The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (14 page)

Myer was poorly educated, crude, and rude, but there could be no denying that he was a showman of audacity and farsightedness. Most sideshow managers were content to present their attractions inside dimly lit, mildewing tents with rickety stages and tattered curtains. Myer took the position that the manner in which an act was packaged was at least as important as the offering itself, especially since every carnival midway had dozens of features that were all noisily competing with each other.

Over the winter of 1916–17 he assembled a crew of carpenters, electricians, and scene painters to create a theater of his own design for the United Twins. The resulting playhouse, which was erected for the first time at the San Antonio fair, set a new standard on the midway. Its massive facade had taken the form of a medieval British castle, complete with towering turrets on either end. It appeared to have been constructed of rusticated stones, an illusion created by its trompe l’oeil paint job. There were squint holes everywhere in the walls, and near the castle’s center there was a lancelet archway. The ticket buyers passing through the portal were received by ushers in Beefeater uniforms and escorted into a near cathedral-sized tent with cushioned seats and silk-shaded lamps overhead.

Rubin Gruberg, a critic of the fantastical architecture that rose in such places as Coney Island, provided this summary of the feeling that came over him upon entering the playhouse: “All is as spick and span as in any theater. In fact, so perfect has the illusion of a permanent and elegant opera house been created that at night the impression is that one is comfortably sitting in the orchestra seat of a metropolitan theater deluxe.”
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As always, Professor Jay Henry Edwards held forth outside the Hilton girls’ canvas hall. He stood on his elevated platform, a megaphone to his mouth, and, over and over, threw out his spiel like a lariat, roping strollers from the promenade. “Ladies and misters, girls and boys,” he intoned solemnly. “Miss out on this one-time opportunity to see the world famous Royal English United Twins and, mark my word, you’ll regret it until the day you begin your eternal sleep.”

It was at the War of the Flowers Fiesta of 1917 that Jim Moore entered Daisy and Violet’s tent for the first time. He was twelve years old, long-bodied, and skinny. For Moore, if not for Daisy and Violet, it was love at first sight. It was the beginning of an abiding relationship between the three that, many years later, would take a surprising turn.

“The twins were in beautiful, ruffled white dresses the first time I saw them,” Moore recalled. “The girls seemed to be glowing, as if there were auras around them. They were bathed by light in a tent that was otherwise dark. I started shivering. The scene was a little like that in the movie
Song of Bernadette
where Bernadette comes upon a grotto in the French countryside and gets a vision of the Virgin Mary. Daisy and Violet didn’t seem to be earthly creatures. Rather they appeared to have been sent here from someplace beyond. I knew my life was not going to be the same again.”
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Moore had a natural empathy with the twins. Like them, he felt out of place in almost all social situations. He was a foot taller than
most boys his age and, with his long brown hair slicked back and parted in the center, he seemed to be trying hard to affect the appearance of a matinee idol. He was indifferent to river fishing, sandlot baseball, mumblety-peg, and the other activities with which other boys were preoccupied. Most summer days he hung out at a dance studio in downtown San Antonio. His father thought dancing was for sissies, and Jim never had money for private instruction. He absorbed what he could by watching. At home and alone in his room, he practiced with broom partners.

Moore was to be found in the twins’ theater every day it was set up on the San Antonio plaza, not leaving until around midnight when the midway closed. Edith usually emceed the twins’ performances. Moore endeared himself to her by running errands and holding four-month-old Therese Mary while Edith was on stage.

“It was almost impossible to have contact with the girls,” Moore remembered. “They were under strict orders from Myer Myers not to talk to anyone unless he, Edith, or Mary was at their side. Sometimes, though, Edith would have to leave the tent for a short time, and then I could at least tell the girls how much I enjoyed their performances. I also showed them that I was mastering all the dance numbers they were doing on their stage. I really wanted them to like me.”
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Moore had been on hand every minute of the time the C. A. Wortham Shows was on the San Antonio plaza. Now, ten days later, he was watching it dissolve. Working by torch light, roustabouts were striking the great tents, dismantling the rides, and reloading the carnival’s cargo on the flat-beds of the twenty-seven-car train.

