The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (29 page)

Still from Tod Browning’s 1932 film
, Freaks.
Violet’s love interest in the film, shown here, is not identified in the movie’s credits. (Author’s collection)

Some of the freaks were so physically or mentally incapacitated they had to be diapered. Many of the MGM workers, especially those engaged on projects other than
Freaks
, were repulsed by the sight of so many freaks in their workplace.

Of the two dozen or so human anomalies Browning had brought to
Hollywood, only Daisy and Violet and the midgets Harry and Daisy Earle were allowed inside the MGM commissary. Josephine/Joseph, Lady Olga, the pinheads, and all the other freaks dined in a special tented cookhouse that was staked out in a weedy lot near the set. Joined by other MGM employees from floor sweepers to executives, Harry Rapf, a producer, had mounted a successful campaign to keep the sideshow element out of the lunchroom so, in his words, “people could eat in the commissary without throwing up.”
¹⁶
It isn’t known why the commissary ban didn’t apply to the Hiltons. Probably even Rapf would have had to concede the sisters occupied a high rung on the Hollywood social ladder.

Robert Montgomery, then filming
Private Lives
with co-star Norma Shearer, sent a personal invitation to the twins to see him on the set. Even more impressive, Marie Dressler, the grande dame of moviedom, invited the Hiltons to her vine-covered cottage for tea. Dressler may well have had a special empathy for Daisy and Violet. As a child, she believed she was so conspicuously homely that she herself thought she was a freak. As Dressler related in her autobiography, she resolved early in life “to compensate the world for my ugliness” by becoming an actress. “I’d not only make [people] laugh. I’d make them love me.”
¹⁷
She succeeded. When Daisy and Violet entered her two-story hillside house, their eyes were immediately drawn to a mantel where they saw the statuette of Oscar that had been presented to her earlier that year for her title role as the keeper of a wretched waterfront hotel in MGM’s
Min and Bill
.

But for all the cachet the Hiltons had inside certain Hollywood circles, there were still some movie workers who believed the twins, out of respect and decency, should have voluntarily kept themselves outside the circle of the beautiful people. Among those holding this view, apparently, was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had been brought to Hollywood by MGM to work as a screenwriter. Dwight Taylor, a
fellow writer, remembered accompanying Fitzgerald into the commissary the day after a soirée at the Malibu beach home of Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer. Fitzgerald had become falling-down drunk at the party and was still badly hung-over when he entered the commissary.

“Scott and I had no sooner seated ourselves than the Hilton sisters … entered and took a single chair at the same table,” Taylor recounted. “One of them picked up the menu and, without even looking at the other, asked, ‘What are you going to have?’ Scott turned pea-green and, putting his hand to his mouth, rushed for the great outdoors.”
¹⁸

For all the shock the sight of the conjoined twins might have given Fitzgerald’s gastro-intestinal system, he himself had degenerated into a unfortunate figure. He was in an alcoholic haze almost all the time. About the only writing he was doing anymore was penning his signature on his bar bills. He was fired by MGM a week after the lunchroom encounter with the twins.

While the Hilton sisters may not have been Fitzgerald’s ideal of dinner guests, not all of Hollywood’s beautiful people shared the writer’s view. Willard Sheldon remembered that Daisy and Violet were constantly pursued by newspaper and magazine reporters all of the time they were in Hollywood. “Just about everyday you picked up the paper, you saw their pictures—‘The Hiltons sisters seen dancing in this nightclub,’ ‘The Hilton sisters being toasted at a party by the elite of the movie world,’ that sort of thing.”
¹⁹

Among the writers who interviewed the twins during their Hollywood sojourn was Faith Service, a respected film journalist. She seemed totally enamored of them. “Daisy and Violet are more than pretty,” she observed in
Motion Picture
. “They are beautiful. They are exquisitely gowned and groomed. Their hair is beautifully waved and hennaed.” Service also described the twins as “clever, sophisticated, well-read, and witty.”
²⁰

Although it is not known how much the twins were paid for their work in
Freaks
, Johnny Eck maintained that he commanded $1,000 a week during the four-month production. If Eck’s claim was accurate, it can be assumed that Daisy and Violet probably earned considerably more.

But however much the sisters were being paid for their work in Hollywood, it may not have been enough to keep up with their lavish spending at the time. As Service reported, Daisy and Violet maintained the lifestyles of top film stars. They had a “lovely” apartment. They had a full-time secretary/manager who looked after their business affairs as well as their social calendar. They had a “big sedan” as well as a chauffeur to ferry them everywhere. They also had a status symbol that all movie actors needed to be convinced they had truly arrived in lotusland: The twins had, in Daisy’s words, their own “colored maid.”
²¹

In their interview with Service, the twins talked about how dramatically their lives had changed since the trial ended six months earlier when they won their emancipation.

If Daisy and Violet had traveled to Hollywood in the belief that their roles in
Freaks
would lead to regular employment in the movies, their expectations may have vaporized the moment the film was given its earliest preview screenings. Merrill Pye, the film’s art director, was present for the first of the previews in early January of 1932. He was left with this painful memory: “Halfway through the previews, a lot of people got up and ran out. They didn’t walk out. They ran out.”
²³

Another of the film’s architects, production manager J. J. Cohn, said one woman claimed to have been so traumatized by seeing a preview of
Freaks
that she suffered a miscarriage and, as a result, tried to bring a wrongful death suit against MGM.

