The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (34 page)

“This is terrible,” she said, addressing the reporters on the courthouse steps. “How do they expect a girl to be moral?”
¹³

If she was trying to imply that she and Maurice had intended to remain chaste until after they became legally married, she was likely being disingenuous. The band leader, after all, had already moved into the twins’ apartment at 25 Central Park West.

Hours later, Daisy and Violet opened their apartment to Lady Terrington, a celebrated columnist for the
New York Daily Mirror
. The golden light of late afternoon was pouring into the spacious living room, ricocheting blindingly off a grand piano at its center. Boy II, a new Pekingese Daisy and Violet had gotten recently, was running all over the apartment, alternately chasing imaginary cats and then jumping onto Lady Terrington’s lap.

Violet was in tears throughout the interview. “Why shouldn’t I marry” she asked. “I’m a normal human with a woman’s feelings and a woman’s desire of fulfillment. I am in love with my fiancé, and the natural culmination is marriage.”
¹⁴

Lady Terrington made the observation that, as one half of a physically inseparable human set, and as a constantly traveling entertainer, Violet was living a life that was already more complicated than almost anyone could imagine. The writer asked Violet if she had really thought about how much more of a struggle her life would become if she and Maurice were to become parents. “I want children,” Violet replied. “A boy and a girl. I love children, but I do not approve of having them until we can settle down. One cannot look after children right on the road.”
¹⁵

Accounts of the misadventures Violet and Maurice experienced in New York and Newark were carried in virtually every daily newspaper, in magazines like
Time
, on the radio, and even in the movie-house newsreels. Within days, the star-crossed lovers started getting telegrams from municipal clerks all around the country who assured the pair they could obtain licenses at their courthouses. Many of the wires came from small towns in North Carolina,
Maryland, Arkansas, Indiana, and Kansas. The clerk in Marion, Arkansas, told Maurice and Violet that if they chose his town for their Gretna Green, he could guarantee that the entire community would join in the celebration.
¹⁶

The twins with Maurice Lambert, mid-1930s. (Author’s collection)

Because it was the closest town from which they received an invitation, Violet and Maurice accepted an offer to obtain their license in Elkton, Maryland. Because their earlier efforts had set off feeding frenzies with the press and other media, they decided to keep their plan to themselves. To the extent that it was possible for the twins to travel anywhere without attracting attention, Violet and Daisy, along with Maurice, boarded a train in New York and slipped away
to the town just inside Maryland’s border. After they filled out their application and paid a license fee, the Elkton city clerk congratulated the pair, kissed Violet, and shook Maurice’s hand. After the requisite five-day waiting period, he assured them he would mail their marriage permit.

Violet and Maurice were overjoyed. However, they had hardly returned to the Manhattan apartment when there was more bad news. The Maryland state attorney learned that the Elkton clerk had accepted the couple’s application for a license. He wired the clerk immediately, prohibiting him from issuing the license.

Like lovers in a Shakespearean drama, they felt helpless rage toward those who declared that a marriage between a conjoined twin and a normal man would not only be a misalliance, but an affront to society. Who were such people to decide what was right and wrong in the moral universe?

The love between Violet and Maurice didn’t lose its intensity, but it did begin to change. It no longer had the lightness that characterizes the relationships of couples who have just committed themselves to one another. Their love started to feel dark, even grave. It felt ponderously heavy, a burden each was meant to carry. And because so many officials had characterized their efforts to marry as being outside the law, indecent, and even immoral, their love began to feel soiled.

To the press, Violet and Maurice declared they had every right to become Mr. and Mrs. and that they would not give up their fight. Between themselves, it was another matter. First one would sink into despondency, and then the other, in spite of their efforts to rally their spirits and offer each other assurances that everything would eventually work out.

Violet was accustomed to the invasions the press and public tried to make on her privacy. She couldn’t remember a time when reporters
weren’t trying to pry into highly personal matters concerning her life. And, of course, she was used to people gawking at her whenever she appeared in public. But Maurice, who was bashful by nature, found it agonizing to deal with all the attention and especially the smutty jokes that came with being engaged to a Siamese twin. Behind his back, even members of his orchestra jested about what his nights in the bedroom with Violet and Daisy must be like.

Lambert’s uneasiness at being thrust into the spotlight was evident in a Fox Movietone newsreel that was produced at the time. Probably filmed in the twins’ apartment, the three are shown sitting on a settee. Though Maurice kept gazing at his fiancée with a moonstruck expression, he apparently was too camera shy to vent his outrage at being denied the chance to marry the woman at his side. He didn’t utter a single word during the film. Violet, however, looked unflinchingly into the camera lens. In a voice that sounded like she was on the verge of tears, she tried to present their case before America: “I am Violet Hilton and this is the bandleader for our show, Maurice Lambert. We tried very hard to procure a marriage license both in the states of New York and New Jersey, but were refused in both places. I feel very unhappy about it because I love Maurice very, very dearly and he loves me. I don’t see any reason in the world why we should be denied the pleasure of being happy.”
¹⁷

Violet and Maurice still held a sheaf of telegrams from municipal clerks in small towns offering them licenses to wed. But they feared that if they accepted another invitation, their application, like that which they had filled out in Elkton, Maryland, would only be invalidated at the state level. Finally, they consulted with an attorney, Irving Levy. A New Yorker who had represented the twins in contractual matters in the past, Levy moved immediately to bring the case before the state supreme court of New York. He petitioned the high court to prepare a writ of mandamus against the city of New York,
ordering its officials to show cause why the couple should be barred from obtaining a marriage license.

