The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (40 page)

Sawyer never got over his amazement at the preternatural gift Daisy and Violet had for being able to enter totally different spheres, while at the same time occupying the same physical space. He said the twins were able to co-exist in relative tranquility only because of their ability to now and then escape into entirely separate worlds. But there were instances when their equipoise went out of balance. Sawyer observed, “Sometimes Daisy and Vi could get so angry with one another that they’d stop talking for days. Surprisingly, though, they’d go on stage and there would be all this loving patter and hand-holding between them. Then they’d leave the stage, and again they’d stop talking to each other. They were such pros as entertainers that their audiences never guessed when the sisters were having a spat.”
¹⁸

Increasingly, around 1940 or so, according to Sawyer, there was one matter over which the twins quarreled more and more: Violet’s drinking. “Daisy liked to have a cocktail now and then, and certainly I did, too. But there were times when Vi just didn’t know when to say when. We’d have dinner someplace and Vi would say, ‘I want just one more drink before we leave.’ Then she’d have three or four more.” Sawyer said that Daisy was not entirely unaffected by Violet’s excessive drinking, but because the two had separate circulation systems, which only allowed for a very gradual transmission of blood from one sister to the other, “Vi could be completely crocked while Daisy might only have a slight buzz.”
¹⁹

Late in the summer of 1941, the Hilton sisters and Buddy Sawyer settled in for an extended booking at a Buffalo, New York, supper club, Brogan’s. Famous for its hospitality to acts of a more
outré
variety, among the entertainers who appeared there regularly was Baron Nowak, a popular midget, 23 inches tall and 17 pounds, who played xylophone, rode a unicycle, tap danced, and did voice impersonations
of Edward G. Robinson, Rudy Vallee, and the new singing sensation of the day, Frank Sinatra. Another favorite at Brogan’s was Yvette Dare, an exotic dancer who had two or three performing parrots that had been trained, as part of the routine, to pluck off her bra and sarong.

Sawyer had been separated from the twins for some months before the three were reunited for the engagement at Brogan’s. Following the trio’s opening night, the twins invited him up to their hotel room to catch up over a night cap. Violet, as usual, downed three drinks for each one Sawyer and Daisy had. In time, she nodded off on the sofa they shared.

With her sister softly snoring at her side, Daisy continued to brim over with news. After a time, Sawyer remembered that her effervescent mood changed and her manner became very serious.

“It happened in the wee small hours of the morning, with Vi slumped there on the sofa, off in dreamland someplace,” he recalled. “Daisy looked directly into my eyes. Then she started talking in a way that gave me goose bumps. She said, ‘Buddy, I just hate it when you’re off working one place and Vi and I are off working somewhere else. I think we should always be together. Buddy, do you feel anything for me? Do you feel about me the way I feel about you? Buddy … Buddy, do you think we should get married?’ She looked over to her sleeping sister for a moment and then returned her gaze to me. ‘We, all three of us, get along so well, don’t you think? It could work.”
²⁰

Sawyer admitted to being momentarily speechless, although he had “always secretly loved” Daisy. There had been times, on and off the stage, when Daisy seemed to show an amorous interest in him, he recalled. But because she flirted with many men, he never thought there was any great depth to her feelings for him.

“Daisy was definitely the aggressor in the marriage proposal,” Sawyer said. “It was probably a good thing. As fond as I was of her, I probably would have been too shy ever to get down on my knees and
say, ‘Daisy, will you be my wife?’ ” Sawyer did, however, answer ‘yes’ to Daisy’s proposal.

Violet knew better than anyone how rash her sister could be when it came to romance. But even she admitted to being “startled” when, after Sawyer left for the night, Daisy woke her up to tell her that she and Buddy had decided to marry. “I felt then that her marriage with Buddy would not be right,” Violet reflected later. “I thought she had not weighed the idea well.”
²¹
Violet also said she felt sure that Daisy was not so much in love with Buddy as she was in love with love. Violet may also have been troubled by the disparity in age between Sawyer and her sister. At twenty-five, Sawyer was eight years younger than Daisy.

