The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (28 page)

“They all started wearing sunglasses and acting funny.” he said. “In other words, they all went ‘Hollywood.’ ”
¹⁰

Lady Olga may have been the most obnoxious one of the whole bunch.

“She was grand and ritzy,” said Leila Hyams, a legitimate actress who was cast for the film. “You almost expected her to peer at you through a lorgnette.”
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Christened Jane Barnell at the time of her birth in Wilmington, North Carolina, Lady Olga had done a lot of living in her sixty years. She felt she was entitled to respect. She had gone to the altar four times. She had traveled with every circus of note, including Barnum & Bailey, Forepaugh-Sells, Hagenbeck-Wallace, and Ringling Brothers, and had been one of the biggest draws at Huber’s Museum on West 42nd Street in New York. Once, outfitted in a rhinestone-spangled gown, she accompanied Cole Porter to a cocktail party that actor Monty Woolley threw at the Ritz-Carlton in New York. There was not full unanimity among the hundred or so party guests regarding who had the more impressive beard—Lady Olga with her steel gray, House-of-David whiskers or Monty Woolley with his snowy, neatly clipped, face brush—but most threw their vote to the lady.

The title Browning chose for his new film was simple, but charged:
Freaks
. The story centered on a beautiful but duplicitous trapeze artist who marries a dwarf in the sideshow not out of love, but because of her greed for the fortune he has just inherited. The big top princess treats her new miniature husband with contempt, and, along with her real love, a circus strongman, starts plotting the dwarf’s death so she and her lover can take possession of his fortune. The most compelling sequence of the screenplay was to be a scene in which all the sideshow freaks, in a show of sympathy for the degraded husband, gang up on the circus beauty and her paramour, and, with some fancy knife work, remodel the pair into a duck woman and a soprano-voiced eunuch, respectively.

Working for such film giants as MGM and Paramount Pictures, as well as smaller studios, Browning had directed some sixty films before taking on
Freaks
. Because of his preoccupation with gruesome topics and his collaborations with screen ghouls like Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi, he had gained such sobriquets as the “Edgar Allan Poe of film” and “master of the macabre.” For all the hideousness of the vampires,
werewolves, and assorted supernatural creatures that populated Browning’s earlier films, these monsters were all make-believe, concoctions of the makeup and property departments. There would be no pretend monsters in
Freaks
. Browning was seeking a new realism in cinema. This picture would be inhabited by real human anomalies.

Browning’s inspiration for the movie was a dark short story by Clarence Aaron “Tod” Robbins called
Spurs
. The Robbins story, set against the backdrop of a European circus and featuring such well-drawn characters as Monsieur Hercule Hippo and Griffo, the Giraffe Boy, appeared originally in 1923, in
Munsey’s Magazine
. Browning was so taken with the piece that he persuaded MGM to buy the film rights for $8,000.

As David J. Skal and Elias Savada reveal in their excellent biography,
Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning
, almost everything in the original Robbins tale was to become lost in the translation to film. Irving S. Thalberg, head of production for MGM, assigned Willis Goldbeck and Elliott Clawson, veteran scenarists, to transform the magazine story into a screenplay. Somewhere along the way, the two were joined by four more writers, Leon Gordon, Edgar Allan Woolf, Al Boasburg, and Charles MacArthur.

Even with a half-dozen script writers on the project, the overhauling took five months. When the screenplay was finally finished, it was just about impossible to trace its lineage back to the Robbins short story: The title
Spurs
was discarded for
Freaks
; the drama’s setting was moved from France to the United States; and completely expunged in the script were every one of the richly imagined freaks that Robbins introduced in his story. Most surprising of all, the six-man writing committee scrapped every twist and turn of the Robbins work and fabricated an entirely new drama.

Because of his enthusiasm for the film project, and also because of Browning’s vaunted reputation as a director, Irving Thalberg decided
initially to pull out all the stops for
Freaks
. He went to the very top of MGM’s A-list of stars. He selected the newly-signed Myrna Loy to play Cleopatra, the venal trapeze queen of the film. At the same time, he named Jean Harlow, the blonde bombshell, to handle the role of Venus, a good-girl counterpoint to Cleopatra. But it was not long before Thalberg rethought his casting plans. After reading the many successive drafts of the screenplay the writing team kept cranking out, he began having reservations about how the picture would be received by the public, the press and, especially, the Hays Office. He was not at all sure the world was ready for a movie that included a castration and at least hinted at sex between a divinely beautiful woman and a dwarf. Because of all its inflammatory ingredients, Thalberg worried Browning’s film might well explode upon its release. If that were to happen, he didn’t want Loy and Harlow, two of MGM’s most bank-able stars, to incinerate with the project.

To his credit, Thalberg turned a deaf ear to those who tried to persuade him to scrap the film project entirely. He did, however, decide to re-cast the female leads. The role of Cleopatra was turned over to Olga Baclanova, an actress in her sunset years, who was probably happy for the assignment. Leila Hyams, a beautiful, one-time fashion model who had mainly served as window dressing in her earlier film parts, was called in to replace Harlow.

The substitution of Baclanova in the role of Cleopatra was perfect type-casting. Baclanova was a former dancer with the Russian ballet. An exotic and zaftig woman with platinum hair, large blue eyes, and a big red gash for a mouth, she had often been cast as a man-eating seductress. Off-screen, Baclanova was as gentle as a turtle dove. When all the freaks gathered on the lot for the first time, Browning personally escorted the actress on a tour of the circus encampment that had been created, introducing her to the human oddities with whom she would be working.