Levy outlined the couple’s case before Chief Justice Kenneth O’Brien on July 13, 1934. He argued that Violet and Maurice met every requirement of the law to be husband and wife. He reasoned that by denying the couple a marriage permit simply because the bride happened to be a conjoined twin, New York’s licensing authorities had acted in a way that was completely arbitrary.

Levy went on to argue that New York was the last place in the country where any official should be expressing concern about a husband and wife sharing their marital bed with the wife’s sister. In Manhattan, especially, he observed, “two or three couples often dwell in the same one-room tenement.” The attorney also dealt with a claim that the marriage bureau would be violating the law by granting a license to Violet and Maurice because, perforce, the freedoms of a third party, Daisy, could be abridged by the contract. Levy introduced an affidavit from Daisy in which she declared that she “unequivocally and irrevocably approves … the marriage of her sister, and that she gives the consent fully aware of the consequences and relations which may ensue as a matter of normal married life between Violet and Maurice L. Lambert.”
¹⁸

After hearing Levy’s arguments for why Violet and Maurice were entitled by law to wed, Justice O’Brien ordered the opposing side to respond. Representing the city of New York in the matter was Russell Tarbox, the assistant corporation counsel who earlier had written “Denied” on the couple’s license application.

Tarbox began his pleading by stating that the marriage bureau denied Violet and Maurice a permit to wed because its officials could not be sure whether, under the law, the bride would be considered one person or two.

Levy tried exploding the counsel’s argument by introducing evidence
showing that Violet and Daisy had always been two persons in other legal matters. He noted, for example, that the sisters were issued separate passports, filed their income tax forms separately, and entered into all their contracts as individuals. He also presented the high court with affidavits from medical experts and scientists, including comparative anatomists and geneticists, who declared that conjoined twins were separate entities. One of the affidavits came from Dr. D. H. L. Shapiro of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who provided this testimony: “In my opinion, Siamese twins are two persons. The strongest basis for this conclusion rests on the fact that they reason and think differently.”
¹⁹

Attorney Levy then presented evidence that there already were precedents for the granting of marriage licenses to Siamese twins. He cited the case of Chang and Eng Bunker who, in 1843, married daughters of a North Carolina minister and together fathered more than twenty children. He also referred to the cases of Lucio and Simplico Godino who, in 1929, married sisters in the Philippines, a United States possession. “Because of an accident of birth, because of an accident of fate, … Violet was born a Siamese twin,” Levy stated. “This should not preclude her from entering into the bonds of holy matrimony, which is the desire of every young woman.… To deny her rights is imposing an unnatural and immoral burden upon her … and it will prevent her from leading a full life, from indulging in those normal, intimate acts of married life, and possibly from bearing children. The ruling of the city clerk’s office that Miss Hilton could not wed because she is a Siamese twin is arbitrary. She is mentally, morally, and emotionally fit to wed.”
²⁰

Tarbox directed Philip A. Hines, New York’s deputy city clerk, to take the witness stand. Under direct examination, Hines maintained that the law granted city officials broad discretionary powers in determining which couples were fit to obtain marriage permits.
Granting a license to a Siamese twin, he declared, would be contrary to public policy because it would mean the city was sanctioning a situation in which a third person would be present during the most intimate moments of a couple’s married life. Hines declared also that the license bureau had refused a permit to Violet and Maurice because some city officials suspected the couple was not really marrying out of love, but rather because they wanted merely to attract publicity for their road show.

Levy sprung up from his chair as though he were on a jack-in-the-box spring, and then he blew up.

“I deny that,” he shouted. “This is a true love match.”
²¹

He accused Hines of outrageous effrontery for impugning the motives of a couple who only wanted to spend their lives together. He also took exception to a claim made by the deputy city clerk that the public at large would be offended at the idea of a Siamese twin marrying.

“This cannot offend public decency in an era that permits interracial marriage, birth control, and nudist camps,” Levy declaimed in what seemed to be a personal editorial about all he believed was decadent in society.
²²

Levy had been thorough and forceful in arguing the case for Violet and Maurice. It came as a surprise, when just a day after the hearing, the state supreme court of New York ruled that the city clerk’s office had acted within the law by rejecting the couple’s marriage license application. O’Brien, the presiding justice, provided no explanation for the finding other than to say his fellow jurists unanimously concurred in the decision.

Both inside and outside legal circles, there was widespread belief that the supreme court’s decision was not based on any points of law, but rather on an agreement that had been hammered out by an “old boy” network involving city officials and New York’s highest justices.

The
American Weekly
weighed in with an editorial calculated to persuade the country that justice had been grievously miscarried. It pointed out that Violet and Lambert had both made successes of their lives, had never been in trouble with the law, and that Violet, especially, had been a heavy contributor to the government through income and real estate taxes.