Of all the pacts the Hiltons developed for maintaining sisterly harmony, none was more inviolable than their agreement never to meddle in one another’s affairs of the heart. As badly mismatched as she believed Daisy and Buddy were, Violet said, “I did not argue with my sister about her choice.” Instead, she tried to give the couple the impression she was happy for them. “… Buddy was pleasant to me, and he was most friendly when we sat down to talk about our future together,” Violet said.
²²

Daisy and Buddy wasted little time in going ahead with their plan. Just days later, on September 15, 1941, they were at the marriage bureau in the Buffalo City Hall, filling out an application. To comply with the minimum twenty-four-hour waiting period, the wedding was set for the next day.

As long as he was on a stage, Sawyer delighted in jousting with the drunks and hecklers in the audience because he always bested his antagonists. And when he was singing or dancing before an audience, he always appeared insouciantly relaxed. Curiously, acquaintances say Sawyer’s confident manner vaporized the instant he left the stage. He then became introverted. It was as if he worried that if the customers
got to know the
real
Buddy Sawyer, they would find him beset with insecurities. He even had trouble responding graciously when a patron approached him and complimented him on a performance. Daisy was sensitive to Buddy’s shyness. She was determined not to let their wedding become a spectacle before the press and public. She wanted everything about the marriage to be low-key.

A local newspaper, the
Courier-Express
, reported that Daisy and Buddy had applied for a marriage license, but, mercifully, this news did not seem to catch the attention of many locals. The news item was conveyed in a single paragraph on page 22. And unlike the experience that Violet and bandleader Maurice Lambert had had ten years earlier, Daisy and Buddy did not encounter any impediments to obtaining a permit in Buffalo. Judge Christy J. Buscaglia, probably the most respected jurist in all of Erie County, not only agreed to preside over the ceremony, but assured the couple he would be honored to do so. In campaigning for a place on the bench, Buscaglia once declared, “I have made it my rule that tolerance and patience should govern my every action.…”
²³
When Daisy and Buddy asked him if he would join them as husband and wife, Buscaglia told them to return the next day.

The twins and Sawyer entered city hall on the morning of September 16th. There was little about their dress that would have caused anyone to guess the trio was a wedding party. Daisy had wrapped her blonde hair in a polka-dotted blue silk scarf. She wore a simple, gray suit with a fluffy white blouse beneath her jacket. Violet, too, was dressed in a gray suit, but it was of a different cut and style than Daisy’s. Sawyer wore a dark business suit. Once inside, the three were ushered into the private office of the clerk of city courts. Buddy, his hands sweating and trembling, pinned a simple white corsage on his bride. Daisy attached a boutonniere to Sawyer’s lapel. At the couple’s request, no photographers or reporters were permitted inside the room.

The marriage ceremony was carried out with dignity in just a few minutes. Sawyer was damp with sweat but relieved that he and Daisy had been able to exchange vows without attracting a mob of busybodies and reporters. He kissed his bride, shook the judge’s hand, and hugged Violet. He was feeling so at ease about how quietly the ceremony had gone that he even agreed to pose for a newspaper photographer with the new Mrs. Buddy Sawyer and his sister-in-law. He didn’t know yet about the fěte that had been planned for the bridal couple that night at Brogan’s, nor about the press releases the night club had placed in the Buffalo papers that day:

Because winter in Buffalo often slams down on the city like the white lid of a freezer and sometimes keeps the landscape almost hermetically sealed for weeks at a time, residents have a particular need
for hometown fun spots where they can vent steam. In the 1940s, Buffalo had over forty nightclubs, maybe more than just about any other city its size. Except for Brogan’s, all the other clubs might as well have switched off their lights the night of the wedding reception for Daisy and Buddy. The crowds at Brogan’s were thick as locusts. Out on the sidewalk, there were hundreds more hoping for a chance to enter. Everybody in town, it seemed, wanted to get a look at the freak twins and the man who could be presumed to be some kind of sexual superman.

