The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (15 page)

It was natural enough for Percilla to invoke the name of famous dancers when explaining the excitement she and the Hilton sisters brought to the midway. Dancing, or something resembling it, was the performing art she valued above all others. In her adult years, when she and her husband, Emmitt, the Alligator Boy, Bejano were
traveling as the World’s Strangest Married Couple, she entertained sideshow crowds with approximations of Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils. “Percilla learned to dance early,” said Ward Hall, her one-time manager. “As a youngster, she used to sneak into the tents of the girlie shows. She marveled at the affect the dancers had on men.”
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Percilla said that on Sunday mornings, before the Jones midway opened, there were times when Myer allowed Daisy and Violet to invite her over to play. “Mostly we entertained ourselves by having tea parties,” Percilla recalled.
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Surely Alice’s teas with the Mad Hatter, March Hare, and the Dormouse could not have been any more curious than the picnics outside the Myers’ Pullman car. Not only did the attendees around the table include Siamese twins and a bearded six-year-old girl, but also Percilla’s pet monkey, Joanna.

Bejano said she thought it was unfair to judge Myer Myers harshly because he never let the twins out of his or Mary’s or Edith’s sight. “Carl Lauther, my manager, also kept constant watch over me and had the same rule. I’m sure the twins’ manager was only trying to protect them. Probably he was worried that someone might try to kidnap them. There were a lot of crazy people on the outside, do-gooders who felt they had a religious mission to rescue the children of the sideshow.”
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The summer of 1918 turned out to be one of the most challenging seasons of all for the outdoor entertainment industry. By then, the United States had joined with Great Britain and France in a war against Germany. Such great numbers of roustabouts were raided from carnivals and circuses by the military that the shows had trouble putting up and taking down their shows. And the demand for coal, steel, and other resources used in the manufacture of armaments meant the railroads became so overtaxed that they often denied passage to the carnivals.

By August, when the Johnny J. Jones Exposition was touring the South, the show was battling a new adversary. An epidemic of influenza was spreading across America, and thousands were perishing from the scourge each week. In a massive effort to slow the wild-fire spread of the disease, health officials everywhere ordered the closing of public gathering places, including beaches, movie theaters, and state and county fairs.

By midsummer, according to
The Billboard
, 90 percent of the traveling shows had already limped back to their winter quarters and “the carnival business … is almost at a standstill.” Although the cancellations of contracted dates caused the Exposition to bleed money in torrents, Jones tried to keep his show rolling. He finally had enough when one of the carnival’s most profitable stands, the Georgia State Fair in Augusta, was expunged from the 1918 season. He directed the crew of his thirty-seven-car train to pilot the caravan to the show’s home base in Birmingham, Alabama, and kept the whole agglomeration in mothballs until the pestilence had come to an end and “the Kaiser has abdicated and leaves for parts unknown.”
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With a war raging and a deadly plague spreading, not just in the United States but in Europe as well, Myer Myers felt sure it would be a long time, if ever, before the carnivals rolled again. With a wife and child who were dependent on him for survival, along with a mother-in-law and Siamese twins, what was he going to do now?

It was not a question he had to ponder for long. By October, the Allied Forces began to win all of the major battles overseas, and on November 18, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II gave up his throne and fled to The Netherlands. The influenza epidemic eventually claimed more than six million lives, but in the United States, at least, it had run its course by late in the year.

Soon after the start of the new year, Johnny J. Jones stepped out of a chauffeur-driven sedan at his carnival’s winter quarters in
Birmingham and issued a directive to his staff. They were to round up as many laborers as possible and start spit-shining the train and all the rides. The Exposition was going back out on the road in 1919.

The rigors of gypsy life—cold rains, muddy lots, searing heat, and dust storms—had finally taken their toll on Mary Hilton. She was now stooped over and could walk only by leaning on two canes. Mary had long ago ceded the decisions concerning the twins’ exhibition to Edith and her son-in-law.

But Mary was a carny through and through. Such souls seem to have a kinship with migratory birds. When spring comes, they are stirred by some unappeasable instinct that impels them, sometimes even against their wills, to leave one place and, with others of their species, travel to another. Mary was aboard the shiny green train of the Johnny J. Jones Exposition when it pulled out of Birmingham.

Mary Hilton died in Atlanta Hospital at 3
A.M.
on April 20, 1919. The cause of her death, according to the death certificate, was an acute infection of the kidneys, along with “complications of age.”
The Billboard
put her years at “about eighty,” an estimate that likely was based on her appearance. In fact, she was sixty-seven.

Daisy and Violet, in their memoir, said Mary’s death marked “a turning point” for them. They were orphans now. They had convinced themselves that if they could somehow get away from Myer, they could find help and finally gain some measure of independence. “We had become strangely wise and filled with unvoiced thoughts,” Violet said.
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It had angered Myer that Daisy and Violet hadn’t shown the slightest signs of sadness over their foster mother’s death. “Your hearts are made of flint,” he berated. “How could you be so unfeeling? Auntie had never shown you anything but tenderness and love. Had it not been for her, you’d be rotting today in an asylum.”

The wake for Mary Hilton was held at the Harry G. Poole Funeral
Chapel in Atlanta. Daisy and Violet provided a detailed, if melodramatic, account of the vigil. While Edith and Myer were at the rear of the viewing room, visiting with callers who stopped by to offer condolences, the twins walked up to the coffin. For the first time, they observed, they were able to move within Auntie’s presence and not feel threatened.

“As we looked at her, our first corpse, and, you might say, our first friend, the cunning and shrewdness seemed out of her face,” Daisy recalled. “I did … not care that she was dead.”
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Daisy looked to her sister and saw changes coming over her. Violet’s eyes were welling with tears and she was trembling.

