The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (36 page)

Like leaves or candy wrappers being nudged along a sidewalk by eddying breezes, people were always moved from their original positions when they were hit by Terry Turner’s gusts of words. Now Daisy and Violet were being swept along, too. Turner reminded them that eleven years earlier, thanks to his careful molding of their stage presentations and his promotional efforts, he had turned them into one of the hottest, highest-paid attractions ever to appear in vaudeville. He promised that if they again entrusted him with making the decisions about how best to promote their careers, he would have them quickly re-elevated to superstar status.

Certainly Daisy and Violet must have been excited by his projections of the new riches they could soon expect. The weekly payroll and traveling expenses for he Hilton Sisters and Their Orchestra had been hemorrhaging money almost from start. The twins had been able to prevent the road show’s demise only because they kept transfusing it with funds drawn from their savings.

Turner had the twins’ full attention as he continued to reveal the plan, especially when he assured them they could expect to become, once again, one of the most sought-after attractions in all of show business. Who knows, he went on, the Cotton Bowl wedding might even lead to starring roles in major motion pictures, maybe even their own weekly radio show.

As pleasurably adrift on Turner’s word zephyrs as they now found themselves, imagining what it would be like to be richer and more popular than ever, Daisy and Violet retained some skepticism. Even if one of the sisters did offer herself up as the bride for a staged wedding, they didn’t see how Turner could make the marriage legal. Violet reminded Turner of all the brick walls she and Maurice Lambert had encountered when they tried to marry.

“Maurice … tried to get a marriage license to marry me in twenty-one states, and he couldn’t,” she said.
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Her eyes were tearing, and she started sniffling. She apologized to Turner and Zucker. She said she still hadn’t gotten over her heartache from all the rejection they had experienced.

Turner reached for a hand from each sister. “That’s right,” he concurred. “But if I can get a license, will you go through with the ceremony?”
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Violet then asked the big question: Who would the bridegroom be? Turner shifted in his chair. Frown lines appeared on his brow. He replied that a groom hadn’t yet been selected, but he assured the sisters he would find a mate whom both would find attractive and compatible.

It all sounded outrageous. Was Turner merely pulling their legs? The twins only half believed he was serious about the plan he outlined. Still, Violet decided to humor him.

“I’ll be the goat, if you can manage,” she volunteered.
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A grin broke on Turner’s face. Violet had given him the answer he wanted to hear. He threw his arms around both sisters. He kissed them over and over. He and Daisy and Violet were going to get along beautifully, just the way they had when he first introduced them to Broadway, only this time Myer Myers wasn’t going to be around to call the shots and suck up all the money.

Turner left Detroit on a Dallas-bound train the next day. He was already on retainer with Lew Dufour and Joe Rogers, carnival men who were operating thirty-eight attractions on the midway of the Texas Centennial Exposition, including one called the “Streets of Paris,” a recreation of belle époque Montmartre with nude dancers in every cabaret.

The Hilton Sisters and Their Orchestra continued their rounds of nightclubs and theaters in the Midwest and East. Weeks passed.
Daisy and Violet heard nothing more from Turner or the Zucker brothers about the planned Cotton Bowl wedding. Speculating that Texas, like all the other states, had told Turner it couldn’t issue a marriage license to a Siamese twin, Violet and Daisy concluded he and the Zuckers must have abandoned the whole idea. In July, the Hilton sisters entourage made the long trip to Texas for the engagement at the Centennial Exposition.

Upon arriving at the Dallas train terminal, the troupe divided into small groups to travel by taxis to the state fairgrounds. The twins shared a cab with Jim Moore and his dance partner, Anita Marie Ciska. The four hadn’t been in the cab more than a few minutes when they began to see billboards plastered all over town that left them astonished. Blown up four or five times larger than life, were pictures of Daisy and Violet. The billboards invited one and all to turn up at the Texas State Fairgrounds on the evening of Saturday, July 18, 1936, to attend the wedding of Violet Hilton of the “World Famous Siamese Twins.”

