The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (11 page)

There were 100 to 150 detainees, most of them Chinese, stockaded on Angel Island at the time Edith entered the complex. Most had sworn they had fathers in America who already were naturalized citizens. Because they lacked documentation to back their claims, they were held in quarantine until authorities could either locate these men or, as was far more common, determined through interrogations that no such fathers existed. Detainees who were caught making false claims about citizen fathers were marched in chains onto outbound Chinese vessels and thrown into lockup, giving rise to the expression “shanghaied.” Some desperate men and women awaiting deportation managed to avoid returning to China by fashioning ropes from strips of mattress ticking and hanging themselves in the barracks’ lavatories.

When Edith first saw Daisy and Violet, they were sitting motion-less on the lowest mattress of a three-tiered bunk bed. Gathered before them, seated cross-legged on the floor, were several dozen women and young girls, all of them Chinese. Some were eating rice and vegetables from small bowls. Others were picking at the carcass of a roasted seagull they had caught after luring it with handfuls of rice. All were staring in wonder at Daisy and Violet.

By this time, Daisy and Violet had been left unattended for ten or twelve hours. Edith threaded her way through the knot of gawkers bunched before them. She placed her suitcase on an upper bunk, and tried to embrace the twins. Daisy and Violet stared ahead vacantly, showing no sign they even recognized their much older stepsister. It was apparent they were still suffering from the trauma of being torn
from their family by Immigration officers and then turned into a spectacle at the hospital where they were disrobed and placed on view not just for the examining doctor and nurses, but for any Angel Island employees who wanted to see them.

Some of the Chinese women came forward thrusting their rice bowls towards Daisy and Violet, trying to communicate to Edith that the girls needed to eat. Edith shooed the women away, sat on the mattress beside Daisy and Violet, placed an arm around their small shoulders, and drew them tightly to her side. “We have to be strong,” she sobbed. “Everything will work out, but we have to be strong, brave.”
⁹

On the sidewalk outside the offices of the
San Francisco Chronicle
. Mary had a handbag filled with scrapbooks in one hand, a hickory cane in the other. She turned and hobbled into the building.

From the day she had adopted the twins, Mary had shown a gift for charming newspaper men. She always struck them as being grand-motherly, a woman of innocence, and pure in heart and soul. What other kind of woman would take such wretched children into her life?

Mary was surprised when she entered the
Chronicle’s
news department. The paper’s city room was several times larger than any in which she had ever been. After announcing herself to a secretary at the front desk, she was directed to take a chair. In a moment, she was ushered into a glassed-in office occupied by an editor. She drew the scrapbooks from her bag and placed them on his desk. Mary began leafing through the pages, showing articles and news photos of all the places the twins had appeared. “They’re so,
so
lovely, they are,” she said appraisingly. “They’re so,
so
talented. And, may I say, betwixt the two, despite their condition, there ain’t so much as a farthing’s worth of self-pity.”
¹⁰

Mary was chirpy but then turned somber. She withdrew a time-piece from a pocket and calculated out loud: “Twenty-four, twenty-five hours since I’ve even been able to hold them in my arms,” she sniffled. “A day and a night. Eight-year-old girls all alone and thousands of miles from home, and held in detention on Angel Island as though they were common thieves. I don’t even know if they’re alive or dead.”

The editor didn’t need to hear any more. He gathered up Mary’s scrapbooks and returned them to her handbag. He took her by the arm and led her out into the city room to the desk of a staff writer.

Mary did not so much tell the story of the twins’ misadventures, as dictate it. She embellished some events and underplayed others. At no time did she mention she had traveled to America not just with the twins, but also with a married daughter and son-in-law. Such a detail, she seemed to sense, would only water down her account. The saga was so much better when its cast of characters was limited to an eccentric and big-hearted old lady and the two angelically beautiful but physically cursed sisters.

In her retelling of the tale, Mary stressed her selfless generosity. She skipped relating her reason for coming to America with the twins, which, more than any other place in the world, was where she believed a true fortune could be made.

Most critically, near the end of her recitation Mary introduced a Dr. Adrian Drew into the story. Was he a villain or hero? Only time would tell. Drew was the chief quarantine officer on Angel Island. He alone had the power to make the final ruling on whether Daisy and Violet would ever set foot on American soil.

When Mary emerged from the
Chronicle
building, Myer was still waiting on the sidewalk. They started walking in search of a hotel for the night. The winds had shifted on San Francisco Bay, draping a gauze of fog over the structures near the waterfront. Mary Hilton and Myer Myers hardly noticed. They were in a fog of worry and concern over how things would play out.

The
San Francisco Chronicle
account appeared the next morning, running under the headline:

The story could not have been more sympathetic to Mary Hilton if she had written it herself, which, of course, she all but did. It characterized her as a stooped and widowed old granny who was giving her last breaths to provide care and love to two pitiable girls who had been cast away by their own mother. The twins were portrayed as wretched creatures who had triumphed over the circumstance of their birth to become exceptional children who could serve as role models to less fortunate people everywhere.