Moore stood in the darkness outside Daisy and Violet’s Pullman car. He was aching. How he wished he could run off with the carnival.

The curtains inside the Pullman had been drawn for hours. It was four or five o’clock in the morning and presumably everyone inside was
fast asleep. After a long doleful wail from the steam locomotive, the front of the train began to move. There was a sequential clanking of the couplers as the train started rolling. Moore looked up one last time at the windows of the twins’ car. Daisy and Violet had drawn back the curtains. They were gazing at him through the window. They looked like ghosts, unearthly, just as they did the first time he saw them in their tent. In the seconds just before their car disappeared in the darkness, the sisters did something that made Jim Moore’s heart leap. They smiled and, simultaneously, blew him kisses.
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The Royal English United Twins were, by far, the most popular attraction on the C. A. Wortham Shows’ midway. They were, in fact, the most popular attraction on any carnival midway anywhere. There wasn’t a sideshow man in the country who wouldn’t have entered into a pact with the devil to take possession of so powerful a draw. Often the crowds who flocked to the carnival headed straight for Daisy and Violet’s playhouse, and after seeing the pair, left the lot without leaving a dime anyplace else. Not since P. T. Barnum was trotting out such attractions as Tom Thumb and Chang and Eng, probably the first conjoined twins to be publicly exhibited, had any human wonders caused as great a public stir as the Royal English United Twins.

As inimitable as Daisy and Violet were as carnival attractions, the sensation they created could be traced in large part to Myer Myers’ adroit management. He had already revealed himself to be an impresario of daring when he erected the biggest and most opulent theater ever to be seen in any traveling carnival. He also showed himself to be a genius at promotion.

Of all the sideshow operators traveling with the C. A. Wortham Shows, Myer alone was given approval to load his touring car on the train. This allowed him great personal mobility whenever the carnival rolled into a new town.

Joe McKennon, the carnival expert, described Myer like this: “One of his publicity maneuvers was to take Daisy and Violet to see the mayor of a city, or, if the carnival happened to be in a state capitol, the governor. Because reporters and photographers always buzzed like flies around these officials, the twins’ visits frequently resulted in front-page stories and pictures.”
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And maybe more than any other carnival man of the time, McKennon observed, Myer recognized the value of radio, a medium that was just becoming established in 1917. “He would pinpoint all the radio stations that were within fifty or seventy-five miles of where the carnival was playing. He would then squire the twins to all of those stations. During their radio appearances, the girls would talk, sing, and play their violins and saxophones. It was brilliant marketing. Often with horse and buggies, farm families traveled great distances to see the twins. Those radio appearances accounted for much of the traffic that streamed into their tent.”
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Daisy and Violet were completely at ease in their radio interviews and invariably charmed their hosts. They were probably no more preoccupied with their mortality than other nine-year-olds, but over and over their interviewers asked how they would feel if one of them should become gravely ill and die. Violet once answered the question this way: “We were lucky enough to come into the world together, and when the time comes, we’ll feel blessed to go out the same way.”

Through the publicity Myer kept engineering for them over the air-waves and in newspapers, Daisy and Violet became widely known in households across America. But there remained only one place where the public could see them, their performing hall on the midway. Myer absolutely guarded against appearances by the twins in such public places as department stores, restaurants, and movie theaters, or for that matter, even inside the tents of the other midway attractions. Like almost all of the edicts he issued for the twins, his logic was
motivated by greed. “Why would anyone buy a ticket to see you if they can see you for free at a hotdog stand?” he would ask.

Myer quickly ascended to the position of prince of the midway. He relished everything about his elevated stature. He savored the looks of envy that appeared on the faces of other show operators when they walked by the United Twins’ theater and saw the swarms of customers waiting for a chance to go inside. In their face-to-face encounters, these presenters of five-legged cows and alligator wrestlers regarded him with deference, but Myer knew they were green with jealousy. Scouts from Barnum & Bailey’s Greatest Show On Earth, as well as other circuses and carnivals, regularly called on Myer, trying to persuade him to show his United Twins with their operations.
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After listening to their offers, he promptly sent the emissaries on their way.

