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The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins

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Today, Daisy and Violet Hilton are probably best remembered for their brief appearance in Tod Browning's contentious film, Freaks. But in their heyday, the Hilton twins were household names. Genuine conjoined twins, they were born fused at the lower spine in 1908, and lucky not to be handed off to eager experimental surgeons.

Dean Jensen's book is, thankfully, a traditional biography, with the sister's birth on page one and ending with their funeral on the last. Jensen has not tried to be clever, but rather let this unusual story and the numerous strange characters have all the attention.

Adopted, raised and exploited by a pub owner turned raconteur and, later, a Melbourne-born self-taught showman, Daisy and Violet Hilton remain an island of near-calm in the giddy upheaval of their lives. Dragged from their birthplace in Brighton, England, to Germany, then Australia and finally to the United States, where they tried to simultaneously rise above their affliction and take advantage of it. The girls became talented singers, musicians and dancers, with one of their signature pieces being a pas de quatre at the end of the show.

Their lives touched briefly with others who were, or would go on to be, Hollywood or Broadway stars, something which the twins attempted numerous times. The book is peppered with familiar names and locations, such as a lovely snippet on the opening of Luna Park in Melbourne, Australia. The girls appeared in the park's Egyptian temple, "Pharoah's Daughter", just after their fifth birthday, only a few months after the park was opened. They went on to tour country Australia where they met Myer Myers, a Clifton Hills born circus-runaway who would gradually become the twin's manager and guardian.

The Lives and Loves... allows room to explore the people who surround Violet and Daisy; the characters of the freak shows and fairs and later the vaudeville circuit, their colleagues on stage, in the orchestras they used, and their business associates.

With black and white publicity photos, film stills and postcards every few pages and quotes from contemporary documents and articles, as well as recent interviews, The Lives and Loves... has clearly been thoroughly researched. It is written in a straightforward, engaging manner, which gives the bizarre characters that populate every page of this book space to shine on their own. And it is not the more physically unusual people that are the most oddly behaved.

Dean Jensen did a great job unearthing the facts and assembling the intimate life stories of the ORIGINAL Hilton Sisters, in his book, "The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins". His writing style is very easy to read and the story sucks you in early on. Although these sisters are looked upon as "freaks", the more you read about the challenges they faced, the more you see they are just two women searching for happiness and love.

As the mystery is unlocked, and intimate details are exposed something surprising happens, you find yourself rooting for the twins and genuinely caring about them. This book takes you on an emotional roller coaster ride detailing their lives of coming into this world a little different, entertaining millions internationally and dying virtually unknown. By the time you read about the accounts of their death, you feel like you've lost two good friends.

I was swept away in the descriptive writing of the vaudeville era, the glimpse into the sideshow life and how fickle the entertainment industry really is. It was unbelievable to learn that the twins helped the careers of many 'just starting out stars' like Bob Hope & Burns and Allen and how the great magician Harry Houdini taught them a technique to 'separate themselves'. The more you read about how extraordinary their lives were, the more you change your perception of how you view people who are different from you. Life handed them lemons, so they made lemonade and then some.

I highly recommend this book!

These two women were "freaks" at a time when that made them superstars of Vaudeville, more famous than Bob Hope, Burns and Allen, etc. But the book is more about the two people, Violet and Daisy, and their very human talents, feelings and struggles. Dean Jensen has written a page-turner about human nature, not just that of conjoined sisters but of the people who took advantage of them, the people who went to see them because they were "freaks" and the people who genuinely loved and resapected them. This is a great book as biography and as entertainment.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, perceptibly hung over, possibly still drunk, eyed the Hilton sisters over breakfast at MGM Studios. Daisy and Violet had just strolled into the commissary, taking a single empty chair across from him. Daisy picked up a menu, and without looking at her sister, asked Violet what she planned on ordering. Fitzgerald turned pea-green, ran outside, and retched. The sisters were at MGM to star in the film Freaks.

Daisy and Violet Hilton were pygopagus conjoined twins, united by a "cord of flesh" near the base of their spines. As described in Dean Jensen's biography, The Lives And Loves Of Daisy And Violet Hilton: A True Story Of Conjoined Twins, they were also clever, beautiful, and eminently likable women. And yet, Fitzgerald's reaction to them was uncommon only in manifestation. For something in the sister's irregular form converted even their most trivial activities into enchantments. In merely wanting breakfast, Daisy and Violet inspire our unseemly fascination, exposing us as gawkers, or moralists, or miserable, inconsiderate drunks.

