The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (13 page)

From Spokane, the World’s Greatest Shows traveled on to cities in Oregon, Idaho, and California. According to a report in
The Billboard
, Daisy and Violet “were making a hit all along the way,” and were drawing in more money to the carnival than any attraction but the Rice & Wortham Water Circus.
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Money was gushing into the show daily, thanks to Daisy and Violet, so that in the course of just a month or two, Myer Myers was transformed into a parvenu. The sisters did not benefit in any direct way from their growing wealth, however, nor did their lives change much. The rules had been laid down earlier by Myer and Mary: They were not to associate with other children, especially those from outside the carnival. Actually, they were forbidden by Myer and Mary
from being seen by the public anywhere outside their tent. The twins weren’t allowed to do anything or go anywhere that might risk tarnishing their aura as the rarest of sideshow attractions and possibly discourage some townies from paying to see them.

From the time he was a child, Jim Moore was fascinated by the carnival and circus gypsies who set up their here-today gone-tomorrow canvas pavilions and rainbow-colored thrill rides in the weedy fields of San Antonio, Texas, where he grew up. He dreamed about wandering with these carnival folk who would appear in town one day, seemingly out of nowhere, and be gone the next. Because they were almost the same age, Moore was especially spellbound by Daisy and Violet. He hung around their tent day and night whenever the carnival brought them to town and he developed a close and, ultimately, an intimate relationship with them.

Moore recalled the pains that were taken by the twins’ warders to prevent any townspeople from getting a free glimpse of them after the carnival closed for the night. “The Myers kept them isolated,” he said. “They had a limousine pick them up right in the back of the tent that they were being shown in, and they were driven straight back … to where they were staying, and were never seen.”
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Moore said that as a child, he always wondered when, if ever, Daisy and Violet had a chance to rest. He remembered another rule by which the sisters had to abide: If they were not on stage performing, they were either being drilled by Edith in dancing or singing two-part harmonies, or they were cracking school books and memorizing the names of U. S. presidents or the capital cities of the world. “When you went in (their tent), their books were right there,” Moore said. “They were studying. The girls were quite well educated and they were talented. They had charming singing voices.”
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It may have been Mary, more than Myer, who was insistent that the girls receive rigorous tutoring in reading, writing, geography,
and history. Freaks were common enough, she told them daily. She expected them to be something more. She said she expected them to be more intelligent, more talented and more socially skilled than any classroom full of
wunderkinder
. “I want you to be the smartest Siamese twins in the world,” she commanded.
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By November 13, 1916, the World’s Greatest Shows traveled to Phoenix for a six-day booking at the Arizona State Fair. In the three months that the family had been traveling with the carnival, Myer had seen dozens of towns and cities in six or eight different states. There was something about Phoenix, however, that seemed to have placed him under a spell. The town had sprung up in the desert as a supply point for cowboys and miners. Its population wasn’t quite 15,000. Everywhere on Phoenix’s streets there were cowhands in sweat-stained Stetsons and scuffed boots. The look of the town, along with the searing heat, probably reminded Myers of the frontier towns that had pushed up in Australia’s bush country as watering holes for the sheep and cattle men.

Following its appearance at the Arizona State Fair, the Wortham carnival was scheduled to play a few more engagements before ending its 1916 season and rolling back to El Paso, Texas, its winter quarters. This time when the show train left for its next stand the Royal English Twins were not aboard. Myer, Edith, and Mary had decided to establish a home in Phoenix. The family took up residence near the downtown district in a house at 1220 East Jefferson Street.
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The Myers and Mary weren’t quitting the life of carnival gypsies permanently. With the fast and easy riches they had started to enjoy in America with the grown-together twins, that would have been foolish. But Edith was pregnant with her first child. It was time for the family to suspend its peregrinations and settle in one place until the new baby arrived.

T
he delivery took place in the family’s rented house in Phoenix. Mary, of course, coached Edith through her labor. Of the hundreds of births at which she presided in her many decades as a midwife, this one was the most profoundly affecting. As she later recounted, “All them other babies were just practice. Today I got to assist in my own multiplication.” She was made all the happier when Edith and Myer christened the infant Therese Mary, a name that would always remind the child of her maternal grandmother.

“That little baby, as near as I could tell, became the entire focus of Myer’s dreams,” Jim Moore observed. “Therese Mary was still sucking on her mother’s teats, and Myer was saying he was going to buy her a pony and he was going to build her a playhouse and fill it with dolls. Of course he was counting on Daisy and Violet to provide all the things he wanted for his daughter. They were the geese that laid golden eggs for the family.”
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As emotionally detached from Daisy and Violet as Myer and Mary always had been, they became even more distant after the arrival of Therese Mary. In fact, they never viewed the twins as actual family members. To them, Daisy and Violet were a business, a cottage industry on which they depended for their livelihood.

But even Jim Moore conceded that, through their own greed, Mary Hilton and Myer Myers probably provided Daisy and Violet with the
best option available to them at the time. After all, the usual alternative for “freaks of nature” was life in an institution. Because the sisters were always on the move to new places, their childhood was filled with adventure. And because they were forced to interact with thousands of strangers, they developed poise and social skills beyond their years. And more importantly, they also received the kind of schooling that was denied to all but the most privileged children.

