The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (50 page)

As solicitous toward Daisy and Violet as the Reids were, Dunnagan noted, there came a point during the meeting when La Rue’s manner turned somewhat reproving. He said La Rue’s usually benign expression changed to revulsion as she focused on the twins’ appearance, appraising the heaviness of their makeup, their tattered, soiled, out-of-date clothes, and the grayness of their sandaled feet. “Rue looked them squarely in the eyes and, with no mincing of words, told them they were going to have to clean themselves up,” Dunnagan said. “She said no employer would think about putting them on a payroll as long as they looked the way they did.”
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A woman whose own hair burned auburn without enhancement from drugstore products, La Rue told the twins to ease up on the per-oxides
and henna. She advised them that the heaviness with which they applied their mascara, eye-liner, and lipstick, while perhaps appropriate for the stage, made them look like hussies. She also told them that if they expected to become part of the workaday world, they would have to dress like ordinary women and pack away their costumes. “You have to get over any ideas that you’re still stars and that you’re going to be able to return to the stage,” La Rue said. “Those days are now over. Over forever.”

As another condition of their offer to help Daisy and Violet, the Reids may also have suggested that the sisters publicly declare their faith in God. Although the twins had been christened soon after birth, there is no evidence that they had ever been religious. On June 2, 1962, just days after their meeting with the Reids, the twins were visited by the Reverend Ernest Fitzgerald, pastor of the Purcell United Methodist Church where Charley and La Rue were members. Fitzgerald, in an interview years later, said he was elated after his visit with the Hiltons who agreed to become congregants at his church. “I can’t tell you how much joy I felt when they came to the church for services the first time,” he said. Fitzgerald’s sense of triumph was not to be lasting, though. Daisy and Violet attended services perhaps three or four times, he recalled. They then stopped coming to church altogether.
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The Reverend John Sills, who succeeded Fitzgerald as Purcell’s pastor a few years later, said it was likely that Daisy and Violet joined the church at Charley Reid’s bidding. “Mr. Reid worked as hard as anybody to recruit new members for our church,” Sills said. “He was a very active member of the congregation and was also very generous with gifts to the church.”
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From the time of her meeting with the twins, La Rue took the sisters “completely under her wing,” said John Dunnagan. “She took them shopping for new clothes. She got them to the beauty parlor.
La Rue could present a gruff exterior when the occasion warranted, but her heart was as soft as a cream puff. She was always looking out after the twins’ interests.”
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Because the twins were so lonely and hungry for companionship when they arrived in Charlotte, they also stirred the sympathy of a Mrs. S. C. Hannah, a neighbor in Patsy’s Park.
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Mrs. Hannah, a widow and longtime resident of the mobile home court, made it a practice to invite the sisters to her trailer at mealtimes. Because Daisy and Violet didn’t own a television set, they also spent many of their evenings with Mrs. Hannah watching TV.

“I think I enjoyed these nights more than they did,” Mrs. Hannah said. “We’d be watching George Burns and Gracie Allen or Bob Hope or Phil Silvers or somebody like that, and then the twins would say, ‘Oh, we know George and Gracie or we know Phil.’ Then they would launch into stories about appearing in the same theaters where these stars once appeared. They’d tell me about going out to dinner with these big name entertainers.”

Mrs. Hannah also recalled how thrilled Daisy and Violet were after their meeting with the Reids during which Charley and La Rue promised they were going to do everything in their powers to find employment for the sisters.

Because of the high regard with which they were held in Charlotte’s business community, Charley and La Rue may not have expected much difficulty in finding employment for the twins. But they soon learned that some of their business contacts had an almost pathological fear of people with extreme physical abnormalities. Paula Payne, Inc., a manufacturer of hair care products, was reportedly contacted on the twins’ behalf either by the Reids or Dunnagan. The company had a reputation for hiring workers with disabilities. Violet and Daisy were asked to report to the company in person to fill out job applications. According to Dunnagan, when word spread
through the plant that Siamese twins had applied for jobs, some workers began to talk about an insurrection. “A female employee who was pregnant was terrified that if she had to work under the same roof as the twins, the child she was carrying could turn out to be a freak,” he recalled. “The worker said that if the twins were hired and her baby later turned out to have some problem, she’d hold the company responsible and sue it for all it was worth. The threat may have killed any chances of the twins getting a job there. As far as I know, the company never offered them jobs.”

