The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (30 page)

Lewis touched the brim of his brown felt hat. “Hello again, Daisy and Violet. Because we’re now sharing the same agent, I think it’s time we get to know one another. I’d be honored if you’d join me for dinner.”

A moment later, the three were whisked away by cab to a trendy supper club where Lewis was a regular. He slipped the maitre d’ a couple of dollars and the three were shepherded to the choicest candlelit table and settled onto a luxurious red leather sofa. Lewis positioned himself directly across the table from the twins. Whenever Daisy started talking, he slid nearer to her side. Then, when Violet picked up the conversation, he would slide to the other end of the sofa to be nearer to her.

If Violet had thought she was auditioning for Lewis’s affections,
she must have known after their second or third date that she had lost the part to her sister. The romance between Daisy and Lewis effloresced with the swiftness of a hothouse Easter lily. Within a month or two after their first meeting, they announced they were engaged to marry. As was always the case when something eventful happened in the lives of the twins, the announcement of Daisy’s nuptial promise stirred great excitement in the press. The
New York American
ran nearly two yards of type on Lewis, dissecting all of the strategies the young bandsman employed to win Daisy’s hand. Its explanation of the Boy Maestro’s battle plan sounded only a little less complex than Ghengis Khan’s sack of Peking. The
American
theorized:

When they were out in public, Daisy and Violet almost always wore identical outfits. Each also colored her hair with henna, and,
almost curl for curl, each had her tresses cut and styled in the same coiffure. In the view of at least one newspaper writer, the twins were “as alike as two silver dollars.” Observers wondered what it was about Daisy that made her more attractive to Lewis than her twin. The orchestra leader tried to clear up the mystery. “Both of the girls are swell,” he said, “but Daisy is so smart and cute at the same time. She is the cleverest girl I’ve known, and I’ve known a good many in my travels around the country. She has beautiful, curly auburn hair and the bluest of eyes. Daisy laughs a good deal, and yet she is one of the most serious young ladies I’ve met. She refuses to let her abnormality become an affliction, and a deterrent to her progress in life. ‘Jack,’ she has said to me, ‘regardless of the imperfection of my body, my mind is normal and I’m going to let it rule my imperfection. Never will I forget that it is the master of my body.’ ”
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As lovestruck with one another as Daisy and Lewis were, each admitted to feeling some self-consciousness about cooing sweet nothings when they knew an eavesdropper was always present. As a partial solution to the problem, Daisy had a phone booth moved into their Central Park apartment. She then had carpenters modify the booth in a way that allowed her to enter the cubicle and carry on long conversations with Jack while Violet sat outside its glass door, reading a magazine or filing her nails. While Daisy primarily used the phone booth so she could have privacy while pouring out her love for Jack, the enclosure also proved useful to her when she was having spats with her inamorato that she didn’t want to air before Violet.

More than once, Daisy refused to admit Jack into the apartment after he had let a dinner grow cold because he had been out drinking with the boys in his band. On those occasions, Daisy would meet him at the door, fix him with an angry glare, and address him in a stern, no-nonsense tone. “Here’s a nickel. Go to the drugstore on the corner and call me up. I wish to speak to you.”
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Lewis’s courtship of Daisy meant that Violet often had to stay home when she wanted to go out or go out when she might have preferred to stay at home. Lewis was not ungrateful for the adjustments Violet had to make. He told the press that his prospective sister-in-law was always a “good sport” about doing anything she could to help nurture the romance. She spent endless hours in the apartment, glued to the radio, crocheting and working crossword puzzles, while Jack held hands with Daisy and murmured words intended only for her ears. Violet was mostly bored with the lovey-dovey talk between Lewis and her sister. Whether the three were sharing a sofa in a hotel room or a seat on a train, she often fell asleep whenever the conversations changed from trialogues to dialogues. But it shouldn’t be supposed that Violet was always a mere tag-along on Lewis and Daisy’s dates. Violet, too, had admirers, some of them with serious intentions, and often the parties were foursomes.

From the day the press learned that Daisy and Jack were engaged, reporters began pressing them about the date for the wedding. The lovebirds replied that while their trip to the altar could not come soon enough, they were postponing the event until Violet, too, was ready to stroll down the aisle—and not as a mere bridesmaid. While Violet was regularly seen in the company of different men, she cared deeply for only one, the orchestra leader Blue Steele. While she could listen to him most Saturday nights on the radio, and even carry on long conversations with him over the telephone, it became increasingly evident to her that Steele had no intentions of leaving his wife for her.

Late in 1932, while the twins were in Chicago, they applied for, and were granted, American citizenship. The reporters and photographers, of course, swarmed the city’s office of the U.S. Immigration Bureau to record the twins’ signing of their naturalization papers. Daisy and Violet said it had become especially important for them to have American citizenship because they were planning a visit to
England for a reunion with their mother and wanted to be assured that they would be able to return to the United States.

As Daisy and Violet prepared for their voyage, they carried another expectation, one shared by scores of other American performers. They were hoping to discover new audiences abroad. As bad as the conditions in the United States had become for stage entertainers in the late 1920s after the introduction of talking pictures, they had grown even worse in the early 1930s with the economic collapse brought on by the Great Depression. Even such big-name entertainers as Duke Ellington, Ethel Barrymore, Cab Calloway, and Buster Keaton were having trouble finding regular bookings at home. They, along with hundreds of other American musicians, singers, comics, dancers, and actors sailed to Europe to look for new opportunities.