Sawyer felt like a prey animal that had been thrown to a pack of jackals to be toyed with and then devoured. He was miserable. All night long, strangers approached him and asked whether he had decided on which of the twins he was going to mount first. “It was terrible,” Sawyer remembered. “Because I had taken a Siamese twin as a bride, a lot of people thought that our sex life should be an open book. It was nobody’s business but ours back then. It’s nobody’s business today.”
²⁴
Sawyer and the twins got no relief from their taunters even when Brogan’s closed in the early morning. A splinter group from the club followed the three to their hotel. Massing outside on the walk beneath the window of the honeymoon suite, the tormentors kept crying out, “Buddy, you in bed yet? The girls are waiting.” There was no lessening of the crowds at Brogan’s the next evening, or the next. Hours before the cabaret opened, people started lining up at the door. They didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to see the three grotesques. It was with considerable horror that Daisy recalled her first evening as a bride and the days that followed: “All that night, and through every night and day for the following ten days, we were pursued.”
²⁵

Given Sawyer’s youth and shyness, what was probably the inevitable eventually happened. Daisy described the denouement this way: “… One morning when we looked across the twin bed where
Buddy had been when we drowsed from the incessant phone calls from reporters, Buddy had disappeared. I, the bride, who had not yet known a honeymoon, tried to believe that Buddy would come back. For a while I waited for him, although I knew he would not return.”
²⁶

Sometime later, a reporter located Buddy back in his hometown of Elmira, New York. He provided an explanation for deserting his bride. “Daisy is a lovely girl,” he said. “But I guess I am not the type of fellow who should be married to a Siamese twin. As a matter of fact, I am not even what you would call gregarious. In the show business, there are times when you get tired of seeing anybody—let alone twin brides.”
²⁷

Two years later, Daisy started a divorce action in the Court of Common Pleas in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Naming Buddy by his christened name of Harold Thomas Estep, rather than his
nom de theater
, she charged that he “committed willful and malicious desertion from the habitation of the libellant, without a reasonable cause, from the 27th day of September, 1941, to the present time.” In an affidavit filed in response, Estep rejoined that his wife’s account of why they parted had some “errors and imperfections.” But when the final hearing on the action was held in February, 1944, he failed to appear in the courtroom. Daisy was granted the divorce unconditionally.

Sawyer never again saw the woman he had married. He still seemed rueful when he was interviewed more than a half century later on the subject of his whirlwind union with a Siamese twin. “Maybe it was my fault, but how many marriages could have stood up to the test ours was given?” he asked. “Some people thought we got married only for the publicity. They were wrong. I loved Daisy very much. She loved me. Even when we parted, I thought that when the hysteria of the press died down, maybe we could get together again and have a life together after all. It just never happened. She went her way, I went mine. People get badly hurt by love sometimes.”
²⁸

D
aisy’s and Violet’s craving for love was so extreme, it often moved them to the brink of lunacy. Daisy’s marriage to Buddy Sawyer, after a courtship lasting only days, was only the latest example of their madness. Anyone who really knew the sisters could have predicted that the union was doomed.

If their pursuit of husbands bordered on the pathological, it was certainly impelled by a desperate need to belong somewhere, if only temporarily. For all their ease in relating to others, and the acceptance accorded them in showbiz society, they still felt like aliens. They had one another, but no one else. Their loneliness was profound. Daisy and Violet were thirty-three and had never heard from anyone who acknowledged having a blood relationship to them. If ever they were going to validate their humanity, they believed it could only be through the marital bonds to mates and the production of children. In other words, because they had no family that would claim them, they needed to create their own.

While Sawyer’s abandonment and the beating they took in the press were emotionally devastating for the Hiltons, the sisters made some gains in putting their professional lives temporarily back together. Certainly they were no longer the incandescent stars they had been as teenagers when, they were the most talked-about and highest paid new act in vaudeville. But thanks to careful steering by
their agent Arthur Argus in the late 1930s, they had made a surprising comeback from the bleak years that followed Violet’s Cotton Bowl wedding debacle.