“Why cry?” Daisy whispered. “We have hated her forever.”

“I’m afraid without her. Now Sir will boss us.”

“Let’s run,” Daisy said.

Violet was surprised by the challenge but felt emboldened by it. “We’ll never have this chance again.”

“Let’s run!” Daisy repeated.
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The sisters turned from the coffin, and, with their heads bowed, began slowly walking toward the door. Daisy had moved only a few feet when she felt her sister lagging, as though Violet were carrying some great weight. She turned and saw Myer. He had dug his fat fingers into Violet’s shoulder. His face was crimson.

“Don’t touch me,” Violet hissed, squirming and straining to break free.

Myer dragged and pushed the twins to a seating area. Not wanting to create an even greater scene in the chapel, he said nothing. Finally he shoved the sisters onto a single chair beside Edith and, still glaring, signaled to them to remain seated. The sisters feared for the punishment they were sure was coming. However, after the family left the funeral chapel and returned to their hotel room, Myer stewed in silence as if he were waiting for the twins to offer some explanation.
Violet was sobbing, still dreading the caning that she was certain was coming. Daisy was fearful of a whipping, too, but she wore an expression of smugness at having summoned the courage to take a stand against him. The wordless standoff between the twins and Myer was finally broken by Edith. She turned to her husband.

Violet and Daisy at about eleven years old. Although it has the look of a candid snapshot, this photograph was probably an orchestrated publicity stunt, as the sisters did not have access to their own money. (Author’s collection)

“Tell them.” she said.

Myer dug into an attaché case and brought out a sheaf of typewritten pages that he waved before the twins’ faces. Next, he turned to the final sheet of the document. The page bore the inked signature of Mary Hilton. After a tense pause, Myer finally spoke.

“You girls belong to us now,” he shouted, in a voice edged with triumph. “You’ll do just as we say. See here? Auntie left you to us. You and her jewelry and her furniture are now ours. Do you understand?”
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It is doubtful that any court in the land would have upheld a last will and testament that “willed” two minor children to another party or parties. But at eleven years old, Daisy and Violet could hardly be expected to know that Mary’s will was without legal merit.

The twins’ version of their failed escape attempt may be accurate in its broad details, but there are known errors of fact in their published account. To begin with, Daisy and Violet wrote that Mary died not in Atlanta, but in Birmingham, a matter contradicted by the death certificate. They also related that before going to their foster mother’s wake, they stuffed their shoes with cash that had been given to them seven years earlier by a theater stagehand in St. Louis, Missouri. At the time of Mary’s demise, the sisters had been in the United States only three years and had yet to perform in any American theater, whether in St. Louis or elsewhere. Different explanations might be offered as to why, in the recounting of Mary’s wake and in numerous other recollections in the twins’ autobiography, there are so many inconsistencies and what seem to be outright fabrications. Maybe Daisy and Violet had notoriously bad memories for details, especially those surrounding incidents early in their lives. It seems possible, too, that their idea of reality was shaped by the sideshow hawkers who took the position that truth existed only to be varnished, expanded, contracted, and reshuffled.

Whatever the factual errors in the twins’ retelling of their escape attempt, this much is clear: The act was not without consequences for them. Because he feared they might again try to plot an escape, Myer took even greater precautions to keep them from ever leaving his sight. He insisted the twins start sleeping in the same room with Edith and him.
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He also continued repeating, in slightly modified form, the invocation that Auntie had recited almost every day: “Your
own mother rejected you because you were so hideous and terrifying. You should kneel in prayer every night, thanking God that Edith and I care enough to save you from being thrown into an asylum for monster children.” Myer, of course, never hinted during his deprecations of Daisy and Violet that he felt in any way beholden to them for the riches and fame he was enjoying in the carnival world.

Looking at things from a certain angle, it could be reasoned that Myer was deserving of every dime and quarter that was slapped down at the box offices for the Royal English United Twins. He had the vision to foresee opportunities in America that had never presented themselves in Europe or Australia. He fine-tuned every detail of their stage appearances and presented them in the classiest playhouse to be found on any carnival midway. And through his deft use of the media, especially radio, he installed the modern Siamese twins into the imaginations of people across America. Maybe it could be argued that Myer Myers, even more than the girls themselves, was responsible for turning them into the most sensational carnival attraction of the twentieth century. And did it even matter that Daisy and Violet saw none of the money they were minting twelve and fourteen hours a day? What use was money to them? They had no lives outside the sideshow. When they weren’t on the stage, singing, dancing, and tootling their clarinets and saxophones, they were kept in isolation, sequestered in a small Pullman compartment with no contact with anyone but Sir, Edith, and Therese Mary.

More so than with the carnival’s other members, a camaraderie existed among the freaks.

“We all considered ourselves members of the same family,” explained Jeanie Tomaini, the Half-Girl. “Of course, that family consisted of such different types as fat ladies, human skeletons, dwarfs, giants, bearded ladies, sealboys, pinheads, and someone like me with only half a body. I’m not saying that things were always rosy among
us. I’ve seen fat ladies get into eye-scratching, hair-pulling fights over which one really weighed the most. I’ve also witnessed some nasty scraps between midget ladies who both had designs on the same man. All in all, though, all of us in the sideshow looked out for one another. When someone in our group got married or had a baby, we shared in their happiness. And when one of our number was down because of a death in the family, or maybe a breakup of a marriage, the rest of us extended helping hands. We depended on one another to survive. We couldn’t expect help from the people outside our tents. The people from the so-called normal world considered us untouchables.”
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