The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (49 page)

Unknown to the twins, the Faws’ drive-in regularly screened X-rated films and, after local church groups mounted a protest against it, was shut down for a time. Not long after the theater resumed operations, a local judge ordered the Faw brothers to present him with copies of two films they had been showing,
Garage Girls
and
Hot Pursuit
. The Faws complied with the order but only after they had snipped large chunks of footage from the features. They were found to be in contempt of court and each was jailed for ten days.
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“It seemed like the theater’s operators were always getting in hot water with people in the community, especially the local politicians and church leaders,” said Curtis McCauley, who was a teenager during the years the New Monroe was operating. “It was located right off a busy boulevard, and its screen faced the road so that anybody driving by could see what was playing. On nights when it was showing risqué movies, a large percentage of Monroe’s twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys could be found lying in the grass just outside the theater grounds, getting what was probably their earliest education in sex. Because of all the protests from local parents, the Faws finally did something about it. They installed some big lights at the edge of the
theater grounds. Because of the glare from the big, bright lights, you could no longer see from the highway what was playing on the screen.
²⁰

Before leaving Charlotte to travel to Monroe early in December 1961, Daisy and Violet hired someone in Charlotte to serve as their new road manager. No one who remembered the twins’ arrival in Monroe knew the identity of or anything about their manager, other than that he drove a newer, bigger black car, maybe an Oldsmobile, Buick, or Cadillac. The trio’s first stop was the Mary-Lynn Motel where Daisy and Violet booked a room for a few nights. Next they traveled to the New Monroe Drive-In to meet with the Faw brothers and look over the area where they would peddle their autographed photographs and their booklet. They were heartened when they saw a large sign outside New Monroe:

Because of the New Monroe Drive-In’s unsavory reputation with many in Monroe, it drew its greatest patronage from the rural areas and from Charlotte.

It was winter, 1961, and just a few weeks before Christmas, traditionally a slow time for drive-in theaters. The nightly turnouts for Daisy and Violet and their motion picture were by no means large, but business was good enough to keep the Faw brothers content. Daisy and Violet, too, were happy to be working again. They enjoyed mingling with patrons. At closing time each night, the twins’ manager and the Faw brothers divvied up the gate receipts and earnings from the booklet and photo sales. The manager then returned Daisy and
Violet to the Mary-Lynn Motel, only to come back late the following day to again deliver the twins to the theater.

Following the twins’ final appearance at the New Monroe, their manager presented them with what they received as great news. He said he had lined up three or four additional drive-in appearances for them. He told them to pack their bags and he would be back early the next day to ferry them to their next engagement. The twins never saw him again. He drove off in his big, black sedan that night, making off with all of the sisters’ earnings from the weekend.

Daisy and Violet were absolutely stranded. Not only did they lack the means to get out of Monroe, they didn’t even have the money to settle their motel bill or pay for their next meal. Like much else in Monroe, the Mary-Lynn Motel was owned by Clegg Keziah. The twins tearfully related their plight to him. They said that while they had no immediate prospects for work, they were sure that opportunities would present themselves soon after the Christmas season. They promised they would pay him with their first paychecks.

“Dad told the twins not to worry,” said Lynn Keziah, a son of Clegg. “He told them they could remain at the motel as long as they needed to, and to forget about how they might settle the bill.”
²¹

Clegg Keziah told the twins something else. He owned the Orange Bowl, a restaurant on Roosevelt Boulevard just a short walk from the motel. He informed the sisters he was extending free dining privileges to them. Thus it became a thrice-daily ritual for Daisy and Violet to leave the Mary-Lynn, walk to the Orange Bowl, then return to their room with table scraps for their Pekingese.

Each day Daisy and Violet posted letters to the managers of clubs and theaters where they once worked: Did they have, or did they know anyone who had, any open spots the twins could fill? Christmas 1961 passed. The new year arrived. Their letters went unanswered.

Among the Monroe residents who saw the twins almost daily was
Marlene McCauley. At the time, she was the sixteen-year-old proprietor of Marlene’s Beauty Parlor. The twins passed her window everyday on their way to and from the Orange Bowl Restaurant.

