The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (42 page)

Daisy and Violet were beneficiaries of this upturn. Once again they were in demand by the nightclubs and variety theaters. They were also flooded with invitations to appear at military training camps and USO clubs. They especially relished these engagements. Like most civilians, they felt an obligation to contribute to the country’s war effort in any way possible. And because England was being pummeled nightly by German bombs during the Blitz, they may have felt an even greater sense of patriotism. Sometimes by themselves and sometimes in company with other entertainers, they regularly appeared at rallies organized to sell United States Defense Bonds.

“I don’t think there were another two entertainers who worked harder at selling bonds than Daisy and Vi did,” Buddy Sawyer once said. “The girls would even cancel paying dates if they were asked to
take part in a rally. Such entertainers as Kate Smith, Bob Hope, and Jack Benny were always credited with selling the most war bonds. But it was said that right after big name stars like those, the twins were next in getting people to buy the bonds.”
⁵

One gathering place for soldiers, sailors, and marines where the Hiltons regularly appeared, always without taking a fee, was Pittsburgh’s USO–Variety Club Canteen. Among the other regular dropins there was L. Daniel Schmidt, an attorney and amateur hypnotist. Schmidt had a reputation for being imperious and overbearing. He was a man of normal height, but he had somehow perfected a technique of looking down on people even when they were five or six inches taller than he was.

Always seeking ways in which to extend his renown, Schmidt dreamt up an experiment in behavioral science that he apparently believed would make him a cover boy of the psychology journals if not
Time
magazine’s Man of the Year. His plan was to simultaneously place Daisy and Violet into hypnotic trances. By examining the twins while they were in dream states, he said he would provide the scientific community with empirical evidence of how dissimilar in personality two people can be even when both have the same genetic makeup and have shared the exact same experiences and environments all their lives.

Schmidt decided to carry out his experiment in a decidedly nonscientific laboratory: Pittsburgh’s USO–Variety Club Canteen. Carl Jung didn’t respond to his invitation to see the demonstration, but the event did pull in a standing-room-only crowd of GIs.

Schmidt called Daisy and Violet to the stage and asked them to sign their names on a blackboard. Both had long been separated from their husbands, but, curiously, they chalked “Mrs. Jim Moore” and “Mrs. Buddy Sawyer” onto the slate.
⁶
Next they seated themselves on a divan. Schmidt started talking to the sisters softly while at the same
time swinging a pendulous pocket watch before their eyes. Before a minute had ticked away, the twins’ heads were leaning together, their eyes were closed, and their expressions were placid. Clearly Schmidt was pleased by how well the first phase of the experiment had gone. He tendered a slight bow to the audience, winked, and then returned his attention to his subjects.

“Violet, I want you to think very hard. Can your remember when you and Daisy made your very first appearance on the stage of a theater?”

Violet moved her head up and down languidly. Her words emerged slowly, deliberately. “I think we were three. Yes, yes, I’m sure of it. We were just three years old.”

“Now, Daisy and Violet, I want both of you to continue the peace of your sleep and drift back … back … back in time. I want you travel back through the years to the time when you were three. Perfect. Now please concentrate very hard. Daisy, I want you to tell me where you and your sister performed for the first time.”

“It was far, f-a-r a-way.

“How far?”

“A-a-a-cross the o-o-o-cean.”

“Violet, you heard your sister say you made your performing debuts in a theater across the sea. Think very hard, Violet. What did the theater look like? What was its name?”

“Oh, it was so beautiful.… A great and splendid vaulted ceiling painted with frescoes of the Muses.… gold, decorated, horseshoe-shaped seating sections that rose in three, four … no, five tiers over the orchestra section. The theater was completely filled, and all the ladies and gentlemen were in their finest evening clothes. The theater was in Italy … Milan, Italy. It was called … called La La La Scala.”

The response set off tittering in the audience and then cackling, especially with its more erudite members. Schmidt’s face became a
lantern of red. Of all the highlights that musicologists had documented in the 200-year history of the opera house, somehow even the most meticulous of them had overlooked the appearance on its baroque stage of grown-together toddlers singing “Un bel di.”

Able lawyer that he was, Schmidt decided against questioning the twins any further. Visibly flustered, he abruptly terminated his experiment. Later he asked Violet if she knew how badly she humiliated him before the crowd. Violet confessed she had been faking her hypnotic trance all along, and that her only experience with La Scala had been in the pages of a travel book she had checked out from the library a few days earlier.

The relationship between the attorney and the twins, while strained for a while, wasn’t over. Schmidt later provided counsel for Daisy in her divorce action against Buddy Sawyer.

After dimming during the late 1930s and early 1940s, and at times almost guttering out altogether, the twins’ stars started flaring with bright, white light beginning in the fall of 1943. It was then when the king of all Sunday newspaper supplements, the
American Weekly
, began running on six successive Sundays, what was purported to be the first tell-all, no-holds-barred autobiography of the Hilton sisters: “The Private Life of the Twins.”
⁷
There wasn’t a fading entertainer anywhere who wouldn’t have entered into a Faustian bargain for such publicity. the
American Weekly
—proclaiming itself “The Nation’s Reading Habit”—was owned by the Hearst empire and boasted a circulation of 6.5 million, the widest of any publication in the world. Once the series began, the twins were instantly restored to America’s consciousness.

