The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (33 page)

Violet and Daisy pose on the boardwalk with their orchestra, mid-1930s. Violet’s fiancé, Maurice Lambert (all in white) stands next to her. (Author’s collection)

He was thrilled when the twins outlined their plans for a new touring show and offered him work as both a dancer and emcee. They did not know it at the time they offered him the job, but Daisy and Violet were to receive unexpected returns from their hireling. Moore was to become their closest confidant and, in time, something even more, especially for Violet.

The new road troupe, called the Hilton Sisters and Their Orchestra, gave its premiere performance in June 1933 at Fay’s Theater in Philadelphia. With full-page ads in the entertainment trade papers, the enterprise was billed as “America’s Super Box Office Attraction.” Besides the twins, who sang, danced, and played duets on a variety
of instruments, the show also included bravura displays in rhumba, tango, and the Charleston by Jim Moore and a partner, Anita Marie Ciska. In the pit, waving a baton before a newly minted orchestra, was Maurice Lambert.

The stage production was glossy, fast-paced, and lasted an hour and a half, according to Moore. As always, the show closed with Daisy and Violet’s signature finale, the
pas de quatre
in which each twin took a male partner. “I danced with one twin and a boy out of the orchestra danced with the other one,” Moore recalled. “To see four of us doing it all together was sort of spectacular.”
¹

Following the Philadelphia engagement, the company appeared at the State Theater in Baltimore, Maryland, and then moved to Proctor’s Theater in Newark, New Jersey. Big outlays on road expenses and weekly payroll for the large retinue meant the production was too expensive for all but the largest theaters. Fortunately, a new type of entertainment venue had started to evolve that made the revue more widely in demand. After the 1933 repeal of the Prohibition Act, there was a proliferation of nightclubs that not only offered their patrons dining and liquor, but also live entertainment and dancing.

“The formula we had was an especially good one for the swankier nightclubs,” Moore recalled. “The stage shows were slickly packaged. Most nights, we’d put on two shows, one at about nine o’clock, the other at eleven. Then, after we finished the last stage show for the night, Maurice and his orchestra took over. They provided dance music for the patrons until the wee hours.”
²

All indications are that it was Violet, not Maurice, who made the first moves in launching the romance between the two of them. Not only was she irresistibly attracted to him because of his boyish good looks, she was also swept up by his gallantry. Maurice came from a wealthy Virginia family. He was a man of breeding and elegant manners. Charm oozed from him like juice from an overripe peach.

What happened to the promise Violet had made to Harry Mason a few months earlier when, just before shipping off from England’s shores, she let him slip a diamond engagement ring on her finger? Violet’s jettisoning of the boxer, while betraying a certain hardness of heart, may be explainable in psychodynamic terms. Because she and Daisy were rejected at birth by their own mother and raised by warders who regarded them only as chattel, the sisters came into womanhood with a craving for love that seemed almost pathological. Certainly Harry was no longer in a position to fulfill Violet’s needs. He was 5,000 miles away. He was also obsessed with regaining a boxing crown before settling down in a marriage. Maurice, on the other hand, was now readily on hand to take Violet in his arms and tell her over and over that she meant the world to him.

Among those with whom the twins worked and socialized, there were at least some who believed that Violet’s romantic and sexual urges could have been as easily appeased by another woman as by a man. There had always been murmurings that she might have had bisexual, if not homosexual, tendencies. Intimations of Violet’s possible ambivalent, if not antipathetic, feelings about men had already been publicly remarked upon when the sisters were quite young. The
New York Herald
, for example, provided this assessment in a story about the girls when they were sixteen:

Lew Dufour, a carnival operator and friend of the twins’ one-time employers, Clarence A. Wortham and Johnny J. Jones, intimated that
he had close knowledge of the twins’ sexual wiring. “Too bad only one of them went for boys,” he commented, tantalizingly.
⁴
While Dufour side-stepped the question of which Hilton might have preferred same-sex partners, there can be no doubt he was referring to Violet. Daisy was never coy about revealing her interest in men. She had always been blatant in pursuing them.

