The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (44 page)

Frisco brought out three glasses, filled them with scotch and water, and lit another cigar. Up to this point, the narrative Frisco was unreeling seemed to closely mimic those in the twins’ actual lives. But as Frisco resumed his recounting, the story took some new twists and turns. Although Dorothy is at first romantically indifferent to André, she finds herself falling in love with him once the two begin to plan their arranged marriage. The sharpshooter seems equally smitten with Dorothy, even strumming a guitar and serenading her over the telephone with love songs.

Just as Hinckley had hoped, the press falls all over the announcement that Dorothy Hamilton, a pretty Siamese twin, is going to marry the strikingly handsome André Pariseau. Pictures of the two run on the front pages of newspapers everywhere, and crowds of people now appear at the box offices for every performance of the Dorothy and Vivian Hamilton Revue.

The penultimate scene in
Chained for Life
occurs on the eve of Dorothy and André’s scheduled wedding. It is revealed then that André has resumed a relationship with Renée, a beautiful stage assistant who balances apples and oranges atop her head as André, from twenty-five paces away, blasts away at them with his pistols. When Dorothy Hamilton learns of André’s perfidy, she feels desolate and, because of all the attention her engagement has received in the press, publicly humiliated. Her sister Vivian has a different set of emotions.
Her realization that André has been cheating on Dorothy fills her with murderous contempt for him. While André is on stage with Renée before a capacity audience, Vivian drags Dorothy into the wings, picks up one of André’s revolvers, takes aim, and with a single squeeze of the trigger, leaves him mortally wounded.

Frisco’s screenplay finishes with an ending he is sure is going to leave its audiences gasping for air. Vivian is brought to trial for the first degree murder of her sister’s intended, and is ultimately found guilty as charged. But the sitting judge is left in a quandary that no amount of legal arguing can resolve. Because Dorothy and Vivian are physically bound to one another, “chained for life,” as it were, how can he sentence Vivian to death, or, for that matter, even life imprisonment? To do so would exact the same punishment on the innocent sister.

While Frisco claimed full credit for the concept of his story, it was, in fact, heavily borrowed from
Those Extraordinary Twins
, Mark Twain’s short story of fictional Siamese twins, Luigi and Angelo Capello. As with Frisco’s Vivian, Twain’s Luigi is placed on trial for murder. The judge finds him guilty, but because Luigi is physically connected to an innocent sibling, he falters over how to mete out justice. In the Twain story, the judge’s dilemma is resolved by a mob of angry townspeople. They take the law into their own hands and hang Luigi, simultaneously also snuffing out the life of his innocent brother.

Even though Daisy and Violet had vowed they would never again allow themselves to be taken in by someone else’s schemes, they were absorbed by Ross Frisco’s film project. The screenplay he outlined sounded like it had all the components of a blockbuster. And certainly it struck them as a movie that was absolutely tailor-made for them, a vehicle whose starring roles only they could carry. Said Daisy: “Maybe we were crazy—how many times before had we been taken in by the
wild dreams of others?—but if ever Violet and I were presented with a proposition that seemed to be absolutely a sure-fire winner, Ross’ movie sounded like it might be such a thing. Vi and I talked over the proposition for only a little. Then we gave Ross the answer he wanted to hear: we would go to Hollywood and if it meant that we would we could retain full artistic and financial control over the picture, then we would put up the money for its production.”
⁴

Once he received the twins’ assurances they would underwrite the costs of bringing his story to the screen, just as he had promised, Frisco shut down his talent agency, and, accompanied by Daisy and Violet, entrained for Hollywood.