As stunned as Violet and Daisy were at seeing their bodies inflated to such gargantuan size, they weren’t nearly as shocked as Jim Moore was. He recalled the horror he experienced when he got his first look at one of the roadside wedding invitations. “I look up on the billboard,” he said, “one of those sixty foot billboards, and it said, ‘James Moore and Violet Hilton.’ … First I knew of it!”
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Moore loved Violet and, for that matter, Daisy, too. But not
that
way. His own sexual predilections meant marriage was not a prospect the thirty-year-old dancer had ever considered in his life. In an instant he learned that he was not only due to take a wife, but it was going to happen in a stadium in front of thousands of spectators. He was left so traumatized that before he even got to the fairgrounds he slipped into what appeared to be a cataleptic state.

Jim Moore with his bride, Violet, and maid of honor, Daisy. The Reverend Henry A. May officiated at the ceremony, July 18, 1936, at the Dallas Cotton Bowl before a paying crowd. Daisy was four to five months pregnant by an undisclosed member of the Dale Stevens Orchestra. An annulment followed so swiftly on the heels of the wedding that the Dallas press wondered (in print) if it had all been a publicity stunt. (Author’s collection)

Terry Turner was ready and waiting for the convoy when it entered through the gates of the exposition grounds. He was fully expecting Jim Moore to be distraught at the discovery he had been selected to be Violet’s bridegroom. Turner approached the tall, cigarette-thin hoofer carefully, half expecting Moore to punch him in the nose.

Turner told Moore he had every reason to feel upset. He tried to explain that plans for the public wedding had advanced more rapidly than he was able to control. As the event began to take on a life of its own, Turner just couldn’t find a mate who was truly worthy of so lovely a bride as Violet. It occurred to him then, Turner said, that Violet could never hope for a more caring, gentlemanly, understanding husband than Jim Moore.

Moore remembered that his first urge was to choke the life out of Terry Turner. But as he continued to listen to the promoter’s tale of woe, Moore said, he, oddly, began to feel some sympathy for him.

“It was too late,” Moore said. “Turner told me there had been a lot of money spent on publicity. Of course, it’s publicity. If I were smart, I’d capitalize on it.… But I was embarrassed.”
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Moore said he felt impossibly conflicted. He knew that Turner was playing him for a chump. At the same time, he bought into Turner’s claim that the Cotton Bowl wedding, because of the national attention it was sure to generate, would help the Hiltons retrieve the stardom and mass-adulation they had once enjoyed. Moore also gave some credence to Turner’s claim that, as the bridegroom of a famous Siamese twin, he, too, would instantly become a national celebrity, and surely this would help him realize his ambition to become a star of stage and screen in his own right. Moore was finally won over. If Violet was willing to go through with the wedding, he told Turner, well, then, he supposed he could go though with it, too.

For Moore, he would reveal later, the hardest thing about agreeing to marry Violet was breaking the news to his parents in San
Antonio. Throughout his adult life, he said, his father had been pressing him to find a good woman, marry, and trade his sissy job as a dancer for real man’s work. The senior Mr. Moore was less than approving when Jim told him that he was finally going to marry, and, by the way, the bride and new daughter-in-law happens to be a Siamese twin. “My daddy disowned me,” Jim declared ruefully. “He just told Mama, you see, ‘Don’t even write to the boy.’ ”
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Because of the publicity blitz Turner had mounted for the Cotton Bowl nuptials, the wedding was already a main conversation topic in Dallas by the time the twins and Jim Moore had arrived in the city. Half the states in the union had denied them marriage licenses when Violet and Maurice Lambert tried to form a legal union, but Turner had somehow been able to persuade Texas officials to grant a permit. Most of the city’s ministers were condemning the proposed union, declaring from their pulpits that such a marriage would make a mockery of the holy sanctity of matrimony and legalize bigamy. After a long search, Terry Turner found a minister willing to preside over the ceremony, the Reverend Henry A. May. Because Turner couldn’t produce Violet’s father, the honor of giving away the bride fell to Lew Dufour, one half of the carnival team producing the Cotton Bowl wedding. Picked by Turner as the best man was Joe Rodgers, a Broadway actor. Daisy, of course, was the natural choice for maid of honor.

