The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (25 page)

“You mean to tell this court that you took this money belonging to your wards and just used it?”

“All that was handled by Herman Klein.…”

Arnold next asked Myer how much the Hilton Sisters act was
paid in 1925, the twins’ first year on the vaudeville circuit. Myer referred to a piece of paper on which he himself had written some figures: “Seventy-nine thousand, three-hundred and eighty dollars and eighty cents.”

Arnold delivered a surprise. He produced a copy of the performers’ contract the twins had with Marcus Loew’s corporation. It showed that Daisy and Violet, in fact, were guaranteed $114,000 under their initial agreement with the Loew chain.

Myer shifted in his seat. His face became redder.

“Well tell us what became of the $36,000 that was left?” Arnold insisted.

“I cannot answer that question,” Myer mumbled. “I do not know.”

“Do you claim to be a businessman?”

“In a way. All these matters were handled by my bookkeeper.”
¹²

Next Arnold produced a contract that showed the twins earned $3,850 a week in 1926, while touring vaudeville houses. The attorney asked Myer how much money the twins saw.

“It all went into one lump, into the family treasury.”

“So it was just a family affair?” Arnold clarified.

Myer spat out his reply. “Yes, and a happy family, too, until you stepped in and corrupted it.”

Arnold exploded. His attention turned from the witness to the judge.

“If this man makes another remark like that, I am going to ask the court to protect me, or I will protect myself.”
¹³

Thomas J. Saunders tried to ease some of the tension. He instructed his client to only answer the questions and to refrain from making any personal attacks on the plaintiffs’ attorney. Judge McCrory, too, censured Myer. He said he would not countenance any further outbursts from the witness.

Arnold insisted on having the final word.

“I do not wish to turn this into a personal matter,” he warned, “but I will do so if I have to.”
¹⁴

He then began a searching examination of the defendants’ assets. Myer placed the value of the ranch property and new home on Vance Jackson Road at $150,000. He said a 300-acre farm he owned in Atacosa County, Texas, was worth $28,000, and claimed that a few small houses he owned in the city of San Antonio were not worth more than $1,000 or $1,500 a piece.

Myer estimated the total value of his investments in stocks and bonds at somewhere between $35,000 and $40,000.

“All this property was bought with money earned by these little girls since you became their manager, was it not?” Arnold asked.

“It was bought with
my
money!” Myer retorted.
¹⁵

Arnold asked why Daisy and Violet never saw anything of the money they earned. Myer made the ridiculous claim that, over the years, he had spent more than $100,000 on private tutors for Daisy and Violet, thus, he had never been in a position to make large cash outlays to the sisters. When Arnold pressed him to recite the names of the tutors, Myer came up with only one, Ray Traynor, who served as the twins’ emcee and accompanist during the first year they were touring vaudeville.

On further pushing from Arnold, Myer said he paid Traynor $100 a week. Myer’s face grew redder when he realized he had been caught in a lie: At a salary of $100 a week, Traynor would have had to have been on his payroll for nineteen years to earn as much as $100,000. But Myer tried to convince the judge that he employed Traynor only because he wanted the twins to have the best musical schooling available. “We did not need him in the act, but took him with us simply to give the girls music lessons,” he testified.
¹⁶

In an effort to further justify why he withheld their money, Myer claimed the twins were incapable of handling financial matters. At
this point, a smile crept over Arnold’s face. He made reference to a court proceeding that Myer started four years earlier when the twins were nineteen. As a result of the legal action, Myer and Edith were granted full guardianship of the sisters, including complete control of their earnings.

Arnold looked Myer squarely in his eyes. “You filed that application, did you not?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Well, there were several reasons. I was advised that it would be necessary so they could sign their own contracts.”

Arnold’s bushy white eyebrows rose into great arches and his frown lines deepened. His expression became one of incredulity.

“So knowing these little girls were incapable of handling their financial affairs, you went into court and had the protection the law gives them set aside so they could sign a contract with you?”

