The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (26 page)

Edith wept openly much of the time she was on the stand. At least at first, she came across as a sympathetic witness, one who seemed conflicted over her own ideas of what was right for the twins and what her husband thought was best. She testified she had tried to act as a mother to the girls.

“I have always loved them and always will love them,” she said in a tremulous voice.

Scores of women in the audience daubed their eyes with handkerchiefs as Edith related that the twins’ mother had been so repulsed and frightened of the babies she had brought into the world, she refused to nurse them or even hold them. Edith recited the history of her own involvement with Daisy and Violet, from the time they were placed in her arms as week-old babes, noting their weakness and Daisy’s deformed leg.

“The doctors told us they could not possibly live, and that even if they did live, they could never walk. My mother and I massaged the deformed limb daily and it gradually straightened when she was about seven years old. The girls learned to walk when they were about three years old.”
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Daisy bit her lip and her face became flushed as Edith recalled the long and daily sessions of massaging the crippled leg. Both twins seemed pained that Edith had been included as a defendant in the trial. They stared downward at their hands.

Edith said that because Daisy and Violet had entered the world with such a severe deformity, she and her mother believed it was important for the twins to be especially well educated and, as a result, great care was exercised in choosing their tutors.

“We gave them the best teachers we could find,” she sobbed. “I wanted them to be smartest freaks that ever lived.”
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Edith testified that the sisters had always been affectionate toward her, but that they had begun to change about two years earlier.

“The girls came to me in 1929 and demanded to know who their mother and father were. I asked them if they really wished to know, and they replied that they did. Although I was asked by their mother many years ago never to tell them of their birth, I finally told them the story. When the girls learned that Kate Skinner was a single mother, they said such bitter things about her I can’t repeat them in the courtroom. They told me they had always been under the impression their
father was an army officer. Where they got this idea, I do not know. At last I told them how we came to have custody of them, and their entire attitude changed towards Mr. Myers and me. At times they would be affectionate towards me and at other times bitter. They grew very unkind towards my husband and cursed and abused him on every occasion.”
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Edith denied she and her husband tried to hold the twins as their prisoners. She also rejected the twins’ claim that her husband sometimes threatened to have them deported or committed to an insane asylum. She presented such moving testimony about her role in mothering the twins that even the judge’s wife was sniffling.

Martin Arnold was asked by McCrory if he wished to cross-examine Edith. The lawyer knew the judge might regard him with disfavor if he showed too much harshness while questioning her. At the same time, he wanted to impress upon McCrory that the witness might not be quite as saintly as she portrayed herself to be. Arnold asked Edith if she had always been willing to give the twins what they wanted. She replied that she had.

“Are you willing to give them that $36,000 for which they signed a receipt and did not get?”

He scraped a nerve. “I have nothing to do with the money,” she replied, her voice rising.

Arnold bored deeper. “Since the girls have been in your care, they have earned about $500,000, have they not? How much of that do you want to take?”

Edith lost all of her self-possession. Her face became twisted in an ugly way.

She screamed, “How much do
you
expect to take!?”
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Arnold maintained his sangfroid. He continued to address Edith in a calm manner. He told her he believed her claim that she felt love and pity for the twins from the instant they were born, but he wondered
if, from the beginning, she also might have had some mercenary interest in the pair. He asked if it wasn’t true that she and her mother and stepfather, Mary and Henry Hilton, put the twins on exhibit almost from the day they took the babes from their mother and carried them into their “beer hotel” in Brighton, England.

Edith finally admitted that, well, yes, she and her mother and stepfather had taken in the twins because they saw them as an attraction that could help drum up business at the Queen’s Arm pub. She also conceded that as an inducement to get people to buy drinks and meals at their establishment, the patrons were presented with the opportunity to enter the parlor in back of the bar to see the Brighton United Twins.

Except for Edith Emily Myers, no other witnesses were brought forward by Saunders and his co-counsel, Will Barber, to contradict the testimony by Violet and others that the twins had been enslaved and cruelly exploited by their guardians. Judge McCrory directed the attorneys from both sides to present their final arguments.

Martin Arnold concluded his summation to the court by reading from a slip of paper he said had been handed to him by someone in the gallery. The paper bore a single terse statement “A farmer feeds and provides harness for his mules.” Clearly he wanted to leave the judge with the final impression that even though Myer had accumulated kingly wealth by enslaving and working Daisy and Violet Hilton, he showed less respect and kindness toward them than the farmer provides for the dumb animals that work his land.

Saunders bristled at Arnold’s use of the aphorism. “Which one of your press agents gave you that?” he retorted.
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When he was given his turn to present his closing arguments, Saunders portrayed Myer Myers as a martyr who had dedicated much of his life to Daisy and Violet Hilton only to be betrayed by them. He also used the occasion to fire salvos at the people in San Antonio who seemed so anxious to see the defendant pilloried and stoned.

“I knew my client was at a disadvantage when he took the stand due to the mob rule of the audience,” he said. “It was mob rule that crucified Christ and sent Bunyan to prison. Though scoffed at by the rabble, Mr. Myers sat there and told truth after truth. I knew he’d make a bad impression. If there is any condemnation coming from the bench at the end of this hearing, it should denounce Mr. and Mrs. Myers for giving these girls too many luxuries.”
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Saunders said it might be easy to condemn the Myers solely on the basis of the testimony adduced in the courtroom, but he asked McCrory to try to imagine what the Hilton sisters’ lives would have been like if they had not become the wards of the couple. The Myers looked after their schooling, brought them to America, and, through Myer’s genius at promotion, turned them into world-class entertainers.

