The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (47 page)

The earliest showings of
Chained for Life
began in the spring of 1953, although the exact location of the premiere showing is
unknown. Wherever it took place—a drive-in somewhere in the Utah scrublands; a theater in a crumbling Cleveland neighborhood; a county fair livestock barn in North Dakota—the event apparently occurred without fireworks, a visit by Louella Parsons, or searchlights raking the sky.

Daisy and Violet didn’t make personal appearances at every venue, but there were times when they motored great distances to a drive-in theater or small-town movie house only to discover that fewer than 100 people had turned out. During the early 1950s, adult admission to a movie was typically 50 cents or less. The owners of road show pictures commonly agreed to make their films available to the exhibitors for 15 or 20 percent of the box office receipts. Because the twins had to share this with the theater owners, their take for an appearance could be less than $100. Their proceeds would be further decimated by travel expenses and the percentage they had to turn over to Rosenberg’s film distribution company.

To augment their earnings, Daisy and Violet tried selling autographed, black-and-white photos, as well as a cheaply-produced booklet titled
The Intimate Lives and Loves of the Hilton Sisters, World Famous Siamese Twins
. The booklet was simply a compilation of the six-part series that the
American Weekly
syndicate had made available to newspapers ten years earlier. To help justify the $2 cover price for the forty-eight page potboiler, they threw in a second publication, a recreation in novella form of
Chained for Life
. Usually the twins piled their booklets on a card table set up inside a theater lobby or beside a drive-in concession stand. They always displayed a hand-lettered placard on their table that declaimed, “More Than 100,000 Already Sold.” They seldom did brisk business as booksellers, however. Sitting through
Chained for Life
was so torturous an experience for most viewers that, when the movie was over, they exited the theaters as quickly as they could.

Jim Moore took in the film when it appeared at San Antonio’s Rigsby’s Drive-In. By then, Violet’s one-time husband had retired from show business and was a restaurateur of some success. He operated the El Matador, a popular Mexican restaurant in downtown San Antonio. During the intermission, Moore made a trip to the food concessions, eager to renew his acquaintance with Daisy and Violet. Upon seeing the twins from afar, Moore said he was so startled by how the sisters had changed in appearance over the dozen years or so, he turned around and left before they recognized him. “I never felt more sorry for anyone in my life,” he said. “They were wearing cheap evening dresses and had dyed their hair.”
³

By the early 1950s, more than 4,000 drive-in theaters were already in operation and more were appearing every day in cornfields, swamp-lands, and abandoned air strips. One reason the ozoners became so popular, especially with families, was they often presented live entertainment, like western stars, Punch and Judy shows, trained dog acts, and even such circus features as the Great Wilno, a human cannonball, and the Nervous Nocks, daredevils who did headstands atop 100-foot sway poles. The live acts appeared during the twilight hours, before darkness fell and the screen became aglow with what was usually a Bugs Bunny or Elmer Fudd cartoon.

The twins, too, often put on mini-shows at the outdoor theaters. They sang duets, usually accompanied by a scratchy phonograph record. They danced and played their saxophones. But there were nights when mosquitoes and June bugs were their only spectators.

Philip Morris, a professional magician and host of a late-night horror movies show televised in Charlotte, North Carolina, had this recollection: “Daisy and Violet were the attraction at an outdoor theater in Concord, North Carolina, a town about thirty miles outside Charlotte. They barely stood five feet tall and because they were so tiny, the only way they could be seen by a crowd was to be on some
kind of elevated stage. Like most drive-ins of the day, this theater didn’t have a real stage. It presented its live attractions on the rooftop of its concession stand. A couple of step ladders were brought out for Daisy and Violet, and they were asked to climb to the top of the building. The spectacle that followed might have been funny in a Laurel and Hardy routine, but because it involved the twins, it was heartbreaking to witness. As hard as they tried to coordinate their ascents up the two ladders, and as hard as the drive-in people were trying to help them, there was just no getting them up on the rooftop. It was just physically impossible. Of course a lot of the drive-in patrons gathered around to watch this operation. There was snickering and crude remarks from some of the people. The twins must have suffered great humiliation. Finally they gave up the effort to get atop the roof. They put on their little show in an area that was roped off inside the concessions building.”
⁴

Wherever
Chained
was screened, it was most often presented as part of a double and triple feature with
Reefer Madness, Test Tube Babies
, or the twenty-year-old
Freaks
. Now and then, usually at very small theaters in the remotest of regions, Max Rosenberg arranged screenings where the sisters were not required to show up. But without the added attraction of personal appearances by Daisy and Violet, these showings rarely produced much of a return. It was one thing for a farmer to load his wife and kids into the car on a weekend night and drive to a weedy field for the rare opportunity to see actual Siamese twins. It was another matter to pull a working man away from his television set on a Friday or Saturday night and then expect him to shell out $2 or $3 for a black-and-white movie without a single legitimate star.

Throughout most of the 1940s, Daisy and Violet had been getting consistent bookings, many of them well-paying nightclub engagements, and, as a result, had been enjoying a comfortable, if not conspicuously
extravagant, lifestyle. But by the early 1950s, they were living the life of gypsies, spending most nights in cheap motels and sometimes even in the Buick. Besides the drive-in appearances, there were even rarer invitations to appear at small-town theaters and fairs. So the twins, once again, were sending telegrams to businessman Emmett Sweeney, their dear friend in San Antonio, and presumably to others, pleading for funds to tide them over until their situation improved.

