The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (43 page)

Because the population of Miami Beach changed almost completely from week to week, with tens of thousands of tourists entering the city at the same time that tens of thousands were leaving, Daisy and Violet probably could have attracted full houses at Club Bali all winter long. Don D’Carlo had booked the sisters to make appearances at numerous other clubs in Florida, however, and after two weeks, Daisy and Violet traveled on to Key West, then to Palm Beach, then to other resorts.

The money rolled in throughout the winter of 1943–44, and there was no interruption when spring came. The Boyle Woolfolk Agency in Chicago signed the sisters to head an eight-act grandstand unit, billing them as “The Sensation of An Era … The Most Talked Of Couple In The History of Theatricals.” The Woolfolk productions, part rodeo and part circus, included such fare as the Glades, trick horseback riders; Ray Thornton, a lariat twirler and Will Rogers impersonator; and Krick and Bodo, a comedy trampoline duo.

The shows were primarily intended for fair audiences and were decidedly more low-brow. According to trampolinist Howard Krick, the sisters seemed to enjoy appearing before the rustics. “I never got the impression that they felt it was beneath them to be playing before
the country folks in the grandstands,” said Krick, who toured with the twins in the summer of 1944. “It didn’t matter to them if they were playing to an audience in a ritzy nightclub or to some farmers sitting in bleachers downwind from a fairground pig barn. They just seemed to genuinely enjoy putting on their show.”
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No records have been found that show what the twins received for their fair appearances, but Krick said he and his partner, George Bodo, earned $375 a week. “Because the Hilton sisters were the top-billed act in the unit, it’s likely they were earning at least three times as much as George and me,” Krick estimated.
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Not since their earliest years of touring with carnivals three decades earlier had the twins faced such hard traveling. Because the country fair sites were often in remote regions not served by railroads, they traveled everywhere by automobile. As the twin on the left, it was Daisy who had always been at the wheel in the past, but the sisters now found a way to share the driving. They bought a car with a steering wheel and controls on the right side as well as the left side. The car, a second-hand Buick, had seen earlier service in a high school drivers’ education program.

Because it was still a time before motels sprouted every ten or twenty miles along America’s highways, Daisy and Violet often slept in the car at night while en route to their fair engagements. “They were real troupers,” according to Krick. “They never complained about the rigors of traveling to the fairs and, as far as I know, they never asked for any special treatment anywhere. They were also generous with their concerns for other performers in the road unit, even those way down the ladder.”
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“We were in Knoxville, Illinois, for the Knox County Fair. Just a couple hours before the first show, while George and I were rehearsing, I cut my knee quite badly on one of the trampoline springs. Some fair officials rushed me into town to see a doctor. The doctor found it
necessary to stitch up the wound. He then wrapped the knee in bandages and advised me to stay off the leg for six weeks. Upon my return to the fairground, the girls invited me into their dressing tent. Daisy said she had something to make my knee feel better. She got out a bottle of gin and gave the doctor’s bandage a good soaking with the stuff. I don’t know if her first-aid really helped, but some of the pain did go away. With a little adjustment of our usual routine, George and I were able to go on with our act that very afternoon. Today, fifty years later, a scar from that gash to my knee is still visible. I treasure it. It often puts me in mind of Daisy and Violet. It reminds me of their kindness.”
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Daisy and Violet toured continuously through the end of the decade, playing the resorts and big cities in winter, and traveling the fair circuit in summer. If they were still having romantic liaisons during this period, they were likely of the one-night-stand variety. While they had never been shy before about discussing their latest heartthrobs, they no longer made declarations to the press about boyfriends. After going through two disastrous marriages, bringing an illegitimate child into the world, and making business decisions that had wiped out their fortune, what seemed to matter most to them at this point was holding on to their careers. And they worked as hard as ever.

Thanks to the constancy of their engagements, they were probably earning $75,000 or more a year from the mid-1940s on. While that was considerably short of what their act had generated during their vaudeville years in the 1920s, the twins collected all their earnings, minus the 10 percent skimmed by their booking agents. Financially, at least, they may have been better off than at any time in their lives.