“The Private Life of the Twins” was represented by Daisy and Violet Hilton to be a “true and full double-autobiography,” as told to Ethelda Bedford, apparently a staff writer for the
American Weekly
. In the series’ opening paragraphs, the twins promised readers “the story
we never intended to tell.” They promised, too, that there would be nothing in the account that had not been “carefully, factually” set down. In detail upon detail, they described their childhoods as a time of unrelenting horror. Their mother, they said, died in childbirth; their father, whom they described as a Belgian military officer, was killed in the war without ever seeing them. They lived in terror of the woman who was to become their warder, identified not by the name Mary Hilton, but as a “Mrs. Mary Williams.” Except for the times when they were on exhibit on the rickety stages of sideshows or in the exhibition pits at country fairs, they were kept sealed away from the rest of the world. They never had any opportunities to interact with other children, and while “Mrs. Mary Williams” and their subsequent keepers became rich, the twins knew only penury, they wrote.

As unrelentingly lugubrious as the published tale of the girls’ early life was, parents across America started telling their youngsters of the Hilton twins, recasting the story as a parable, explaining that the sisters finally triumphed over the most evil of forces to become creatures of grace, beauty, and worldwide adulation.

Daisy and Violet were sensitive about having been born out of wedlock. It’s understandable why they would change the identity of their parents from an unmarried barmaid and a skirt-chasing, apparently married hairdresser and reinvent them as a loving, married couple who, because of their tragic and untimely deaths, left the twins orphaned. What was more amazing was how circumspectly Daisy and Violet treated their one-time slave masters, Mary Hilton and her son-in-law, Myer Myers. Not only did they change Mary’s surname from “Hilton” to “Williams,” but they were careful never to identify Myers by name in their memoir. Instead, they referred to him only as “Sir.”

If the twins were chary about identifying the people from their past, they showed no reticence in talking about the men with whom
they had been romantically involved. They named all the names: the publicist Bill Oliver whose wife brought a suit against them for alienation of affection; the Mexican-born troubadour Don Galvan; the orchestra leaders Blue Steele, Maurice Lambert, and Jack Lewis; the boxer Harry Mason; their one-time husbands, dancers Jim Moore and Buddy Sawyer, and more. Readers of the Sunday serial must have gotten the idea that the Hilton sisters were so experienced in love that, by comparison, such heartbreakers as Carole Lombard and Mae West didn’t even belong in the same league. As well-tried in romance as Daisy and Violet might have been, they apparently didn’t want to leave the readers with a final impression that they were through with love. Indeed, they concluded their memoir with what sounded like an open casting call for other beaus:

The twins’ mailbox did fill up with marriage proposals after the
American Weekly
published the memoir, but apparently none of the candidates seemed quite right to Daisy and Violet. Some of the offers came from prison inmates. There were also proposals from three-legged men, midgets, fat men, and other sideshow attractions. Many of these correspondents claimed that because they inhabited a place beyond the periphery of the broader society, they could empathize with the sisters’ pain and loneliness. But most of the love notes they received came from gold diggers who clearly were most interested in receiving a percentage of their earnings.

The vast dissemination of the twins’ autobiography may not have improved their romantic fortunes, but it was a boon to their performing opportunities. Offers poured in from all over in the United States and Europe. For Daisy and Violet, the choice of where to travel first was easy. They picked Florida. They were able to coordinate a string of engagements that would have them opening in Miami’s Club Bali in the fall of 1943 and then stay in Florida throughout the winter, playing houses up and down its eastern coast.

From the time they stepped off the train in Miami, Daisy and Violet felt that they had arrived in the Promised Land. They loved the look of the new and renewed that was everywhere to be found in the winter playground. Gypsies most of their lives, the place struck them as a spot where they could happily make their home forever.

Like the twins themselves, Miami was well on its way to resurrecting itself. Hotels, nightclubs, and apartments were pushing up everywhere on its coastal land, and magazines like
Life
and
Time
were referring to the city’s renewal as an urban miracle. The boom was spurred in part by the war. Unlike during the 1920s, when it was mostly the spectacularly rich who flocked to the beaches, by the 1940s, Miami had attracted hordes of factory workers and their families.

These fugitives from the ice and snow of Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Chicago headed south by train, plane, and bus, but rarely by automobile, since civilian consumption of gasoline was still strictly rationed by the Office of Transportation. Many wage earners seemed eager to splurge a month or two of their pay in a single week. And why not? Where was a worker’s reward for spending twelve hours a day slow-stewing in the foundries or tamping explosives into torpedo shells if he could not be a prodigal in Miami for at least one week out of fifty-two?

By the time Daisy and Violet opened their engagement at the Club Bali, their audiences thought they knew more details about the sisters’
lives than they did about their own spouses. By then, “The Private Life of the Twins” had been serialized in the Sunday papers for weeks. Club Bali seized the opportunity and ran large ads in the Miami dailies, declaring “You’re Reading About Them In The Newspapers! Now See Them In Person!” And people did see them. They went in droves. Looking over the crowd from the big stage, Daisy and Violet saw men in white tuxedos and women in expensive dresses that exposed gleaming shoulders. They also saw, huddled around the bar, raffish men in dark glasses and slouch hats.

The sisters on Miami Beach, mid-1940s
. (
Author’s collection
)

The club at 734 Biscayne Boulevard was famous for its shows and its food, but it was also a hangout for racetrack touts and bookies. Even though the Bali was always awash with vacationers, the establishment likely raked in its greatest profits from a tiny, second-floor space that operated days as the Arena Barber Shop. Nights, after the barbers had swept up the day’s cuttings and turned out the lights, the shop became a gambling boiler room where bookies throughout Miami called in bets to a half-dozen men manning phones. Police made regular raids, but because the Bali’s ownership seemed to change almost every month, the district attorney found it difficult to prosecute anyone.