The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (12 page)

Violet and Daisy being tutored in a carnival tent by Edith Myers, 1916. The boys at left are Clarence Jr. and Max Wortham, sons of Clarence Wortham, the carnival impresario. (Courtesy of Carol Wortham Anspacher)

Myer Myers was amazed. Anaconda was a town of about 3,000 inhabitants, but the midway was so choked with humanity it seemed to him there could have been double that many revelers at the World’s Greatest Shows. Long lines of people waited at every ticket booth, whether for Johnny Begano’s Congress of Wonders, Red Booger’s Wild West Show, the Whip, or George Farley’s House of Filipino Midgets.
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In an exercise that came almost as naturally to him as breathing, Myer started counting customers in the ticket lines and
multiplying these numbers by the 15-cent and 35-cent admission prices. He couldn’t wait until his Siamese twins had an address on the midway.

To the people of remote communities like Anaconda who rarely traveled anywhere, a carnival was an exotic mix of the bizarre, the beautiful, and the grotesque. It wasn’t surprising that preachers used their strongest invectives to fulminate against these portable Coney Islands. The carnivals encouraged carefree extravagance that could quickly undo the values of sobriety, seriousness, hard work, and frugality that the local ministers tried to instill in their flocks. Whatever the denunciations the small town people heard from the pulpits, few could resist the allure of the carnival, especially at night. The ferris wheel turned with a thousand lights, circumscribing a huge glowing circle that could be seen for miles in the darkness. The air not only carried the scents of frying meats, but also the sing-song rodomontade of pitchmen who stood outside the tents of monkey-girls, human pin-cushions, and nymphets from India and Egypt whose only costumes were their pet snakes. The night erased all the rough edges of the dreamland that was the traveling carnival. In the glow of gas lanterns, an overweight and over-the-hill dancer could look like a sylph.

Clarence Wortham was really without any serious competitors in the carnival industry. Known by competitors as the Little Giant, he insisted that each of his half-dozen carnivals offer only the biggest tent attractions and the latest, state-of-the-art thrill rides.

“If he had his designs on some new attraction or ride that other showmen wanted, he would outbid them all,” said Joe McKennon. “He always won. He was willing to spend king’s ransoms for midway attractions, whether for some new loop-to-loop ride, the fattest of the fat ladies, or a five-legged cow. P.T. Barnum was probably lucky that Clarence wasn’t a contemporary. He would have given him a run for his money.”
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The unchecked extravagance Wortham showed in collecting carnival attractions didn’t carry over to his wardrobe. He apparently believed it was sinful for a man to ever own more than a single suit since he could never wear more than one at a time. He was known for donning the same tweed three-piece outfit day after day, week after week, without ever getting it cleaned. When it became evident, even to him, that a suit had begun showing too much wear, he’d reluctantly hand over $15 to an aide and send him into town to buy a new one. He disposed of his old suits by presenting them to employees. His castoffs usually ended up on the backs of sideshow midgets who, with help from some tailoring, looked quite dapper in them.

So great were the swarms that had massed before the Rice & Wortham Water Circus, its ticket booths were not even visible from the midway.

“It’s been the same in every town we have played this season,” Wortham said of the water circus’s drawing power. “It’s an attraction unlike any you’ll find on any carnival traveling America today.”

Hanging near the circus’s entranceway, strung from a cable that was as high as a telephone line, was a hand-painted canvas that was at least as enormous as Gericault’s
Raft of Medusa
, and almost as lurid in its imagery. The banner depicted three or four mermaids perched atop a rocky outcropping in the middle of an ocean. Each of the spirits of the sea was wearing what was recognizable as a come-hither expression, but each was otherwise naked from her golden hair to the end of her fishy tail. To the side of the pictorial banner, there was another canvas sign that read:

Wortham lifted the twins into his arms, and with the Myers and Mary tailing him, bore them through the crowd to the attraction’s entranceway.

The audiences for the water circus viewed the spectacle from bleacher seating that encircled a canvas-lined tank that was eight feet deep and twenty-four feet in diameter. The show got underway when daredevil Joey Florey streaked down a long wooden chute on a bicycle, tore through a wall of fire, and, after flying forty feet through the air, landed in the water tank. The crowd was still roaring as Florey then ascended an eighty-foot pole, and, from a tiny perch, executed a swan dive into a pool below.
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As spectacular as the stuntman’s feats were, most of the crowd had been drawn to the water circus to see “Neptune’s Daughter,” a musical production that, a few years earlier, had been presented to large and approving audiences in New York’s Hippodrome. The play’s storyline involved the mermaid daughter of King Neptune who is determined to avenge the death of her sister who had been caught in the fishing net of a mortal man. But on her way to plotting the fisherman’s demise, Annette, the avenging mermaid, falls in love with him.

Besides its principals, the Wortham revue included a corps de ballet of a dozen young women. These splashers were hired less for their swimming abilities than for what they did for bathing suits. “Men and boys always outnumbered the female patrons at the shows by at least three to one,” McKennon calculated.
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Wortham was always so far ahead of the curve with his carnival features that he was beyond the reach of all other showmen. In addition to the production of “Neptune’s Daughter,” he introduced another major money-maker in the 1916 edition of his World’s Greatest Shows. The attraction was called “A Trip to Mars” and was a portable version of a feature that, in a far more primitive form, had
been a sensation at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.

