The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (18 page)

The Hilton sisters’ debut on Broadway was scheduled for March 23, 1925. There couldn’t have been many New Yorkers who weren’t aware of the upcoming event. There was hardly an elevated train kiosk or subway wall anywhere that wasn’t covered with posters advertising “San Antonio’s Siamese Twins, Daisy and Violet Hilton, Born Joined Together.” “Never in the history of the Loew vaudeville circuit has that organization spent as much money in exploiting an act as it is spending on the Siamese Twins,”
The Billboard
observed. “The amount totals several thousands of dollars weekly.”

For weeks before the debut, the dailies were filled with pictures of Daisy and Violet, showing them in rehearsals, bent over crossword
puzzles, or hugging their fur coats and holding down their cloche hats against the blustery winter wind. The
New York Daily Mirror
probably went farthest in promoting their upcoming theater appearance. It ran a coloring contest for children aged thirteen and younger. Each day the paper carried a black-and-white line drawing of the twins in striped pajamas. The sixty children who showed the greatest “originality and neatness” at coloring the picture were to receive Daisy and Violet Hilton dolls made by the Effanbee Doll Company. “These dolls are almost as interesting as the Twins themselves,” the
Daily Mirror
declared. “They’re joined together just like the Siamese Twins; they open and close their eyes; and they’re too cute to describe.”
¹³

While kids were jamming New York’s mailboxes with crayoned artworks, sets of boy twins were making early morning visits to the stage door of the Loew State Theater on Broadway at 45th Street where auditions were being held to select a pair of male twins, sixteen or older, to serve as dance partners for Daisy and Violet. Winning the spot were nineteen-year-old brothers from Woodhaven, Long Island, Charles and Darwin Praitschling.

Marcus Loew was amazed by the sensation the Hilton sisters inspired. Never before had he seen the papers go so bonkers over a vaudeville act. Loew felt he had some atoning to do for labeling Daisy and Violet “monstrosities” four months earlier and telling Turner he was mad to believe that performing Siamese twins could ever be welcomed on Broadway.

Although Daisy and Violet had turned seventeen a month and a half earlier on February 5, Loew decided to throw a birthday party for the sisters on March 23, the same day as their advertised New York debut. He reserved the Astor Hotel’s banquet hall for the grand occasion.

Many of the most important people in New York’s theater and motion picture worlds turned out for the party, as well as more than a
hundred newspaper writers. Each table had a centerpiece of daisies and violets. There were also two massive birthday cakes that were fused together, each with seventeen candles. As flash bulbs popped and newsreel cameras ground away under klieg lights, Daisy and Violet cut slices of cake for the guests and placed them in fancy pink boxes. With the sisters seated on the dais beside him, Marcus Loew welcomed the guests, then turned the microphone over to Myer Myers whom he identified as “the uncle of these beautiful children.” Myer diplomatically referred to Loew and Turner as great visionaries, geniuses of the theater who had been able to foresee the public’s embrace of the San Antonio Siamese Twins when no other showmen would have anything to do with them. Following the luncheon, two hundred partygoers marched to the Loew New York State Theater where the first several rows of the orchestra seats had been reserved for them.

In addition to the San Antonio Siamese Twins, there were nine other attractions on the State Theater’s bill, although these features were really window dressing for the headlining sisters. But at least two of the secondary performers who took the stage that afternoon would, in time, ascend to the uppermost heights of the entertainment world: George Burns and Gracie Allen, then in their fourth year as a vaudeville comedy team.

Daisy and Violet were as enthusiastically received at their New York debut as they had been in Newark. They received a long standing ovation and were brought back onstage for five curtain calls, a number that may have been unprecedented in any New York vaudeville house. Their debut notices were unanimously bright. The appraisal that appeared in
The Billboard
was typical:

What was it about the twins that left the public and the press so smitten? They were uncommonly comely, vivacious, and talented. But there was another explanation why they were able to hold their audiences in thrall: Daisy and Violet were cursed with a gross physical anomaly more horrific than most people could imagine. Yet the sisters had not only come to terms with their condition, they had fully triumphed over it. Who could come to the theater feeling sorry for himself and then, after seeing Daisy and Violet, not feel his burdens taking on a smallness?

Of all the reviewers present for the twins’ New York debut, Sam M’Kee, drama critic for the
Morning Telegraph
, may have come closest to describing the happy/sad feeling the twins engendered in the hearts of their viewers. M’Kee wrote:

Daisy and Violet did not want sympathy from their audiences. They even disdained it. As carefree and ebullient as they always appeared, however, it may have been impossible, as the critic Sam M’Kee observed, for their audiences to ever fully forget the tragedy of the sisters’ situation. Rose Fernandez, an acrobat who sometimes appeared in the same vaudeville lineups with Daisy and Violet, talked about the conflicting emotions that stirred within her whenever she saw them on stage: “You laughed at their girlish patter. You applauded them when they sang or played their saxophones and violins. You rose to your feet when they danced. But all the time that you were witnessing their triumphs on stage, you had tearing eyes and a lump in your throat. They were so radiant and beautiful, so cheery, so lovely as human beings in every way. But yet they had such a heavy cross to bear.”
¹⁵

Sometime during the twins’ opening day at the Loew’s State, an enterprising
New York American
reporter sneaked backstage and got a surprising one-on-two interview. Daisy and Violet provided the writer with the astonishing news that both of them had already received offers of marriage.