“I felt so sorry for them,” McCauley said. “Imagine how hard it must have been for them to be cooped up in a little motel room day after day, stuck in a strange little town where they didn’t know a soul. They looked so sad and lonely and bedraggled. To this day, it bothers me that I didn’t do more to extend myself to those ladies. I could have at least invited them into my shop for some hair styling. I don’t know why I didn’t. My only excuse is that I was so young then, and probably a little bit afraid of them.”
²²

The twins created quite a stir with the customers inside, McCauley said. “Somebody would say, ‘Here comes the Siamese.’ Then all the ladies would get out from under the hair dryers and run to the window. The twins hated being gawked at. Sometimes they would shake their fists. The twins wore the same outfit every day—two very plain dresses that were cut and sewn in a way that covered the way their bodies were attached together. As time went on, their outfit started looking more like a rag. Probably it was the only outfit they had that wasn’t a show costume.”
²³

In addition to operating the motel and restaurant in Monroe, Clegg Keziah developed several shopping malls. He also owned a road grading company and several rental properties. Keziah was not popular with everyone. Some were resentful that while still in his early forties, he owned so much of the town. It apparently didn’t occur to his detractors that Keziah amassed his wealth by working about five times harder than the average person. He also may have been the only person in Monroe who took anything deeper than a voyeuristic interest in Daisy and Violet. Along with his wife Helen, he regularly looked in on the twins. The Keziahs tried to keep the sisters’ hopes up. But their efforts to elevate the twins’ spirits grew tougher with
each visit. As the weeks and then months passed, Daisy and Violet sank ever deeper into despair. It struck Clegg and Helen that the twins seemed to be aging perceptibly. Each had lost weight and Violet, especially, looked almost skeletal. Daisy had quit peroxiding her hair and Violet no longer colored her hair with henna. The sisters told Keziah they worried they would die in the little motel room. It bothered them to imagine how the gawkers at Marlene’s Beauty Parlor would watch as the coroner’s attendants struggled to roll a gurney out through the narrow motel door with the twins’ bodies, side-by-side, spilling over the edges.

It was May, 1962. Daisy and Violet had been marooned for six months in Monroe, still holed up in the tiny motel room with their Pekinese. One day Clegg and Helen came to take the sisters away to their very own place. They loaded the car with all of Daisy and Violet’s worldly possessions.

Daisy and Violet dressed in their finest outfits: floor-length gowns, now a little frayed at the hems and faded, in which they had often appeared on stage.

Less than an hour later, the sisters got their first glimpse of their new home, a twelve- by thirty-eight-foot trailer in Patsy’s Park, a mobile home court on the west side of Charlotte. They wept when they saw, stacked on the floor, all the provisions they would need to establish their own household: pots and pans, dishes and utensils, towels, blankets, bed sheets, and groceries. It was more than they had ever had, even in the best of their times.

When the time came for the Keziahs to say goodbye, all four were crying. “We’d have been dead long ago if it hadn’t been for you,” Daisy sobbed. She embraced Clegg first and then Helen. “You took us in when no one else in the world offered any help. We’ll never forget what you did for us.”

Violet told the Keziahs their new home and new city represented a
fresh beginning for the sisters. She was sure they would be able to put their lives back together, they would find work, and when they did, they would start sending weekly payments for all the bills they had left behind at the Mary-Lynn Motel and the Orange Bowl Restaurant.

Clegg put a finger to his lips and tried to shush Violet. He said he and Helen were thankful just to have had the opportunity to extend helping hands and that they expected nothing in return. He drew out a pen and wrote something on a slip of paper. He handed the note to the sisters. “Here’s our phone number,” he said. “If you should need anything, you call me or Helen, you hear.”
²⁴

Accounts vary as to where the funds to resettle Daisy and Violet in the trailer park came from. Some said Clegg Keziah called on all the ministers in Monroe, including the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, and got them to take up special collections for the sisters. Others said the funds came from Clegg and Helen Keziah themselves. Still others contended that Charley Reid and his wife, La Rue, the owners of the Park-N-Shop supermarkets, put up the money to move the twins. The truth may never be known. Real angels don’t leave business cards behind.

