The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (38 page)

D
aisy and Violet entered the compartment on the train and immediately drew down the shades, blocking out the bright morning and what they hoped would be their last sight ever of anything or anyone in New Orleans. They took their places on a small divan, positioning themselves back-to-back as the train began to pull away from the terminal. Slowly they began to feel a release of the tension that had been building in them for weeks. Never before had they been so anxious to leave a place.

They had come to feel like pariahs: It seemed to them that everyone in New Orleans reviled them. It all started when the city’s newspapers reported that Violet’s much-publicized marriage had been a charade, a mere publicity stunt carried out by the twins and their agents in the hope of energizing the Hiltons’ flagging box office appeal. In the petitions Violet and Jim Moore filed with a New Orleans court seeking to have their marriage annulled, the couple claimed that they were coerced by their managers into marrying. But neither the public nor the press was quick to forgive and forget. The Hilton sisters lost the quality that had endeared them to much of the nation. Stripped of their innocence, from then on, they were personas non grata wherever they appeared. The doorman and the desk clerks at their hotel stopped greeting them. In the past, they had always been given the choicest tables in restaurants but now they were seated
nearest to the kitchen or washroom. The sisters even had trouble hailing taxis. Most cabbies sped right by them.

Camille Rosengren, their goddaughter, said she was sure that neither Violet nor Daisy ever really understood why, after the news of Violet’s sham marriage came out, the sisters were shunned in so many circles. Former librarian and later the operator of one of the nation’s most distinguished book stores, Rosengren provided an analysis of the backlash in literary terms.

“From the time the twins had come to America as eight or nine-year-olds, remember, they were in the news all the time,” Rosengren said. “There probably were never two souls who endured more wretched childhoods. They were cursed at birth with the most terrible of conditions. They were given up by their mother. As children, they were kept as slaves and cruelly exploited by their warders. Yet they triumphed over all their adversities. They blossomed into bright, talented, beautiful young ladies without a trace of self-pity.

“Because the twins endured so much tragedy, I don’t think there was anybody in America who didn’t want them to find great happiness. When Violet married the tall and handsome Jim Moore, it was one of those loopy, feel-good stories in which an entire nation could take a little giddy joy. Now maybe some thought it was goofy for them to get married in the Dallas Cotton Bowl, but probably the ceremony was no less loopy than those pageants in England where royals marry before thousands of commoners with great pomp and ceremony. I think almost everyone viewed Vi’s marriage as a beautiful ending to a modern Cinderella story. Who, after all, was more deserving of love and bliss? And if she could walk down the aisle and take the hand of a handsome prince, well, then, it could be expected that Daisy, too, would someday soon find love, marry, and like her sister, live happily ever after. Then, hardly a month passed and it was exposed by the newspapers that the wedding had been a masquerade,
that Vi and Jim were never romantically involved, and that they were now seeking to have their marriage annulled. Maybe the poor little Siamese twins weren’t so sweet and pure after all. What everybody thought was a real life fairytale turned out to be a sick joke. People felt disappointed by them, if not betrayed.”
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Like Rosengren, Rose Fernandez, too, was convinced the twins “never really figured out” why they fell so swiftly and sharply from public grace.

“People may be willing to forgive certain extremes of behavior from celebrities,” said the nightclub dancer and acrobat. “But they won’t put up with being suckered by them. Vi and Daisy put their careers at risk by agreeing to that phony-baloney wedding in the Cotton Bowl. Even the twins’ most loyal supporters felt deceived by them. And just like that, a lot of the powers in the entertainment field—the agents, the bookers, the managers of theaters and clubs—saw them as damaged goods.”
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After Violet and Moore had begun the legal proceedings to have their marriage annulled, Hernandez said, they started experiencing so much ill will just going out to a movie or dinner that they tried disguising their identities. “I never knew them to have worn dark glasses before, but now they had them on whenever they were out in public. I don’t know if they saw the foolishness of this. They were joined together physically, for Betsy’s sake. Did they really think that dark glasses were going to hide who they were?”

It may be that Daisy and Violet wore the glasses less to mask their identities than to hide their red eyes. Almost daily they experienced slights and tongue-lashings that left them in tears. Probably their ugliest encounters involved the manager of the Chez Paree. The Chez had been waging a publicity campaign urging the public to stop in and see “Violet Hilton, the newly married Siamese twin, along with her sister, Daisy, and the very blushing bridegroom, the handsome and
talented James Moore.” The club enjoyed turn-away crowds initially, but when the news came out that the newlyweds were seeking an annulment, business absolutely dried up. In his confrontations with Daisy and Violet, the Chez’s manager called them “has-been entertainers” and “cheats.” Not only did he refuse to pay them for their appearances, but because he had booked their stage show with the understanding that Moore and Violet had married not for mercenary reasons but purely out of love, he threatened to sue the Hiltons for entering into a contract with an intent to defraud the club.

The train was only a few miles out of New Orleans when there was a rapping at the door of Hiltons’ compartment. It was the conductor.

“Tickets, please,” he asked when Violet opened the door. Violet handed him a single ticket.

The conductor looked to Daisy. “And your ticket, ma’am?”
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There was no second ticket. The twins were probably close to destitution when they left New Orleans. They had received no pay for nearly two months during which they had incurred expenses, including hotel bills, salaries for Jim Moore and dancer Anita Marie Ciska, and attorney fees.

