The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (7 page)

Extensive tours throughout the United States and Europe afforded Houdini many opportunities to seek out freaks and phenoms. In fact, he may have encountered more human oddities than any other person of his time. Even so, he was wonderstruck when he entered Pickard’s Waxwork and saw Daisy and Violet Hilton. Not only were they the most amazing human oddities he had ever seen, but the blue-eyed, curly-haired moppets were also just about the most beautiful children he had seen anywhere, period. The girls appeared to be almost ethereal, otherworldly, like
putti
in a Raphael painting. Houdini’s excitement at his discovery was heightened by his knowledge that in just days, he would be able to bring the twins to the attention of Ike Rose, an American talent scout who had not only launched the escapologist into the big-time, but also such entertainment eminences as W. C. Fields, Isadora Duncan, and Will Rogers.
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Several hundred Scots were waiting on the platform when the train carrying Ike Rose arrived at Glasgow’s Central Station. It was not the famed talent scout that drew the crowd. The Glaswegians, most of them men and boys, were hoping to get a glimpse of the celebrities with whom Rose was traveling, the world-famous Siamese twins, Josefa and Rosa Blazek, and Rosa’s eight-month-old son, Franzel.
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Excitement over the Blazek sisters had been building for weeks in Glasgow. There was hardly a wooden fence or an outhouse that was not emblazoned with colorful posters ballyhooing the sisters’ scheduled appearances at the Coliseum. The lurid advertisements depicted the Blazek sisters in ballooning, see-through pantaloons. Their
sequined bras were so overfilled they seemed on the verge of bursting. When Rosa and Josefa stepped awkwardly off the train, they bore absolutely no resemblance to their poster idealizations as tall, willowy temptresses. They were, in fact, short, dumpy, and gnome-like.

Rosa and Josefa were joined back-to-back by a thick mass of flesh-covered cartilage and bone that started just above their shoulder blades and continued to their rumps. The grotesque hump, which was fully forty inches in circumference, kept their heads so distanced from one another that, as a reporter once oddly observed, it was only “by severely twisting their necks [that] they can kiss each other.”
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Sometime before the Blazek girls had entered adolescence, their lower extremities had taken extended vacations from growing. By the time they reached adulthood, their normal-sized trunks were mismatched to what seemed to be the legs of ten-year-old girls. Rosa and Josefa were charming in disposition, but besides being cursed with fat, stubby little legs and the huge mass of flesh between them, they had the faces of gargoyles.

The sisters had been the subject of crude and cruel jokes from the time they entered puberty. Signor Saltarino, a turn of the century circus authority, wryly commented, “Their future groom will have … two wives—and only one mother-in-law.”
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Some observed in print that one sister or the other would be a perfect mate for the man with a particularly ravenous carnal appetite since he could lawfully bed down with two women each night. In fact, physicians reported that the sisters had but one vagina and one rectum between them, although each had a uterus. The jokes about them became even more brutal after April 16, 1910, when Rosa, at age thirty-two, gave birth to a nine-pound boy, Franzel. Her new motherhood provoked barroom discussions about the complex acrobatics that must have taken place between the father and the sisters at the moment of conception. After becoming a mother, Rosa variously assumed the names of Mrs.
Vorschek or Mrs. Franz Dvorak. Her claims to having a husband were contradicted by official record. A baptismal certificate, recorded at the Apollinarus Catholic Church in Prague three days after Franzel’s birth, listed her by her maiden name and stated that Franzel was illegitimate.

After Franzel’s birth, Ike Rose immediately started billing the trio as a quintet: “A Mother, Sister, Son, Aunt and Nephew in the Strangest Family Group the World Has Ever Seen!” The pay he offered the Blazeks was generous for the time. He signed them for a reported “$10,000 yearly, plus all the postcards they could sell.”
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Houdini met with Rose for dinner after the showman had spirited the Blazeks away from the train depot and seen them safely settled at a hotel. Rose could not remember another occasion when Harry had seemed any more excited. Houdini told his ex-manager that as great a draw as the Blazek sisters might be, he had discovered another pair of Siamese twins that had the potential to be a far bigger attraction. Their names were Daisy and Violet Hilton, they were just tots and, as luck would have it, they were presently appearing in Glasgow.

