Read The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins Online
Authors: Dean Jensen
From all accounts, Mary was a poorly educated, simple woman. After becoming foster mother to the twins, she revealed a surprising gift for showmanship. Indeed, her natural instincts for show business seem to have revealed themselves the instant the twins emerged from the womb. While their terrified mother saw the babes as a curse from God, Mary seems to have immediately sized them up as cash cows. And certainly she recognized that there was no better place than Brighton for exploiting them.
From Easter to late October, Brighton was a kind of Babylon, a place of raffish gaiety overrun with tourists. Trains rolled into the seaside resort from London at the rate of one every ten minutes. Many tourists headed directly for the Palace of Pleasures on Palace Pier where they could take in a flea circus or feed coins into the hand-cranked peep shows that featured such offerings as “What the Butler Saw” and “A Night of Love.” Others fanned out for the new motion picture houses, the racetrack, the theaters, the football stadium, and the Aquarium. Brighton also drew hordes of health-seekers who believed they could detoxify their bodies and regain the vigor of their youth by dipping into the salty waters lapping at the town’s chalky cliffs. The beaches were always full. Young, pale females—shop girls, office clerks, and domestic workers—occupied most of the deck chairs that could be rented for a tuppence. They placed themselves on display for the young men who roved in pairs and threes and fours, shopping for love.
There was nothing original about Mary’s idea of showcasing the Brighton United Twins in a saloon. Tattooed ladies, dog-faced boys, midgets, living skeletons, and other human oddities had been putting themselves on display at least since the mid-eighteenth century in England’s public houses. These itinerants had found Brighton to be an especially fertile ground for enthusiastic and free-spending audiences. Indeed, it is likely that Chang and Eng Bunker, the eponymous
Siamese twins, made appearances in Brighton’s taverns years earlier. The Thai-born Bunkers, who for a time were represented by P. T. Barnum, made two tours of the British Isles, one of them extending fifteen months in 1829 and 1830, and the other lasting six months in 1869.
Business so boomed at the Queen’s Arms after Mary placed the twins on exhibit that by March of 1909, a month after Daisy and Violet’s first birthday, the family relocated into an even larger tippling house, the Evening Star at 56 Surrey Street.
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Daisy’s lower right leg was twisted slightly outward at birth, the apparent result of crowding inside the womb. Several times a day, over a period that would turn into years, Mary and Edith Emily took turns kneading the leg.
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As gentle as they tried to be when manipulating the limb, the sessions always brought on great wailing from Daisy, and, thus, they were carried out when the pub was closed. After several years, Mary and Edith Emily were gradually able to reshape the limb to a correct alignment with the thighbone.
The fleshy, cartilaginous bond that kept the twins pinned back-to-back in their first months of infancy began to stretch as they became more active. By the time the sisters were eighteen months old, the short tether had become so elastic that Daisy and Violet could position themselves side-by-side. It was about then when they started to crawl. Their ability to move as one provided the Evening Star’s patrons with a fresh spectacle, but the sight may have made all but the most jaded customers squirm in discomfort. Daisy and Violet provided this account of their earliest attempts at moving together:
When we were turned loose on the floor to crawl, we seemed to move without too much effort because we propelled each other. There seemed to be only a short time before we gained speed and direction. Then something happened. We discovered to our dismay that we could not pass when the leg
of the bed or table was between us.… We cried and tried again and again to pass the table leg and bed post.…
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Mary kept the twins clothed in the most beautiful of baby gowns and always saw to it that they were scrubbed and scented with talcum powder. And whenever she exhibited her charges, she presented herself as a warm and doting foster mother. For all her public displays at being affectionate, Mary was cold to Daisy and Violet, or so the twins would claim years later. They insisted that Mary Hilton never showed the slightest maternal tenderness toward them, but only valued them as chattel. “She never petted or kissed us or even smiled,” Violet once said. “She only talked.”
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When the twins began forming their first words, Mary taught them to address her not as Mama or Mum, but rather as “Auntie.” Among Daisy and Violet’s earliest memories of their warder was a short speech she recited daily, like a mantra: “I am not your mother. Your mother was afraid when you were born, and gave you to me.… You must always do just as I say.”