The dimes, quarters, and dollar bills that were pushed through the ticket windows for the United Twins’ accumulated to such a staggering sum by the end of the 1917 season that Myer felt like Croesus. He wondered how he was possibly going to be able to spend so much money. He certainly tried.

After having established a residence in Phoenix the previous year, Myer moved with his blended family to San Antonio, the winter quarters for several large railroad carnivals, among them two or three owned by Clarence Wortham and the Dodson Brothers World’s Fair. Myer made such a display of profligacy that San Antonio’s other citizens of wealth, most of them cattle barons and oilmen, started to wonder if the short, fat newcomer was one of the principal beneficiaries of Andrew Carnegie’s will. Myer’s first major purchase was a small ranch on the city’s outskirts into which he moved the family. Next he acquired three or four houses in San Antonio as investment properties. He also bought a vacation home on Medina Lake, forty miles from the city. In Poteet, he bought an interest in what was
described as “one of the finest horticultural farms in Southwest Texas.”
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Still he had money left. He invested tens of thousands of dollars in bank and railroad securities. He assembled a domestic staff of maids, handymen, and a chauffeur.

Daisy and Violet were held in near solitary confinement even during the months when the carnival was off the road and the family was at its San Antonio ranch. Camille Sweeney, daughter of Emmett Sweeney, a prominent local attorney and businessman, may have been the only youngster from San Antonio ever allowed at the ranch, and, as it turned out, she had special entrée. She was goddaughter to Daisy and Violet.

Camille Sweeney, who years later would marry Frank Rosengren, a screenwriter and playwright, had this girlhood recollection: “No neighborhood children were allowed to visit Daisy and Vi, nor were they allowed to leave their home to play with other kids. They never had a chance to interact with any peers. They were prisoners. There were times when I joined my mother and Aunt Dorothy in visiting the Myers’ home. These occasions may have been the only ones when Daisy and Violet had a chance to socialize with anyone from outside the gates of their home.”
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Camille Rosengren said she was never clear about how it was that her father and mother came to know the Myers but speculated that the introduction was probably made through Dorothy Lodovico, an aunt who was a dancer in vaudeville and later a chorine in the Busby Berkeley movies. “Except for the people who entered their tent, Daisy and Vi had no chance to relate with anybody from the outside world,” Rosengren said. “As a result, they formed a strong attachment to Aunt Dorothy and my mother. They were such sweet girls. When my mother became pregnant with me, the girls became very solicitous of her. They asked if they could be godmothers to me. Of course, Mother said yes.”
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After presenting the Royal English United Twins for two seasons with Clarence Wortham’s empire, in 1918 Myer decided to switch to the midway of another mammoth carnival, the Johnny J. Jones Exposition of Amusements. Not only did he bring along his Congress of Human Wonders but a brand new third unit, Myer Myers’ Fat Folks’ Chatauqua. It struck some carnival employees as odd that Myer would assemble a show that was wholly made up of grossly obese men, women, and children when his own circumferential measurement seem to exceed that of his verticality.

The switch to Johnny J. Jones’ carnival probably did not signify a rift with Wortham but rather a sound business decision by Myer. Wortham’s carnivals mostly traveled the western part of the United States. Jones’ colossus—advertised as an exemplar of “Meritorious Attractions, Cleanliness and Square Dealing”—criss-crossed the Atlantic side of the country, along with Canada’s eastern provinces. With the move to the Jones enterprise, Myers could gather new audiences for his attractions.

Percilla, the Monkey Girl, Bejano, six years old at the time, was one of the attractions on the Jones midway. “The Johnny J. Jones show was one of the biggest carnivals of that time or any time,” she said. “Forty railcars, I think. Maybe this is going to sound like bragging, but no carnival or circus ever had two attractions on its midway that were bigger than me and the Hilton Siamese twins. It was like having Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly or Margot Fonteyn and Cyd Charisse on the same stage. I mean, how do you get bigger and better than that?”
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