“Well, there were other reasons. I do not mean to say these girls are crazy. They are far more intelligent than most girls their age, but they don’t understand business. Every time I would mention business matters to them, they would fly into a rage and tell me they did not want to know anything about it, that they did not care for money.”
¹⁷

Arnold produced only a few of the many performing contracts the twins had signed in the previous half dozen years or so, but even these documents provided evidence that Daisy and Violet had earned more than $500,000 during that period. Arnold seemed determined to learn whether the defendant had anything resembling a conscience. He asked Myer whether he did not feel a twinge of shame for not seeing to it the twins received even some small portion of the money.

“They always told me they did not need money, that they wanted for nothing and knew of nothing on which to spend it. There was no use in giving it to them just to let them throw it around.”

“So, you just took it yourself.”

“Well, I was not going to throw it in the gutter.”

“So you considered it your money? It did not occur to you to save it for the use of your wards?”

“I considered it my money.”
¹⁸

Throughout Myer’s testimony, spectators hissed and snorted at the witness’s repeated claims that Daisy and Violet so disdained money that they would refuse it even when it was offered to them. The twins themselves delighted in these public shows of scorn. Whenever they heard tittering in the gallery, they spun in their chair toward the spectators and giggled like schoolgirls. Most of the outbursts in the gallery now went unremarked by Judge McCrory, and he had stopped banging his gavel. He seemed to have concluded the witness’s answers so stretched credulity that the audience’s reactions were unavoidable.

Arnold turned to the subject of the new home on Vance-Jackson Drive in which Myer and Edith and their daughter were living. Myer insisted the home and all its furnishings, including its collection of Chinese antiquities and Oriental rugs, had been purchased entirely with his own money. In an attempt to trip up the witness, Arnold referred to a two-page story on the grand residence that appeared in 1927 in a Sunday edition of the
San Antonio Light
. The spread was headlined: “This Is the Birthday House San Antonio’s Siamese Twins Gave Aunt Who Mothered Them.” Arnold asked if it were true, as the
Light
reported, that the twins had made a gift of the house and all its furnishings to Edith Myers. Myers drew himself up in his chair with an air of pride and smugness.

“That was just a big publicity splash I cooked up. You know, showmanship.”
¹⁹

The crowd groaned in disgust.

After a long exploration of all the real estate in Texas and New York held in the names of Myer and his wife, Arnold questioned the
witness about his conduct toward the twins. He asked if there had been occasions when he directed profanity toward his wards. Myer conceded there may have been times when he raised his voice at the twins and “may have used a few mild curse words” but said he could remember only one instance when he directed strong language at Daisy and Violet. He recalled blowing up while the three of them were traveling by car and the twins were engaging in “a lot of back-seat driving.” Myer said that Daisy and Violet were mocking his manner of driving and he finally erupted when he glanced into the rearview mirror, and one or the other of the sisters said, “I wonder what that son of a bitch is looking at?”

“Did you ever strike them or threaten to strike them?” Martin Arnold asked.

“Never in my life!” Myers shouted. “I never raised my hand against them!”
²⁰

Myer’s denials drew smirks from a middle-aged woman sitting directly behind the table where Daisy and Violet were seated. She leaned forward and whispered something to the twins. They smiled and shook their heads in agreement.

Myer occupied the stand for five or six hours before Arnold concluded his examination. Next he called Mrs. Erma Wyams to testify, the woman seated behind the twins. She said she had worked for the Myers as a housekeeper and she clearly remembered a time when Myer had loudly cursed the girls as they sat across from him at the dinner table. On that occasion, she said, Myer rose from his chair and began slapping Daisy and Violet. Mrs. Wyams said her husband, the Myers’ yard man, made a move to interfere in the confrontation, but she stopped him.

