The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (48 page)

After the food stand failed, Daisy and Violet tried selling beauty products door-to-door. Out of pity for the sisters, if for no other reason, some women looked through the Hiltons’ sample case and bought lipsticks and nail polish and facial creams. But more often, Miami housewives kept their doors shut to the sisters, irritated that these two strange creatures would invade their neighborhoods and frighten their children.

Because it was the only way they could continue surviving, in 1958 Daisy and Violet again entered into a contract to appear as “The World’s Only Strip-Teasing Siamese Twins.” Most of the clubs were ratty beerhouses where patrons jeered at them. There had never been another time in their lives—not even when they were being exhibited in carnival pit shows as freaks—when they felt so thoroughly degraded. They were fifty and struggling simply to survive.

The Cat and Fiddle, a seedy nightspot in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, seemed to go out of its way to import strippers who diverged wildly from the profession’s norm. Among its bump-and-grinders, besides the conjoined and aging Hilton sisters, were midgets, obese women, and Ricki Covette, a towering six-foot-nine-inch amazon from Canada.

A newspaperman familiar with the twins’ past as one-time vaudeville sweethearts sat down with them during one of their engagements at the Cat and Fiddle. He asked them if, as middle-aged women, they didn’t feel they were debasing themselves by playing in lowly dives where they had to peel off their clothes. Daisy replied that of course, she and Violet would prefer to appear in legitimate theaters and entertain their audiences with music, song, and dance, but because their talents no longer seemed salable, they had turned themselves into exotic dancers “to adapt to the times.”
⁸

Violet added: “We made the big switch to this sort of dancing for two reasons—money and fun. Mostly fun.”

The reporter pressed them further as to whether they felt there was something morbidly sick about club owners who ignored their gifts as versatile entertainers to present them as mere freak strippers. Daisy and Violet apparently believed that if they spoke harshly of their employers, they could lose one of their last sources of income. “We can’t say anything bad about it,” Violet replied. “Who wants to bite the hand that feeds you?”
⁹

The twins developed hardened exteriors and seemed to enjoy talking in Mickey Spillane-speak. “We shun things we don’t like and heavily indulge in things we love,” Daisy once said in characterizing the sisters’ constitution. “In other words, we stay away from fat women, rock-and-roll, and filter cigarettes, and surround ourselves with mature men and Dixieland music.”
¹⁰

Unable to afford the luxuries they had once known, Daisy and Violet concentrated their energies on just keeping food on the table and paying the rent on their tiny Miami apartment. They spent much of their time on the phone, prospecting for engagements. They also continued peddling cosmetics, going house-to-house in Miami with their cases of rouge, lipsticks, and toilet water. And when they had to, which was often, they called old friends, asking for loans to tide them over until the next engagement came along.

In September of 1959, Daisy and Violet were hired for what should have been one of their choicest assignments in years—grandstand headliners at the Michigan State Fair in Detroit. But even this ten-day engagement went badly for them. Daisy had been bothered by a hernia that developed soon after she gave birth to her baby in 1936. Because of the twins’ fear of doctors, the condition was never corrected. After finishing only one performance at the fair, Daisy began experiencing a pain so great she collapsed. The sisters were rushed to
Mount Carmel Mercy Hospital. In the operating room, with Violet chatting amiably with the nurses while her sister was anesthetized, three surgeons worked for two hours on Daisy. By the time Daisy had sufficiently recuperated from the operation and the twins were able to leave the hospital, the fair had ended for another year.

In late 1961, desperate for employment as ever, the twins placed a phone call to Kemp-Morris and Associates, a talent booking agency in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“They said they were looking for work, any kind of work,” recalled Philip Morris, who, with Theodore D. Kemp, ran the agency. “I had heard of the Hilton Sisters, but didn’t know them personally. T D., on the other hand, knew the girls quite well. In his long career, he had found bookings for the girls before, probably in the 1930s or early 1940s. We decided to do what we could for the girls.”
¹¹

One of the major booking agencies in the mid-South, Kemp-Morris sometimes arranged arena shows for major stars, such as Elvis Presley, Amos ’n Andy, and Vaughn Monroe. Its specialty, however, was packaging shows whose lineups featured mostly aging film and television actors or recording artists who were well beyond their prime years as entertainers.