But while their fortune was rebuilding, they were imperiled by an occupational hazard that almost all entertainers seem to face whenever
they start accumulating wealth conspicuously and rapidly. Sooner or later they were going to be approached by an opportunist operating in the belief that other peoples’ money was there for the taking by anyone smart enough to get it.

T
he gray-white cumulus cloud hanging over the desk of Ross Frisco’s office kept massing thicker and thicker, bloated from the smoke of Frisco’s cigar and the Old Golds that Daisy and Violet kept firing up. Frisco appeared immensely pleased with himself. He peered across his desk at the twins with a you’re-going-to-love-me expression, and posed a series of questions that were purely rhetorical:

Were they prepared to become so fabulously rich they would be able to turn away invitations to appear at all but the poshest theaters and nightclubs? How would they feel about seeing their names emblazoned on the marquees of half the movie houses in the country? Was there a fireplace mantel in their apartment where they would be able to show off a couple of Oscar statuettes?

Even in his elevator shoes, Frisco stood only a few inches more than five feet tall. His black hair was slicked back with Vitalis. He wore tortoise-shell framed glasses that were so over-sized he appeared to be looking at the world through the windshield of a Packard. His booking agency, Ross Frisco Attractions, Inc., operated out of a scruffy fifth-floor suite in an office building on Boston’s Tremont Street next door to the one of the world’s largest and most glittering movie palaces, the 4,400-seat Metropolitan Theater.

Frisco tried to style himself as the most egalitarian of the talent
bookers in the East. He engaged opera divas and string quartets and nine-year-old violin prodigies for the garden and yachting parties of Boston’s Brahmins, but he also represented spoon players and big-top aspirants with names like Cuddles and Blinky who twisted balloons into animals.

Daisy and Violet were forty-two. Certainly their stars had lost a lot of the candlepower with which they had once blazed. Still, Ross Frisco regarded them as the hottest property to have entered his stable since the early 1930s when, for a brief time, he was the booker for the Will Mastin Trio, the dance troupe in which a peewee-sized kid named Sammy Davis, Jr. made his professional debut. Frisco bagged the twins by dint of being in the right place at the right time. Daisy and Violet had always found Boston appealing. Financially flush from nearly a decade of regular engagements, they left Pittsburgh in 1950 and settled into a big and gracious apartment in Boston’s toney Back Bay. They had scarcely gotten their names on the mailbox at 22 Dartmouth Street when Frisco started ringing their doorbell. They politely turned him away at first. Don D’Carlo, their agent in Pittsburgh, had kept them working and their relationship with him had always been good. But Frisco persisted. He assured the sisters that because they were now in his backyard, he could serve them better than any out-of-state booker. He promised he’d make the girls bigger stars than they had ever been and, ultimately, wooed them to his agency.

Frisco didn’t get off to the smoothest of starts with Daisy and Violet, according to Abe Ford, another talent booker in Boston.
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Frisco consistently found work for the twins, but the engagements were hardly what they had been expecting.

“Ross’s specialty had always been novelty acts—magicians, jugglers, acrobats, tap dancing midgets, and the like,” Ford noted.

“He had handled acts like that since the ‘twenties when he booked
for a lot of the smaller houses. By the time Ross started handling the twins, though, there were no longer many opportunities for placing variety acts in the theaters. Mostly what he did was use the girls as headliners in unit shows that also included such dime-a-dozen attractions as tumblers, plate spinners, ventriloquists, and magicians. He sent these unit shows to entertainment-starved small towns where the programs were often presented in school auditoriums and gymnasiums. The pay the entertainers got in these unit shows was lousy, and a lot of nights they were put up in flea-bag hotels. Because the Hiltons were known the world over, I don’t suppose this sat too well with them. I had the sense that they were unhappy with Ross almost from the beginning of their relationship with Ross.”
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Ford was correct in surmising that Daisy and Violet had quickly become disenchanted with Frisco. They were on the phone with him every day, asking how he expected them to meet their living expenses when he found them so few engagements. Frisco was aware that the twins were losing faith in him. He was sure he was going to lose them unless he could quickly stop their careers from moving in reverse. He phoned the twins one day late in 1950 and asked if they could meet at his office as soon as possible. He had an exciting new plan, he said.

