The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (9 page)

Early in 1911, Williams leased the remains of a small seaside amusement park in St. Kilda that had opened, and closed, in 1906,
earning it the epithet of “Deadland.” He brought over many of the same designers and contractors that created the Dreamland Amusement Park on Coney Island, New York, and had them transform it into Luna Park St. Kilda. With 18,000 lights glowing like the Milky Way, the park opened in December, 1912, on Friday the 13th. Despite the bad portents usually associated with the day, Luna Park drew free-spending crowds on opening night and continued to be favored with great success.
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J. D. Williams regarded his signing of the Brighton United Twins as a major coup. He mounted a massive publicity campaign to let everyone in Melbourne know the sisters were coming. Posters trumpeting the twins’ arrival were plastered everywhere. For weeks before their appearance in Australia, the newspaper carried ads huzzahing the park’s triumph in engaging the attraction. And there was no shrinking from hyperbole: “The World’s Most Astounding Freak of Nature,” and “The Most Talked About Subjects of the World’s Medicos,” and “Secured for Exhibition by the Management of Luna Park at Enormous Expense Because the Best Is None Too Good for Our Patrons!”
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The twins were to appear in what he prized as the most magnificent of all the structures in his park, a performing hall christened Pharaoh’s Daughter. A ziggurated Egyptian temple, its exterior was decorated with gold leaf and lapis lazuli, and two massive stone sphinxes flanked its entrance. While Daisy and Violet had been given top billing, other headliners included Le Vant, the Great Australian Illusionist; Baby Ben, a twelve-year-old who, at 351 pounds, was promoted as the World’s Fattest Boy; and Electro and Electra, a man and woman who made sparks arc between their bodies whenever they kissed.
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Daisy and Violet made their first appearances in the Pharaoh’s Daughter on the night of February 14. By the next day, the park’s
newspaper ads made the claim that the Brighton United Twins’ first performances drew “vast crowds … immense multitudes.” In fact, despite the great sums Williams had spent in securing and promoting the sisters, the pair’s drawing power was well below his expectations. Few visitors walking the midway of Luna Park St. Kilda seemed to care much about the sisters, nor did the press. None of Melbourne’s major papers, in fact, even bothered to send out reviewers to see the twins’ show.

So euphoric had Williams been when he signed the twins that he was sure that long lines would snake past the concrete sphinxes every day until the park closed for winter. He hadn’t accumulated his kingly riches by making many miscalculations in show business, but his importation of the twins had been a massive misreckoning. So anemic was the act’s appeal to Australians that, after just one week, Williams decided to drop it. A principled businessman, he did honor all the guarantees he had made to Ike Rose. Rose himself conceded that Williams had lost at least $5000 on the Brighton United Twins.
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Rose was no less dismayed than Williams at Australia’s indifferent reception of the sisters, but he was not yet ready to write off the whole country. According to
The Billboard
, he became chummy with “a great bunch of sportsmen and big businessmen.”
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Rose was told that while there was something that made Australians recoil at the sight of anyone with extreme or unusual physical deformities, somewhat paradoxically, they went absolutely gaga over midgets. Rose’s advisors noted that Australia had been visited only the year before by a troupe of dwarfs from England. The British show called “Tiny Town” reportedly netted $150,000 from the tour.
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Rose had been aware that something of a midget mania was occurring elsewhere in the world. Leo Singer, a producer of musical comedies, had started developing Lilliputia, a half-sized community for midgets in Vienna, Austria. Elsewhere in Europe, and also in America,
prize fights between dwarfs were being promoted, and operas were being staged with casts comprised entirely of little people.

Rose immediately booked passage on the next ship leaving for Germany. He told Mary Hilton it was urgent that he put together a troupe of little people but assured her he would return to Australia as soon as possible. He left Mary, Edith Emily, and the twins in the care of an aide. Mary was furious. She was also terrified. Rose had shepherded the Brighton United Twins to a distant continent with assurances of lucrative and steady bookings. Now he was abandoning the act, leaving Mary and the girls high and dry in a strange place without a single future engagement.

Because the twins had been such a dismal drawing card at Luna Park, no theater owners were willing to give them a try. Eventually Mary did find an opportunity. In exchange for a percentage of her receipts, the owner of a small wagon circus agreed to let her ride along with Edith Emily and the twins into the outback. Tramping through Britain three years earlier, moving from country fair to country fair, Mary already knew something about the rigors of trouping with wagon circuses. She was to discover that the trials of trouping into Australia’s interior were almost beyond the limits of her endurance.

While the outback was always searing in the summer, the heat was especially lethal in 1913. The caravan of horse-drawn wagons rolled through a landscape where, in Mark Twain’s words, “only a few of the hardiest kinds of rocks survive.” They saw cattle become broiled steaks on the hoof and vegetation turn to ashes.

The circus put on its performances in bush towns of 200 to 300 people, but the settlements were so distantly separated that the caravan often rolled through emptiness for a full day or more to get to them. Because the people of the outback were so starved for entertainment, normally the circuses and carnivals could count on doing good business in the scattered stations and townships. But nothing was
normal in the summer of 1913. Because of an extended drought, cattle and sheep ranchers suffered massive losses. Depleted herds and flocks meant farmhands, drovers, shearers, and laborers were thrown out of work and had little money to take their families to a circus or carnival. When the circus that Daisy and Violet traveled with put up its big top, the clowns, strongman, and trapeze artists played mostly to empty seats.

