The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (23 page)

Myer’s expression turned sheepish, and he left the room. Daisy and Violet were momentarily stunned. It was the first time they had seen anyone put Myer in his place.

Arnold’s tone became avuncular. He already had some knowledge of the exploitation the twins had endured as Myer Myers’ wards. He was a friend of Harry Hertzberg in whom Daisy and Violet had confided bits and pieces of their history.

Arnold tried putting the sisters at ease by telling them they really had little to fear from Mildred Oliver. She had filed the lawsuit in Missouri rather than a jurisdiction inside Texas, and he said it was unlikely that they would ever have to stand trial. If Daisy and Violet felt any relief on hearing the assessment, there was nothing about their expressions that changed. They still appeared to be terrified.

“You are two frightened girls,” Arnold observed. “Isn’t there something else wrong? Do you want to tell me?”
⁸

His manner was one of friendly persuasion and because they had just seen him stand up to Myer, Daisy and Violet apparently believed they could put their trust in him. Starting at the beginning, they recounted how, just weeks after their births, they were given up by their own mother, and how, as tots, they were put on exhibit in taverns, wax museums, and carnival pit shows. They spoke so softly that Arnold
had to strain to hear them. Their story unfolded with one twin talking for a time and then the other picking up the narrative. Their tale sounded Dickensian. Arnold was so mesmerized that he remained absolutely silent. For ten or fifteen minutes, the only sound in the room other than the sisters’ utterances was the ticking of a grandfather clock. Then, startlingly, a single sob, ragged and muffled, issued from a corner the room. The twins abruptly stopped. Once again they appeared terrified. Martin Arnold was clearly chagrined. He swiveled his chair in the direction of a folding screen in the office.

“You can come out now, Miss Stotzer,” he said.
⁹

Stepping from behind the screen was Martin Arnold’s embarrassed secretary, Louise Stotzer. A pretty woman with brown hair, she was holding a stenographer’s notebook. She had become so absorbed in the twins’ story that she had started sobbing.

“It was a strange experience for us to see someone crying over our predicament …,” Daisy would observe later. “We have never known self-pity.”
¹⁰

At Arnold’s direction, the secretary settled into a chair beside the twins and Daisy and Violet resumed their story. The lawyer was astonished to hear that in the twenty-two years since they had first been placed on exhibition, the twins had earned hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million dollars.

“What became of all the money you’ve earned? What about the beautiful home you have on Vance-Jackson road?”
¹¹

Though the ranch and the imposing new home sitting on it had been acquired with money they had earned, the property was in Myer and Edith’s names. They told Arnold that while Myer had promised a few years ago to start giving them at least a small share of their earnings, he had made only one or two payments and then stopped altogether.

The meeting with Arnold and his secretary had lasted for forty-five
minutes. Myer had been outside in the anteroom the entire time, nervously pacing the floor. Before finally concluding his conference with Daisy and Violet, Arnold gave the girls very specific instructions. When they stepped out of his office and saw Myer again, they were to act as normal as possible and not reveal any of the details of their meeting. Arnold further instructed them to phone his office the instant they were dropped off at the studio of their voice coach for their weekly lesson. He said he would take care of all other details.

“I’ll help you,” he promised. “From now on you’re my clients. You don’t have to go home with this man.”
¹²

Like straws in a tumbling, racing river, for the next hour or so, Daisy and Violet were uncertain of the direction they were heading. But just as they had been instructed, they phoned Arnold as soon as they arrived at the studio of Mrs. Fred Jones, their voice coach. The attorney directed them to retrace their steps to the building’s entrance and wait just inside the door. Daisy and Violet kissed their teacher goodbye and took their places at the building’s front door. A cab appeared. Lucille Stotzer, the secretary, threw open a rear door of the vehicle and signaled for them to enter. Within minutes, Daisy and Violet found themselves cosseted inside a suite at the St. Anthony hotel, San Antonio’s finest. There were flowers in the room, a radio, candies, magazines, and newspapers.

“Girls,” Lucille told them, “you’re Mr. Arnold’s guests. Order anything you like. Telephone your friends. See if you can’t enjoy yourselves.”
¹³

For a long time, Daisy and Violet could not believe that in the course of a single afternoon, their lives could have become so absolutely changed.