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By reminding the sisters over and over that their biological mother had rejected them out of fear and revulsion, Mary seemed intent on preventing Daisy and Violet from developing any sense of self-worth. This was likely unconscious as Mary was hardly sophisticated enough for such an intimate psychological insight. But conscious or not, her cruelty did not end there. The twins had this recollection of “Auntie” from those early years: “About her waist was always a wide leather belt, fastened with a large metal buckle. And it took only a little jerk to release the buckle.… When we displeased her, she whipped our backs and shoulders with the buckle end of that same wide belt.”
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As much as Daisy and Violet feared their adoptive mother, there were others who struck even greater terror in them. These were the medical men from near and far who called regularly at the Hiltons’
pub to examine the children. “We were punched and pinched and probed until we were almost crazy—and we always screamed, scratched, and kicked,” the twins recalled. “When the doctors and scientists left, Auntie would often whip us and call us ungrateful little brats.”
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The doctors maintained that the twins belonged to science and that in the interests of medicine, Mary should consent to their wishes to surgically separate the pair. Although there had never been a successful operation in parting conjoined twins, the surgeons offering their services apparently had no concern about the grave consequences that almost certainly would have resulted. They were opportunists who looked upon the conjoined sisters as guinea pigs who, if they did happen to survive the surgery, would bring the doctors everlasting distinction in the medical annals.
The question of separating Daisy and Violet had in fact already been raised at a meeting of the Sussex Medico-Chirurgical Society. After examining X-rays of the twins’ fused lower spines and “the internal arrangements of the viscera and blood vessels,” it was unanimously concluded that an operation “would certainly result in the death of one child and probably of both.”
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Dr. Rooth, himself a member of the physicians’ society, told his colleagues that he whole-heartedly agreed with their conclusion.
M
ary Hilton loved the look of amazement that appeared on the faces of visitors to the Evening Star when she ushered them into the tavern’s back room to see the United Brighton Twins. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen,” she would say, “you’re getting a first-hand look at a marvel that all future ages will contemplate. You’re seeing an absolutely unique manifestation of God’s handiwork that is to be found nowhere else under the sun.”
After lifting the twins’ gowns and revealing the thick rope of flesh that tied the pair together just above their backsides, she would explain that the connection was a conduit through which the blood circulated from one child to the other. By tickling and sometimes lightly pinching the ligament, she also demonstrated how the children simultaneously responded to sensation. Mary invited the curious to touch the fleshy connection if they wished. Few ever accepted the offer.
Because of the constant influx of new tourists to Brighton, there seemed to be no end to the twins’ pulling power. Even after two years, people were still coming to the pub in droves and the money continued to roll in for the Hilton family. But Mary was no longer content with the status quo. At the time she adopted the sisters, she could not have imagined they would produce a steady income for her. But as the earnings began to accumulate, she started to think about
places outside Brighton where the crowds could be even greater and where, at the end of each day, her purses would be even bigger. She began thinking like a true impresario.
By the late spring of 1910, when Daisy and Violet had just turned two, Mary, along with Edith Emily, took the girls on the road. The twins’ earliest engagements outside Brighton were in saloons, small circuses and carnivals, and street fairs. Because the appearances went unadvertised, no records survive of exactly where Daisy and Violet were exhibited. Typically, the babies were presented in “pit shows,” deep holes that had been dug into the earth at the fairgrounds or pens fenced with waist-high canvas around which the ticket holders circulated.
The foursome traveled the provinces by hitching rides with the small tramp circuses, carnivals, and fairs that criss-crossed the countryside in horse-drawn wagons. Mary found plenty of opportunities to exhibit her monster girls. During the warm weather months there were pleasure fairs all over Great Britain that mostly featured such common fare as fire-eaters, sword-swallowers, and dancing bears. Siamese twins had always been viewed as the true royals in any sideshow, the rarest of all human oddities. Daisy and Violet were a major sensation wherever they traveled, especially since the British press had already made them known everywhere in the country.
