The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (41 page)

As was true of their love lives, their professional lives seemed never to purr along smoothly for very long. Near the end of 1941, Daisy and Violet again found their careers seemed all but finished after December 7th when Japanese warplanes attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered World War II.

The nightclubs had always been predominantly patronized by free-spending young men, but young American males began answering the call to arms. With the nation in shock over the slaughter of 2,400 men in Hawaii, not many Americans were in the mood for clubbing. In New York City alone, dozens of night spots went out of business within weeks of the nation’s entry into the war. The clubs that weathered the sharp drop in patronage were able to do so only by resorting to drastic measures. Most cut back their floor shows to just one or two nights a week and replaced their expensive celebrity acts with local talent.

The period was especially trying for Daisy and Violet and the war wasn’t the only reason. They had been appearing in theaters and nightclubs for nearly two decades. As humiliating as it must have been for them, they had to face a harsh reality: In entertainment circles, they were starting to be seen as relics. By constantly making over and updating their show, such veterans as Sophie Tucker, Jimmie Durante, and George Burns and Gracie Allen had always been able to keep fans coming back year after year. The Hiltons, too, always tried to keep their productions
au courant
, and added the requisite gibes at Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolinito to their stage patter and sang songs like “Over There” and “You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap.” They also made appeals to their audiences to buy Defense Bonds. The truth was, audiences never viewed Daisy and Violet in the same way they saw such timeless entertainers as Tucker, Durante, or Burns and Allen. For all their
polish as entertainers, their drawing power had always been centered on their strangeness rather than talent.

Theodore D. Kemp, a sometime booking agent for the twins during the 1930s and 1940s, characterized the relationship the twins had with their audiences: “The girls were so outstanding as musicians, vocalists, dancers, and even comediennes that they could have had careers in entertainment even if they weren’t Siamese twins. The problem was, though, that the public never really appreciated the girls for how gifted they really were. They were fascinated by Daisy and Vi first and foremost because they were oddities of nature, freaks. I don’t think it really mattered much that the girls were terrific entertainers or that that they always tried hard to give their act the look of being the current year’s model. Most people saw them as a novelty and that created a problem for the girls. All but their greatest fans seemed to feel that if they saw the Siamese twins once, that was quite enough.”
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There was another reason why the twin’s marketability kept slipping. By the 1940s, some segments of society had begun taking a different view of what they saw as the exploitation of human misery. They began to feel it was indecorous to go to a theater or a nightclub to look at freaks, however brilliant these souls might have been as performers. There were, to be sure, still carnivals and circuses criss-crossing the country with tents full of quarter-ton ladies, alligator-skinned boys, living skeletons, and armless wonders. Thanks to exceptional social charm, beauty, and stage radiance, Daisy and Violet had been able to escape these sorry caravans. They were, at least for a while, embraced by the same audiences that gave their hearts to such luminaries as Al Jolson, Fanny Bryce, and Edgar Bergen. Popular tastes were changing as the world approached the midpoint of the century. Daisy and Violet represented the last of their kind. They were the sole surviving freak royals.

By 1942, the twins found themselves sometimes going for a month or two without work. Even when Argus managed to book engagements for them, the venues were often so far from one another that when the sisters finished a date in one place, they often had to travel across the country to get to their next one. With their pay-days spaced farther and farther apart, and their road expenses higher than ever, Daisy and Violet once again were at the edge of a financial precipice.

Desperate for some upturn in their fortunes, they quit Argus late in 1942 to join a new booking operation, the Jolly Joyce Agency in Philadelphia.
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Their new agents did find them steady work. When Daisy and Violet learned what their new act would be, their self-esteem sank to its lowest depth ever. They were informed they were now going to be repackaged as “Daisy and Violet Hilton, The World’s Only Strip-Teasing Siamese Twins.” The Joyce agency had booked them to travel the I. Hirst Circuit, a chain of about thirty-five burlesque houses in the East and Midwest.