In part, the
Chronicle
account read:

Just as Mary had hoped, the newspaper story prompted almost immediate action on Angel Island. Dr. Adrian Drew, the island’s chief quarantine officer, was swamped with cases that required hearings to determine which of the island’s detainees could be granted entry into the United States. Typically, a detainee waited weeks or months before he or she was given a hearing. Because the
Chronicle
had now turned the twins’ case into a cause célèbre, Dr. Drew felt pressured to act with dispatch in the matter. He docketed the sisters’ case for an immediate hearing.

Drew had a reputation for being tough. Almost all the appellants who appeared before him were ordered to board ships back to their homelands, rather than the ferry that could give them passage over the final three-and-a-half miles to California’s golden shore. Since almost all the foreigners he barred from entering the U.S. were Chinese, he was generally able to carry out his job without attracting even the slightest attention from the press or public.

Drew may have worried that if he ordered the twins’ banishment, he might be scorned as the evilest man in America. Surely he could imagine what the
Chronicle
and other papers across the country would do with the story. There would be front-page pictures of the tiny Hilton twins, woebegone and crying their eyes out, aboard a ship pulling away from Angel Island. He ordered the twins’ immediate release from detention and authorized them to go ashore.
¹²

Mary’s claim to the newspaper that she traveled to America with the twins “largely for their education” was, of course, a fiction. When Mary, Myer, Edith Emily, Daisy, and Violet were finally able to travel ashore as a family, one of their first stops was the San Francisco office of
The Billboard
. Myer arranged for a large advertisement in the publication. The ad, which included a picture of Daisy and Violet seated back to back at the keyboards of two pianos and read:

Myer didn’t wait long for a response. The ad caught the eye of W. H. Rice, the West Coast talent scout for Clarence A. Wortham, the owner of six large railroad carnivals that were touring the country. Rice met with Myer in San Francisco and opened negotiations for what Rice assured him would be “a dignified presentation of the girls in the show world.”
¹⁴

Within a week, Mary, the Myers, and Daisy and Violet were rolling northward through California on a train. They were on their way to Big Sky country—Anaconda, Montana.

D
aisy and Violet got their first glimpse of the Wortham World’s Greatest Shows a half mile up the tracks from Anaconda. As their train was slowing to a stop, their hearts leaped. Could any carnival really be so sprawling?

The midway had sprouted in a field right alongside the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railroad tracks. It spread a wide band of jostling colors at the edge of the sullen company town that was otherwise unrelievedly gray.

A sparkling red ferris wheel, taller than the tallest church steeple in town, slowly churned against the sky. Striped tents were everywhere, and, behind them, chomping on grass, were elephants, camels, and zebras. Luridly illustrated canvas banners were strung up behind all the ticket booths advertising such attractions as Tam Tam, the Last of His Race and Red Booger’s Wild West Show.

Anaconda was a mining village. The settlement had started pushing up out of a piney wilderness three decades earlier with the discovery of a vein that would transform the area into the richest copper producing region in the country. The town was laid out with row upon row of soot-powdered brick and frame houses. Smoke from the Anaconda Mining Company smelting factories hung in the air day and night.

Myer, Edith, and Mary could not have been more surprised nor more impressed when, along with Daisy and Violet, they alighted
from the train at the Anaconda depot to be greeted by the owner of the carnival himself, Clarence A. Wortham. His arms were brimming with kewpie dolls, teddy bears, and bags of taffy.

“Such pretty girls,” Wortham appraised. “And I’ve heard about how talented you are as performers. I’m so pleased that you are going to be part of our shows. Now which of you is Daisy and which is Violet?”

“We liked Mr. Wortham immediately,” Violet would say later. More than anyone else whom Daisy and Violet had met in the entertainment business, Wortham gave the sisters a sense that he viewed them as sensitive human beings, not as the mere chattel of the fat man and skinny lady accompanying them. There may have been another reason why they felt at ease with the showman. They only had to tilt their heads slightly upward to make direct eye contact with him. Wortham was a small man, barely an inch over five feet and just 125 pounds.

“Like Toulouse-Lautrec, Napoleon, and some of the other runts of history, Clarence Wortham became a towering figure in his field because he over-compensated for his diminutiveness,” observed Joe McKennon, a carny himself who, in retirement, made himself generally handy around the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. “Who knows what Clarence might have done with his life if he had grown another six or eight inches taller. He probably would have driven a milk truck.”
¹

Wortham was accompanied by his chauffeur when he went to welcome Daisy and Violet, the Myers, and Mary Hilton. He directed the driver to strap the family’s bags and trunks to his touring car. He then ferried the group to the railroad siding where the carnival’s train was parked. Each of its twenty-five cars was painted red and emblazoned in gold with the title, Wortham’s World’s Greatest Shows. “Home sweet home,” Wortham declared, as he showed the family the quarters they would occupy, a furnished stateroom that, rare for the
time, had both electricity and running water. Next, he squired them on a tour of his midway.