It was January or February of 1951 when the three arrived in Hollywood. At this point, Frisco’s movie project had no existence anywhere outside his mind. His first job was to find a producer, someone who could commission a script, hire a director, choose a cast and put together a film crew. It isn’t known how many doors might have been slammed on him, but, ultimately, he was able to sell the idea to George Moskov. A movie man of long, rich, and varied experience, Moskov had apprenticed with the highly regarded producer, Lewis Milestone. In the late 1930s, Moskov launched his own career as a producer, shepherding the development of such solid hits as
Angel Island
(1937),
Joe Palooka, Champ
(1946),
Isle of the Missing Men
(1947),
Heading for Heaven
(1947), and
Search for Danger
(1949). Only months before he was approached by Frisco, Moskov had completed
Champagne for Caesar
, a sparkling, critically well-received comedy about radio quiz shows. The film featured such A-list stars of the day as Ronald Colman, Celeste Holm, and Barbara Britton, and boasted a score by Dimitri Tiomkin. It was perhaps surprising that a producer of Moskov’s credentials would agree to participate in a film project as amorphously defined as Frisco’s
Chained for Life
. He may have been impressed that the sisters themselves were entirely underwriting the
project and that he would be spared the responsibility for raising any of the production costs.

Moskov’s first step in developing the film was to bring in writer Nat Tanchuck. A graduate of the University of Southern California, Tanchuck worked as a newspaper reporter, a short story writer, a movie reviewer for trade publications, a public relations flak, and a developer of scripts for radio and television. But at the time he was tabbed by Moskov, Tanchuck could only claim credits as an assistant writer on three pictures, all of them forgettable:
Federal Man, I Killed Geronimo
, and
Timber Fury
. Moskov probably was not in a position to attract a more seasoned writer for the project. No records exist of how much money was budgeted for
Chained for Life
, but it seems doubtful Moskov could have had much more than $100,000 with which to work, if that.

As a hired pen, Tanchuck knew from the beginning he would have to take direction from Frisco and Moskov. But from the moment the project began, Daisy and Violet became increasingly proprietary about their investment and kept trying to influence the film’s shape. With so many authors, the screenplay soon became a multiheaded monster.

It was an era when the golden age of big Technicolor musicals was just dawning. While Frisco had conceived
Chained for Life
as a taut murder and courtroom drama with a heartbreaking ending, Daisy and Violet were more interested in having the film showcase their stage talents. They prevailed on Tanchuck to develop a script that would give them opportunities to sing and dance between the stretches of love-making and gunfire. Tanchuck met with Moskov, Frisco, and the twins almost daily. At each session, he was bombarded by conflicting ideas about what should be added, subtracted, modified, or restored. He would return to his typewriter to incorporate the changes, report back to the group the next day with his rewrites, and face yet more new ideas.

Tanchuck’s difficulties in producing a Script that satisfied all his bosses may have been compounded by a personal quirk. Just as Dr. Jekyll metamorphosed into a werewolf only when the moon was bobbing in the sky, Tanchuck transformed into a writer only late at night when all of Los Angeles was asleep. “Dad was the consummate night person,” said his daughter Heather Tanchuck. “He always had some trouble getting his schedule to gibe with that of most other people in the workaday world. He did his writing only at night, late at night. My mother and I would find him pushing away from the typewriter at about the same time in the morning when we were rising for a new day.”
⁵

It isn’t known how many rewrites Tanchuck made on his script, but ultimately “the committee” never felt he got things just right. Moskov complained the dialogue didn’t have an authentic ring, so he brought in a script doctor, Albert DePina, a writer with whom he had worked on
Joe Palooka, Champ
.

As difficult a time as Moskov was having in getting what he considered to be a creditable script, he had an even greater struggle finding the right director. Three or four different directors were hired, but because each balked at taking orders from Frisco and the twins, all of them either walked off the job or were fired. The director’s job ultimately went to Harry L. Fraser. He was known throughout Hollywood as the “King of the B-Movies,” a sobriquet in which he took great pride.