Born in England, Daisy and Violet were just infants when the Brighton press proclaimed the occurrence of "an extraordinary freak of nature." They were toddlers when championed by Harry Houdini. At sixteen, having conquered American midways, they attempted a transition typically blocked to "sideshow freaks": they tried to make it in Vaudeville. In their first performance, Daisy and Violet sang, played instrumentals, and charmed the crowd with tosses of brown curls. Then two young boys, dressed in tuxedoes, joined them onstage. Each took a twin by the hand. Music swelled and the foursome began to glide across the stage, "locked in a pas de quatre." The sold-out crowd erupted. They stood in applause. They cried "tears of joy." They dashed toward the box office to secure tickets for the next show.

Such reactions, sparked at the sight of something as natural as teenagers dancing, explain Daisy and Violet's legendary success. It also inversely illustrates the more common, less noble, response they elicited: dehumanization. Given away by their unwed, terrified mother, the twins grew up chattel to guardians whose parental interest stopped at exploitation and appropriation. Even their first memories, "the movements of the visitor's hands which were forever lifting our baby clothes to see just how we were attached," recall their tragic position: trapped between those who used them and those who wanted only to look. Their childhood was replete with threats of being sent to the "asylum for monster children." They spent most of their time confined in a room - lest someone catch a free glimpse. Years later, while in the office of the attorney who would eventually emancipate them, Daisy and Violet were recounting their upbringing when they were interrupted by sobbing. The stenographer had begun to cry.

Curiously, the empathy wrought by Jensen's faithful portrayal of Daisy's and Violet's lives is no prophylactic to the rubbernecking its details will inspire. It is easy to chastise the surgeons who wanted to saw the sisters apart, but upon the discovery that when Violet got drunk - which she often did - Daisy would get "a little buzzed," the teratologic glee is irresistible.

This conflict resonates loudest in Jensen's chapters discussing the sisters' love lives. Readers will no doubt be moved by Daisy and Violet's inability to find lasting love outside themselves. They will decry the twenty-one states that refused, on moral grounds, to permit Violet to marry. They will disdain the reporters who pressed their eyeballs to the keyhole of Daisy's bridal suite. They will blame the public responsible for this media circus when her introverted husband runs off. And yet, when the reader's friends discover the Hiltons were conjoined twins, and ask the question that everyone asks, the reader will will be quick to answer: Yes, Daisy and Violet had sex, lots of it. Even Jensen, unflaggingly sympathetic as he is, seems unable to resist this salacious urge, ending his story with Daisy and Violet's most enduring "trebling," a burial plot shared with a man whom they never met.

Had Daisy and Violet not been conjoined twins, their biography might well resemble that of those other Hilton sisters, circa 2050. The Hiltons sought and eventually rebuked public attention. The Hiltons learned those well-worn lessons of fleeting fame and wasted fortune. Such comparisons phosphoresce in Jensen's exposition, which can, at varying times, feel either rudimentary or dispensable. Yet, Jensen avoids melodrama. He evokes the Dickensian far more than he uses it as an adjective. And he is delightfully adept with anecdotes, a skill put to memorable use recounting a world populated by the likes of pugilistic bandleader Blue Steel; "flimflam man extraordinaire," Terry Turner; and a villain who actually named himself, Myer Myers. And besides, Daisy and Violet are not those other Hiltons. They were world famous: the Royal English Twins United, made singular by a slip of Mother Nature's hand, "grown together the way tomatoes on a vine sometimes do."

I originally became intrigued by conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton after seeing the 1932 film "Freaks" back in the late 1980s. I subsequently read that they had spent their final years, and in fact are buried, in my own state of North Carolina.

When James Taylor reprinted the sisters' own autobiography in his publication "Shocked and Amazed," I eagerly ordered those issues. I was pleasantly surprised to learn in those pages that a gentleman named Dean Jensen was researching the sisters' lives, and that what he had discovered was a lot wilder than the euphemistic gloss the twins put on their own account of their adventures.

I began anticipating this book immediately. Even then, Jensen's work-in-progress seemed too good to be true, his subject(s) so esoteric and obscure a topic of interest, that I had to wonder if it would ever see publication. Time passed, my anticipation cooled off . . . and then out of the blue this year, an internet correspondent mentioned he'd just received his copy! A web search confirmed it had been out for several months already! A bit chagrined, I quickly ordered a copy for myself.

I have to say the long wait was justified by the degree of biographical detail Mr. Jensen put into his book. This is especially impressive considering how difficult it must have been to dig up the facts on these girls in whom any popular interest had gone cold long before the petite Daisy and Violet were laid to rest in a single casket in a grave plot that was theirs only out of charity.

Take, for instance, the intimate account of their birth, almost a hundred years ago, in a Brighton England slum. It reads as though Mr. Jensen was an eyewitness!