“It was like a dream …,” Violet said, remembering what it felt like for her and Daisy to make decisions on their own. “For the first time we could order something on a menu which we wanted. We had
dresses sent up, and ordered no two alike, and all the silly hats we wanted. We could dress and act our age, and no longer be made up as children with bows in our hair. We got permanents and pinned up our hair. I … always wanted to drink a cocktail. Daisy … always wanted to smoke a cigarette. We did.”
¹⁴

Martin Arnold, accompanied by Lucille, regularly visited Daisy and Violet at the St. Anthony in the days that followed. He had already begun to prepare the lawsuit against Myer and Edith. He would seek to have their guardianship rights terminated and ask the court to award the sisters a substantial financial settlement.

Daisy and Violet were deliriously happy. They paged through
Variety
and
The Billboard
, looking up their fellow performers. Among the first to get a phone call from them was Don Galvan, the Mexican troubadour. Even though Myer Myers had succeeded in preventing Daisy and Galvan from having any private moments together, Daisy said, “I always thought that Don told me with his songs and brown eyes that he loved me.”
¹⁵

Galvan expressed delight but no great surprise upon from hearing Daisy.

“I always hoped you would break away from him,” he said. “I knew you’d call if you had the chance.”
¹⁶

Also getting a call from the sisters was Blue Steele, a prominent band leader whose orchestra had often been in the pit when the twins were playing the vaudeville theaters. Steele was at least twenty-five years the twins’ senior. He was also married. Still, Violet believed the conductor had always been romantically fixated on her, and to some degree, maybe he was. Indeed, Steele never seemed to be shy about revealing his tender feelings toward Violet. There were times, in fact, when tens of thousands of people across America were listening in while he communicated his fondness for her.

Blue Steele and His Victor Recording Orchestra were regulars on
Saturday night radio broadcasts. The orchestra’s signature song was a ballad written by Steele called “Darling.” As the trombones lowly soughed the opening bars of the tune, Steele would pick up the microphone that piped his voice throughout the land. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he would often declare, “I would like to dedicate this number to a real darling, Miss Violet Hilton. Vi, darling, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, this is for you.”

There was a rap at the door of the twins’ suite at the St. Anthony. The instant they opened the door, Violet felt the weight of her sister tugging her downward. Daisy’s knees had started to buckle. Standing in the corridor was Don Galvan. Daisy was so surprised she couldn’t even utter a greeting.

“He was even better looking than I remembered,” she would later recall. “His dark eyes glistened and his teeth flashed white against his Spanish complexion.”
¹⁷

Galvan, too, had trouble saying anything. He had never before been so close to Daisy, at least not without Myer or Edith being on hand. Now he felt shy and awkward, especially with Violet standing by. Daisy, suspended in a state of expectancy, was trembling. After a moment, Galvan kissed her, but on the forehead rather than on the lips. The peck, if anything, only heightened Daisy’s tension.

“It was disappointing,” she complained later. “Don was ‘Old World’ and did not believe a man should kiss his … love otherwise before they were married.”
¹⁸
Galvan told Daisy that he wanted to be near her throughout the trial. He said he had told his booking agent to suspend any further engagements until it was over.

Galvan called regularly at the twins’ room at the St. Anthony Hotel in the days ahead. In preparation for the visits, Daisy put on her finest dresses, daubed herself with perfume, and had wine sent up to their room. The caballero could have completely had his way with her, but he always left Daisy frustrated. The only physical contact
between the two were the forehead pecks that he bestowed at the moment of their greetings and farewells. Even Violet was left disappointed by Galvan’s decorousness.

