The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (27 page)

On those rare evenings when the Hilton sisters were not being fěted somewhere, they were likely to be found in nightclubs or at the movies. Often they were accompanied by male escorts, many of them with good looks, good positions, and good blood lines.

It was a matter of amazement to some that the twins’ deformity—so extreme and so visible—did not seem to prevent the sisters from attracting beaus.

Lucille Stotzer, Martin Arnold’s secretary, had an explanation for the allure Daisy and Violet held. Most strangers, men and women alike, felt awkward and tongue-tied when they were first introduced to the sisters. But because Daisy and Violet were so at ease with their condition, and also because they were so practiced at charming new acquaintances, most people were won over by their vivaciousness, intelligence, and worldliness and quickly came to view the twins’ connection as just another physical trait, like blue eyes or red hair.

“You were not conscious of it after you were with them,” Lucille said of the twins’ connectedness. “They were just average girls, giggling and talking to themselves. They were very congenial between themselves.”
¹

Miss Stotzer remained close to Daisy and Violet after the trial and even shared an apartment with them for a time. She was often present when one twin or the other had a gentleman caller and was always
left wonderstruck by the sisters’ amazing ability to put space between themselves when one or the other of them was being wooed.

“Daisy would have a date, for example, and Violet would sit there and read a book. She never knew what was going on. They had trained themselves that way.”
²

The twins’ ability to dissociate themselves from one another extended even to the times when one or the other was involved in steamy love-making, according to Jim Moore. He recalled a time when both sisters were dating musicians in the Dale Stevens Orchestra.

“We were just sitting there chatting, just dishing, you know. And I don’t who it was, but somebody asked Vi, ‘Well, what do you do when Johnny comes by to see Daisy?’ And Vi says, ‘Why, I just turn over and read a book and eat an apple.’ ”
³

If Daisy and Violet were outfitted with the internal apparatuses to tune one another out, not many of their male admirers were similarly equipped. Even the smoothest boulevardier couldn’t deny feeling some self-consciousness at trying to woo one sister when he knew her sibling was close enough at hand to grade him on his style. Inevitably, complications arose between the twins and their dates whenever things proceeded beyond the hand-holding stage. Daisy and Violet talked about that.

“It gave us grave moments and much wonderment when our suitors were embarrassed by the inevitable presence of a third person,” they said. “However, few were discouraged in their ardor. Some schemed ways to talk to one of us over the telephone. The shyer men wrote and wired.”
⁴

Don Galvan stayed on in San Antonio after the trial. He remained troubled by the suddenness with which Daisy had changed from a demure young woman to a bona fide flapper, but he hoped her attraction to cigarette smoking, drinking, and staying out late were a result of her new independence and would soon pass. On one occasion, he
went to see Daisy at the twins’ apartment and took a place beside her on the sofa. He immediately let her know that he was troubled by some of the manners she had acquired since breaking free. He took the cigarette she held in her hand and snubbed it out. He pushed aside her wine glass. For a long time he just gazed at her with dreamy eyes. Daisy felt her temperature rising. She flushed. He was so handsome.

When Galvan did finally speak, it was in a pleading tone. “Marry me, Daisy,” he entreated. “Forget about show business. Come to Mexico and live with my family.” Daisy thought at first that he was only toying with her emotions, but then she realized he was serious. Her heart jumped. She and Violet had just started to enjoy the companionship of men, but marriage? At first she was too stunned to say anything. Finally, she found words.

“Have you thought this out? Violet would be with us every minute.”

“I have thought it out,” Galvan replied. “I’m sure I can make allowances for Violet. You will be my wife for six months of the year. Then, for another six months, you may go wherever Violet wants to go. And if she should ever get married, then, naturally, you must spend six months with her and her husband.”
⁵

Galvan may have researched the arcane subject of conjoined twins and their mates as the arrangements he proposed were a modification of a conjugating program that had been crafted by Chang and Eng Bunker, the Siamese twins who took the sisters Adelaide and Sarah Yates as brides in 1843. The brothers established separate residences on their Wilkesboro, North Carolina farm, and adhered to a schedule in which they would bed down with one wife for three nights and then with the other for three nights. The arrangement resulted in their siring twenty-one children between them.

Daisy would later describe Galvan’s marriage proposal as the “most gleeful moment” of her life. Because of the complications she foresaw, however, she felt impossibly conflicted. She couldn’t imagine an
arrangement where she would be with her husband for six months and then separated from him for a like term. She was also thinking of Violet. Galvan wanted to move to Mexico to be reunited with his family. While Daisy couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful than becoming Galvan’s bride, she felt such a union would be unfair for Violet. In her words, Violet “still carried a torch for Blue Steele.”
⁶
Because Steele was married, Violet had to content herself, at least for the time being, with an occasional phone call from the orchestra leader. Daisy concluded that even if Violet couldn’t be with her true love, it would be unfair to expect her to become part of a strange household in a strange land.

Daisy was crying. She told Galvan that while she was sure she could never love another man as much as she loved him, a marriage between them just couldn’t work.

“I know that I should not like a separation from the man I married,” she sobbed. “And I would never want to be separated from my twin. I couldn’t bear to be separated from either of you.”
⁷

Like Daisy, Violet dissolved into tears when her sister said her final goodbye to Galvan. He immediately left San Antonio for Charlotte, North Carolina, where he was booked to play the Orpheum Theater.