Morris talked of the frustration he and Kemp experienced when they tried to sell the Hilton sisters as a stage act. “Over and over, we kept ringing up the heads of the motion picture theater chains in the South, and we just couldn’t get anyone interested in taking the twins,” he noted. “The theater people would respond, ‘Oh, yeah, the Hilton Sisters. I remember them. Weren’t they a big draw about thirty years ago? Nope, sorry, they just wouldn’t go over today. It’s a different era, you know. Not even the younger people get excited by the chance to see Siamese twins, bearded ladies or alligator-skinned boys. They’re only interested in rock ’n roll.’ ”
¹²

After spending a couple of days trying to find work for Daisy and
Violet and being turned down by everyone they contacted, Morris and Kemp concluded that they were engaging in a futile exercise. “Because it’s so hard to tell once well-known entertainers that there’s no longer interest in them, I delayed a little bit in getting back to the sisters,” Morris said. “I should have attached more urgency to the call. The next thing I knew, only a few days after the Hilton twins phoned our agency for the first time, they were getting out of cab right outside our door.”

One of the sisters was cradling a pet Pekinese, apparently Boy III or Boy IV. Back at the Charlotte train station, still in the baggage room, were a couple of trunks and several large cardboard boxes. The containers held all the twins’ worldly possessions, their costumes, their instruments, the four reels that made up
Chained for Life
, and a few thousand copies of their booklet,
The Intimate Lives and Loves of the Hilton Sisters, World Famous Siamese Twins
.

After ushering the twins into their office, Morris and Kemp reported to the sisters that although they had made dozens of calls, they had struck out everywhere. “We learned then just how desperate things were for the girls,” Morris recalled. “They were absolutely at the end of their rope. They had spent the last of their money on their train fare from Florida to Charlotte. T. D. and I would have happily dug into our pockets to pay for the girls’ return trip home. The problem was they no longer had a home—not in Florida nor anywhere else. They were like a couple of scared, shaking and hungry little puppies who just happened to show up at our doorstep one day.”
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Morris led Daisy and Violet out to his station wagon and delivered them to the Clayton Hotel where he told the desk clerk to bill the agency for the twins’ accommodations. He told the sisters he would do some more phoning. Daisy and Violet returned to the booking agency a day or two later.

“The girls seemed to be in one of those weird time warps that the
characters in Rod Serling’s
Twilight Zone
sometimes entered,” Morris recalled:

“The subject got around to transportation. By the time the twins came to Charlotte, at least, they had no car and were no longer driving. We explained that if there was any chance at all of their getting stage work, the theaters would likely be in small, small towns. How did they think they were going to get around? ‘Oh, that would be no problem,’ they answered. ‘We could just take the train.’ They were absolutely out of touch with the times. They lacked any comprehension that passenger train service to the small towns, even by the early sixties, was all but nonexistent.”
¹⁴

Morris and Kemp went back to the phones. After going through their A- and B-lists of presenters, they started working the names on their C- and D-lists. They finally found a taker.

Charley Reid was the operator of the Park-N-Shop supermarkets in Charlotte. He was also a major employer of magicians, clowns, ventriloquists, and singing cowboys. Early in his career as a grocer, Reid reasoned that if he offered free and wholesome entertainment at the spacious and modern supermarket he had just erected on Wilkinson Boulevard, his store would draw lots of families, and at least some of those families would keep coming back. The plan worked. On week-ends, the cars were backed up on Wilkinson as parents brought their kids to see aging cowboy stars like Lash LaRue and take free rides on the carousel and bumper cars in the supermarket’s parking lot. Reid prospered and eventually opened a small chain of supermarkets.