Rose Fernandez, a dancer who shared stages with the twins during their vaudeville years, made this observation: “Both girls were the sweetest things you ever saw, but it’s true that Vi didn’t seem as feminine as Daisy. There was something a little gruffer about her manner-isms—the way she talked, the way she smoked a cigarette. Some performers said she enjoyed the company of women over men. If that was so, though, it might have been just about impossible for her to act on her desires. Would even one woman in a million even think about entering into a lesbian relationship with a Siamese twin? I never knew of any lesbian relationships Vi might have had, but I do know she and Daisy double-dated all the time and that they both had male escorts. Violet may have had a stronger preference for women, but because both girls had been starved for one-on-one relationships for so long, I suspect she might have been willing to accept love in whatever form it presented itself, whether from another woman or a man.”
⁵

Another perspective on Violet’s sexual wiring was provided by writer and playwright John Bramhall of San Antonio. Bramhall became something of an expert on the Hiltons in the course of doing research for
Daisy and Violet
, a play that was first produced at the Harbor Playhouse in Corpus Christi, Texas. Bramhall spent considerable time interviewing Jim Moore, the twins’ closest confidant. Moore never discussed any same-sex assignations that either of the twins might have had, Bramhall said, but he did talk about their libidinous urges.

“Moore said that Violet and Daisy were both nymphomaniacs,
that they just couldn’t get enough sex,” Bramhall recalled. “He told me that both sisters had a great number of boyfriends, both serious and casual, and that Daisy and Violet might see two or three lovers at different times during the same night.”
⁶

Bramhall said Moore flatly denied he had ever slept with the twins, although the dancer reported that he had often “scrubbed the girls’ backs when they were in the bathtub.”

Whatever Violet’s preferred sexual orientation, both sisters said that what each wanted most in life was to pair off with a loving mate. Speaking for her twin as well as herself, Daisy summed up their shared aspiration this way: “One thing we agree on is, every girl has a right to romance and love, and she can’t be happy without them.”
⁷

Daisy and Violet created no small stir when, in the company of Maurice Lambert, they entered New York’s Municipal Building on the morning of July 5, 1934. Their high heels clickety-clacked as they strode purposely over the terrazzo floor. They were attired in ankle-length, black velvet dresses. Lambert, who towered over the pair by at least a foot, looked like he could have been on his way to a fashion shoot for
Vanity Fair
. He was wearing a light beige flannel suit and brown and white spectator shoes. Because of the heat of the day, his brown wavy hair was damp and slightly tousled.

Within moments of the trio’s appearance in the building, the switchboard operators seemed to have alerted every office in the forty-story structure. Filing clerks, typists, and stenographers left their posts to stand in doorways and ogle the threesome. Accustomed to attracting attention almost everywhere they appeared, Daisy and Violet maintained an air of cheerful unconcern. Maurice’s expression was one of bemusement, but he may have been a little self-conscious. The office girls looking him over remarked to one another about just how gorgeous he was. Soon the three were leading a small procession
of curiosity seekers, including some reporters who had suspended a pressroom poker game to investigate the commotion.

Still tailed by the entourage, Daisy, Violet, and Maurice ascended a staircase. On the second floor, they walked halfway down the corridor and then entered a doorway above which was a large sign: Marriage License Bureau. Gushing into the office behind them was their entourage of municipal workers.

The three moved to the counter, Violet and Maurice hand in hand. Violet began filling out a form, frequently looking up at Maurice and asking him about such matters as his date of birth, mother’s maiden name, and blood type. A clerk left her desk and came to the counter. When she got a closer look at the sisters and saw they were physically conjoined, she was momentarily too stunned to talk. Her face became flushed. Finally, she asked the license applicants to excuse her for a moment.

