The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (39 page)

Violet and Daisy, December 1937. (Author’s collection)

There is at least one matter about Daisy’s love child that intrigues even today. It seems possible, perhaps even probable, that he is still in our midst—although, as an adoptee—it may be that not even he knows that he issued from a Siamese twin.

From the time five years earlier when a San Antonio court had granted them complete emancipation from Myer Myers, the twins had formulated a series of romantic goals for achieving happiness. Daisy and Violet had often recited the objectives in magazine interviews: Both would fall in love and marry. They would quit show business and settle in some place in the country. They would raise children,
and, to the extent that it was possible, they would vanish from the public eye.

But in late 1936, it seemed unthinkable to the twins that their futures would ever hold a quiet country retreat with devoted husbands and flocks of children. Violet had allowed herself to be used in a national hoax that made a mockery of marriage. Then Daisy had a baby and gave it up.

So the twins seem to have reconciled themselves to going for just one part of their shared dream: They would try to vanish from the public eye. As conjoined twins, they knew, of course, that wherever they tried to live, they would never be able to stroll down a sidewalk or take in a movie without attracting stares and provoking comment. But by keeping away from the entertainment world, maybe they could begin healing—Violet from her disgrace at being turned into a national joke, Daisy from her guilt and suffering at having surrendered her child.

It seems an astonishing feat, but Daisy and Violet
did
almost completely erase themselves from America’s consciousness, and they did so virtually overnight. No record exists of where in the Twin Cities they took up residence at the end of 1936. Their near complete seclusion continued well into 1937, and perhaps even longer. And wherever they lived, they seemed to have been largely left alone. The Hilton sisters stories, a regular staple of magazines and Sunday newspaper supplements, just disappeared. After having been bamboozled by Violet’s sham wedding, the press apparently had become chary about seeking out the pair.

It’s unlikely the twins had much money put aside when they left the public eye. In the nearly three years they been on the road, they lost what would have been a fortune, probably all of the $100,000 they had received in the court settlement and then some.

After entering into their voluntary exile, Daisy and Violet seem to
have entirely broken off contact with other stage and film performers. They did, however, remain in touch with at least a few people with whom they had long and close relationships, among them Emmett Sweeney. “They were always writing or wiring Mom and Dad for money,” said Camille Rosengren, daughter of the San Antonio attorney and well-to-do businessman who, along with his wife, had been devoted to Daisy and Violet from the time the sisters were twelve or thirteen. “I don’t think Dad ever said no to them.”
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It seems likely the twins also regularly asked for financial help from another wealthy San Antonian, their friend Harry Hertzberg, whose admiration for the sisters verged on veneration.

Certainly the frugality that the twins’ straitened circumstances necessitated must have been hard on them. In the past, they had always acted as though the money would never run out. They always stayed in the best hotels and dined in the poshest restaurants. Their trips to department stores always occasioned great excitement among the clerks. They swept through the aisles, loading up the arms of their assistants with the priciest dresses, shoes, hats, and handbags. They also bought expensive gifts for their friends, especially their boyfriends, and thought nothing of taking parties of a dozen or two dozen fans to exclusive restaurants, and picking up the tab.

Rose Fernandez was amazed by the freedom with which the twins spent money, especially when they were touring with their road unit. Besides the expected complement of musicians and backup performers, the troupe included publicists, secretaries, property boys, bookkeepers, porters, and assorted personnel whose only responsibility seemed to be to keep the sisters’ bank accounts running near empty.

“Financial security never seemed to be the least bit of concern to Daisy and Violet,” Fernandez recalled. “When they came into a new town with their show, you half got the impression that the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus had arrived. The twins had a
reputation for being very kind to their help. They were always surrounded by hangers-on who had their hands out.”
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Jim Moore remembered that because Daisy and Violet were so extravagant in their spending, there were times when they had to resort to extraordinary measures just to survive. He recalled one occasion when they turned a saxophone over to a pawn shop just so they could get enough change for cigarettes and coffee. “They were just so generous with their money,” said Jim Moore. “It meant absolutely nothing to them.”
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As difficult as the regimen of self-imposed austerity must have been, what was probably even harder for Daisy and Violet was their voluntary abstention from parties and other social occasions where they often had found men who were attentive and, sometimes for a night or two, romantically adventurous. To ease some of their pain and loneliness, they turned to alcohol.