Daisy and Violet emerge in Jensen's biography as complex, flawed human beings, far from the mere "victims-of-fate-and-avarice-to-be-pitied" their own memoir paints them as. Their behavior is often far from admirable though they will still engage your sympathies.

This book is fascinating and more than once jaw-dropping. I have to say, "Thank you, Mr. Jensen; your book was worth the wait."

-- Micah Harris

This is an amazing book, beautifully written. I couldn't put it down and had to remind myself often that it was non-fiction. Highly recommended.

According to taste, Dean Jensen's "Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton" can be read as tragedy or triumph. After being on display almost all their lives, the Siamese twins at the end lived in quiet obscurity, clerking in a grocery. All their lives they had said that was how they wanted to finish.

However, they had also wanted husbands and children, and they never got those.

Unlike most Siamese twins, who have to deal with an array of deficits and health problems, Daisy and Violet Hilton were normal in every other way. Not just normal but, as we'd say today, gifted and talented.

More remarkable than the link of flesh at the base of their spines was their sunny disposition, maintained somehow despite an infancy and childhood that was extremely restricted by a stepmother who didn't want anyone to see them for free.

Their charm was their salvation. Although they were wickedly exploited, over their lives they repeatedly attracted devoted friends who rescued them time and again. These never were able to rescue the twins entirely from the exploiters, or from their own sad inability to judge boyfriends, but they kept the Hiltons from utter degradation.

Jensen interprets their lives as an endless search for love, which he -- and they -- interpreted as romantic, sexual love. That escaped them, but they did enjoy and attract affectionate love, which, it may be, they were always too distracted to quite recognize.

Jensen tells the story at a glacial pace but with plenty of detail. He rescues an amazing story. In the `20s, the Hilton Sisters were as celebrated -- and, briefly, as highly paid -- any of the characters of that wacky decade. Somehow they failed to make it into the popular histories along with such comparatively dull stars as Shipwreck Kelly.

The Hiltons' story is a gold mine of irony, but Jensen is not an ironist. By a odd accident, the women ended up in the same place, North Carolina, where the first famous set of Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, had enjoyed the kind of life the sisters had longed for: surrounded by children in rural domesticity. Jensen fails to make the connection.

This book is about the lives of conjoined twins who entertain millions internationally in the vaudeville era. It chronicles the extraordinary lives of Daisy and Violet Hilton while documenting famous entertainers of that era with whom the twins worked. It surprises with names of stars whom we all now recognize that the twins `supported' with their fame in those early years. It speaks to how personal and global circumstances affected the twins' lives, the industry, and the world. It speaks to how fickle is fame.

Yet it is about much more. The way it is written and researched offers a significant look at an era that is made fascinating while far from our current experience. A cast of characters is developed. Some exploit the twins and others care about them. The story is compelling because it speaks to the extraordinary successes, failures, feelings, desires, and drama in the lives of these conjoined sisters who, in this story, grow literally from birth to death. One cares about their well being while turning each page. Dean Jensen's book speaks to the humane and inhumane in all of us. It is a great and highly recommended read.
Joan Backes

This is an extraordinary book. The author has taken considerable risk in choosing to tell the story of the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Even before the reading begins, one is captivated by a photograph of the twins from a circa 1920's publicity shot. They seem to convey the image of the paradox, the archetypal enigma, the manifested Gemini. The twins ask in this photograph, "What are you looking for in us? What do you hope to find? What mystery do we seem to possess? "

Jensen succeeds in unlocking the mystery of the twins. He accomplishes this by sensitivity and having thoroughly researched the project. While this appears on the surface to be a straightforward biography based on a linear timeframe of facts, there is actually a subtle undertone that climaxes at the end of the book. One finds the author has truly been the advocate of the twins from the beginning, and has sided with what is human about them rather than what is `freakish'. He makes us feel comfortable with the twins, as they obviously made others feel comfortable with themselves. Through the skill of storytelling, one experiences upon completion of the book that the twins have turned the table around, and what is exposed is only something alien in ourselves.

This book invokes the usual clichés of `not being able to put it down' and `fact is stranger that fiction'. It also is a brilliant weaving of wit and humor and the macabre. One gets swept into a world of alligator and dog boys, midget circuses, pinheads, and a diabolical promoter named Myer Myers.

It may sound unbelieveable, but The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton is the best book that I have ever read. I am surprised at how emotionally involved I became with regards to the twins triumphs and tradgies. The book kept me in suspense from start to finish. I think that the author (Dean Jensen) did a fantastic and brilliant job of really getting you to know the sisters individually. He also touched on things going on in history at the time to help create a realistic and interesting setting. Great photos too. It was also fun to read the book and then watch Chained For Life. So wonderful to see the twins perform. I am encouraging all of my friends to read this incredible book.