By late October or early November of 1910, when the first snows began feathering the countryside, England’s outdoor season ended, and the circus and carnival wagon trains returned to their winter quarters. Winters were brutal for sideshow freaks, especially if they had not been able to salt away their earnings from the summer season. There were few employment opportunities for them beyond the sideshow tents. Most holed up for the winter in cheap boarding houses and tried to hang on until April or May. The skin of an illustrated man could become so loose from weight loss over a winter that by the time
he was called back to work, his tattoos of Da Vinci’s
The Last Supper
and
Mona Lisa
looked like scribblings on a crumpled napkin, and a professional fat lady could lose so much weight between November and May that she was no longer employable.
Thanks to a combination of generous press coverage and word-of-mouth advertising, Mary felt no need to return to Brighton when the outdoor fair season ended. There were permanent, year-round venues elsewhere in the United Kingdom that were eager to engage the girls. In Edinburgh, Scotland, the twins appeared for two weeks before turnaway crowds at Stewart’s Waxworks, a large hall filled with life-size, life-like mannequins of such subjects as Henry VIII and his six wives, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Jack the Ripper.
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The four next traveled to Glasgow where the twins were given star billing at Pickard’s Waxworks.
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In an era before motion picture theaters began proliferating, the wax museums were among the most popular of England’s amusement centers. London alone had at least a half-dozen waxworks at the turn of the century, and most of the provincial cities boasted at least one such establishment. At the scruffier museums, the wax figures often bore little resemblance to the notables they were supposed to represent. At Pickard’s, however, visitors always marveled at how much the effigies resembled their subjects. But even at the better waxworks like Pickard’s, there were limits to how many times a customer could be enticed to view the same kings, queens, serial killers, and baby butchers. To keep people coming back, the proprietors had to offer other allurements, including freaks, palmists, snake charmers, and strong men.
Daisy and Violet were the headliners at Pickard’s when the museum was visited by the famous Harry Houdini, the American escapologist who had been appearing at the Glasgow Coliseum.
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Houdini and the Hilton sisters could hardly have been separated by more distance in the caste system of popular entertainment. Houdini by this time was one
of the world’s biggest stage attractions, an entertainer who packed in crowds wherever he appeared, whether in New York, London, St. Petersburg, Paris, or Berlin. Daisy and Violet, by contrast, were still identified with the lowliest of venues.
Perhaps no one in the world was more admiring of freaks than Harry Houdini. Whether a fellow human soul had been born with no legs or three, he believed that such distinctions deserved to be celebrated in the same way that the public might honor a gifted athlete, like a runner who blazed a mile in less than four minutes. His fondness for freaks dated back to the 1890s when, as a newly-fledged professional magician, he performed twenty or so shows a day in twelve-hour shifts in the dime museums. Not only did Houdini share the cramped stages of the “dimes” with all manner of human oddities, he developed lasting friendships with many of them. Houdini once recalled the complex seating arrangements that were involved when he and his fellow attractions at Huber’s Dime Museum in New York entered an eatery. “I have often sat at the table with [Carl] Unthan, the Armless Wonder, who would pass me the sugar [with his feet], and Big Alice, the fat lady, who would obligingly sit at the edge of the table so as to give poor little Emma Shaller, the Ossified Girl, plenty of room.”
Long after Houdini graduated from the dimes to such entertainment cathedrals as the Palace in New York, the Hippodrome in London, and the Wintergarten in Berlin, he continued to haunt the lowly venues that featured freaks. Dr. Morris Young, one of the world’s most respected authorities on Houdini, offered this view on why the escapologist felt such empathy for them:
He himself always felt like an outsider, somebody who didn’t quite fit in society. His feelings of ‘otherness’ resulted from the way the world viewed him. Maybe the public didn’t look at him as being a freak, but people did view him as somebody who was not quite of the world. He was, in the eyes of the public, a superman, somebody who could walk through brick walls or escape
from the most tightly secured prison cells. He was thought to be a mystical stranger in their midst. He himself worked hard at maintaining his persona of a mystic, a being with supernatural powers. He couldn’t, even for a day, let down his guard and act as though he was just another man on the street. Had he done that, he would have lost his place in the popular imagination as the world’s greatest mystifier.
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