Because of the widespread news coverage the trial received, the San Antonio Siamese Twins were bigger names than ever. They were swamped with invitations to appear in theaters and nightclubs. They declined all the offers. This caused some consternation for Joe Freeman, their court-appointed receiver and business manager. He hadn’t become one of the wealthiest men in Texas by turning away money that was offered to him. Daisy and Violet, however, were in no hurry to return to work. They had their twenty-third birthday two weeks after the trial. They had just won $100,000 in a court settlement—a tidy sum at a time when the income for an average family
was $1,600 a year. They had been in the public sphere all but the first two months of their lives. They believed they were deserving of some respite.

Daisy and Violet took joy in being on their own. They took pleasure in cooking and learning how to sew. They apparently even enjoyed housekeeping. In the words of one San Antonio newspaper, “Every day they sweep, scrub, and dust their little flat. It is as clean as a Dutch kitchen.”
⁸

The sisters were now settled with Boy, the pekingese Martin Loew had given them, in a small apartment on Burr Road. They appeared to be living lives that were sweetly tranquil, even ordinary.

But what no outsiders knew was that the sisters still felt like the two loneliest people on the planet. How could it be otherwise? Because of their uniqueness, they were always aware of being profoundly different from everyone else, whether they were in a group of four or a crowd of four thousand. But there was another reason they always felt so utterly alone: They had no connection to anyone anywhere whom they could identify as a relative. Not only had they been abandoned by their mother, but it was evident they had been disclaimed by everyone else in the world to whom they had a blood connection. They were twenty-three, and in all those years, they had never heard from a single relative, not a grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, or even a niece or nephew several times removed. They appeared to be without a family of any kind.

During and after the trial, Daisy and Violet were regularly visited by newspaper and magazine writers. They talked about how badly they wanted to love and be loved by members of the family they knew were somewhere out in the world. They talked of returning to their birthplace in England and locating relatives who may have been too embarrassed to publicly acknowledge any kinship with Siamese twins, but who, almost a quarter-century later, might be
willing to embrace the girls. Mostly they fantasized about their mother.

Two years earlier, Daisy and Violet had learned the true story of their mother: Her name was Kate Skinner; she was twenty-one, poor, and unmarried when she gave birth to the twins. She was terrified of them, believing they had been delivered to her by God as punishment. Daisy and Violet finally understood why their mother felt she had to give them up and they knew they could forgive her. Kate would now be forty-four. They wanted now only to have some relationship with her, some connection that, if nothing else, would give them a chance to send her Mother’s Day cards and let her know she was in their thoughts. They also fantasized about a future that might include a father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, maybe even brothers and sisters. It wasn’t important anymore that none of their kin had ever tried to establish contact with them. They were willing to let bygones be bygones.

During one newspaper interview, the twins revealed just how much they were aching for family.

Six months passed before Daisy and Violet returned to the stage the week of July 4th at the Metropolitan Theater in Brooklyn, New York. Sometime during the engagement, they were called upon by Ben Piazza, a Hollywood casting agent.

Piazza probably was exhausted by the time he met with Daisy and
Violet. For nearly a month before his meeting with the twins, he had been breaking bread with bearded ladies, hermaphrodites, dwarves, giants, dog boys, armless and legless wonders, and women whose bodies, neck to toe, were inked with colorful tattoos.

The agent told Daisy and Violet he was hoping to persuade them to take part in what he promised would be a new and exciting adventure. He wanted them to travel to Hollywood and launch a career in the movies. He spelled out the proposal: Tod Browning, the director who had gained fame for horror pictures like
London After Midnight
and
Dracula
, was preparing to film a circus movie for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Browning, a stickler for accuracy, wanted all the film’s sideshow characters to be real human freaks, not mere creations of the makeup department.

Piazza likely met resistance from the sisters as Daisy and Violet never again wanted to be associated with the sordid sideshow world. They looked back on the years they were trotted out as a carnival attraction with shame and took umbrage at any suggestion their success in the theater world was in any way traceable to the peculiarity of their bodies. The public adored them not because they were freaks, but because they were talented performers, artistes with myriad stage gifts as singers, dancers, and musicians

But Piazza was well-practiced at pitching the allure of Hollywood. A fellow talent scout said of him: “Ben could make Hollywood sound like the last way station on the way to Heaven. If you gave him ten minutes with the Pope, he would have had the pontiff trading in his beanie for a ten-gallon hat so he could appear in a Western.” Piazza, in fact, had brought scores of unknown talents to the screen, among them the likes of Rosalind Russell, Vivian Leigh, and Robert Taylor, all of whom would become superstars.

Daisy and Violet were present and accounted for on an MGM lot in Culver City, California, on a morning in mid-October 1931, when
shooting on the new Tod Browning film was scheduled to get underway. The sisters arrived on the lot in a shiny black chauffeur-driven limousine.

Probably never before had a larger gathering of human freaks been concentrated in a single place. Ben Piazza had made especially heavy raids on the Coney Island and Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus sideshows. He recruited several freaks who, at least in the big top world, had hall-of-fame status. Among his most prized signings, in addition to the Hilton sisters, were Lady Olga, the Bearded Lady, Prince Randian, born without arms and legs and advertised as the Human Caterpillar, and the startling Johnny Eck, the Half-Boy, whose body ended just below the bottom of his rib cage. Among Piazza’s other finds were Josephine/Joseph, the Half-and-Half because she/he had both female and male body parts, and Frances O’Connor, a golden-haired girl from Sheridan, Wyoming, who, because she was beautiful but also armless, was advertised as the Living Venus de Milo. Additionally, Piazza had rounded up such standard sideshow attractions as a fat lady, a fire eater, a sword swallower, a giant, several dwarves, some midgets, and four or five “pinheads,” lamb-gentle, but feeble-minded souls with heads that looked like they had been shaped by a pencil sharpener.

Curiously, even before the cameras started grinding, the fat lady, the midgets, and many of the other freaks started affecting the personas of genuine film stars, according to Eck.