Browning was desolated by the test audiences’ responses to his film. He and a team of production employees immediately went to work on re-editing, employing a kind of slash-and-burn technique. When they were finished, they had excised fully a third of the celluloid, reducing the film’s running time from an hour and a half to just over sixty minutes. Hacked from the film were some of its grisliest scenes, including its depiction of the freaks jumping the circus queen Cleopatra during a violent midnight rainstorm and gleefully changing her from a creature of seraphic beauty into a “Duck Lady,” a monstrosity of scrambled facial features who was incapable of emitting any sound other than mallard-like squawks. Also scissored were some of the film’s more twisted sexual content, including a scene in which an amorous seal seems intent on ravishing the Turtle Girl.

After all the excisions were made,
Freaks
was released for presentation in the commercial houses in February 1932. Just as Irving Thalberg had feared during the early stages of its production, the movie set off a firestorm. A court barred the movie from being screened anywhere in Atlanta, Georgia, when the secretary of the city’s Board of Review condemned the picture as “loathsome, obscene, grotesque, and bizarre.” Several of Browning’s earlier films had been well received in the United Kingdom, but the British were not welcoming this time. While Great Britain had no shortage of carnivals, circuses, and wax museums that still exhibited human freaks, the Commonwealth forbade the showing of the film anywhere in England, Scotland, or Wales, and kept the ban in place for four decades. Surprisingly, perhaps,
Freaks
wasn’t banned in Boston. It was, however, savaged by the city’s newspaper critics. The
Boston
Herald
said the movie’s “sadistically cruel plot savors nearly of perversion.” The
Boston Evening Transcript
suggested that it was time to strip Browning of his title as “magician of the macabre” and then posed the question, “Where is that artistry that used to be … part of [Browning’s] trademark?”

Concerned that the negative fallout from
Freaks
might forever sully the name of MGM and doom its future projects, the studio finally caved in to the citizen’s groups, critics, and politicians who castigated the film as the most glaring example of all that was excremental and pestilential about Hollywood. It pulled
Freaks
from circulation late in the summer of 1932.

Daisy and Violet were forever angry with themselves for agreeing to take part in the film. They weren’t mere carnival tent freaks. They were, after all, artistes of the stage. Yet they had allowed themselves to be permanently associated in the minds of filmgoers with the most pitiable of the sideshow’s misfits, including the imbecilic pinheads, Johnny Eck the Half-Boy, and Prince Randian, the armless and legless Human Caterpillar who, in his grotesque displays, shows the rubes how he could roll and light his cigarettes by using only using his lips. Like everyone connected with the project, from Thalberg and Browning on down, the sisters would have been grateful if, by the wave of a wand, the movie could have been made to go away forever.

Willard Sheldon summed up the prevailing attitude: “Everyone who worked on the film wanted to go into hiding. Nobody wanted to have his name associated with a picture that was widely denounced as just about the sickest, most disgusting piece of work ever to come out of Hollywood. It was like having a pedophile in your family. You didn’t want anyone to know about it.”
²⁴

After
Freaks
, Daisy and Violet returned to the East to resume working in the theaters. When stage entertainers appeared in movies, they almost always sought to capitalize on the achievement and even
demanded greater pay for their future bookings. But the last thing Daisy and Violet wanted was identification with a movie that was almost universally anathematized.

The publicity materials that were developed for their return to the stage talked about work they had done in Hollywood but made no specific references to
Freaks
.

D
aisy and Violet’s understanding of financial matters may have been confused with the study of the atmosphere. They seemed to believe that money was only slightly less plentiful than the air they inhaled. Once they were on their own, in fact, they developed an attitude toward money that almost seemed contemptuous. They appeared to view it as a mere medium of exchange that was to be kept for the shortest interval possible before being turned into fur coats, honoraria for boyfriends, and salaries for chauffeurs, maids, secretaries, and other assorted attendants.

The sisters began maintaining two residences in the fall of 1932 and then almost never stayed at either one of them. One of their mail drops was the San Antonio apartment where they set up housekeeping after breaking free from the Myers. And soon after finishing the shooting for
Freaks
, they signed a lease for sumptuous quarters in a New York apartment building at 25 Central Park West that became a haven for other stage entertainers, actors, opera stars, and show producers.

It was in Chicago and its environs, however, not San Antonio or New York, where Daisy and Violet were most likely to be found late in 1932. The explanation for their gravitation to the Windy City was elemental enough. After tearfully turning down troubadour Don Galvan’s marriage proposal a year and a half earlier and believing she would never meet another man whom she could adore as much, Daisy
was again in love. Her new interest was Jack Lewis. Popularly known as the “Boy Maestro,” Lewis was a Chicagoan, and it was in his hometown that his orchestra had its biggest following.

Lewis and Daisy were introduced to one another in the New York offices of Ferd (Ferdinand) Simon, one of the country’s most powerful talent agents, who had just signed a contract to represent the Hilton sisters in their business affairs. Lewis, who had been represented by Ferd Simon since the time he started touring with his own orchestra at seventeen, was walking out of the talent agency offices at the same time Daisy and Violet were entering. He had seen Daisy for only seconds in their initial encounter, but, as he would recall later, his attraction to her was “immediate and profound.”
¹

Twenty or thirty minutes later, after Daisy and Violet had finished their business with Simon and exited the building, they saw Lewis leaning against a taxicab with its rear door open. He was short and slight and still looked boyish, but he was splendidly turned out with a fashionable fur-collared camel hair coat and a Stetson hat. Daisy noted a shyness in his expression.