Burlesque was suffering a severe womanpower crisis at the time Isadore Hirst signed the Hiltons. The premier strippers like Ann Corio, Georgia Sothern, and Rose La Rose had already quit the burly houses to work in nightclubs where the pay was much better and the audiences more polite. The burlesque theaters’ ranks of professional undressers became even further decimated when America entered World War II. Many soubrettes packed away their G-strings and picked up their welding torches for both the war effort and higher wages. So desperately low had the supply of strippers become that Hirst and his brethren were willing to do just about anything to attract new hirelings. This meant relaxing some of the usual qualifications for dancers. If a woman could move from one end of the stage to the other without falling on her face, she was almost always offered employment. The burlesque barons also raised the age ceiling for
dancers. The lowered standards for strippers didn’t go unnoticed by the press. A writer for
The Billboard
, for example, carped:

Daisy and Violet launched their burlesque careers in January 1943, at Isadore Hirst’s flagship theater, the Trocador in Philadelphia. Even in a business where dancers imaginatively employed such diverse props as mannequins, pythons, and whipped cream to add a little novelty to their routines, the Hiltons’ act stood out for its bizarreness. They provided their own musical accompaniment, bleating and honking on their saxophones through songs like “St. Louis Blues,” while at the same time shedding their costumes. Because the twins were so tiny, not even five feet tall, their instruments provided a degree of modesty.

Daisy and Violet came to dirty dancing with the naturalness of eaglets making their first attempts at flight. During the years they traveled with carnivals, they had watched the hootchie-cootchie dancing girls often enough to know what to do. Through their artful use of stage lighting and the care they took never to turn their backs to the audience, the twins disrobed to G-strings and pasties without ever exposing the thick, fleshy ligature uniting their bodies at the lower spine. Even so, there was no way they could make their audiences forget that they were Siamese twins. Except for the randiest of viewers, their audiences may have been provoked less to sexual excitement than to pity, if not outright revulsion.

The twins also made nondancing stage appearances at the Trocador during which they served as a foil for a goatish old comedian in a dented brown derby and an outsized yellow plaid suit. As part of his stage routine, the comedian made claims of having Olympian sexual
powers and promised the pair delivery to paradise if they would only give him a try.

“Yeah, yeah,” Daisy would rejoin. “If you’re such a good lover, why do the other dancers call you Peanut behind your back? From everything we’ve heard, you have neither the equipment nor the stamina to satisfy even one woman, let alone a pair.”

As the buffoon continued his boasts of sexual superiority, a change in his appearance would start taking place that would quite astonish the audiences. The nether region of his baggy trousers would begin billowing outward and the bulge would keep growing until it had swelled to impossible size. With the audience hooting, cheering, applauding, and stomping their feet, Daisy and Violet would investigate the source of the comic’s supposed elephantine tumescence. They would tug at the waist of his pants, drawing his suspendered trousers a foot away from his body, and then gaze into the abyss. Daisy would turn to the audience, roll her eyes and flash an I’ll-show-him expression. Next she would fish into her curls and pull out a five-inch-long pin. With an exaggerated gesture, she would twirl the pin in her fingers and feel its point. With Violet still pulling at the waist of the comic’s trousers, Daisy would aim the needle at her target. There would be a loud pop as Daisy punctured the source of the comic’s priapism. It was a balloon that had been inflated through a long rubber tube extended through the bottom of a pant leg to a bicycle tire pump a stagehand was operating behind the curtain.

Following their appearances at Philadelphia’s Trocador, the sisters went on tour on the “wheel” as it was called in burlesque circles, playing week-long and sometimes two-week-long engagements in cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Appearing in these cities during their vaudeville years, the twins had performed only in the most sumptuous show temples. Now they were playing in mostly decrepit buildings that had been added to the Hirst chain
only after they had fallen into disuse. The audiences were also different than those to which Daisy and Violet had become accustomed. By the 1940s, burlesque had already descended to such an abased form of entertainment, its patronage was predominantly made up of just two types: bums who used its theaters as flophouses, or lonely men who sat and watched with their fists moving jerkily, hidden under hats, threadbare coats, or overturned popcorn boxes.