Judge McCrory didn’t waste any time presenting his findings. Upon the conclusion of Saunders’ final arguments, he spelled out his orders:

He enjoined the Myers from interfering “in any fashion” in the twins’ future affairs. He also decreed that the Myers and their attorneys were to return to the court with detailed records of all the twins’ earnings in the past half-dozen years. He also ordered the Myers to produce records for all the real and personal property and all the stocks and bonds listed in their names.

McCrory appointed Joe Freeman as a receiver for the twins. Freeman was one of the country’s leading cotton exporters.
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He was also a cattle rancher, the owner of a large Chevrolet dealership, and had seats on both the New York Stock Exchange and the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. He was one of San Antonio’s wealthiest and most respected citizens. Freeman was to be entrusted with looking out for the twins’ future interests, including reviewing any future performing contracts that might be offered to them.

While granting the twins everything they had asked for in their petition, McCrory conceded Saunders’ point that Myer Myers was indeed a promotional mahatma who had rescued a pair of the most pitiable souls from the heap of human wreckage and turned them into national celebrities. The judge, in fact, likened Myer’s promotional abilities to those of another professional exploiter who had elevated a complete unknown into a superstar.

“Jack Dempsey was nothing but a ham-and-egger until Jack Kearns took hold of him and developed him into a national champion,” he declared. “The Hilton twins would not be where they are today had Myers not managed their affairs and proved himself a good promoter.”
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Ultimately, after reviewing the records of all the Myers’ property and investments, McCrory ordered Myer and Edith to turn over $100,000 to the twins, about $80,000 of which was in cash and securities, and another $20,000 of which was in personal effects, including their costuming.

The twins were jubilant over the settlement.

Said Violet: “… Our freedom was the most important, and that part of the court decision which gave the freedom rang loudest in our hearts. We did not care that the palatial home and grounds were given to Edith and Sir; other properties, too. Perhaps they earned them.”
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A few nights after McCrory handed down his decision, Arnold and his wife threw a victory party at their lovely English Tudor house on Argyle Street. The event attracted a good slice of San Antonio’s social register. There were judges, politicians, and assorted millionaires in cattle, oil, cotton, and stocks.
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Daisy and Violet were the guests of honor, of course, but attracting almost as much attention at the party was another national celebrity, the bandleader Blue Steele. Was there something going on
between Steele and Violet? Was it merely coincidental that he signed his orchestra to an extended engagement at the St. Anthony in downtown San Antonio soon after Violet phoned him in Memphis to report that she and her sister were luxuriously encamped at the hotel?

It was an era when bandleaders excited as much public worship as motion picture idols did. If Blue Steele was merely seeking a paramour, why a Siamese twin? As a major recording artist on the Victor label and a regular radio performer, he was one of the most widely known baton wavers in America. He was more than comfortably well off. And while he would not have presented a serious challenge to either Rudolph Valentino or Douglas Fairbanks in a beauty contest, he was ruggedly handsome. Even the musicians trouping with Steele were mystified that their boss would cultivate an extramarital relationship with a woman as visible as a Siamese twin. Perhaps his fascination with Violet was less libidinous than it was teratological.

Whatever the attraction was between Blue and Violet, the party at Martin Arnold’s home probably didn’t provide the two with many opportunities to take much pleasure, carnal or otherwise, in one another’s company. Both were encumbered with crowds of well-wishers throughout the night.

Don Galvan, Daisy’s ardent admirer, had remained in San Antonio throughout the trial, and he, too, was at the victory party. He spent much of the evening strumming his guitar and serenading the guests. With his dark good looks and plaintive ballads, he did melt hearts, but Daisy’s was not among them. Because there was never a time when the twins were not being entertained by other admirers, the shy Galvan couldn’t get near her.

As rare as Galvan’s glimpses of his heartthrob were that night, he was troubled by what he saw. During all the years he had gazed at Daisy from the wings of vaudeville stages, he had been mesmerized by
her little-girl, almost angelic, demureness. Now she seemed changed. He was in pain at the sight of the child-woman who, all night long, held a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other and coquettishly batted her long, mascara-blackened eyelashes at every young man who looked her way.

Daisy and Violet remembered the night of their liberation party this way: “We drank wine and smoked. Two young men begged us to dance. The ‘don’ts’ of our childhood were all ‘dos’ now, and we reveled in it. It seemed as though we had been transported to another world. We looked forward to a future promising real happiness.”
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T
he euphoria Daisy and Violet felt at being released from so many years of bondage was not swiftly dispelled. In the days, weeks, and then months that followed the trial, they showed a capacity for celebrating that bordered on the hedonistic, if not self-destructive. They seemed relentless in their attempts to make up for all their years of social deprivation.

Overnight, the twins had become San Antonio’s darlings. Their names appeared on the guest lists of almost every celebration held in town, from childrens’ birthday parties to the elegant soirées of the wealthy, with strolling mariachi bands and platoons of waiters balancing trays of piña coladas and hors d’oeuvres. To the extent it was possible, Daisy and Violet made appearances everywhere they were invited.

Like the working classes almost everywhere in the country, San Antonio’s toiling ranks had been ground down by the Great Depression. Signs of the skid in the economy were everywhere to be seen in San Antonio. Many of the downtown shops sat abandoned, their doorways littered with whiskey bottles and discarded newspapers folded to the Help Wanted sections that most days were blank. Men gathered on every street corner at daybreak, hoping a rancher would appear in a truck and haul away a few lucky souls to day jobs.

The trial had offered some distraction from the wearying monotony
of sacrifice and scrimping that most of San Antonio’s working-class families were experiencing. And because the trial’s outcome was a happy one for Daisy and Violet, it may also have provided a ray of hope to people who, after three years of hard times, didn’t have a lot of confidence that things would get better. The contest in the courtroom had been widely viewed as a morality play where the meek were pitted against the mighty. Almost everybody shared in the twins’ exultation when good finally triumphed over evil.