In an effort to save on their travel expenses, Daisy and Violet had boarded the train in New Orleans on a single fare. When the conductor demanded two tickets, they tried to persuade him that because their bodies were joined together as one, they were entitled to travel on a single fare. The trainman refused to accept their argument. Unless they bought a second fare, he would have to put them off the train at the next stop. There was an exchange of sharp words between the conductor and the sisters. Finally, he left to telegraph a passenger agent in St. Louis. Apparently not wanting the matter to escalate into an ugly scene, the agent wired back: “If unable to collect extra fare, make no attempt to put one of them off the train.”
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The trip didn’t become any easier for Daisy and Violet even after
the uneasy truce with the conductor. Their compartment was hot and stuffy. Because of her pregnancy, Daisy suffered from motion sickness. The sisters spent more time in the lavatory than in their seats.

The twins were already in high dudgeon even before they arrived in the Twin Cities, but they became even more infuriated when they stepped off the train. Always in the past when they appeared in a new town, they were received by hordes of fans, theater and nightclub managers, and sometimes even a mayor or city official. This time when they disembarked from the train there was nobody to greet them, not even the local booking agent who had lined up the engagements for them. The twins were even left with the task of finding a hotel.

After exiting the terminal and lugging their bags to a taxi stand, Daisy and Violet were spotted by a reporter and photographer for the
Minneapolis Tribune
. By now, newspapers across the land had revealed that the wedding of Violet Hilton and Jim Moore had been a publicity stunt, but somehow the news had eluded the
Tribune
reporter. He asked Violet where her husband was.

She glowered at her inquisitor and then exploded. “Don’t you even read your own newspaper?”
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“I wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t,” Daisy piped in.

The reporter was stunned by the sharp responses, but he pressed on. He asked how the marriage had worked out.

“It didn’t,” Violet shot back.

“And we’re going to get an annulment,” added Daisy, using the plural.

Trying to be as diplomatic as possible, the reporter finally asked if, during the honeymoon, the twins and the bridegroom had all slept in one bed.

No,” snapped Violet.

“And it’s nobody’s business but our own if we had,” Daisy added.

Things didn’t improve for the twins in the days ahead. They had
been booked to head a five-act variety show at the Palace on a Saturday and Sunday, before beginning a week-long engagement at Lindy’s, a downtown club. The theater and club had booked the Hiltons soon after the Cotton Bowl wedding, expecting to cash in on the national publicity. The Palace and Lindy’s both made the claim that audiences would not only be treated to performances by the most famous Siamese twins of the twentieth century, but they would also have a chance to “see the only man in America who has a legal right to go to bed with two women every night.” The promotion, of course, misfired badly when weeks before the scheduled engagements, the story of the sham marriage broke.

Daisy and Violet played mostly to empty houses. Worse, they were notified by their booking agent that no stage appearances had been lined up after their Minneapolis dates because the theaters and clubs could no longer advertise that Violet’s new husband was part of their show. After their runs at the Palace and Lindy’s, Daisy and Violet sequestered themselves in their Minneapolis hotel room, uncertain when or even if they would work again. Finally, after a month, they did receive another assignment, this one as a last-minute replacement for an act that had canceled a week-long engagement at the Alhambra theater downtown.

Their appearance at the Alhambra only provided the twins with more evidence of how fast and far they had tumbled from the favor of the public and press. Except for the ushers, there was almost no one in the theater for their shows, and the Minneapolis papers didn’t even bother to send reviewers. It probably was just as well that the press boycotted their appearances. If any professional critics had taken in the sisters’ performances, they likely would have cut the pair to ribbons. Daisy, now eight months into her pregnancy, moved awkwardly and without grace, and whenever the sisters danced onstage, Violet seemed to be attached to a ball and chain.

Daisy delivered late in November or early December of 1936, most likely in a hospital somewhere in Minneapolis or St. Paul. The baby was a boy and born healthy and normal physically, according to Florenza Williams of Sacramento, California, whose husband, Clifford, a circus performer, toured with the sisters during their carnival years and became a lifelong friend and confidante.
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Jim Moore and others said Daisy surrendered the baby for adoption immediately after his birth. It will probably never be possible to determine with certainty the exact date of the boy’s birth, nor the hospital where he was delivered, as birth and adoption records are not made public in Minnesota.

Considering the period, Daisy had no other real options to consider but to give up her baby. Society had already decided that for her. She was, after all, a public figure and unmarried. Because the sisters seem never to have talked about the baby, even to those who were closest to them, it is impossible to do anything more than speculate on the searing sense of loss Daisy must have experienced in surrendering her child. No doubt her decision put her in mind of another woman, her own mother, who twenty-eight years earlier, also out of fear and desperation, gave her children away. Upon giving up her son, Daisy may have come closer to loving her own mother on a new level and empathizing with the remorse and inconsolable sorrow Kate must have felt in forsaking her daughters. If it was unthinkable for Daisy, an unmarried Siamese twin, to keep a child, could it have been any more imaginable for Kate Skinner, also unmarried, to keep Siamese twins?

After firing their booking agents Stanford and Ben Zucker who, along with the promoter Terry Turner, concocted the wedding debacle, the twins cast their lot with a woman agent in Minneapolis. A year-and-a-half or so after Moore and the Hilton sisters separated in New Orleans, Moore and Anita Marie Ciska traveled back to the
Twin Cities for a nightclub engagement. While there, Moore looked up the twins’ new agent. He said he was sure the agent suspected him of having fathered Daisy’s child. “She treated me as though I were the big bad wolf,” he said. “And she would give me no information. She would not tell me where the girls were. They may have been in Minneapolis at the time.”
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