Daisy and Violet had been hired for a weekend by Park-N-Shop to do an in-store promotion on a new grocery product, twin-packed potato chips. Rosemary Land, now a librarian at Mecklenburg/Charlotte Public Library, was in ninth grade when, accompanied by her mother, she went to the supermarket to see the Hilton sisters. “They left a vivid impression on me,” she said. “I was both attracted by them and at the
same time a little frightened. How could this be, two people in one? The twins were sitting at a table. People lined up to talk with them and, in some instances, have them sign their boxes of twin-packed potato chips.”
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In addition to the promotional appearance at the Park-N-Shop, Daisy and Violet also found a few engagements at drive-in theaters, one of them at the Fox on Old Statesville Road. The Fox regularly featured such fare as
The Bikini Busters, Our Scarlet Daughters
, and
Some Like It Cool
, filmed “in naturalistic blushing color.” On Friday and Saturday evenings, the Fox offered “All Night, All Girlie Shows,” during which it screened films shot inside nudist colonies. These programs, which continued until dawn, were patronized disproportionately by single men arriving alone in their cars.

Morris arranged bookings for Daisy and Violet at three or four other drive-n theaters in small towns outlying Charlotte. “These appearances were all absolute disasters,” he remembered. “Wherever the twins’ movie was shown, the sisters put on mini-versions of the same song and dance performances they had once given in grand theaters. They just didn’t have any drawing power anymore, though. I remember phoning the operator of one of the drive-ins where the twins appeared and asking how the night had gone. ‘Oh,’ he answered, ‘I guess we took in $20 at the box office and the girls sold maybe $6 worth of their books.’ Here were two sisters who had once captivated the show world and made millions. As entertainers, they were now all but abandoned.”
¹⁶

Morris said he and his partner met with the twins one last time and tried to be diplomatic in pointing out that the public sometimes was fickle, and that for reasons that were not always explainable, even great acts like theirs could lose their appeal. “We tried to suggest that they start exploring ways to survive outside the entertainment world,” Morris said. “The sisters just didn’t want to leave show
business, though. They were stuck someplace in the past. I remember one of them asking, ‘Did you contact the James Theatre in Newport News, Virginia? The people were lined up around the block when we last played there. I think it was 1928 … no, maybe it was 1929.’ Then we had to break the news that there was no James Theatre anymore, that it hadn’t existed for decades.”
¹⁷

Morris said the meeting ended with Daisy and Violet thanking him and Kemp for all they had tried to do. “The thought of their making a final exit from the show world was just too much for them to bear, though,” Morris said. “They still imagined themselves to be stars. I think they thought that somewhere out there, they still had a big adoring public, but that somehow this audience just happened to have gotten misplaced. We said our goodbyes and I never saw them again.”
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Daisy and Violet returned to the Clayton Hotel where Kemp and Morris had offered to cover their bill for as long as they needed a place to stay. The sisters had tried to remain gracious when Morris and Kemp suggested that, in an age of rock-and-roll and Sandra Dee movies, acts like the Hilton’s had become passé. But their hearts had been lacerated, and certainly not for the first time. They had heard the same thing from other agents, especially in recent years. But Daisy and Violet took the position that all these ten-percenters were wrong, just plain wrong. There was no reason why an act that had drawn standing-room-only houses back in the 1920s and 1930s couldn’t still attract turn-away crowds in 1961.

Daisy and Violet knew that Morris and Kemp were only trying to be helpful but the advice was hurtful, nevertheless. The sisters were fifty-four-years-old. What were they supposed to do if not continue as performers?

Daisy and Violet concluded that if they could no longer find an agent on whom they could count, they would do what they had sometimes done before: They would line up their own engagements.
They opened the Charlotte Yellow Pages and began dialing. They phoned supper clubs, theaters, and drive-ins. The owners listened to their story and expressed sympathy for their situation but rejected the twins’ pleas for work.

What were they to do? Beg? Daisy and Violet were homeless. But for Morris and Kemp, they would have been on the street. Daisy and Violet grew ever more desperate. What would they do if the last of their funds ran out before they found work?

Finally, they did find work in the small town of Monroe, twenty-five miles south of Charlotte. Clifford and Wade Faw, operators of the New Monroe Drive-In, agreed to present a weekend screening of
Chained for Life
.