The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (8 page)

Daisy and Violet began by singing a duet. Their arms were interlaced and they swayed this way and that way, kicking up their slippered feet in a kind of modified can can. They seemed unfazed that they were being watched by more than a thousand people. They performed with the insouciance of children putting on a recital for the sole enjoyment of a beloved grandmother. The crowd cooed its adoration.

In time, each sister had her own moment in the spotlight. Daisy was first. She presented a violin solo and, although her performance
couldn’t have drawn comparisons to the great soloists of the day, when she finished, she was paid with house-rattling applause.

She and Violet then moved out in front of the footlights. Daisy looked into the orchestra pit, and, with a toss of her head, signaled the conductor that he could leave. She then led the fourteen-piece orchestra on her own, waving a baton that was approximately half her height. The audience was deliriously approving.

Then it was Violet’s turn. She and Daisy climbed onto a bench before a grand piano. When Violet discovered that she was too short to reach the keyboard, she whispered something to her sister and together the two descended to get a pillow. Once again the sisters positioned themselves on the bench, but the one cushion still had not elevated Violet high enough to touch the keys. Again the twins made a descent and added a second pillow. To building laughter in the house, the sisters went through the pillow-stacking exercise two or three times more. Finally, with Daisy turning the pages of the sheet music, Violet began her recital, playing “The Emperor’s Waltz.” The crowd cheered and applauded when she finished. The twins descended from their perch, curtsied, and then once again ascended the tower of pillows. This time Violet accelerated the tempo to the gleeful roaring of the audience, once again concluding with “The Emperor’s Waltz.”

The twins again climbed down from the bench. They bowed and, with practiced expressions of great weariness, once again scaled the pillows. Violet started playing something slow, dreamy, and soporific. When the audience appeared to have been lulled half to sleep, Violet’s playing changed mid song. Once again she lapsed into “The Emperor’s Waltz.” Now the crowd went crazy. Everyone was applauding, cheering, stomping their feet, and whistling.

If Mary took any pride in the mass adoration with which her charges had been accorded at their stage debut, she was unwilling to
let them bask in the glory. “The theater thundered with applause our opening night,” Daisy and Violet recounted, “and as we came off the stage, Auntie and Edith rushed us into the dressing room in the midst of the cheering. They refused to open the doors to the knocks from backstage folks.”
¹⁶

During their stay in Germany’s capital, the twins were examined by a Dr. Bochenheimer and a Dr. Stier of Konigsberg, described as “brilliant surgeons.” “The cartilage, muscles and bone could be separated,” Bochenheimer whispered to Mary Hilton as he stared down at the twins in their hotel bed, moving his cold stethoscope over their chests. “It will be a worthwhile and interesting experiment to separate the nerves of the spinal column.… There has never been a set of Siamese twins operated on while they were living, and science is deeply interested in making the experiment.”
¹⁷

The sisters pretended to be asleep as the doctors’ faces hovered closely above them. Daisy and Violet later recalled the same horrific vision. Each saw themselves strapped to an operating table. Each saw knives and saws. And, finally, each saw blood pouring out of their lower backs in great torrents. They were relieved when Auntie gave her reply to the doctors. “The girls belong to me,” she said. “I’m going to keep them the way they are.”
¹⁸

Even if the doctors could have positively assured Mary that both sisters would survive a surgical division, it seems unlikely that she would have ever consented to such an operation. As long as Daisy and Violet remained fastened to one another, they could provide her with a generous income. Were they to be separated, they not only would lose all their stage value, but they could become liabilities.

The Brighton United Twins may have stopped the show at their stage debut, but they were not so enthusiastically received after they left Berlin. For all his brilliance at discovering unknown talents and promoting them to world-class standing, Ike Rose evidently was no
great student in geopolitics. He could not have picked a worse place and time to launch the twins’ stage careers than Germany in 1912. The newspapers were filled with stories about the inevitability of a war between Germany and England. Most Germans hated anyone or anything British. Furthermore, anti-Semitism was growing in Germany. Ike Rose, born Isaac Rosenbaum, a Jew, now found himself persona non grata at theaters that earlier had rolled out red carpets for him.

So infrequent were the twins’ theater bookings in Germany that, after a while, Rose resorted to presenting them in beerhouses, pit shows, and wax museums. Daisy and Violet remembered the tour this way: “We lived in dingy … boarding houses, traveling at night between exhibitions at bars, fairs, carnivals, and circuses.
¹⁹
Under the terms of his contract to manage the twins, Rose was to pay Mary Hilton $60 a week, plus travel expenses for everyone in the entourage. By the time the showman settled with Mary every seven days, then shelled out for the hotels, train fares, and meals for everybody, he found he “positively could not make a dollar.”
²⁰

Rose’s road expenses may have showed at least a modest decrease after May 5, 1912. The Hilton clan was reduced by one when Henry died in St. Jacob’s Hospital in Leipzig.
²¹

Not only did Rose find it harder and harder to find bookings for Daisy and Violet as the German tour continued, but he also discovered that audiences had been shrinking for his other premier attraction, the Blazek sisters. Reasoning that four heads were better than two, he started offering theater owners two sets of Siamese twins in a single package. The move brought no great upturn in his fortunes. Still not ready to throw in the towel, he brought in a troupe of midgets and started advertising the Ike Rose Wonder Exhibition. He presented his shows in city squares, at fairs, and in the back lots of circuses. When they weren’t on a stage, Daisy and Violet, not yet five, were exhibited in a tent.