Tickets for the wedding were set at 25 cents. This was a steal, Turner seemed to believe, since the modest admission price would not only provide the guests with a chance to witness the most unusual wedding ceremony of all time, but it would also admit them to a post-ceremony dance with music by the Dale Stevens Orchestra. For all the publicity the wedding had generated in the newspapers and on the radio, it had become clear by the day of the event that Turner may have seriously misgauged the public’s interest. The advance ticket sales had been slow and even in the final hours before the wedding
was scheduled to take place, there were no lines forming at the Cotton Bowl box offices. Turner was tortured. How could he have blown what he had been sure was going to be his greatest promotional stunt ever?

The truth was, the Great Wedding was being eclipsed by another Texas Centennial Exposition attraction, Streets of Paris. This feature consisted of ten separate cabarets, each of them with obviously concocted Gallic names like Madame Pou Pou’s, Charmaine’s, La Poufee, Ti Tee’s and, of course, the Folies Bergere. On each stage were dancers wearing nothing more than cologne. Public exhibitions of nudity were banned in Dallas, but the Texas State Fairground existed as an island unto itself with its own set of rules governing public conduct. Apparently the fairground police were willing to overlook any breaches of the moral code that fell short of murder, pillaging, rape, and treason.

Fair-goers buying tickets at the Cotton Bowl box offices never amounted to anything more than a trickle, while tens of thousands of people were already massed in the fair’s ersatz French quarter. The crushing failue of the Great Wedding was, ironically, the result of Turner’s own doing. He had directed the publicity campaign not just for the Violet Hilton–Jim Moore nuptials, but also for the “Streets of Paris.”

It was now just a couple of hours before the scheduled 8:30
P.M.
Great Wedding, and there was no longer any question the event was going to be a colossal flop. Terry Turner was clearly troubled as he paced the stands of the Cotton Bowl with a glass in one hand and a bottle of scotch in the other. Then he was hit with another crisis. He was approached by Joe Rodgers, the actor who had agreed to serve as best man. Rodgers had a black eye and his nose was a red smudge. He reeked of alcohol and his tuxedo was in tatters. “I can’t go through with it.” Rodgers declared. “I just got in a fight with a bartender. I guess you’ll have to give away the bride yourself.”
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The Dale Stevens Orchestra was already on the bandstand, tuning up. Turner wondered what else could go wrong? He spotted a Cotton Bowl janitor, leaning on a broom. He approached the young man and slipped him a few bills. “Rent a dress suit and be back here in thirty minutes,” Turner commanded. “You’re going to be in the wedding party.”
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Violet would later remember that the wedding drew 100,000 people. In fact, the Cotton Bowl, when filled to its brim, had a maximum capacity of 72,000, and most newspapers reported that barely 10 percent of the seats were occupied for the occasion. The stage had been erected on the fifty-yard line. A collective murmuring spread through the stadium when the sisters appeared, with Violet on the arm of Lew Dufour, a tall, skinny, dour-faced man with sallow skin. Slowly, gracefully, at a halting pace to the orchestra’s essaying of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” the three walked over a long white runner leading to the stage.

Violet was in a white wedding gown of pure silk. Her face was veiled. Daisy wore a silky, ankle-length midnight blue dress blooming with white tea roses. She was now four or five months pregnant. Her waist had definitely thickened, but because she was so small and doll-like, her impending motherhood could not have been evident to anyone in the stadium seats. Jim Moore was already on the stage. He was outfitted in a black tuxedo with swallow tails and standing beside his best man, the janitor whose acquaintance he had made only minutes earlier. Moore was ghostly white and sweating. In the words of a reporter who was a witness to the ceremony, he looked “as unhappy as a dog being washed.”
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