As hard a time as Daisy and Violet were having trying to survive on their drive-in appearances, things grew even worse for them early in the summer of 1953, when Max J. Rosenberg went to the federal courthouse in New York and filed voluntary petitions for bankruptcy. He reported that the film distributing company he created, Classics Pictures, Inc., had debts totaling $336,795 and assets amounting to a mere $2,000. He also claimed he had personal liabilities totaling $248,699 and no cash or property of value whatsoever.
⁵

Before entering into the agreement with Classic Pictures to circulate their movie, the Hiltons had already shopped the property to dozens of other film distributors and were turned away by all of them. The twins knew there was little likelihood they would find another distributor to take over, especially since the film had done so poorly during its first months in release. They decided to have Edward Salzberg, their agent in Cincinnati, arrange all future screenings of the film.

Over the next two years, the twins rarely saw any manmade structures taller than silos. Even though their advertisements still referred to the sisters as “World Famous,” Daisy and Violet seem to have been almost completely forgotten. Sometimes months would pass between appearances, and even when Salzberg did find them work, the twins usually appeared as last-minute replacements for acts that had canceled.

Late in 1955, Daisy and Violet received some cheering news. Ed
Salzberg had arranged for them to return to Florida, where he had lined up a series of club bookings in Palm Beach, Miami Beach, Key West, and other resort towns.

But the twins’ comeback was anything but triumphant. The club owners who had booked Daisy and Violet ten years earlier were startled by how much the sisters had aged. They were forty-seven years old and long past their dewy comeliness and girlish brio. Sadly, the twins didn’t even look like a matched set anymore. Violet was now dyeing her hair red and looked bony and thin. Daisy, on the other hand, was a bleached blonde, and she had packed on at least twenty more pounds than her sister, most of them, it appeared, at her midriff. About the only physical attributes Daisy and Violet seemed to have in common anymore were the wrinkles crazing their faces.

At the famed Five O’Clock Club in Miami Beach, the twins were featured with what was advertised as an “All-Star Girlie Revue.” The club goers may not have altogether lost their fascination in human curiosities, but their interest now seemed to have shifted to wonders of a different type. The physical marvels that were now pulling in the big crowds at the cabarets were attractions like Evelyn West and Her Million Dollar Chest.

When the twins performed, they often did so amidst the sounds of patrons sliding back their chairs to leave. No Florida club owners told the sisters they hoped the two might return again the next year. The last of their Florida bookings was at a Key West cabaret. The house manager was jubilant when, after the sisters’ contracted weeklong run, he was able to remove their names from the marquee. If the Hiltons’ stay had been any longer, he half feared his cash registers were going to rust shut from lack of use.

Word of the twins’ steadily declining drawing power had spread. Ultimately, even their agent Salzberg abandoned them.

Late in the spring of 1956, after their last disastrous appearance in
Key West, Daisy and Violet resigned themselves to a grim reality: The time had arrived when, once and for all, they should pack away their costumes. Alone and terrified, dislocated from the only business they had ever known, they must at least have taken some solace at being in Florida. It was the place they had always planned to live when they retired as entertainers.

Traveling north to Miami, they settled into a tiny apartment at 215 NE 5th Street. Now they faced the question of what they were going to do to survive. They were aware that as conjoined, middle-aged twins with no skills that were easily transferable off the stage, they weren’t likely to find many employment opportunities.

The Hilton Sisters Snack Bar was swarming four and five deep with customers on the day of its grand opening in May of 1956.
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Wearing sexy, bare-shouldered sarongs, Daisy and Violet were dressed in a manner that suggested they were the hostesses, not for the opening of a new hot-dog stand, but for the Fountainbleu cocktail lounge.

A Miami reporter asked the sisters if, as women who had experienced the thrill of entertaining the beautiful people, they might now find their lives as food stand operators somewhat humdrum. “Because we have so enjoyed our lives as entertainers, it may be a little hard at first to live outside the limelight,” Daisy answered. “But Violet and I have been on the move all of our lives. We feel it’s time to put our roots down in one place. We’re anxious to try another way of life that’s a little quieter.”

“This is just a start for us in the restaurant business,” Violet chimed in. “Next we want to get our own club on the beach. We’ll have the best dining in Miami, and also the finest in entertainment—Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, Sophie Tucker, Edgar Bergen, Eddie Cantor. All of them are our dearest of friends from our performing years.
They’ll all appear in our club. And if Daisy and I get bored with our lives as club owners, maybe there will be nights when we get back up on the stage.”
⁷

Their Hilton Sisters’ Snack Bar was tableless and chairless. It was also roofless. It was situated in a downtown open-air arcade a short amble from their apartment. The most exotic items listed on its menu were cheeseburgers and chili dogs. Daisy and Violet operated the stand from mid-morning to early evening seven days a week. It was neither easy nor pleasant to be working over a grill in the blazing Miami heat. Still, they seemed to enjoy the secure routine the little business brought to their lives. Because of the generous publicity that attended the opening of their stand, at first, business was brisk. After the store clerks, shoppers, and tourists got used to the novelty of being served hot dogs by Siamese twins, business soon started to slacken. The twins were forced to close their Hilton Sisters’ Snack Bar before a year had passed.

Some said the twins’ business was doomed from its start because of a prejudice some downtown merchants had against people with conspicuous physical anomalies. A bookkeeper and tax preparer who maintained an office nearby remembered the sisters’ attempt at entrepreneurship this way: “I hate to say it, but from the first day those ladies opened, there were store owners and restaurant operators who said those ladies were bad for the image of downtown Miami and that everything must be done to shut them down. Some business owners forbade their employees from patronizing the twins’ stand and they also talked down the Hilton sisters with their customers. One of my clients, a shoe-store operator, told me that if those Siamese twins were able to make a go of their little business, then soon every street corner would be taken over by double amputees in wheelchairs and blind people with cups selling pencils. He said the shoppers and tourists would be so repelled by the sight of these people that they
would start taking their business elsewhere. It was a shame for those ladies. They were as pleasant and friendly as could be.”