Martin Arnold had scheduled the twins to appear on the witness stand on the third day of the trial. The hearing was not set to resume until 9:30, but by 8:02, two minutes after the courtroom was opened,
all the seating and standing room was taken. As the deputy sheriffs were trying to push the courtroom doors shut, the crowd in the corridor tried to make a desperate push through the entranceway. There was a crashing of glass. One woman was pushed part way through the outer door. She was cut and bleeding and had to be rushed to a hospital for treatment.

Cheering and applause rang out when Arnold called the twins to the witness stand. McCrory pounded his gavel to restore order. “Spectators must respect the decorum of the courts or they will be removed,” he warned.
²¹

After being sworn in, the twins settled into the witness chair. Because of their smallness, their feet dangled a foot above the floor. F. C. Raeber, the court clerk, had a solution that drew laughter from everyone, including the judge. He stacked several fat, criminal court dockets beneath their feet.

Because Violet was to the left of her sister and, thus, nearest to the judge, Arnold designated that she answer the questions. He began by placing into evidence a copy of the 1927 court document that named Myer Myers as the twins’ legal guardian and gave him control over their careers and their earnings. Arnold instructed the sisters to study the handwriting on the dotted line and asked them whether these were their signatures. Violet verified the signatures were theirs, but testified that neither she nor her sister knew the contents of this document nor any of the others they signed on Myer’s orders. She said that whenever Myer presented them with contracts or other papers to sign, he always kept the contents of the forms covered with a book or a blank sheet of paper. If they asked him to explain the papers he wanted them to sign, he exploded. “When we hesitated, he would rave and ask us if we thought he was a thief and if we didn’t trust him. We were always afraid, so we always signed them.”
²²

Violet sometimes had trouble separating her own experiences from
those of her sister while testifying, and frequently used the pronoun “we” when answering questions. On occasions when she hesitated before replying to a question, Daisy tried prompting her with whispered answers. Once, when Violet was reciting the names of private tutors they had had over the years, she paused and turned to Daisy. “Can you think of any more, dear?”

Arnold spoke. “Please confine your testimony to what you yourself remember, Miss Violet.”

Violet smiled. “I will do my best.”

Arnold produced the receipt signed by the twins that indicated Myers paid them $36,142.67.

“Is that your signature?”

“Yes, sir,” Violet answered

“Did you ever get one dollar of that money?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you ever make Mr. Myers any presents of money?”

“No, sir.”

“Did he ever tell you he was putting the money away for you or offer any explanation of what was done with the earnings of you and your sister?

“No, sir.”
²³

Violet revealed that Myer treated her and Daisy as prisoners, and that while she and sister had often talked of fleeing, they were too afraid.

“He told us we were born in England and had no rights in this country,” she said. “He said that if we ever left him, he would send officers after us and have us placed in an insane asylum so what would have been the use?”
²⁴

Violet also testified that Myer was so single-minded about advancing his fortune, he even refused to let her and Daisy attend church because he couldn’t bear the idea of people seeing the pair without
paying for the privilege. “We were taught to do our praying at home,” she said.

Arnold concluded his examination of Violet by asking whether she or Daisy ever cursed their guardian.

“I never swore at him but once when he had used every foul word he could think of to call me, I called him a beast. That was the worst I ever called him.”
²⁵

Under cross-examination by Saunders, Violet testified that, unlike Myers, Edith usually treated her and her sister kindly, and looked after them as though they were her own daughters.

“Has Mrs. Myers always been good to you?” Saunders asked.

“Most of the time,” she replied.

“Has she been like a mother to you?”

“Yes, possibly so.”

“You loved Mrs. Myers, did you not?” Saunders asked.

“Yes, we did.”

“You love her now, don’t you?”

“No.”

“When did you cease to love her?”

“In about 1929, when we found out that we were not being treated right.”
²⁶

Saunders opened his defense of the Myers by calling Edith to the stand. She looked old beyond her forty-seven years. Her hair had become the color of cigar ashes. Rheumatoid arthritis had twisted her hands into grotesque claws. She wore a shapeless dress.