The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (32 page)

When he saw them at Liverpool’s 3,000-seat Shakespeare Theater, Frederick H. U. Bowman, a respected theater critic, was impressed:

The love affair the British had with the twins was not overlooked by the business world. In Wolverhampton, for example, the city’s
leading department store, Beatties, hired Daisy and Violet to put on a fashion show, modeling the emporium’s new line of dresses, coats, and hats.
¹⁷

At the same time that Daisy and Violet were charming audiences throughout the provinces, Harry Mason was methodically going about the business of pruning the long line of scrappers who, like him, were hoping for a chance to fight for the national welterweight crown. He had been single-minded about regaining the title from the time he lost it seven years earlier. But after he and Violet became romantically involved, his crusade seemed to take on an even greater urgency. As though Violet was sitting ringside for each of his contests, his fight appearances, more and more, became displays in showboating. He took glee in openly presenting his face to an opponent, and then, in the microsecond before a fist was due to meet up with his nose, parrying left or right rather like Manoleto dodging a raging bull. Without knowing his campaign had been pitched to a new level because he was now in love,
The Ring
, the most respected of boxing journals, recorded his progress this way:

Late in July 1933, after having toured the United Kingdom for eight months, the time had come for Daisy and Violet to return to America. It was a time of joy and anticipation for Daisy. She was finally going home again to her fiancée, Chicago bandleader Jack Lewis. Now they could start making the final plans for their wedding. The twins’ leave-taking from England was not so joyous for
either Violet or Harry Mason, however. Both were weeping as they embraced at Southampton harbor near the foot of the gangplank that angled up to the deck of the Cunard Line’s freshly refurbished luxury liner, the
Aquitania
. As much as Harry wanted to travel to America with Violet, the time was not yet right. He had made great gains in his drive to be restored as Britain’s welterweight champion. To leave his homeland now would mean throwing all that away.

Reporters and photographers swarmed Daisy and Violet the instant they stepped off the
Aquitania
onto a New York dock on August 6. Violet, comfortably at home in such situations, immediately started orchestrating an impromptu press conference. With flash bulbs bursting all around the sisters, she held out her left hand, displaying an engagement ring with a large diamond. She then made the announcement that was to send the newsmen tripping over one another, searching for phones to call their city rooms.

While in Great Britain, Violet revealed, she had fallen in love with Harry Mason, the prominent British boxer. He had asked her to marry him and had slipped the ring onto her finger moments before she and Daisy left England’s shore. She and Harry would marry before a year was out, Violet announced. Theirs would be a double wedding. At the very same moment when she and Harry were marching to the altar, Violet said, Daisy and the bandleader Jack Lewis would be following in lockstep. “I am quite sure we will be the happiest foursome in the world,” she purred.
¹⁹

Violet made another surprising revelation: Because both she and Daisy had promised their hands in marriage, they would go on tour only one more time and then would retire from the stage forever. Violet said that she and Daisy, along with their affianced Lewis and Mason, had crafted a plan for the future. The four would settle somewhere on a farm and start bringing children into the world. “We’re tired of vaudeville and tired of exhibiting ourselves,” she said. “… We have
found two men who are as devoted to us as we are to them.… We have made up our minds to stop exhibiting ourselves all over the world and to gather as much peace and happiness as we can.”
²⁰

But as Violet chirped on, effusing about just how happy she and Daisy and Jack and Harry were all going to be, it was apparent that Daisy was troubled. She kept standing on tiptoe and craning her neck, trying to look over and beyond the felt hats of the reporters crowded before the sisters. She was sure that in very next moment she would see a taxicab stop near the clot of reporters, and Jack Lewis would throw open a door and come running to her, with a large offering of roses in his arms.

But Lewis never did appear, nor did he ever send an emissary to explain why he was unable to greet her. He was a thousand miles away, back home in Chicago. The bandleader’s absence from the Hilton sisters’ homecoming didn’t go unnoticed by the reporters. Because the newspapers had made so much of Daisy and Lewis’s engagement announcement a year earlier, the writers now asked her if the romance was over.

Flushed and on the verge of tears, Daisy tried covering for her lover. “Jack has been writing to me almost every day since we left America,” she said, “and I’m going to Chicago as quickly as possible. We’ll plan out the wedding when I get there. He’s been so busy, he was unable to meet the boat.”
²¹

J
ack Lewis wept when, in his Chicago apartment, he took Daisy in his arms for the first time in eight months. He seemed genuinely remorseful that he hadn’t bothered to show up when she and Violet returned from their extended sojourn in England.

“I was a terrible cad,” he conceded. “I couldn’t blame you if you never wanted to see me again.”

Jack begged for Daisy’s forgiveness. He tried assuring her that he loved her as much as ever. In the days ahead, however, it became clear to her their relationship had changed while she was abroad. Jack was noncommittal whenever she brought up the subject of when they would marry, and even though he used to be thrilled to have Daisy and Violet tagging along after his orchestra in and around Chicago, he now discouraged the sisters from turning up at his engagements.