Studio portrait of Violet and Daisy at about ten years old. (Author’s collection)

“In effect, Daisy and Violet had a private tutor,” Moore observed. “Even after Edith gave birth to her own daughter, she continued to school the twins in reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. And
every day, before the twins’ tent was opened to the crowds, she rehearsed them in new song and dance routines. Myer and Mary could be hateful in their treatment of the girls, but somehow Edith remained quite devoted to them.”
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Even as late as the first half of the twentieth century, a large segment of the public viewed conjoined twins, microcephalics, and other teratogenic creatures as the offspring of irredeemably evil parents on whom God had visited his wrath. It was common practice for such unfortunate infants to be placed in church- or state-operated institutions because of their parents’ shame at having produced them. Some were drowned like unwanted kittens by parents who felt too disgraced, too fearful, or too challenged to raise them. Few such cases of infanticide were detected by authorities since many of the births took place in homes rather than in hospitals.

Royal though they were in the carnival world, the Misses Hilton were not without rivals. Often appearing on the same midway was Percilla Bejano, known as the “Monkey Girl” because, from the time she was a small child, her face and body were covered with a thick growth of dark hair. As if her extreme hirsutism alone wasn’t a distinction that would set her apart, young Percilla had another characteristic that made her a wonder to orthodontists, if not the wider public: She had double rows of teeth in both her upper and lower jaws.

Percilla took the position that if it hadn’t been for Mary Hilton, Daisy and Violet might have been stuffed into a weighted gunny sack and dropped into the English channel or deposited at the padlocked door of an orphanage for insane, diseased, and severely crippled children.

“It was easy for do-gooders to condemn the carnivals for presenting human oddities like the Hilton twins and me,” she said, “but you have to remember that a lot of the sideshow people had been cast out by their own families.”
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Born in Puerto Rico in 1912, Percilla herself was
given up by her parents at age three to Carl Laufer, an American sideshow impresario. Laufer and his wife could not have treated her more lovingly if she had been born to them, she said.

Jeanie Tomaini shared the Monkey Girl’s view that the sideshows were just about the only haven where a freak might discover a measure of independence, happiness, camaraderie, and, sometimes, even romantic love. Jeanie was born in Blufton, Indiana, in 1916. A lovely child by any standards, she was christened Bernice Evelyn Smith, but before her first birthday, thanks to the striking cloud of curly, light brown hair, her mother started calling her Jeanie after one of Stephen Foster’s loveliest songs.

By this time, however, the Smiths’ neighbors had given her the much crueler moniker of “Half-Girl.” Jeanie’s body ended at her hips. She had been born without lower extremities. Her mother and father, not surprisingly, were at first horrified at having brought such a creature into the world. But because of the curiosity her baby aroused in the farming community of Blufton, Bernice’s mother soon came to the realization that her child could help keep food on the table. This was a responsibility about which her husband, a drinker, had always been indifferent. Mr. Smith launched Bernice’s show business career when Jeanie was just three, exhibiting her at local pumpkin fairs. Soon after, Jeanie Smith was touring with a major carnival, Dodson Brothers World’s Fair, where she was billed as the World’s Only Living Half-Girl. Jeanie never appeared on the same midways with Daisy and Violet, but she knew them well. She saw parallels between her life as a carnival stray and those of the twins.

“Would Daisy and Vi have been better off if, instead of appearing on the sideshow stages as youngsters, they had grown up behind the locked steel doors of some institution?” she asked. “That’s not a life I would have wanted for myself. Even as young girls, the Hiltons were exceptionally well-educated, worldly and poised.

They did everything—sang, danced, played the piano, violin and reeds—and they were gorgeous to look at. I never saw them put on a performance when they didn’t leave their audience absolutely spellbound. I would say they were world-class entertainers, and they gained all their polish and charm because they traveled in the sideshows. They couldn’t have gotten any more polish if they had been educated in the most exclusive boarding schools.”
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As great a sensation as Daisy and Violet had been during their first round on the American carnival circuit, that experience turned out to be but a dress rehearsal for the frenzy they were to set off the following season. News of the grown-together sisters had already started spreading far and wide, broadcast mostly by people who knew a man who knew a man who had already seen the pair.

For the 1917 tour, Clarence Wortham had switched the Royal English United Twins from the midway of his World’s Greatest Shows to that of the most lollapaloosan of his half-dozen carnivals, his flagship C. A. Wortham Shows.
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The carnival’s first appearance of the season was in San Antonio, Texas, where, for ten days and ten nights, its rides and tented attractions were set up on the downtown plaza for the War of the Flowers Fiesta, a festival held in the city each April to commemorate the state’s independence from Mexico.

In all, twenty-six separate tent shows were featured in the carnival, and Wortham had reserved the choicest place on the midway for the Royal English United Twins. Their theater was situated directly across from San Antonio’s most hallowed site, the Alamo. Eighty years earlier, Davy Crockett and a hundred freedom fighters had holed up for twelve days, trying to fend off the attacks of a Mexican army of thousands, before each of them was slaughtered.
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The crowds flocked to the twins: families of ten or twelve with just enough coins knotted in a handkerchief to buy tickets for everyone; dandies with pretty women on their arms, who arrived in new
Oldsmobiles and Essexes; men who worked in oil fields, and women who worked in shirt factories; and, of course, the men who owned the oil fields and shirt factories.

Myer Myers hadn’t merely been cooing promises to his newborn daughter over the winter months. Ever an expansionist, he had drawn together the components for a second attraction to present on the midway, a show called Myer Myers’ Congress of Human Wonders. The production advertised such attractions as the Half-Man, Half-Horse; Walter Cole, the Skeleton Dude; an eight-piece Darkies Band, and a feature he imported from his native Australia, the 772 Pound Queen Lil and Her Tribe of Whistling Aborigines.
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