D
aisy and Violet had been settled into the trailer for a week or two when they received a phone call from La Rue Reid. Within an hour or so, she would be sending somebody over in a car to pick them up, La Rue announced. She and her husband wanted to see if there was something else they could do for Daisy and Violet.

The call left the twins excited but also fitful. They had made casual contact with La Rue and Charley Reid the previous year when, desperate for paying work of any kind, they appeared at one of the couple’s Park-N-Shop supermarkets to promote the sale of twin-pack potato chips. Daisy and Violet hoped the couple could again give them employment.

Knowing the Reids’ driver might already be on the way, they raced to a mirror to try to make themselves more presentable. Neither could remember when they had last visited a beauty salon. Their hair badly needed cutting. They tried bringing some style to it with brushing and pinning. Then they cracked open the large case of theater makeup. With the abandon of De Kooning attacking a fresh canvas, they covered their faces with hastily applied color.

Charley and La Rue had asked John Dunnagan if he wouldn’t mind driving to Patsy’s Park to pick up the twins. Dunnagan, a close friend of the Reids, operated a Charlotte advertising agency that developed
and placed the Park-N-Shop’s radio, television, and newspaper ads. He retained vivid recollections of his assignment.

“What I didn’t know was that before Charley and Rue called me to pick up the sisters, they called several other friends and relatives,” Dunnagan said. “All these people turned them down. There was nothing in the world I wouldn’t have done for Charley and Rue. I would have shoveled do-do for them. But this was a mission for which I wish I had been better prepared. I drove into the trailer court and pulled up in front of the twins’ place. As I watched these two ladies stepping out of their trailer and then walking to my car, I couldn’t believe my eyes. My first thought was that Charley and Rue had sprung a joke on me. They never told me that I would be picking up Siamese twins. What a sight those ladies were—and not just because they were joined together. They were wearing clothes that seemed to come from a different era—outfits of faded and worn cloth that they had somehow sewn together. The dresses had long pleated skirts that brushed the ground. They were caked with makeup—rouge, mascara, eye shadow, tomato red lipstick. One was blonde and the other had hair that was dyed a shade of orange. Their hair was shaggy and stringy. They needed shampoos. Both were doused with toilet water.”
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Dunnagan remembered how excited the twins seemed after they settled in his car. “We were only traveling the mile or so to the Park-N-Shop, but you would have thought they were starting one of the great adventures of their lives,” he said. “They were so chipper. I guess it meant a lot to them that there were still a couple of people who cared enough about them to want to help.”
²

Upon the delivery of his passengers to the Park-N-Shop, Dunnagan was asked by the Reids to sit in on the meeting. “The visit began with La Rue and Charley asking the twins what they now wanted to do with their lives, and whether they thought there might be some way they could help them,” he recalled.

Certainly the sisters must have viewed their little trailer house in Patsy’s Park as a comedown from the days when they were perched high in a light-filled apartment overlooking New York’s Central Park or Boston’s leafy Back Bay. But Dunnagan remembers them telling the Reids that the tin box suited them fine, and that they were grateful to have it. Daisy and Violet also said they had already gotten to know some of their neighbors in Patsy’s Park and found them to be most welcoming. “The twins said they really felt at home in Charlotte,” he recalled. “I got the impression they were willing to do anything to stay put where they were. They were still up against a hard reality, though. They were destitute, really strapped, and had no means for surviving very long.”

So sorely pressed were Daisy and Violet for money, Dunnagan said, they told Charley and La Rue they were willing to do any kind of work, even scrubbing floors, and would take a single salary. Dunnagan said the Reids appeared deeply sympathetic. “Charley and Rue promised to do everything in their power to find work for them,” he said. “I, too, offered to phone some of the my ad clients to see if there was one that could fit the twins in somewhere.”