The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (37 page)

Then, as his words were piped out to every corner of the stadium, the Reverend Henry A. May began speaking: “My dear friends, we have gathered here this evening to witness a miracle of love. Mr. James Moore and Miss Violet Hilton have chosen to become husband
and wife, and, friends, let us pray to God for his continued blessings upon the groom and the bride. Let us rejoice with Mr. James and Miss Violet in sharing their great joy on this occasion, and let us pray that these children of God know only happiness in their journey together until at last, in old age, they come to the kingdom of heaven.…”

The preacher’s benediction went on for several minutes. After accepting the vows of Jim and Violet, he pronounced them husband and wife. The minister told Jim he could kiss the bride. Gentle laughter rippled through the crowd at the spectacle of the six-foot-two, stick-figure groom bending down to smooch his four-foot-ten bride. If Moore was still feeling resentment at have been used by Turner, he was enough of a showman to give the audience his best performance. The people in the stands rose to their feet, cheering and applauding the couple. At least for a few seconds, Violet may have forgotten that every detail of the wedding had been stage-managed. She recalled the post-kiss moment this way: “I looked over the crowd and pulled the wedding veil over my face to hide my excited tears.”
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Daisy, however, never forgot for even an instant that everything about the occasion was the work of a master puppeteer. She looked at Terry Turner, but then quickly turned away because she was afraid she might start laughing uncontrollably. She was, she said, “convulsed with mirth.”
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At the invitation of the Reverend May, the spectators left their seats in the stadium and poured onto the field to congratulate the new Mr. and Mrs. James Moore. Police assisted in keeping the well-wishers in a line. Much of the Cotton Bowl crowd remained on hand to dance to the music of the Dale Stevens Orchestra.

Naturally, reporters swarmed like locusts around the newlyweds. They were eager to learn what arrangements had been made for Daisy when the moment came later that night for Moore and Violet to slip
into bed. Daisy tried to assure the writers that when the lights went off, her brother-in-law and sister would forget she was even on the planet. “When Jimmy kisses me good night, which we think will be quite proper considering that Vi can never wonder what we are up to, it will be goodbye until it’s time to get up, unless the hotel catches fire, or for some other reason they need my spiritual as well as physical presence.”
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When Daisy was pressed by the reporters to explain just how she thought she could make herself vanish between the sheets of the newlyweds’ bed, she repeated the twins’ oft-used claim that years earlier, each had learned from Harry Houdini how, under certain circumstances, to make one another vanish from consciousness. Violet kept nodding in agreement while Daisy kept assuring the incredulous reporters that when it was lights-out in the bedroom of the honeymooners, the happenstance of her being on the scene would in no way cool the ardor of the couple.

“That’s the real truth, although I know most people won’t believe it,” Violet told the newsmen. “She won’t bother us anymore than a nice kitty sleeping on the other pillow.”
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Finally, with great difficulty, the sisters and Moore were able to extract themselves from the press. They hailed a cab and tried to leave the fairgrounds without attracting unusual notice. But that was hardly possible. Several photographers and reporters also piled into taxis and pursued Jim, Violet, and Daisy right to the door of their hotel room. Many of the newsmen, in fact, parked for the night in the corridor outside the trio’s suite. Relentless and shameless, periodically journalists even pressed their ears and eyes to the keyhole of the honeymooners’ room.

So great were the demands by the newspaper people for ever-deeper incursions on the newlyweds’ privacy that Terry Turner was pressed into the role of ombudsman. When a cameramen asked him for
permission to photograph the newlyweds and Daisy in bed, he denied the request, concluding that such a family portrait might border on the fulsome.

Turner did, however, allow the photographers into the newlyweds’ room the morning after their first night together. Violet and Daisy were in their robes and Jim was still in his silk pajamas, wrapped in a smoking jacket. All three of them were wearing beatific, somewhat woozy, faraway expressions, as though each had glimpsed heaven’s gate the night before.

It is a mystery what Moore did to occupy himself during his first full night with the bride and the bridesmaid, but no one who knew him believed that he consummated the marriage, let alone for a second helping with his sister-in-law.

“Jim Moore was gay as a rag,” said Camille Rosengren, goddaughter of the twins.
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Her declaration was echoed by everyone else who knew him well. Whether on the night of his honeymoon, or any other night, the nearest Moore ever came to having a sexual experience with the twins, he would concede years later, was scrubbing their backs while they were in the bathtub.

“I never slept with them,” he stated in the sniffiest of tones.
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Because the Great Wedding had flopped so thoroughly at the box office, Terry Turner was utterly chagrined. Although he had been right about one thing: The Violet Hilton–Jim Moore nuptials had cornered column inches in just about every newspaper in the country. And as a completely unexpected perquisite, Daisy was hired by the International News Service to produce a series of syndicated articles on what it was like to be such a close observer of another woman’s honeymoon. In the first article, written the morning after she and Violet spent their first full night with Moore, she chatted effusively about how beautiful life had become:

Terry Turner’s promises to Violet and Daisy that the Cotton Bowl wedding would restore them to superstardom proved to be overly optimistic. Because of the national publicity the event generated, the sisters did receive some offers for bookings, but the invitations fell well short of the avalanche that Turner had predicted. The most lucrative of the new offers came from New Orleans, Louisiana. The Chez Paree nightclub offered Daisy and Violet a contract for a solid two months of engagements. The Chez Paree, of course, also expected Jim Moore to be part of the stage show because its patrons would want to see the husband of a Siamese twin.