They remembered how punishing those days were:

“We appeared before the public not only during the regular performances … but for the entire day from early morning until late at night.”
²²

While things were unraveling in Rose’s professional life, they were also falling apart in his personal life. Saharet, a child of sixteen when he married her but now a woman of thirty-four, had started engaging in extramarital dalliances—all of them with Spanish dancers.
²³
Rose started a divorce action against her.

After struggling for months to win bookings in the increasingly hostile climate of Germany, Rose decided to leave the country with both sets of Siamese twins. He was able to sign the Hiltons and the Blazeks for appearances in late October of 1912 at a big fair in Basel, Switzerland. He felt a salubrious change the instant he left Germany. The Swiss were actually welcoming. The newspapers were filled with stories that were admiring of Rose and his pairs of conjoined twins. The
National Zeitung
, for example, placed this spin on the news that the showman was favoring Basel with a visit:

No record exists of how the Hiltons and Blazeks were received at the Basel fair. Even if they attracted great throngs, Rose must have
been wondering where he and his troupe might go next. Uncertainty ended when a cable was delivered to him at the Basel fairgrounds from a faraway place: Australia.

Rose regarded the wire as a missive from heaven, especially considering the offer it advanced. It had been sent by J. D. Williams, an old friend. Williams was about to open Luna Park St. Kilda, a seaside amusement park just south of Melbourne. Would Rose be interested in presenting the Brighton United Twins in his new park? Williams was willing to pay $500 a week to engage the twins, plus the fares in getting all concerned to Australia.
²⁵

D
aisy and Violet made their way down the long gangplank of the
Scharnhorst
. They had been on the German vessel for a month on a 13,000-mile voyage from Genoa, Italy. It was February 3, 1913, two days before their fifth birthday, and they had just arrived in Australia’s Port Victoria. They were in high spirits when at long last they stepped on solid ground.

Their glee was quickly dispelled. Soon after disembarking, they were informed that once again they would have to submit to an ordeal they hated above all others. Because, in the words of a Melbourne newspaper, “their peculiar malformation was regarded as being of great scientific interest,” arrangements had been made for them to undergo yet another medical examination.
¹
What was worse, this time they were to be looked over not by one or two doctors, but by the entire membership of the Medical Society of Melbourne, an organization of more than fifty physicians.

The twins appeared before the society in Melbourne’s Masonic Hall on the afternoon of February 7. It isn’t known whether they were again “punched and pinched and probed” as they had been in the earlier scrutinies of their bodies by teratologists, fetologists, hermatologists, and other assorted medicos. But this time the examination seems not to have gone as badly as they had feared. A newspaper reporter was present at the event. To judge from his account, Daisy and Violet
seemed almost to have enjoyed themselves. He recorded the occasion this way:

The examination presumably was arranged by someone in the Luna Park publicity department. Whoever set up the event had probably taken a cue from P. T. Barnum, who, five decades earlier, arranged for doctors to examine Chang and Eng wherever and whenever the brothers made an appearance. The Connecticut showman recognized the publicity value of having his Siamese twins looked over by physicians. It gave him a chance to crow that the brothers were subjects of ongoing scientific interest. And by having the brothers closely and repeatedly vetted by physicians, Barnum could also dispel any suspicions that the Siamese twins connection had been faked.

Luna Park St. Kilda was a delirium of Egyptian, Romanesque, Rococco, and Byzantine architectural styles, suggestive of the crazy assortment of faux palaces, houses of mirrors, music halls, and flea circuses on the waterfront back home in Brighton. One of the more popular Luna Park attractions was the Palais des Folies, a huge funhouse with distorting mirrors, various trip-wire surprises, and steeply dipping and curving slides that were slicked with cornmeal. There was also a tunnel of love called the River Caves of the World, that provided the romantically inclined with boat rides through dark, underground grottoes where, if the voyagers were not too engrossed in canoodling, they might glimpse a mermaid or Arlo, the Human Frog.
But the most conspicuous architectural feature of the park was its entryway, a concrete, moon-faced head sixty or seventy feet high. The massive visage had huge illuminated red eyes that rolled suggestively from side to side. When visitors entered through the moon man’s leering, grinning mouth, they left behind a world of conformity, regimentation, and dullness and passed into a new realm, a wonderland where excitement, exoticism, and surprises were everywhere.
³

Like Ike Rose, J. D. Williams, the park’s creator, was an American. From the time he was a young man, Williams had shown an uncanny ability to pitch out single dollar bills in one direction and have them boomerang back as fives and tens. He started his show business career as the assistant manager of a Parkersburg, West Virginia, opera house. Around 1904, he saw his first motion picture, a crude single-reeler from the Vitascope studio of Thomas Alva Edison. Instantly recognizing the commercial potential, he made up his mind to be an exhibitor.
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Because motion picture theaters did not yet exist, Williams traveled the country with a black tent, charging people 25 cents to see a blurry, shadowy, jittery photoplay of President William McKinley’s funeral. Williams was already a wealthy man when he was drawn to Australia in 1909, nine years after it had become a commonwealth. He bought a rundown music hall in Sydney and reestablished it as a movie palace, the Colonial. While the city’s other cinema houses offered just two shows a day, the Colonial’s movies ran nonstop from 11
A.M.
to 11
P.M.
Within two years, Williams converted three more Sydney music halls into cinemas and started construction on the Crystal Palace. The Crystal was to become the city’s most sumptuous movie house. It included a 1,500-seat theater, a grandly elegant tea room, and a mini-mall where visitors could shop for a variety of American novelties or take a stool at the world’s largest soda fountain.