Indeed, so vaunted was the lawyer’s reputation as a courtroom scrapper that his clients often ordered victory champagne the moment they got his agreement to represent them. One regular observer of San Antonio’s legal arena characterized Martin Arnold’s courtroom style in terms that sounded faintly like a description taken from
Great Fights of the Century
.

Myers’ friends cautioned him from the start that he might have trouble retaining Arnold’s services. The attorney was in his sixties and he rarely accepted any legal work anymore. Some years earlier, Arnold had started trading stocks and bonds and found the investment field far more lucrative than the law. But there was one thing about the Hilton sisters’ case that appealed to Arnold. He was a man who
enjoyed basking in the limelight. Because the press had already blown the case into a cause célèbre, the trial was sure to bring even more attention to the lawyer representing the twins. Myer phoned him. Arnold was noncommittal in their initial conversation, but he did invite Myer to come to his office with the twins so they could talk further.

Myer Myers may have been surprised when, on December 15, 1930, he and Daisy and Violet entered Martin J. Arnold’s wood-paneled office for the first time. There was nothing about the appearance of the man behind the desk that supported his reputation as a one-man reign of terror. Arnold had softly waving silver hair and gentle blue eyes that were magnified to the size of plums by his thick, rimless glasses. He was courtly and spoke in a slow drawl.

Myer threw down the copy of the subpoena on the lawyer’s desk.

“Read her complaint,” he said in a tone that, from the beginning, struck Arnold as being too commanding.

As Arnold read through the subpoena, page by page, Myer began to rant. “You have to fight this! You have to fight this!”
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Arnold repeatedly instructed Myer to try to calm down. Myer did quiet down for a minute or two, but when the attorney turned to the twins to question them about the nature of their relationship with Bill Oliver, Myer erupted again and answered for them.

Myer referred to Mildred Oliver’s lawsuit against the twins as an attempt at a “shakedown.” “Never for a minute was there ever any hanky-panky going on between my girls and Bill Oliver. That woman [Mildred Oliver] is nothing but a hash-house waitress. She never had two dimes to rub together. But somebody must have told her she could get rich by going after us. She’s playing an extortion game, pure and simple.”
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The twins tried to make themselves disappear in the single chair
they shared. Arnold’s exasperation grew every time he posed a question to Daisy and Violet only to have Myer interrupt with an answer. Finally, Arnold rose from his chair. He firmly told Myer that he needed to hear the twins’ side of the story if he was to handle their defense.

“Leave us alone. Close the door as you go into the other room. I want to ask the girls about this without you being present.”

“You can’t send me out,” Myer protested. “I’m their guardian.”

Arnold raised his voice for the first time. “They’re over twenty-one, aren’t they? They don’t need a guardian. Now, will you leave us?”
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