After making futile call after to futile call to prospective employers, the Reids decided they would hire Daisy and Violet themselves. The sisters could work as produce weighers at the Wilkinson Boulevard Park-N-Shop.

But not all the supermarket workers were welcoming when the twins first reported for work, according to Guy Rodgers, manager of the store’s produce department and the twins’ immediate supervisor. “There were at least a few employees who thought it was a terrible mistake to put freaks on the payroll of the Park-N-Shop,” he said. “They thought it would be bad for business, and that we were going to lose a lot of longtime customers because of it.”
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From their first day on the job, Daisy and Violet endeared themselves to their Park-N-Shop co-workers as well as the shoppers, Rodgers said. “They were as friendly and pleasant as could be. Much of the time they worked the produce scales, but I also gave them jobs like shucking corn and bagging potatoes and apples. It was fun to watch them. They’d be a-fussin’ and a-gabbin’ every minute. I don’t know if they had ever done any manual labor before, but they turned out to be excellent employees.”

Linda Beatty, a daughter of Charley and La Rue, also remembered Daisy and Violet as being exceptional workers. “Guy rigged up a couple of produce scales side by side for the twins. It turned out to be a
good system, especially when the store was busy. The customers queued up in two lines that stretched out from the scales. They waited their turns to have one twin or the other weigh and bag and price their bananas, grapes, cucumbers, or whatever. Daisy and Vi enjoyed exchanging pleasantries with the customers. They may have been big show business celebrities at one time, but they took to their new humbler posts with the naturalness of ducks taking to water.”
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Surprisingly, the twins seemed to draw little attention when they were on the job, according to Linda Beatty. “Now and then, when Daisy and Vi were walking through the store’s aisles, there would be people, especially children, who would gawk at them,” she said. “But when the twins were at their scales, they simply looked like a couple of women who happened to be working fanny-to-fanny because they were operating in a rather confined work space. I suspect a lot of shoppers had their produce weighed and bagged by the girls and never realized they were being served by Siamese twins.”
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If the twins were able to carry out their work at the Park-N-Shop without attracting attention, it was not so easy for them in the wider world. Daisy and Violet usually walked to their job during morning rush hour, when the boulevard was clogged with slow-moving school buses, delivery trucks, and automobiles heading downtown. While the twins walked at normal speed, their gait was never quite natural. They moved forward in a slight bobbing and weaving lockstep that gave some observers the impression the sisters must have been counting one-two-three, one-two-three to keep their movements unified. The conspicuousness of the tiny women tripping along Wilkinson Boulevard was only heightened by their clothing. Each was outfitted in the uniform of all the female employees at the Park-N-Shop, red and white checked blouses with ankle-length, blue denim skirts.

The cruelest of the gawkers were teenagers. There were mornings when jalopies packed with young people pulled up and crept alongside
the twins, laughing and whistling at them. The boldest teens jumped from the slow-moving cars in pairs or trios and shadowed the sisters, mimicking the odd, herky-jerky manner of their progress.