A seasoned professional, the sixty-two-year-old Fraser had directed more than sixty films, many of them westerns in which he had worked with such celluloid cowboys as Gene Autry, Harry Carey Sr., Ken Maynard, and John Wayne. Few critics ever described his directorial talents in terms any more glowing than “workman-like,” but Fraser had a reputation for making the best of mediocre scripts and casts. He was also known for turning out his films on time and on budget.
Fraser had begun his film career in the mid-teens as an actor, appearing in western serials. He started directing in 1930, working for Monogram Studios. Besides directing, he often wrote and re-wrote scripts, sometimes operated the cameras, and even lit the sets. If he had trouble getting an actor to follow his direction, he would fire the player on the spot, go to the make-up tent, and assume the role himself. Even more important to Daisy and Violet, something that gave him cachet in their eyes, Fraser had been a vaudeville comedian during the 1920s and played in many of the same theaters where the twins performed. Said Fraser: “Daisy and Violet had fired several directors before I took over for one basic reason—none of them knew anything about vaudeville. Well, I had headlined on the Keith and Orpheum circuit two different times and had been on and off Broadway for a good many years before becoming first an actor and a later a director in the motion picture medium. So the Hilton sisters welcomed me with open arms—all four of them.”
⁶

Autographed publicity still taken during a break in filming
Chained for Life, 1952. (
Courtesy of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences
)

The twins were attracted to something else about Fraser: unlike the other directors who had been brought in on the project earlier, he was a director who could be directed. It may have rankled his predecessors that they were expected to take orders from women whose experience in film was limited to the five minutes they were on camera in Tod Browning’s
Freaks
. But Fraser was free of any artistic pretensions. He took the position that so long as the Hiltons were providing him with regular paychecks, it was fine with him if they wanted to have a say in the picture’s production.

In the history of motion pictures, there couldn’t have been many casts that were more motley than the ragtag gang that Moskov, Frisco, and the twins eventually drew together. It was almost uniformly comprised of actors and actresses who could be placed in the categories of has-beens, never-beens, and never-would-bes.

Of the fifteen players that were hired to join Daisy and Violet, only one, Jack Mulhall, had a name that could have resonated with the film-going public, and then, only those with long memories. Mulhall was the cinema world’s first star ever to earn $1,000 and then $2,000, $3,000, and $4,000 a week
⁷
. A dapper, wavy-haired, handsome man with an urbane manner, in his much younger years he been paired as leading man with such stars as Mary Pickford, Billie Dove, Dorothy Gish, Lillian Gish, Norma Talmadge, and Constance Talmadge. Mulhall was able to purchase much of the land that is known today as Sherman Oaks, California. There, he built a mansion that would later be bought by Spencer Tracy. But Mulhall’s glory years had been during the era of silent films. Born in Wappinger
Falls, New York, and raised in New Jersey, he had a flat, nasal voice that no amount of vocal coaching seemed able to modify. The liability rendered him all but extinct as a film star when the talkies came in. Thereafter, all he could get were small parts and small wages. Mulhall was sixty when he was hired for
Chained for Life
. He was cast for the part of Judge MacAdoo, the jurist who presides over the Vivian Hamilton murder trial. Because it had been decades since he had worked in film, he was thrilled to land the job. The one-time star was working as a greeter at a Sunset Boulevard restaurant when the twins approved his hiring. Having experienced falls from grace themselves, Daisy and Violet may have given Mulhall a job as much out of sympathy as out of a need to only hire players who commanded modest salaries.

The role of Ted Hinkley, the conniving manager of the Hamilton Sisters Revue, was handed to longtime character actor Alan Jenkins. This may have been the film’s best casting. Jenkins, too, had also begun his acting career during the era of silent films. Unlike Mulhall, he remained in demand after sound came in. On and off camera, Jenkins had a raffish air. He had the face of a ferret, a pronounced New York accent, and a mouth whose right corner was permanently drooped from the cigars that were always plugged there. Jenkins almost always played one or the other of two stock types: the itchy-fingered triggerman or the confidence man of constantly misfiring schemes.