“Gee, Daisy, I’m tired of waiting for Don to kiss you,” she said after each of Galvan’s departures.
¹⁹

The Hilton sisters might have been San Antonio’s most famous residents, but it was rare when any locals got to see the pair. When they weren’t out on tour, they had been kept confined behind the brick walls of the family compound. Most San Antonians knew the twins only through the stories about them in the city newspapers. Invariably the local papers proudly referred to the Hilton sisters as “San Antonio’s own.” They always portrayed the sisters as being rich beyond imagination, glamorous, sublimely happy, and absolutely adoring of their guardians. The first suggestion that all had not been well at the Myers’ ranch greeted San Antonians on the front page of the morning
Express
on January, 13, 1931:

It had become official. The day before, acting on the twins’ behalf, Martin J. Arnold filed the lawsuit. In their court papers Daisy and Violet stated that virtually all the assets listed in the names of Myer and Edith Myers—the ranch and other real estate, the stocks and bonds, the savings accounts—had been acquired with the Hiltons’ earnings. They petitioned the court to establish the value of the assets and award them an equitable share of the holdings. They also asked the court to nullify a contract that committed the twins to keep working for Myer Myers at least until March 31, 1937. The contract had no validity as a legal instrument, the twins contended in their court papers, because when they signed the papers on April 1, 1927, they
were still minors and had no real understanding of the document’s terms or binding clauses.

Within days after news of the twins’ lawsuit exploded in the San Antonio newspapers, other papers across the country started running accounts of the Hiltons’ lives, some of them suggesting that not since the Dark Ages had two children been more cruelly exploited and mistreated. The papers painted Myer as one of the most fiendish souls the world had ever known, a man so greedy and morally base he enslaved children who, because of their extreme physical deformity, already had been doomed to lives that were tragic beyond imagining.

In hopes of implementing some damage control, Myer and Edith welcomed reporters into their home so they could present what they claimed was the true side of the story. They represented themselves to be the real victims in the case, insisting they had taken in the orphaned sisters not out of greed, but because they could not have loved Daisy and Violet more if the two had been their own issue.

Edith, in one tearful interview with the
San Antonio Light
, said she could offer no explanation why Daisy and Violet would have betrayed the two people who cared most about them. Over and over, she emphasized that she had cared for the sisters almost from the instant of their births when their own mother rejected them out of fear and revulsion.

“They don’t seem to be making any allowances for the time I have spent with them, constantly caring for them, and attending to their wants,” she sniffled. “I have spent the best part of my life in their interests, and now they ignore me. Why, they didn’t even send me a Christmas card.”
²⁰

Myer, too, expressed bewilderment at why Daisy and Violet had turned on him.

“The girls must have the idea that they can make ‘whoopee’ like other young people,” he said, “but they can’t do it. They would
appear obnoxious and out of place. My wife and I have tried for fourteen years to take the girls to all places possible, constantly taking them to theaters, dances, and other places, but they can’t fit in with that kind of life and should realize it.”
²¹

The Myers’ declarations to the press of their piousness and selfless-ness did not seem to have won them much sympathy in San Antonio. Whether they were shopping for groceries or stopping at the post office, they were scorned by most locals. If Myer had anything at all about which to be thankful, it was that frontier justice no longer prevailed in Texas. There were San Antonians who believed he was so reprehensible that he should be run through a gauntlet and then strung up by his neck from the highest pole in the Alamo plaza.

I
t was still dark on the morning of Friday, January 16, 1931, when the crowds began massing by the hundreds on the square outside San Antonio’s Bexar County Courthouse. It was the day the trial of Myer and Edith Myers was to begin. Pandemonium broke out when, at 8
A.M.
, the doors to the red stone building were opened. Curiosity seekers, most of them women, rushed through the corridors to the courtroom of Judge W. W. McCrory. A few spectators were nearly trampled in the stampede.

Within minutes, every seat in the courtroom was filled. The bailiffs permitted 700 spectators to squeeze in—by far the biggest crowd ever for a San Antonio trial. A like number of people had to be turned away because there wasn’t room for them. Having the best seats in the house, on the aisle and in the front row just behind the rail, were McCrory’s wife, Ethel, and his five-year-old grandson, Travis. Also filling the prime front rows were dozens of courthouse employees, most of them stenographers and clerks who had abandoned their jobs. A reporter for the
San Antonio Light
counted fifty attorneys among the spectators. Like everyone else, they were anxious to see the Siamese twins, but an equally powerful drawing card was Martin J. Arnold. It had been a long time since the brilliant attorney had been seen in any courtroom.