The ticket holders for Wortham’s “A Trip to Mars” entered a large, darkened tent and took their seats inside a rocket ship whose under-carriage was attached to a maze of steel bars. After all the patrons were belted in, there was a ground-shaking explosion, and, in the next instant, there would be a terrible shuddering of the spaceship as its nose would lift upward. Motion pictures were projected onto the tent’s interior walls, and, by peering through the portholes of their rocket, the “passengers” got a strong impression they were leaving Planet Earth. After streaking through the Milky Way and then a celestial electric storm, the craft made a noisy and bumpy landing on Mars. Next, the audience saw a pocked, tomato-colored landscape inhabited by little green men, actually some dwarfs that had been borrowed from George Farley’s House of Filipino Midgets. Finally, the spaceship again lifted off and returned everyone to earth.

Daisy and Violet were beside themselves with excitement after the ride, but Wortham told them he had one more surprise. He led the sisters and Myer, Edith, and Mary away from the bustling midway to a drab tent near the railroad tracks. Inside, working by the light of lanterns, a lone painter was leaning over a canvas as massive as the one they had seen for the “Neptune’s Daughter” production.

The artist was nearly finished with the painting. Daisy and Violet were dumbstruck, as were Myer, Edith, and Mary. The canvas depicted, four or five times life size, two girls, standing closely side-by-side. They could have been eight or nine years old, and each was pretty enough to have stepped out of a Raphael painting. Both girls were covered with ermine-trimmed blue velvet robes. There were diamond-studded tiaras on their heads and gold slippers on their feet. Buckingham Palace was in the background. Above the mural, in lettering readable from hundreds of feet, was the legend:

Wortham spoke cautiously. “I hope,” he said, “that nobody minds that I tossed out that old name of ‘Brighton United Twins.’ It struck me as sounding a little too … well, parochial.”

Roustabouts strung up the banner the next day and a tent was erected. The playhouse was smaller than most of the canvas pavilions lining the midway. It was also patched and faded. Wortham apologized for its size and condition but said it would have to do until a new top could be made and delivered.

There is no published account of how Daisy and Violet were received at their American premiere. The
Anaconda Standard
printed only one review of the carnival’s appearance, and it ran a day or two before the twins arrived in the town.
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It can be supposed that the circumference of Myer’s bankroll started thickening from the sisters’ first day on the midway. After finishing the stand in Anaconda, the Wortham carnival played Butte, Great Falls, and Kalispell.
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The cavalcade then moved over the rails to Spokane, Washington, for a week-long appearance at the Interstate Fair. The
Spokane Daily Chronicle
reported that in the fair’s first day alone, the Royal English United Twins drew “thousands of visitors to their cozy tent.” The newspaper went on to declare Daisy and Violet to be among “the most interesting and … most popular of all the … attractions.” A rival paper, the
Spokane Press
, seemed positively smitten with Daisy and Violet. It pronounced them to be “excellent musicians” but seemed even more impressed that the sisters, at the tender age of eight, were already poised and scintillating as raconteurs. “The two children, who have only recently arrived in America from Australia, … are entertaining visitors with their bright … stories of travels in Europe and the Antipodes,” the
Press
observed.

Wherever the Royal English United Twins’ tent was raised, the
public’s response was the same. From the time the midway opened in the morning until after midnight when the carnival extinguished its gas lanterns, droves of people kept streaming into their canvas hall.

At least part of the reason for the twins’ enormous popular appeal could be credited to Jay Henry Edwards, or, as he preferred to be addressed, Professor Jay Henry Edwards. In the parlance of the sideshow, Professor Edwards was a “talker” or “lecturer,” the authority figure who stood on a platform outside the tent and described the wonders inside. Edwards was a veteran sideshow spieler who had a reputation in the outdoor amusement business as the best in his profession. He seemed to have cultivated his manner from both an Oxford classics scholar and a snake oil salesman. Whatever the subject of his lectures, he dropped the names of Homer, Aristotle, and Plato as though he regularly sat down with them at the local Moose Lodge for rounds of poker. He wore derby hats, vests, checkered suits, and he always had a fresh boutonniere in his lapel.

Day and night, Edwards stood on a platform outside the tent of the Royal English United Twins, making outrageous claims. He took pride in his ability to invent. No two of his lectures were ever the same, but they always lured townsfolk off the midway like a candle flame to moths.

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” he would begin, “it is through the kind auspices of His Majesty, King Edward the Seventh of England, that Mr. Clarence A. Wortham’s World’s Greatest Shows is able to present the Royal English United Twins. I promise you, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, that when you step inside our comfortable amphitheater, you are going to see, live, the rarest, most inimitable attraction ever to be presented on a stage anywhere in America. You are going to see two genuine British princesses who have blood coursing through their veins that’s bluer than the waters of the Aegean Sea. The princesses are descended in a direct line from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. They’re the most beautiful children
you’ll ever see, but there is something about them that’s very different from you and me. Because of a slip of Mother Nature’s hand while they were in their royal mother’s womb, their bodies grew together the way tomatoes on the vine sometimes do.”

Professor Edwards then pleaded with the crowd to treat the sisters with the deference that should be accorded all creatures of noble birth.

“The royal twins will sing for you, they’ll dance for you, they’ll play all the instruments of a philharmonic orchestra,” he would declaim. “They’ll talk to you. You can talk to them. You might find them to be a little reserved, though. The carnival life is still new to them. Until Wortham’s World’s Greatest Shows brought them to America, the twins spent most of their time cosseted in their castle, reading Chaucer and Descartes and playing chess with dukes and viscounts and other assorted grandees. Miss this one-time opportunity to see the Royal English United Twins, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and you’ll regret your misjudgment all the rest of your days. The show is just 35 cents for the adults, a nickel and a thin dime for the little ones. Enter our hall and stay as long as you like. You’ll thank me on your way out.”