“They became quite heavy drinkers,” said Rosengren. “I don’t know if they were alcoholics, but they seemed to be at least slightly buzzed much of the time. They were such sweet, fragile girls. From the time of their earliest reasoning, all they knew was the loneliness of being so different from everybody else. How could anyone be expected to cope with such baggage? My dad and mother worried about the girls’ drinking and the effects it might be having on their health. I think the twins were using alcohol as a palliative, as something to numb the pain they were feeling.”
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After becoming big stars of the vaudeville stage, Daisy and Violet had vowed they would never again return to the carnival world. But so destitute had they become by the spring of 1937, they were having trouble meeting even their most basic living expenses. Because no other offers of work were coming in, the twins, in desperation, decided they would once again have to exhibit themselves in one of the circus sideshows that were crossing the country.

Newspaperman E. Burke Maloney remembered seeing the twins at about this time when, as headliners in a circus sideshow, they came to Elmira, New York. Maloney, then a young cub reporter, was assigned to interview the pair and carried out his meeting with them over lunch. He found the sisters to be pleasant enough, although, “They had fielded the same questions so often all over the world that they gave answers almost before the questions were asked.”
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By his description, the twins at this time were “pretty in an anemic way—they had dabs of rouge high on the cheekbones and each mouth was a dash of vermilion.” Sadly, they were already showing marked deterioration from their vaudeville years. Maloney summed up the encounter this way: “After all these years one thing stands out in my memory of these Siamese twins: They both had dirty fingernails.”

Following their summer travels with the circus sideshow, the twins resumed their lives as shut-ins in Minneapolis, but once every month or two, they emerged long enough to take a paying job somewhere. In February of 1938, for example, they traveled by train to San Francisco to an engagement at the Tivoli Club and after a week returned to their Twin Cities redoubt, not to be heard or seen again in public for a long time. The Tivoli was a swank house that probably paid them well. But most of the twins’ occasional appearances in 1937 and 1938 were made either in the halls of flyspeck towns or the tawdrier theaters and clubs of big cities.

Sometime in 1939, the years of self-imposed exile ended when Daisy and Violet received a phone call from Arthur Argus, an important booking agent in Rochester, New York. He presented them with an opportunity for one of the cushiest assignments available to entertainers of the day: He had lined up an engagement to appear as floor show entertainers on the ocean liner,
Berengaria
, a ship of almost sybaritic luxury that ferried nobles, oil magnates, and other wealthy voluptuaries between New York City and Southampton, England.
Daisy and Violet were elated. After practicing self-denial for so long, they relished the idea of the hedonistic living that life aboard the superliner would offer. And after appearing almost exclusively before bumpkins and rustics in sideshows and shabby theaters for the last two or three years, they were thrilled by the chance to once again perform for the rich and privileged. It was, Daisy imagined, going to be “fun to sing with the tuneful orchestra where the guests laughed and drank.”
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Nearly a fifth of a mile long and the pride of the Cunard Line, the
Berengaria
was the largest luxury liner on the seas. Its interior, hung with Renoirs and Gainsboroughs, was decorated by the same designer who did the Ritz hotels in Paris and London. Its massive indoor swimming pool was styled after a Pompeian bathhouse, complete with marble columns and frescoes, and boasted toga-clad ladies-in-waiting. The dancing started in the
Berengaria
’s lounge at nine each night and usually continued until the stewards cheerily announced, “Caviar breakfast being served!”

Buddy Sawyer, who was also represented by Arthur Argus, served as the twins’ pianist and emcee. He, along with another young man, also partnered with Daisy and Violet in their four-way dance routines. For Sawyer, just twenty at the time, life aboard the
Berengaria
had aspects of a nonstop bacchanalia.