The nightclub had its own house band and was not willing to pick up the tab for the fourteen-piece Dale Stevens Orchestra. Daisy and Violet wrote the last of their payroll checks for the ensemble and, with tears on both sides, bade farewell to all of the musicians, among them the father of the baby Daisy was carrying.

Letters, cards, and telegrams of good wishes from every part of the Western world flooded into the trio’s hotel room in New Orleans. Well-wishers believed that despite the challenges, love would conquer all. Long accounts on the newlyweds appeared in the Sunday newspapers, providing readers with reports on how famously well the three were still getting along one, two, three, and four weeks after the nuptials. But a week short of Violet and Jim Moore’s two-month anniversary, the press and the public learned that it had been suckered, that the trio was not enjoying the state of harmonious, blissful, nonstop sensual gratification that had been supposed. The three, in fact, were not living together at all. It was revealed that upon their arrival in New Orleans for the Chez Paree engagement, the twins registered at one hotel, and Moore, using an assumed name, checked into another.

The press and public’s first knowledge they had been conned came on September 9, 1936, when Violet and Moore jointly filed a petition in a New Orleans district court, asking that the marriage be annulled. In their plea, the two contended they had been coerced into the marriage because of a cruel hoax foisted on them and the American public by Terry Turner, their publicist, and Stanford Zucker, their booking agent.

“Your petitioners had no desire to be married and in going through the form of the marriage ceremony, it was without any intention of their entering into a contract of marriage or of assuming any of the responsibilities of their marriage status,” they declared in their court papers. “Your petitioners … did not give their free consent to a legal
and binding marriage.”
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They stated further in their plea that after “all the plans [for the marriage] had been made and some publicity given … the said booking agent … informed [them] of the plans and arrangements, and insisted that it was necessary that [they] comply with the plan as arranged.”

In oral testimony presented a month later before a New Orleans judge, William H. Byrnes, Jr., Moore said he and Violet felt they had no other choice but to participate in the sham because, upon the arrival of the Hilton Sisters’ revue in Dallas, Zucker told them if they didn’t comply, he would tear up their performance contract with the Texas Centennial Exposition. This would have left the sixteen entertainers and musicians from the Hilton troupe stranded with no funds to return to their homes, Moore said.

All the time Moore and Violet were appealing to have their marriage dissolved by the court, they remained close friends. Their quarrel was not between themselves but with Terry Turner and the brothers Stanford and Ben Zucker. Indeed, Moore and the twins remained so close as friends they continued to go out socially together.

One of the more memorable of their outings involved that other set of widely-known performing Siamese twins, Lucio and Simplicio Godino. The Filipino brothers stopped in at the Chez Paree one night and, after a long visit with Daisy, Violet, and Jim Moore in a dressing room, made plans to join the three for a late dinner. Moore remembered the attention the brothers drew when they entered the restaurant and then advanced to the table where Moore and Daisy and Violet were already seated.

“When they started to sit down,” Moore said of Lucio and Simplicio, “they sat down on one chair … but they would sort of get straddled, and then they would go up and down and up and down and up and down.…”
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Moore said the Godinos created such a strange scene just trying to take a seat in the restaurant, that Daisy and Violet
were mortified with embarrassment and wanted to slip beneath the table. The sisters were still fuming about the incident the next day, he said, and for all the humiliation Daisy and Violet themselves had suffered over the years as conjoined twins, they seemed unable to empathize with the predicament of the Godino brothers.

Said Moore: “One of the girls—I don’t remember which—looked at the other and says: ‘Well, did you see the way those clumsy sons of bitches sat down? I was so embarrassed, I didn’t know what to do.’ Now the girls were very graceful.… To see them walking down the street, you would have thought, ‘Why are those girls walking close together?’ because there were no bobbles, there was never anything awkward or like that.”

By the time the Hiltons began their engagement in New Orleans’ Chez Paree, it had become an ever-greater challenge for Daisy to keep her pregnancy concealed. In the past, the sisters had always created their stage wardrobe from gowns of identical style and size. Because of Daisy’s bulging belly, they now had to pack away all their old dresses and have new costumes made.

If, after two months of marriage to Violet, Moore still had not known his wife in the biblical sense, he did learn something about her internal workings. It struck him as interesting that not only did Daisy stop menstruating after she became pregnant, but so did Violet.

Following the two-month engagement in New Orleans, Daisy and Violet were invited to make two appearances in Minneapolis, Minnesota; one of them at the Palace Theater and another at Lindy’s Supper Club. But the house managers at both venues were stingey to an extreme and refused to cover the salaries of Jim Moore and his dancing partner, Anita Marie Ciska. By then, Moore had been trouping with Daisy and Violet for nearly three years. He had been the most loyal of their employees, sometimes performing with their shows even when they didn’t have money to pay him. More significantly, he
was also the twins’ most trusted friend. He recalled how pained Daisy and Violet appeared to be when they sat down with him and Ciska to discuss their dilemma:

“The girls had an offer to go to Minneapolis and [the theater managers] didn’t want to transport Anita and I up there.… And so we talked it over, and the girls said, ‘Well, we almost need this job,’ and ‘would it be all right?’ And we said, ‘Well, sure,’ and so they went to Minneapolis.”
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At the time of the separation, Violet and Moore were, at least in the eyes of the law, still husband and wife. While the couple had begun a court action to dissolve their union, the proceedings were suspended when the twins left New Orleans. Seven years would pass before they returned to court and made the annulment official.