Daisy suspected Jack had started seeing other women when she was abroad. That may have been so, but the reason for the slackening in their relationship may have been more complex. Even after proposing to Daisy a year earlier, Jack’s thoughts kept shifting to whether a marriage to a Siamese twin could ever work. From the start, he was troubled by the idea that if he took Daisy as his wife, he would be entering into a union with not just one mate, but two. Upon learning that Violet had fallen in love with the English boxer Harry Mason and that she too was planning a trip to the altar, Jack realized that
matters had become even more complicated. He was now going to have to get used to the idea that he would have not just two partners in his life, but three, one of them another male.

Soon there was another matter dividing Daisy and Jack. While making plans for what they told the press would be their farewell tour of American stages, Daisy and Violet, along with their agent, Ferd Simon, counted on engaging the Jack Lewis Orchestra as the show’s backup band. Daisy felt sure Jack would be elated at the arrangement. It would mean the two would be together on the road. She was desolate when Jack gave her his response.

“Until I met you, Daisy, dear,” he said. “The only thing I wanted in life was to be a big-name bandleader. Now that’s really starting to happen. The Jack Lewis Orchestra is becoming ever more popular. It’s only a matter of a little more time before we’re considered a national act. As wonderful as it would be if we were able to travel everywhere together, dear, I worry that the orchestra would lose its popularity if it now became a backup unit for a road show.”

Indeed, Lewis’s following had been growing ever larger, and not just in the Chicago area, but also in outlying Midwestern towns like St. Louis, Kansas City, and Milwaukee. Lewis was still only twenty-two, but he had ambitions of becoming a bandleader with the renown of a Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, or Blue Steele. He was hoping to get a contract with a major record company as well as regular radio broadcasts.

“Let’s not make a mistake, Daisy,” Jack said. “We’re both young. We’ve got the rest of our lives to spend together. It’s only going to be a little while longer before the Jack Lewis Orchestra is on top. Then I’ll be able to provide you with everything in life that you deserve.”

Hoping to placate the sisters, and especially Daisy, Jack said he knew someone who would be ideal to lead their road show band. Maurice Lambert, he assured the twins, was a talented conductor
and arranger. As luck would have it, Maurice was also looking for work.

Jack arranged a dinner at a Chicago supper club so Daisy and Violet could meet Lambert. The sisters had been willing from the start to accept Jack’s high assessment of Lambert’s abilities as a conductor and arranger, but on seeing the job applicant face to face, they learned immediately that he had other credentials to commend himself.

Maurice Lambert was tall and thin. He had dreamy brown eyes and wavy, cinnamon-colored hair. Positioned equidistantly between his patrician nose and his upper lip was a thin, zipper-like mustache.

Violet couldn’t take her eyes off Maurice. While the four were in the restaurant, discussing plans for the Hilton Sisters road show, Violet was comparing Maurice’s beautiful, unmarked face with her memory of her scruffed and dented pugilist fiancé in England. She tried hard to establish a connection to Maurice that first night, signaling with her eyes that she was interested in everything about him. She couldn’t tell if her coquetry was registering. Maurice was shy in manner and seemed always to have a slightly entranced expression, as though his thoughts were never fully grounded in the present.

Later that night, after the dinner party had broken up and Daisy and Violet were back in their hotel room, they had a discussion about Maurice Lambert’s suitability as the musical director for their road show. Daisy said she had to agree with Jack: Maurice seemed perfect for the job. Violet’s opinion was only slightly different: Maurice seemed perfect, period.

In their next meeting with Maurice, the twins told him they wanted him as their orchestra leader, and asked him to immediately start auditioning players for the band. They wanted him to put together the best ensemble possible.

Lambert gathered an orchestra of fourteen members. If there was one musician who shone brighter than the others in the new ensemble,
it probably was Howard Gustafson, the piano player. Gustafson, who was from Burlington, Iowa, was just sixteen and making his debut as a professional musician. Later, he would change his name to Bart Howard, and after penning such tunes as “Fly Me To The Moon (In Other Words)” and a slew of others, he would gain a reputation as one of the country’s most beloved song writers.

Daisy and Violet were feeling flush. They had earned $3,500 a week while making the circuit of Moss Empire theaters in the United Kingdom. Not since their second year in American vaudeville had they commanded such high pay. But the overseas tour had left them exhausted. They felt they needed some rest before returning to the road. They decided to spend part of the 1933–34 winter at their apartment in San Antonio. It was there that they renewed contact with their closest admirer, one whom they first had met thirteen years earlier.

Jim Moore was now twenty-eight years old. But he was no less worshipful of Daisy and Violet than he had been during their carnival years when, as a teenager, he could be found inside their tent anytime the Wortham or Johnny J. Jones shows had spread their tents in San Antonio. In his eyes, the sisters were more beautiful than any of the sainted children he saw illustrated in the books of Bible stories. He had never viewed them as freaks, as creatures whose bodies had been fused together because of some misfiring of nature. Rather he believed that God must have bonded them together for some divine purpose, just as He had endowed Methuselah with lungs that could keep him breathing for a millennium.

Moore was feeling some chagrin at his situation at the time Daisy and Violet rejuvenated their acquaintanceship with him. He was living in a rooming house and working as a part-time instructor at the Mimi Pomme’s Dance Studio in downtown San Antonio where the sisters themselves had studied. The job was a comedown for him. Only a few years earlier, he had been touring the country performing
in variety shows. But with the rapid and widespread conversion of vaudeville houses into emporia for the new talking films, Moore, like thousands of other stage entertainers, discovered that his talents were no longer much in demand.