“The pretty grown-together English girls, five years old.” (Author’s collection)

When the aide Ike Rose had assigned to her finally quit, Mary wondered how she was going to keep plodding forward. Mary was
flinty to the marrow, but even she knew the Australian outback was not a place for two women and two five-year-old girls to be traveling without the protection of a man. Miraculously, another rescuer appeared. Trailing after the circus from bush town to bush town was Myer Myers, a balloon salesman and candy peddler. He had taken notice of Edith Emily from the day the Hilton family linked up with the caravan. Edith, as Myer preferred to call her, was a woman who blended unnoticed into the shadows of others. She was tall and thin, meek, shy, and appeared to be eternally sad. Myer’s recognition of her may have been impossible in a space less deserted than Australia’s interior. But somewhere in the sun-seared outback, romance began to blossom between Edith and the balloon vender. She was twenty-nine; he was twenty.

Myer Myers, who had been christened Meyer Rothbaum, was the son of George and Teresa Rothbaum, Austrians who had migrated to Australia and settled in the Clifton Hills section of Melbourne.
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George was a bootmaker by trade and a sadist by temperament. As a child, Myer was given whippings by his father for the slightest transgressions. He was thirteen or fourteen when a traveling circus raised its big top in Melbourne. When the caravan left town, he was in one of its wagons. He had been a vagabond ever since.

Even in the frying-pan heat of the summer of 1913, the attraction between Myer and Edith kept growing stronger. Finally, he approached Mary to ask for her daughter’s hand in marriage. Mary was sixty-one and troubled with a badly infected leg from a snake bite suffered in the outback. “We need a man to travel with us,” she replied, still pondering Myer’s request for her daughter’s hand. “Will you give up your balloon concession?”
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Myer answered that he was willing to do anything to make Edith his wife.

Myer was five-foot-four, and, like the balloons he sold, he had the appearance of being pneumatically inflated. His face and hands had
been baked brown by the sun and his black hair was slicked back with grease. His black eyes were unforgettable: They were like those of a shark, never changing expression. It was impossible to tell by looking at him whether he was feeling rage, joy, disgust, or passion.

Although Myer was always fawning whenever he was around Mary, the twins detected an acridness in his temperament. Their dislike of him was immediate.

It was a matter of pride with Myer that he had often taken canings as a boy. He boasted to Daisy and Violet that the beatings had made him strong and conditioned him to the hard life of trouping. “We took this to mean,” the twins said in their memoir, “that he approved of Auntie’s thrashing us with her belt buckle.”
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From the instant Myer became a member of the Hilton sisters’ retinue, he assumed much of the responsibility for them inside and outside their tent. He didn’t show them any more mercy than Mary did. When they were not on exhibition, they were expected to work on their reading, spelling, and arithmetic lessons with Edith or to rehearse their act, practicing on their violins, saxophones, and clarinets. They were never given time off just for child’s play, nor were they allowed to associate with any other children, either in the traveling troupe or in the bush towns where their tent was raised. And as if to impress the twins that now he was their lord and master, Myer insisted that they never address him by any name other than “Sir.”
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Accompanied by a tattooed lady, the operator of a marionette show, and twenty midgets, Ike Rose returned to Australia in November or December of 1913. By that time, Mary, Edith, and the twins had settled in a small Melbourne apartment. Even though Rose had abandoned them eight or nine months earlier, he was infuriated to learn that Mary had turned over the management of Daisy and Violet to someone else, and a balloon salesman of all people. He reminded her that she had entered into a contract that gave him full authority for the presentation
of the twins. He threatened Mary with a lawsuit for breach of contract. She was not impressed.

Rose did get a court injunction to prevent Mary and Myer Myers from exhibiting Daisy and Violet anywhere in the State of Victoria, including Melbourne. But after a single legal challenge, he gave up. “Having a troupe of midgets on his hands, he had enough worries to keep him occupied,” it was observed by a writer for
The Billboard
.
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Rose’s imported midgets were from the Carl Schaefer company in Germany. The company included Mike and Ike (“They Look Alike”) Matina, twins from Hungary who would later become immensely popular in America and even have a brand of boxed candy named after them. In addition to presenting the Schaefer midgets, Rose also promoted boxing matches between the more bellicose members of the troupe.

It was as though Ike Rose had been hexed from the time two years earlier when he first presented the Brighton United Twins. By his account, he lost $18,000 trying to promote the sisters in Europe and Australia.
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His fortunes continued on a downward spiral after he brought the midget troupe to Australia. The diminutive singers, dancers, acrobats, and boxers didn’t even generate enough money to pay for their beer and whiskey consumption, which, Rose complained, “was oceanic.” He was a broken man when he left Australia for the final time in 1914 and returned to his home in Berlin. His destitution was not permanent, however. A few years later, the impresario assembled another platoon of little people, Ike Rose’s Royal Midgets, and brought the troupe to America. The company became a staple of the vaudeville houses and bigger carnivals in the 1920s and 1930s.

After a courtship that lasted more than two-and-a-half years and took place before the constant gaze of Mary Hilton, Myer Myers and Edith were married in Sydney on Christmas Eve, 1915. Mary Hilton and one Jimmie Ellis signed the marriage license as witnesses. The
newlyweds, along with Mary and the twins, took up residence at 42 George Street, Sydney.
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Now and then, the Brighton United Twins performed in theaters in smaller towns, but most of their appearances were limited to the horse-drawn wagon circuses that rolled through Australia and New Zealand during the summer months.

In January of 1916, Myer scored something of a coup. He won an engagement for Daisy and Violet at the grand opening of White City, a nine-and-a-half-acre amusement park in Sydney. The booking was the most impressive of the sisters’ nearly four years of trouping Down Under. Myer, however, was less than ebullient at having landed the engagement. By this time, he had a new ambition for Daisy and Violet. He wanted to take them to America.