The clerk slipped inside the glass cubicle of the marriage bureau’s chief clerk, Julius Brossen. She and her boss were out of earshot, but it was evident to everyone crowding the office that the clerk was agitated. After a few minutes, Brossen emerged from his office and made his way to the counter. He smiled wanly and introduced himself as the chief of the marriage license bureau. “Ah …,” was the only sound he was able to emit before clearing his throat. “But …” he tried continuing, and then cleared his throat again. “Well, what I mean to say.…”
⁸
Finally he apologized to Violet and Maurice, picked up their completed application form, and asked them to excuse him for a moment. He returned to his glass-walled office. In seconds he was talking into a phone.

Within minutes, Michael J. Cruise, the New York city clerk, and his top deputy, Philip Hines, turned up at the bureau office. Before entering Brossen’s office, they had to part a crowd that was now spilling outside into the corridor. The marriage bureau chief, the city
clerk, and the deputy city clerk conferred for several minutes and then, as a trio, left to pay a call on the New York Corporation Counsel office elsewhere in the Municipal Building. Meanwhile, the reporters interviewed Maurice, Violet, and Daisy.

“We want to get married as soon as soon as we can,” Lambert said. “We love each other very much.”
⁹
He explained that when he first met the Misses Hilton, he was attracted to both of them, but that his friendship with the sisters initially was “purely platonic” and slightly complicated by his difficulty in telling the auburn-haired sisters apart. “Then, after a time, Violet and I realized that we were in love with each other,” he said. “But I like Daisy, too. I couldn’t want a nicer sister-in-law. We are all very congenial. And when I talk to Violet, Daisy may be reading or dozing or talking to her own friends.”
¹⁰

A newsman remembered that when the twins returned from Europe only six months earlier, Violet announced that she had just become engaged to the English boxer, Harry Mason. What had happened to that romance? he wanted to know. At that moment Daisy made an announcement that left even the reporters momentarily speechless.

“
I’m
going to be married to Harry,” Daisy declared. She raised her left hand into the air for all to see. Glistening from her finger was a diamond engagement ring. It was the same ring that Mason had given Violet at Southampton harbor moments before the twins boarded the
Aquitania
.

Daisy explained that Violet had broken off her engagement to the fighter a couple of months earlier, and, coincidentally, she had ended her betrothal to band leader Jack Lewis at the same time. This gave her the freedom to step in for Violet and take over the romance with Harry Mason just where her sister had left it off. “He’s coming over in six months,” Daisy said of the English pugilist. Daisy didn’t say whether Harry had yet been informed that he now had a new fiancée.

A half hour passed. Finally, Julius Brossen returned. He located
Violet and Maurice in the crowd. He handed them the form they had filled out. “I’m sorry,” he said. Scrawled in pen on the paper were the words, “Application is denied on the ground that the bride is a Siamese twin.” The writing bore the signature of Russell Tarbox, an assistant corporation counsel.

Immediately, several newspapermen made a beeline to the office of William C. Chanler, the acting head corporation counsel. While Chanler conceded that there was nothing in the city’s code that would prevent a Siamese twin from marrying, he noted that the city clerk had broad discretionary powers in the granting of licenses. Chanler said that he supported the decision to deny the permit. “The very idea is quite immoral and indecent …,” he declared. “The city will not be a party to such an affair.”
¹¹

Violet and Lambert were feeling frustrated when, moments later, they exited the New York Municipal Building, but they were not altogether vanquished. Within minutes, Violet, Maurice, and Daisy were speeding in a cab through the Hudson River tunnel. Their destination was Newark, New Jersey.

The Newark city clerk, Harry Reichenstein, had been tipped off by his New York counterpart that the three were heading his way. He was standing behind the counter, his arms folded before him, when Violet, Maurice, and Daisy entered his domain. “No,” Reichenstein announced firmly. “I can’t give you a license. What grounds? The same grounds as in New York. Moral grounds.”
¹²

Violet was sobbing openly when the three exited the Newark courthouse. Maurice tried reassuring her that their love would find a way, that in the end, everything would work out fine. But Violet no longer seemed so sure the story would have a happy end. The rouge on her cheeks bore thin tracks from her tears.