“Whether we were sailing from New York to England or England to New York, every day and every night seemed like a never-ending Roman carnival,” he recalled. “The passengers, most of them filthy with money, seemed to exist only to be fed, entertained, and pampered. And the ship’s crew, like indentured slaves, seemed to exist only to see to it that the passengers were glutted with food, filled to the gills with booze, kept amused, and waited on hand and foot every moment. Some of this was a little disgusting to see.”
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Sawyer remembered his days aboard the
Berengaria
as being among
the most exciting of his life. It also was the time of his earliest professional relationship with the Hiltons, a relationship that would continue for several years and ultimately take a surprising turn. “I wasn’t much more than a kid then, and here I was, working with the world-famous Hilton sisters,” Sawyer said. “It was a heady experience.”

Sawyer, who was christened Harold Thomas Estep, had been fascinated with the twins long before he joined their act. As a boy, he had been regarded as something of a stage
wunderkind
. In the mid-1920s, about the time he was eight, Buddy began appearing with a beloved aunt, Bobbie Cunningham, in a dance duo that traveled the Keith-Albee circuit of vaudeville theaters. In the years ahead, there would be times when he and his aunt found themselves appearing in vaudeville lineups that included the Hiltons.

“The twins, of course, were always the headliners and all the other acts on the bill, including mine and my aunt’s, were considered fillers,” Sawyer explained. “I still remember how the twins took the country by storm during their first years in vaudeville. They were truly phenomenal. It was SRO for them everywhere. They were still girls then, just sixteen or seventeen, but in the history of vaudeville, there may not have been more than a half-dozen performers who were their equals in endearing themselves to the audience. There was so much love between the people in the seats and Daisy and Violet that you could slice it with a knife. People flocked to the theaters thinking they were merely going to see a couple of sideshow freaks. What they really saw, though, were two of the most beautiful and talented girls God ever created.
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Because of the high pay and luxury lifestyle they were enjoying as performers on the
Berengaria
, Buddy and Daisy and Violet would have loved it if they could have held on to the assignment for years. However, some of the ship’s wealthier passengers considered the vessei their primary residence, and because the
Berengaria
’s entertainment
director knew it was important that these guests never get bored, he felt it necessary to make at least periodic changes in the floor shows. The twins and Sawyer retained their jobs on the ship for two or three months before they were replaced by new acts.

Daisy and Violet separated from Sawyer for a time after the three finished their stint aboard the liner. Because the sisters and Sawyer meshed so well in their performances, and because they also shared the same agent, they kept getting back together.

“Probably the best times I had with Daisy and Violet came when we were playing some dates in Los Angeles,” Sawyer said. “The twins were invited to parties almost every night and I tagged along. The parties mostly were thrown by Hollywood people—producers and directors—and there were always famous movies stars around. You wouldn’t believe the way people drank and what was going on in the bedrooms. Some of the parties were almost like orgies.”
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Sawyer, who was extremely shy, tried to blend into the walls, although he was often the subject of no little attention at the showbiz soirées. Revelers who spotted him standing off in a corner by himself would turn to one another and remark how disgraceful it was that somebody had been thoughtless enough to bring a child to the party. Sawyer had attained voting age, although he was just five-foot-two and weighed only a little over 100 pounds. His shoes, Buster Browns, were size 4 ½. He had another characteristic that made him stand out in any crowd: He had yellow hair, not blond or flaxen, but yellow, like butter or sweet corn.

Sawyer remembered the taxicab conversations the twins had while traveling back to their hotel after the Hollywood parties. “Daisy might say, ‘I had a nice long visit with Jackie Coogan. He said to give you his regards.’ At that point, Violet might chime in, ‘Oh, Jackie is always such a dear. By the way, the Barrymores just returned from Rome. We had a nice time looking through their photo album of the
ruins. John said that the whole time they were there, they only had two days of rain.’ ”
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