The sisters at work in the Park-N-Shop, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1968. (Courtesy of Linda Beatty)

Pauline Harton, a cashier at the Park-N-Shop, remembers when the twins first reported to work at the supermarket, they looked to be of retirement age. “I don’t think Daisy and Vi ever told us their age, but I thought they were already old, old ladies when they first took jobs with us,” she said. “I guess that’s the price they paid for being on the road almost all their lives.”
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Linda Beatty observed, “I think they were grateful to have steady jobs where they could mix with the shoppers and their fellow workers. Certainly they weren’t making anything close to the money they once earned. But now, at least, they didn’t have to worry about any
agents or managers taking them for all they were worth. And now they had their own little home in Patsy’s Park and some friendly neighbors. I remember them telling me once that in some ways they were happier than at any time in their lives.”
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Once Daisy and Violet had settled in Charlotte, they seemed reluctant to travel outside a sphere that was roughly circumscribed by the mile between their home and the Park-N-Shop. Gene Keeney, a magician from Indianapolis, Indiana, had long been a fan of the twins, and had assembled a small collection of Hilton Sisters memorabilia, including booklets, posters, photographs, and newspaper clippings. Upon arriving in Charlotte, he found them in the supermarket’s produce department and had both twins autograph a Hilton Sisters poster.

“Because I had all these magic props to carry from one engagement to another, I traveled around in a small truck in those days,” Keeney said. “After I had been in Charlotte for a day or two, I happened to spot Daisy and Violet at a bus stop. I stopped the truck and offered them a ride. They remembered me from my short visit with them in the supermarket. They climbed in beside me. I had seen them perform onstage when they were much younger and, from then on, had always been fascinated with them. I really wanted to learn all I could about their performing days and to become friends with them. They were pleasant enough, but I quickly learned that they weren’t interested in reminiscing about their lives in show business. They seemed to want to put all that behind them. I was staying in Charlotte for a few days and I asked if I could do something for them. I thought I could take them to a nice restaurant or that maybe they would even enjoy a sightseeing ride in and around Charlotte. They thanked me for the offer, but said no, they had absolutely no interest in going anywhere or seeing anything new. They didn’t go out to restaurants anymore, they said. They didn’t even go to movies either. Except for the time they were at the supermarket, they said, they spent all their time at home.”
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There was unusual closeness among the employees at the Park-N-Shop. Many of the workers were related the Reids, among them La Rue’s brother Guy Rodgers. Park-N-Shop employees often socialized at weddings, christenings, bridal showers, barbecues, and picnics. Pauline Harton said the twins were always asked to take part in the events. “Whenever an invitation was extended to the twins, Daisy would say, ‘Oh, I’d like nothing better than to be there.’ But then Violet would say, ‘Daisy, don’t you remember? We have something else to do that day.’ Violet was always throwing a wet blanket on things. The twins never appeared for any of the parties.”
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“The sisters were as different as day and night,” Harton said. “Daisy was warm and friendly and soft and feminine. Violet, on the other hand, was hard and could be gruff. I really think she hated all men and children. I had become a new mother of twins, and, when the babies were just weeks old, I wrapped them up in blankets, and took them to the store to show them off. Daisy cooed over the babies. Violet never gave them a second look. I often heard her say that she couldn’t stand children. She said they all became meanies by the time they were eight or nine years old. Probably it was understandable for her to have such a strong dislike kids of that age. As Siamese twins, the sisters probably took a lot of taunting from children.”

Guy Rodgers remembered one occasion when Violet’s antipathy towards children had disastrous consequences for the sisters. The event occurred after Daisy and Violet had begun to regard the store’s produce section as their little fiefdom. “A father came in with a small boy, and while the man went up and down the aisle, picking out produce, he let his son run around unsupervised,” Rodgers said. “The boy started swinging like a monkey on the produce scales. The twins warned the child that he could fall and hurt himself and asked him to get down. The boy ignored them and his father did nothing about it. Violet grew more and more irritated, but she never raised her voice.
Finally the father got his things weighed, and then moved with his son to another aisle. Violet stopped biting her tongue. She started complaining to other customers about how bad it was that some parents exercised no control over their children. Unknown to Violet, the father of the mischievous boy was only one aisle away and he over-heard everything she said about irresponsible parents. He stormed into the store’s office and told someone there that he was not going to take insults from a lowly store clerk. He left his cart filled with groceries right there and walked out, announcing that he would never set foot in our store again.”
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