The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (35 page)

The
American Weekly
went on to address the issue of adultery that it said could be an ever-present temptation for a man whose wife is a conjoined twin.

Violet and Maurice, of course, were crushed. But they didn’t quit their struggle to become husband and wife—at least not immediately. For the next year or so, wherever the Hilton sisters and the orchestra traveled, Violet and Maurice tried to slip off quietly to the local marriage bureau. Always they were rebuffed. And, because the clerks were quick to call the press in on the story, Lambert was always portrayed as a pathetic half-wit who, for all his physical beauty, had a loose screw that made it impossible for him to find happiness in a normal one-on-one relationship. In every town, reporters quizzed him about what it was like to love and be loved by two women simultaneously.

The love that Violet and Maurice felt for one another, once brimming over with promise, sweetness, and excited expectation, mutated into something that felt smutty, lascivious, and even un-American as, over and over, the two were beaten down by the press and the judicial system.

Because of his exhaustively publicized attempts at trying to marry a Siamese twin, Maurice had not only become a national laughing stock, he had also become fixed in the public’s mind as a freak himself, a man of almost god-like beauty who was damned with a libido of the most curious wiring. As a result, Lambert was becoming almost pathologically shy. Whenever he stepped out to lead the Hilton Sisters Orchestra, he was aware that everyone in the house, including the musicians, viewed him as some kind of sexual misfit. What made everything worse was that there was no longer any place to hide. Because he and the twins had been photographed by the newspapers so many times in so many courthouses, he couldn’t appear anywhere in public without setting off murmurs.

Finally, Maurice was unable to bear the strain and humiliation another day. One morning, while the twins’ revue was out on the road, Violet and Daisy woke up in their hotel room to find he was
gone. Violet immediately got on the telephone, calling his relatives, musician friends, and agents to see if anyone knew his whereabouts. It seemed Maurice had vanished from the face of the earth.

In fact, Maurice boarded a ship bound for Europe. What happened to him there, or whether he ever returned to America, no one in the twins’ circle ever seemed to know for sure. One thing is certain: Maurice never fulfilled his ambition to become a famous bandleader. Bureaucracy shredded that dream while it ground down his hopes of walking to the altar with the woman he truly seemed to adore. The gentle, bashful, charming, handsome Virginian should perhaps be remembered as a man who was turned away more times and in more places than any other prospective groom who ever sought to obtain a license to marry. Before finally giving up his effort to take Violet as his bride, he had unsuccessfully applied for a license to wed in twenty-one different states.

I
n the spring of 1936, Daisy learned she was pregnant. The discovery left her terrified about what might lie ahead. Violet, of course, felt desperate, too. What were they going to do? What would become of the child and what would become of them? They were twenty-eight and beginning to think they were washed up as entertainers. What would they do to earn a living if they could no longer work on the stage?

One thing was certain: The father of the child was not Harry Mason, whom Daisy had publicly named as
her
new fiancé after Violet had fallen for Maurice Lambert and then crossed Harry off her list. Harry was still back in England. He hadn’t seen the twins since the day two-and-a-half years earlier when Daisy and Violet left England to return to America, leaving Harry behind to continue his quest to regain the British welterweight crown.

Indeed, even if an ocean hadn’t lain between Harry and the twins, there were questions: Had he ever truly been smitten with Daisy after losing Violet? Some of his acquaintances suggested that even if Harry had agreed to go to the altar with Daisy, it was only because the resulting union would necessarily allow him to be with Violet, his true love.

Whatever feelings Mason had for Daisy before she caught him on a rebound from Violet, it was Daisy, not Harry, who ultimately broke
off their engagement. Daisy said she became disenchanted with the boxer because of what she called his outsized ego. “Harry is too conceited,” she complained. “He’s eaten up with himself. I can’t stand that.”
¹

Mason may have been unlucky in love with not just one, but both Hilton sisters, but clearly the fates were in his corner in the square ring. After an eight-year crusade during which he faced off with hundreds of contenders, he finally recaptured the British welterweight crown in November 1934, snatching it from Len Tiger Smith in a decision that came after fourteen rounds.

If Harry could be eliminated as the father of Daisy’s lovechild, then who was it? Except for Daisy and Violet, and presumably the father, the only other person who knew for sure was Jim Moore, the twins’ closest friend and confidant. A principled man who was not given to revealing secrets with which he had been entrusted, Moore would only identify the father as a musician with the Dale Stevens Orchestra.

The twins had hastily engaged the Stevens orchestra to deal with the crisis brought on by bandleader Maurice Lambert’s abrupt departure and the subsequent rapid disintegration of the ensemble he assembled. The Stevens orchestra, which was organized in Mansfield, Ohio, was, according to Moore’s characterization, “a semi-name band, a very, very fine band.”
²

“Both the girls had boyfriends in the [Stevens] band,” Moore said, “and I will change the names. I’ll call Daisy’s boyfriend Johnny and I’ll call the other one Stan.… Those were the two boys in the band that came to see Daisy and Vi. And Daisy somewhere along the line got pregnant.…”
³

Whoever the father of Daisy’s baby was, he was probably already a married man, or so it might be inferred not just from Moore’s somewhat evasive discussion of the subject, but also from some remarks
Daisy herself made. She never publicly acknowledged she was carrying a child, but she did declare to reporters that she was in love with someone in the Dale Stevens Orchestra and hinted that there was an impediment blocking their way to the altar.