Daisy and Violet were prepared to issue an ultimatum to Frisco: Either start finding them work in the better theaters and clubs or they were walking. They were cool and standoffish when they appeared at his office. Their agent, on the other hand, was more chirpy than the twins had ever seen him. He asked them to settle into a chair across his desk and then he unfolded his plan.

Frisco asked the sisters to forget about nightclub and theater engagements for a while. He had something much bigger in mind. His plan was going to transform them into movie stars … no, not mere movie stars, but big-screen heroines who would become so adored by
the public they would stand out like Venus and Athena at a convention of cleaning ladies.

Frisco said he already had a rough draft of the screenplay. It was a vehicle he had created just for them and one only they would be able to play. It was so unlike any other movie ever made, Frisco promised, it was a foregone conclusion it would win an Academy Award. Daisy and Violet shifted forward to the edge of their chair. Frisco continued to effuse, describing in detail Daisy and Violet’s ascension into Hollywood’s firmament.

Eventually, the sisters interrupted his growing list of superlatives and asked which studio would be producing the picture. Frisco cleared his throat and said they would have to take on full responsibility for bankrolling his film project. Daisy and Violet flashed looks of disgust at one another, stubbed out their cigarettes, and rose from the chair.

“We’ll be sure to see the picture when it comes to town, Mr. Frisco,” Violet declared. “You’ll have to find another pair of Siamese twins for the project, though. Come on, Daisy, let’s not waste another minute here. We’ve got work to do. We need to find another agent.”
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The sisters knew that a movie production could wipe out every dollar they had in the bank. This had happened before when they were persuaded to produce their own road show. Ultimately, the venture gobbled up every cent of the fortune they had been awarded in their lawsuit against Myer Myers.

Frisco begged Daisy and Violet not to leave before hearing more about his project. He tried to allay their concerns about the risks involved in investing in the film. He would not, he averred, have any trouble at all getting Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or Paramount to produce it. But if he were to turn the project over to one of the big studios, he went on, the three of them would not only have to surrender all artistic control over the production, but they would also miss out
on the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars the movie was sure to earn.

“Listen,” Frisco said, “Here’s how strongly I believe in this picture. I’m going to go to Hollywood with you. I’m going to close down this booking agency of more than thirty years. I’m going to lock the door, throw away the key, and walk away from the place. Would I even think of doing that if I weren’t absolutely sure the three of us would be wading in money?”

Frisco leaned well back into his leather chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and turned his gaze to the ceiling. He seemed enraptured, as though he were having a vision of what things were going to be like after the premiere.

“The movie is going to be titled
Chained for Life
, and, of course, it’s going to say right up there on the screen, ‘Starring Daisy and Violet Hilton.’ ”

Frisco went on to describe the story in detail. The movie he outlined may not have been DeMillean in scope, but it did seem cinematic. It had tension, drama, quirkiness, and a corker of an ending.

The story, he said, would play out against the backdrop of a road company called the Dorothy and Vivian Hamilton Revue, starring singing and dancing Siamese twins, and, of course, these roles would be assumed by Daisy and Violet. The cast also included a magician, a comedian, a juggler, and a sharpshooter.

Early in the story, Dorothy and Vivian, along with the company’s manager, are seen fretting over patronage so paltry there is barely enough money to fuel the bus to get them to the next town. Dorothy and Vivian are agonizing over the realization they may soon have to hand pink slips to their troupers and leave them stranded somewhere without funds to return home. The show’s manager, Ted Hinckley, hatches an idea he believes might save them: If he can engineer an onstage marriage with one of the twins, the event might trigger the
kind of media buzz that could draw people to the revue just to see the new bride and groom. Hinckley determines that the best possible pairing would have Dorothy, portrayed by Daisy, marrying André Pariseau, the sharpshooter. At first, Hinckley encounters resistance from Dorothy and André when he tells them he wants them to wed before a paying crowd in a grand ceremony. Through his gifts of persuasion, he finally convinces the pair that a public marriage might be the last hope for keeping the Dorothy and Vivian Hamilton Revue alive.