Still from Tod Browning’s 1932 film
, Freaks.
The actor at left, Roscoe Ates, played Daisy’s husband in the film. (Author’s collection)

Baclanova had this remembrance:

In time, Baclanova not only became comfortable in the company of the sideshow denizens, but developed tender feelings toward them,
and they for her. In fact, one of the casualties of her surpassing beauty was Harry Earle, the three-foot, three-inch midget cast as her husband. In a case of life imitating art, Earle became sick with unrequited love for his co-star.

Poor Johnny Eck, the Half-Boy, was left in even greater ruins by Baclanova. Whenever she was before the cameras, Eck was to be found nearby in the shadows, watching her. Baclanova had this memory of the bright, sensitive, and painfully shy man-child whom everybody pitied but no one could love:

Daisy and Violet seem not to have been recruited for the film because they were needed to carry the story forward, but because someone, probably Thalberg, believed they might give the picture additional box office pulling power. Through their triumphs in vaudeville, and through the sensational trial that was chronicled in papers across the country, they were reliable brand names.

The roles that Daisy and Violet were given in the film, like almost everything else in the screenplay, were tailored from whole cloth. There were no Siamese twins in the original story. If the roles handed to the sisters were incidental to the movie’s plot, their inclusion gave the picture some sexual overtones that were surprising for the time. Daisy has a husband in the film, a clown called Rosco, played by Roscoe Ates. Violet, on the other hand, is single. As the story unfolds,
Violet accepts a marriage proposal from a darkly handsome suitor who ostensibly is the owner of the mythical Rollo Brothers Circus, although, inexplicably, the suitor’s role is never made entirely clear in the picture.

Because of the period in which it was made, the sexual carryings-on in
Freaks
are mostly alluded to rather than explicit. But Browning boldly included one scene that quite explicitly suggested that whenever one Siamese twin was in the throes carnal ecstasy, her sister, in a kind of two-for-one effect, was also simultaneously enjoying the experience. The scene takes place in the twins’ circus wagon when Violet is asked by the big top impresario if she will marry him. Because Violet is weighing the consequences of changing the threesome of herself, Daisy, and Daisy’s clown husband into a foursome, she is a little slow in giving her reply.

“Please, please,” the circus boss urges. “Don’t you want to make me happy?”

Violet still appears to be conflicted. “Yes, but I don’t know what to say,” she murmurs.

“Just say ‘yes.’ Will you?”

“Yes.”

The face of the young, hunky circus owner melts into an expression of bliss. “Oh, Violet,” he sighs. He gathers his newly won prize into his arms and locks onto her lips in a kiss that is tender, passionate, and long. The camera shifts from the faces of the freshly-betrothed couple to Daisy. As the lovers beside her continue with their kiss, she, too, seems to be experiencing physiological changes. Her eyelids flutter. Her expression tightens and then, by turns, slackens. A wave of ecstasy seems to roll through her entire body and she gives out a soft cry of pleasure that is faintly orgasmic.

A thinly veiled reference to the mating practices of Daisy and Violet is also brought out in another scene. Rosco tells a fellow
trouper of the frustrations that can be involved when one has taken a Siamese twin for a wife. He confides there were often evenings when he wanted to become amorous with Daisy, but, because of Violet, his desires were thwarted. “That sister-in-law of mine wants to stay up half the night to read,” he complains.

The twins’ on-camera appearances in the sixty-four-minute film take up less than five minutes. The acting talent they showed in their film debut was serviceable. Willard Sheldon, a script clerk on the lot, remembered Daisy and Violet as “bright, intelligent girls who always followed Tod’s direction carefully, and turned out professional work whenever the camera was aimed at them.”
¹⁴

Possibly because the film awakened memories of the grim days when they were placed on exhibit for strangers to gawk at, Daisy and Violet remained aloof from the other freaks. Sheldon said that during breaks in the shooting, the midgets, armless wonders, fat lady, and human skeleton spent their time in a mess tent, drinking coffee and playing checkers, but the Hilton sisters were never part of the crowd.

“They were lovely girls, but I never got the impression that they were enjoying themselves very much,” he said. “They got along fine with the working crew and with the legitimate actors, but they wouldn’t have anything to do with the other freaks. They stuck pretty much to themselves which I suppose sounds funny now. What else do Siamese twins do but stick to themselves?”
¹⁵

Except for Daisy and Violet, all of the film’s freaks took housing in the Castle Apartments in Culver City, which were conveniently situated next to the circus lot created just for the movie. Because they were adamant about keeping their distance from the other human oddities during nonfilming hours, Daisy and Violet leased an apartment well away from the lot.

Slathered in pink stucco and ornamented with stained glass windows and iron grillwork, the Spanish-style apartments provided far
more luxurious accommodations than the freaks were accustomed to enjoying. Few of the sideshow travelers, in fact, seemed familiar with such creature comforts as flush toilets and bathtubs. As a result, the Castle’s long-term tenants started filing complaints against the freaks almost from the day they moved in. For one thing, the Castle’s residents were finding it impossible to sleep because of the constant glugging and pounding of the water pipes in the building. Every night, all night long, the pinheads kept flushing their toilet for the sheer entertainment of seeing the water vanish and then magically reappear.