“Maybe there is someone in our band I do like … a lot, but there is no question of marriage for, anyway, a very long time,” she said.
⁴

In a syndicated newspaper column, circulated by the International News Services, she also talked about having a secret lover, but stopped well short of revealing that they had made a baby together:

The twins were being managed by the Consolidated Radio Artists of New York and Chicago at the time Daisy became pregnant. Stanford and Ben Zucker, brothers who operated the agency, were discomposed by the news. The Hilton Sisters and Their Orchestra had been one of their more profitable attractions. The Zuckers were sure that if the press and public found out Daisy was carrying an illegitimate child, the sisters’ appeal as entertainers would be finished. Ben set out
to meet with the twins on the road. Jim Moore couldn’t remember where the encounter took place, but he said the meeting between Zucker and the girls was anything but civil. Zucker raged at Daisy for allowing herself to become pregnant, Moore said. He also lashed out at Violet for not having done something to prevent it. Because of their carelessness, because of their reckless hedonism, they had placed their careers at risk, Zucker stormed. He told Daisy she had to act immediately to have the child aborted.

The dreams Daisy and Violet had of one day entering into marriages and living quiet lives of domesticity and motherhood now seemed to have slipped away from them forever. Where were there two decent men anywhere who would be willing to settle down with Siamese twins and an illegitimate child? The sisters’ sense of self-worth was at an all-time low.

Zucker was not having an easy time persuading Daisy to seek an abortion. The sisters still carried the pathological fear of doctors left over from childhood when surgeons poked and prodded them with cold steel instruments, pleading with Mary Hilton for permission to slice the flesh and cartilage that yoked the girls’ bodies together.

Zucker’s method for dealing with the twins’ resistance was one of sustained attack. He kept reminding them of just how desperate their circumstances had become. What would they do if they lost their ability to earn a living as entertainers? he asked repeatedly. Where did they expect to earn a living if not on the stage? Sure, maybe they still had some funds from the court awarded $100,000, but where would they be in another two or three years when the money ran out? They would most likely be institutionalized in a sanitarium for the morbidly crippled and destitute. “Is that what you want?” Zucker asked. “Is that how you want to spend the rest of your years?”

Daisy and Violet were aware that thousands of women died every year from infection or blood loss due to back alley abortions performed
by quacks working with kitchen utensils and coat hangers. They were also aware that medically supervised abortions were illegal except in instances when they were deemed necessary to save the life of a mother. The twins whimpered throughout Zucker’s tirade, Moore recalled.

Finally, Zucker wore away the last shreds of their resistance. Daisy and Violet agreed to see a physician about having the child aborted, but only under two conditions: Because of their trust in Jim Moore and his dancing partner, Anita Marie Ciska, they insisted the pair accompany them to the doctor. They also insisted that if Daisy’s pregnancy was to be terminated, the procedure was to be carried out in a hospital. “They wanted,” Moore explained, “to have it done right, you know … to have an abortion and have it done clinically, and in a sanitary place. It could have been [performed] in the doctor’s office, but they wanted no problems.”
⁶

Zucker told the twins that when they saw the doctor, it was important for them to emphasize that they shared some internal organs and, thus, both their lives would be at risk if the pregnancy continued to term.

Moore and Ciska not only accompanied Daisy and Violet to the doctor’s office, they were right behind the sisters when the physician called them into his examining room. Moore provided this account: “So the doctor says, well, let him examine them, and so forth. Well, they were very adverse to that, but he got out his calipers and he started measuring a little bit on Daisy. And he says, ‘No, this young lady is perfectly capable of having normal childbirth.’ And he wouldn’t do this abortion.”
⁷

“It was the only time that the girls ever consented to go see a doctor in all the time I knew them,” Moore said.
⁸

The twins were almost hysterical when they left the physician’s office. It isn’t known whether the twins felt sadness or relief at the
doctor’s refusal to end Daisy’s pregnancy. Their perturbation was probably only partly due to their terror of doctors. They may also have been guilt-ridden for even considering casting off Daisy’s baby as they had been discarded by a mother who felt they would be just too burdensome for her. But for the decision of the physician, they had been prepared to throw away a life. They decided then and there they would go no farther in seeking to have the pregnancy terminated.

Although Ben Zucker continued to harangue the pair about how they could be jeopardizing their careers by permitting a child to enter their lives, now the sisters were firm in their resolve.

Daisy and Violet, along with their orchestra and road company, were appearing at a Detroit nightclub six weeks later, when they got a surprise visit from their past: promoter, press agent, and flimflam man extraordinaire, Terry Turner. Accompanying him was their booker Stanford Zucker, Ben’s brother. By now, Daisy’s baby tummy was already beginning to show, but surprisingly, neither Turner nor Zucker expressed concern about her impending motherhood. Instead, Stanford excitedly told Daisy and Violet he had just booked their show for an open-ended engagement at the Texas Centennial Exposition, a year-long celebration in Dallas that already had attracted millions of visitors.

Then Terry Turner started talking. His ice-blue eyes glazed over. His expression became one of pure rapture. The twins had often seen the same changes come over him during their first years in vaudeville when he was their promoter and publicist. Turner told Daisy and Violet he had dreamed up a publicity scheme that could prove to be one of the most successful show business promotions of all time: while the twins were making their appearance at the Texas Centennial Exposition, he wanted one of them—he didn’t care which—to get married. The wedding, he said, would be performed in Dallas’s newly erected Cotton Bowl. He was convinced there would not be a
newspaper anywhere in the world that would not play the story on its front page.