There was nothing about Rose’s appearance that hinted at his wealth or eminence in the stage world. Altogether he had the appearance of an old prize fighter whose numbers had been much higher in the right column than in the left. His nose was mashed and, like his eyes, mouth, cheeks, and the other facial features, seemed to have been moved some centimeters from where it had originally been placed. He had thinning, tin-colored hair, was short and fat, and wore suits that looked cheaply made.

Not one to miss an opportunity to scout for a new freak attraction, especially one that came recommended by so highly regarded a judge as Houdini, Rose ventured out that same evening on the Trongate, a stretch notorious in Glasgow for its penny arcades, tattoo parlors, pawnshops, and vice houses. He found Pickard’s Waxworks and
entered. In the words of one profiler, Rose was absolutely besotted at the sight of “two of the prettiest children he ever saw …, two-year-old Daisy and Violet Hilton, born in Brighton, England.”
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He felt the rush of excitement he had experienced years earlier when he first discovered Harry Houdini and Isadora Duncan.

Rose’s talent for looking over armies of unknown dancers, singers, comedians, and magicians and plucking out the rare performers who had true star potential seemed unerring. One of his successes was with an Australian-born dancer Clarissa Campbell. He had spotted her for the first time in 1894, in a New York burlesque production of “The Night Owls.”
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Miss Campbell was a startling beauty with long legs, waist-length red hair, and green eyes that made men suddenly anxious to propagate their species. Except for the fact that, in Rose’s word’s, Clarissa was able to immediately seize every audience member’s attention “by suddenly appearing … as though shot out of a cannon,” at the time, she was just another hoofer of the high-kicking, ten-dollar-a-week variety. Rose was sure he could change that. He met with the dancer and her mother the next day and got them to sign a contract naming him as agent. A few months later, he got Clarissa to sign another agreement, a marriage contract. She was sixteen, he was thirty-two.

Rose rechoreographed her routine, discarding her cheerleader kicks and bounds and replacing them with the slow and seductive moves of Salome. He also threw out trunks of costumes, reducing her wardrobe to a few filmy veils that she could easily transport in a purse. Finally, he christened his bride with a new stage name, Saharet. Within a few years, she was playing London and Berlin and commanding $1,000 a week. She was also getting star billing in such New York musical comedies as
The Merry Widow
and
The Belle of New York
.

Over and over, Rose repeated this knack for plucking unknown performers from obscurity and transforming them into headliners. While visiting backstage at a theater in Vienna around 1903, Rose was
approached by the famous American clown Billy Burke, who told him that he had a seventeen-year-old daughter who was a talented singer, actress, and comedienne.
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After auditioning the young woman, Rose concluded that she did indeed possess exceptional stage gifts, but that her name, Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke, would require some tinkering to have marquee pizzazz. He got the carrot-haired, freckle-faced ingenue her first major booking. The world soon came to know the young star as Billie Burke until 1914, when she became Mrs. Florenz Ziegfeld.

Rose was eager to represent Daisy and Violet from the moment he saw them. He sat down with Mary Hilton and told her the Brighton United Twins were far too remarkable to be appearing in lowly wax museums and traveling fairs. Because of his connections in the show world, he boasted, he could get bookings for them in important theaters everywhere on the Continent and in England. Mary may have been impressed, but to Rose’s dismay, she refused his offer. She explained that because her husband, Henry, was no longer in the best of health, she couldn’t continue touring with the twins and had to return to Brighton.