Probably more than Daisy, Violet was especially eager to make the trip abroad. By traveling across the sea, she hoped that maybe she could get Blue Steele out of her heart once and for all. She had long despaired over the hopelessness of her love for him. There were nights when she thought she might suffocate from her grief as she listened to Daisy and Jack making love beside her and then, when they were finished, panting and cooing. She knew that in their bliss, Daisy and Jack had been able to displace her, to will her out of existence. Over and over, she kept holding her breath for long stretches, trying not to make even the slightest sound that could end the couple’s illusion that they were all alone. And in the dark, she wept in silence at her own loneliness.

The twins arrived in London in January 1933. It wasn’t lost on them that they were in the richest theater city in the world. They sometimes crammed two shows a day into their schedule, taking in plays by Shakespeare, Moliére, George Bernard Shaw, and Noël Coward. They were also regular visitors to the variety houses, especially the Pavilion and the Palladium, which regularly featured American entertainers, many of them comics, dancers, and acrobats
with whom they had shared vaudeville bills in the United States. But the strongest pull on the twins came from the sports arenas that featured prize fights.

Violet, especially, was a rabid fight fan, and her knowledge of professional boxing was such that she could have easily held her own on the subject with any barber in the shadow of Madison Square Garden. Her interest in boxing developed well before she and Daisy traveled to England. It was an enthusiasm she had picked up from Blue Steele. In fact, Steele had once aspired to become a professional boxer. A broad-chested, blocky figure with arms and legs like the trunks of pine trees, he wiped out all competitors in his youth, and then, after joining the U.S. Navy and becoming a member of its boxing team, continued to finish off most of his challengers.

Steele’s aspirations to become a professional boxer were quickly extinguished, however, when he was matched in an Armed Forces tournament with a young Marine named Gene Tunney. Steele retained but a single memory from the meeting with the world’s future heavyweight champion. It was the moment when the referee asked the combatants to touch gloves and instructed, “Now, boys, when the bell rings, you come out swinging, and I want you to give the folks a nice clean fight.”

Before Steele had a chance to even aim a jab at Tunney, he was on his back on the canvas, unconscious. Just before opening his eyes, Steele remembered, he heard a chorus of angels, their voices in decrescendo. He interpreted the heavenly choir as a sign that he should abandon his aspiration to become a professional fighter. He decided to become a musician instead, and thereafter mostly indulged his passion for boxing as a ringsider rather than insider.

But every now and then, even years later, Steele could become bellicose when he was sufficiently provoked. In Cincinnati, for example, while performing with his orchestra for the 1931 Stage and Screen
Scribes’ Ball, his hackles were raised when some dance floor buffoon started pitching pennies into the bass horn of one of his musicians. Steele identified the hooligan, leaped from the bandstand, and decked him. Don Dearness, president of the Stage and Screen Scribes, had this memory of what happened next: “[Blue] then mounted the stand, peeled off his coat and vest, rolled up his sleeves, displayed his muscular arms, and made a speech telling of his fistic powers and defying anyone to start something. Somebody did.”
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Violet and Daisy on tour in Great Britain, 1933. The twins made numerous personal appearances, including this one at James Beattie’s department store in Wolverhampton during their run at the Hippodrome. Founder James Beattie (far right) shakes hands with Daisy as his son, Arthur, looks on. Daughter Christine Beattie (far left) shakes hands with Violet while an unknown woman looks on. Hippodrome manager, Jack Daniels, stands behind and between the sisters. (Author’s collection)

Actually, not somebody, but some
bodies
. The troublemaker whom he had felled was still writhing and moaning on the dance floor. Friends of the downed man charged the bandleader. A free-for-all ensued. When the donnybrook was over, Steele had a badly moused eye, a severely bitten left shoulder, a wrenched right leg, and cuts and bruises to his head, face, and body.

Crowds of reporters and photographers surrounded Daisy and Violet almost everywhere they turned up in London, especially at the fights. Their visit to one of the city’s most venerable boxing temples, the Ring on Blackfriars Road in the East End, was noticed by one newspaper this way:

The twins’ appearances in the fight arenas likely would have caused a distraction even if they had not been physically entwined. Except for the tarts who combed the seats, trying to drum up post-fight assignations, unescorted women were a rare sight in the sporting houses. Whenever Daisy and Violet arrived, they had their faces powdered, rouged, and lipsticked, and they wore silver fox coats and high heels.

Welterweight Harry Mason was on the main card one night when Daisy and Violet appeared at the Ring. He was immediately captivated by the doll-like figures he saw jumping up and down in a single ringside seat, punching the air with fists, and cheering him on. Mason’s bout was scheduled to go twenty rounds, but he had no intention of putting in a full work day. In the fifth, he hammered his opponent with three or four chops to one side of the head and then repeated the process on the other side, dispatching his challenger to the canvas. Later, Mason sent one of his cornermen back out into the arena to invite Daisy and Violet to his dressing room.