There were times when the twins became so discomfited by the loud snoring, belching, and farting in the seats that they could scarcely continue their act. If they felt dishonored at having descended to such stink-holes, some of their dearest friends were equally tortured at seeing the sisters on burlesque house stages. One of the witnesses to a performance by “The World’s Only Strip-Teasing Twins” was Bud Robinson, who, with his wife CeCe, formed a dance duo that for years had appeared on some of the same variety bills as the sisters. Robinson, who later became the manager for bandleader Doc Severinsen, caught one of the twins’ performances in a Louisville burlyhouse. Even after the passage of many years, his memory of the spectacle hadn’t blurred.

“It was Kentucky Derby time, and as was often the case at that time of year, CeCe and I were booked at the Rosemont Hotel,” he recalled.

“We saw in the papers that Daisy and Vi were in Louisville, playing at a local burlesque house. We hadn’t seen the girls in years, although now and then we would get a letter or Christmas card from them. CeCe and I thought we’d surprise the girls. We went to the burlesque theater with the thought that we’d take in their show and then visit them backstage and invite them out for dinner someplace. When we saw them onstage, it just broke our hearts. As they danced, they peeled off parts of their costumes. They did some bumping and grinding. As strip-tease performances go, their exhibition was pretty
tame. Still, it tore us up watching them. They were lovely, vivacious girls. They had genuine talent as entertainers. Now they were reduced to this. When their performance ended, CeCe and I just left the theater and went back to the hotel. We couldn’t bring ourselves to go backstage to say hello. We were embarrassed for them and we knew that they, too, would have been terribly shamed at knowing we had been in the audience. It was one of the saddest things I ever saw in my life.”
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Daisy and Violet were often jeered by their audiences, and some of the more boisterous spectators yelled at the sisters to leave the stage and make room for the real tassel twirlers. Hirst’s Howard Theater in Boston or his National Theater in Detroit delivered sexual displays of the lewdest, most revealing kind. As outré as the twins’ act was, some patrons may have viewed it as more sickening than sexual. Because the sisters’ very survival now depended on their keeping their jobs, they had no choice but to take the insults and go on with the performances. “We run into drunks and hecklers, but we just ignore them,” Violet once said, revealing what it was like to perform before mobs of disparagers. “Our motto is to be gracious under any circumstances.”
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Sometime during 1943, Daisy and Violet switched to yet another booking agent, Don D’Carlo of D’Carlo Entertainment Services in Pittsburgh. At D’Carlo’s encouragement, they also established residency in Pittsburgh, moving into the Kirkwood Hotel. A small but stately brick structure at 5935 Kirkwood Avenue in the city’s New Liberty section, it had a reputation as a hotel that never slept. It was a warren for performers, painters, and assorted bohemians. Wafting through its hallways at any time of day or night was an olfactory broth of cooking cabbage, oil paints, turpentine, and burning leaves from plants other than tobacco. Jostling in the same passageways were the sounds of rehearsing Irish tenors, tap dancers, and concert
pianists. Many of the Kirkwood’s residents were entertainers who were either trying to launch new careers or put broken careers back together. The hotel’s restaurant, advertised as “The Area’s Finest Bar, Grill and Lounge,” had a small stage on which comics, singers, and magicians could test new material before fellow aspiring performers and, now and then, local talent scouts.

With their switch from the Jolly Joyce Agency in Philadelphia to D’Carlo, Daisy and Violet were able, at least for a while, to quit their lives as strippers. The war was still raging overseas, but by now a certain uneasy calm had befallen the nation and opportunities for entertainers had improved. America’s factories were operating around the clock, turning out armaments and other military supplies, and the workers had more money to spend than ever. With no new houses, automobiles, or refrigerators to buy, the plant workers felt free to spend their earnings on good times and escapism. In greater numbers than ever, working people flocked to the theaters, nightclubs, and movie houses. Suddenly there was work for comics, dancers, impersonators, and other entertainers who hadn’t been on stage in years.