“Yes,” said Daisy. “We’re both engaged, but we won’t get married for three years at least.… We’re just seventeen, seventeen today.…” The
American
rushed its scoop into print under the headline “Linked Twins Going to Wed, But Not Now.”

By this time, Daisy and Violet had become practiced in the art of flirting. Because they were almost divinely pretty, stagehands, flower delivery boys, and other men had begun to look at them longingly. But their claim that each was betrothed was clearly an invention. Not
only did Myer and Edith still watch the girls’ every waking move, they continued to insist the pair sleep in the same room with their guardians. It seems doubtful that either sister had yet tasted an amorous kiss let alone engaged in talk about marriage.

Myer and Edith had been aware for some time that Daisy and Violet were having romantic, if not sexual, yearnings. But because of what Edith called “the complications of the situation,” she said that she and her husband felt justified in doing what they could to put a stop to those feelings.

“If one of the girls should fall in love and decide that her misfortune made it impracticable for her to marry …,” Edith said, “then the girl’s life would become embittered and ruined. And if, on the other hand, Daisy should give her hand to some worthy young man, a complication would arise that would be extremely embarrassing to sister Violet.” Edith observed, too, that if both twins should decide to marry, “it might be extremely trying for the husbands” since the men would have to come to daily agreements on when it was time to go to bed with their wives and at whose domicile.
¹⁶

The pace that Daisy and Violet maintained during their New York run was grueling. The first of their four daily shows began at 10:15
A.M.
It was after midnight when the crowd from their last show finally exited the theater. Each day, the house shoe-horned in 15,000 patrons, 3,000 of whom had to stand. Even so, an entire class of people was denied the opportunity to see the twins perform. These were the thousands of other Broadway vaudevillians, musicians, actors, and dancers, working at the same time Daisy and Violet were performing. After receiving “hundreds of requests” from these players, Marcus Loew and the twins agreed to stage a special performance just for them.
¹⁷
The show was scheduled to begin at 11:30
P.M.
, after the other entertainers had closed their own shows.

Among the luminaries turning out for the late, late show were
Vivian and Rosetta Duncan, the popular sisters after whom the Hiltons styled some of their musical routines. The Duncans were appearing in
Topsy and Eva
, a musical of their own creation that was the hottest ticket on Broadway.

Still in their twenties, the girls had the untouched freshness of schoolgirls. Following the Hilton’s special performance for New York entertainers, the Duncans, along with a great throng of other well-wishers, jammed into the twins’ dressing room. Vivian and Rosetta graciously told Daisy and Violet they felt flattered by the twins’ imitation of them. Then and there, a close and enduring friendship developed between the sister acts.

Within a week after their first meeting, the Hiltons were house guests at the Duncans’ home in White Plains, New York. Each day Vivian and Rosetta faced Daisy and Violet in croquet, and each day the twins were victorious. When it was time to leave, Daisy and Violet embraced their hostesses and explained that it was because they adored the Duncans so much that they paid homage to Vivian and Rosetta in their act. “Well,” said Rosetta, “let’s enter into an agreement right now for the next time you visit. You give us croquet lessons, and Vivian and I will give you vocal lessons.”
¹⁸

Their names were in lights over Broadway; adulation poured from the theater crowds; friendship came easily with the rich, the powerful, and the famous. Daisy and Violet had never dreamed it was possible to be so happy.

D
aisy and Violet came into public prominence midway through a decade of national whoopee, a ten-year-long New Year’s Eve party when revelers unsnapped and unzipped the last of their inhibitions. They were embraced by a generation that took sport in goldfish swallowing, pogo sticks, flagpole sitting, and petting parties, and hero worshipped such limited talents as Rudolph Valentino and Rudy Vallee. With their bodies pushed together like empty bookends so that when they moved they appeared simultaneously to be coming and going, they were the perfect poster children for a nation that, in the aftermath of the Great War, seemed unsure of where it was heading.

Almost from the moment Daisy and Violet first appeared on Broadway, everyone, it seemed, wanted to know them. Edith Myers assumed the role of their social secretary. She spent hours a day sifting through the invitations that poured in. For every request she accepted, she rejected twenty others.

Jackie Coogan, Robert Montgomery, and Constance Tallmadge were among the many actors who arranged to have publicity photographs taken with the sisters, believing that an appearance of friendship with Daisy and Violet would broaden their popularity.

Many evenings, after finishing their last show, Daisy and Violet, always chaperoned, made the rounds of the penthouse parties that
were thrown for stage luminaries and the most fashionable Man-hattanites. Even the most established hostess felt divinely favored when Daisy and Violet crossed over her threshold. It was a guarantee her soirée would receive notice in the gossip columns.