Before leaving Glasgow, Mary did accept Rose’s invitation to take Daisy and Violet to see Rosa and Josefa perform at the Coliseum. The Blazek twins danced with something approaching the gracefulness of two yoked oxen. They also sang, played violins, and, according to a newspaper account, performed a “spirited duet on the xylophone.” Mary must have been impressed with the Blazeks and was shrewd enough to recognize that if the Brighton United Twins were ever to amount to anything more than a sideshow attraction, it was important that they develop some stage talents. On returning to Brighton, she immediately engaged a German music teacher to start instructing three-year-old Daisy and Violet in various performing arts, including voice training, dancing, and a variety of musical instruments. Daisy
recalled years later that “Auntie” had ordered their music teacher not to make any allowances for either the sisters’ youth or their handicap. “Teach the girls the hard way, professor,” Mary instructed. “They’re strong and tough, old for their years. Teach Violet to play the piano; Daisy, the violin.”
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Ike Rose could not get the twins out of his mind. He carried photographs of the sisters and looked at them often. He even dreamt of the sisters. As human wonders, they represented the ultimate. He coveted them as he had no other discovery.

Early in 1912, a little more than a year after he had seen Daisy and Violet in Glasgow, Rose made a special trip to Brighton to call on Mary Hilton. After seeing the twins a second time, he was surer than ever that the two could be the greatest attraction he ever promoted. Under the daily tutelage of their music teacher, Daisy and Violet had learned to sing in harmony, dance, and play violin and piano.

Rose once again begged Mary for a chance to represent the sisters. This time she gave in to his importuning. Her change of heart may have been prompted as much by her husband as by Rose’s assurances that, under his management, the names of Daisy and Violet Hilton would soon be blazing on the marquees of Europe’s grandest theaters. Henry Hilton’s health had continued to decline. The year 1911 was the last in which he and Mary were able to operate the Evening Star pub.
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Of all the people who figured in the twins’ early childhood, Henry Hilton is the most shadowy. He received only a cameo role in the twins memoir. Daisy and Violet observed that Mary quarreled with Henry constantly, a situation that might have aggravated the illness that ultimately forced him to stop working. The twins also made the claim that Henry was Mary’s fifth husband. The assertion may be accurate, but it has to be considered with at least some suspicion since many of the claims in their autobiography are demonstrably exaggerated or patently false.

The twins at about three years old. (Author’s collection)

Sometime in March or April of 1912, the Hilton clan—Mary, Henry, Edith Emily, Daisy, and Violet—sailed from Southampton to Berlin where they were to connect with Rose and begin preparing for a national tour of Germany’s theaters. The entire family was jammed into a tiny cabin. As dyspeptic as Henry was, he presented a softer side to the twins than Mary. Daisy and Violet remembered Henry and Mary fighting throughout the trip because he thought her treatment of the twins was contemptible. “He thought we should go to religious
services. She argued that people would not pay to look at us if they could see us for nothing. Auntie won.”
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Ike Rose began to make over the Brighton United Twins from the day they arrived in Berlin. Daisy and Violet Hilton, if they were to appeal to the theater set, could no longer be retailed as mere sideshow monstrosities. They would have to endear themselves to the public through talent, charm, refinement, beauty, and personality. As young as Daisy and Violet were, they already had these qualities. It was now Rose’s job to burnish and magnify their attributes. He took over every detail, selecting their wardrobe and even making decisions about how they should wear their hair. And for long hours each day over many weeks, he rehearsed them in an empty theater, drilling them over and over on their stage movements, their performances on the piano and the violin, their singing, and dancing.

So completely did Rose choreograph the twins’ stage turn that when the curtains parted on the night of their theatrical inaugural, the sisters skipped to the center of the stage and didn’t show the slightest sign of jitters. Daisy and Violet were pinafored in white. Their heads bore great cumuli of chestnut curls in which were pinned white satin bows so large that it must have seemed to the spectators that the two could be kited aloft in a strong wind. The twins bowed ever so slightly to the audience and then, with a nod to the conductor in the orchestra pit, signaled him to get on with his job.