Exploitation, Fame, and Tragedy: The Story of Violet and Daisy Hilton

Nov 26, 2024
7 min read

The Hilton twins in swimwear, conjoined at the hip, pose on a ship deck. A black-and-white photo depicts them with a man. Text: Exploitation, Fame.

On a brisk day in 1934, Violet Hilton, a poised young woman with dreams of marriage, walked into a New York marriage licence bureau hand-in-hand with her fiancé, Maurice Lambert. On her left stood her ever-present conjoined twin sister, Daisy. Their entry caused a commotion, drawing typists and clerks out of their offices to gawk at this unusual trio. However, the stir quickly turned to rejection when a city official, flustered and unprepared for such an unprecedented situation, refused Violet's request to marry. The reason? The official deemed the union akin to bigamy. Newspapers the next day mocked the drama, with one headline quipping, "The lawyers figured out that three-party honeymoons are no good." For Violet and Daisy Hilton, this public denial was only one of many challenges they faced in a life that veered between the extraordinary and the deeply tragic.

Born into Exploitation

The story of Violet and Daisy Hilton begins in Brighton, England, where they were born on 5 February 1908 to an unmarried barmaid, Kate Skinner. The twins were pygopagus conjoined twins, connected back-to-back at the lower spine. They shared a circulatory system but no vital organs, and while separation surgery might have been possible, the medical risks in 1908 were deemed too high. Their very existence defied the odds: conjoined twins were rare, and their survival past infancy even rarer. Yet from the moment of their birth, their lives were shaped not by love or care but by exploitation and cruelty. Kate Skinner viewed her daughters as a curse, a divine punishment for having conceived them out of wedlock. Rejecting the twins, she sold them to her employer, Mary Hilton, a midwife and pub owner, who saw in them not children but a business opportunity. Hilton claimed ownership over Violet and Daisy in exchange for money and immediately began displaying them to paying customers in the backroom of her pub. The girls, adorned in frilly outfits, were treated as curiosities, with patrons charged to see the "join" or to buy postcards of the twins as souvenirs.

The twins grew up in an environment of constant objectification. They called Hilton "Auntie," but there was no familial affection. Their earliest memories were of strangers lifting their clothes and the pervasive scent of ale in Hilton's pub. By the time they were toddlers, Hilton took the girls on the road, displaying them at fairs and circuses. Physical and emotional abuse became part of their daily reality, with punishment meted out harshly if they cried or resisted.

Conjoined twins in fur coats and hats smiling to the camera — After their birth, a doctor was summoned who established the girls were joined back to back at their lower spines but shared no major organs

Training and the Road to Vaudeville

By age five, Violet and Daisy were more than just static exhibits. Recognising that performing would draw larger crowds, Hilton trained the girls in music and dance. Violet became proficient at the violin, while Daisy conducted. Their stage personas were carefully crafted to attract attention and pity, and the twins soon gained international attention, touring Europe and Australia. In 1915, Hilton tried to bring them to the United States, but immigration officials initially refused entry, citing the twins' "medical unfitness." Undeterred, Hilton orchestrated a media campaign that pressured officials to admit the twins. Once in America, their lives took another dark turn. Following Hilton's death in 1919, Violet and Daisy became the wards of Hilton's daughter, Edith, and her husband, Myer Myers, a balloon salesman with grand ambitions. Myers quickly took control of the twins' lives, exploiting their talents to catapult them onto the vaudeville stage.

By the mid-1920s, Violet and Daisy were the highest-paid vaudeville act in America, earning $5,000 a week for 44 weeks annually on the Orpheum Circuit, equivalent to roughly $91,000 a week in today's money. They performed alongside Bob Hope and Charlie Chaplin. None of the money was theirs. Myers kept every penny, controlling their movements, their friendships, and their correspondence. They were not allowed to speak to anyone Myers hadn't approved. "We were slaves," Daisy later said. Their contemporary Grace McDaniels, who performed in the same vaudeville circuits, described the sideshow world as providing "a place where difference wasn't hidden but became part of a shared family." Violet and Daisy had none of that protection.

Harry Houdini and the Fight for Freedom

The twins' friendship with Harry Houdini proved to be the turning point of their lives. Houdini, fascinated by the sisters, taught them techniques for what he called "mental separation," the ability to give themselves psychological privacy from each other even when they couldn't have physical privacy. He also recognised that their financial arrangement with Myers was a form of slavery and strongly advised them to pursue legal emancipation. Houdini died on Halloween night, 1926, before he could help them achieve that goal. But five years after his death, his advice was finally acted on.

Conjoined twins in identical dresses holding one hand up — American immigration inspector John J. Conner administers an oath to British conjoined twins Violet Hilton (center) and Daisy Hilton, in matching flower-print dresses, who are seeking American citizenship, in Chicago, Ill., late 1920s or early 1930s.

In 1931, a Texas court ruled in the twins' favour, awarding them $99,000 in a landmark decision that emancipated them from Myers's guardianship and established them as legal persons with control over their own affairs. The Indianapolis Times headline read: "Verdict Frees Siamese Twins From Bondage." Standing outside the courthouse, they told reporters: "It is so wonderful to be free to go wherever we please, choose our own friends, and appear in public as humans rather than as freaks." They spent most of the $99,000 within a few years. The rigid financial structure Myers had imposed, whatever its cruelties, had at least kept them solvent. On their own for the first time in their lives, neither twin had any experience managing money.

Hollywood: Freaks and Chained for Life

In 1932, Violet and Daisy appeared in Freaks, a film directed by Tod Browning, whose previous picture had been Dracula. Browning had himself run away from home at 16 to work in a circus and retained a genuine affinity for sideshow performers. Rather than cast able-bodied actors in disability makeup, he filled the film with real performers: Johnny Eck the half-boy, Schlitzie the pinhead, Prince Randian the living torso, and at the centre of it all, Violet and Daisy Hilton. The film was made for MGM at the request of studio executive Irving Thalberg, who wanted to compete with Universal's monster movies. The budget was significant. The intentions were, by some accounts, progressive. The results were catastrophic for everyone involved.

MGM employees objected to sharing the studio cafeteria with the film's performers. A separate cafeteria was set up. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was working as a screenwriter for MGM at the time, came across the Hilton sisters ordering lunch in the regular cafeteria and fled the building. The original cut of Freaks ran 90 minutes. After test screenings in which audience members reportedly ran out of the theatre and one woman threatened to sue MGM claiming the film had caused her a miscarriage, MGM cut nearly 30 minutes from it and reedited the ending. The version that exists today runs 64 minutes. The original footage is believed lost.

The film was released and immediately pulled from circulation. It was banned in Great Britain for decades. Browning's career was effectively destroyed by it. MGM was so embarrassed that versions of the film distributed without their involvement don't carry the MGM lion logo. The rights were later sold to exploitation filmmaker Dwain Esper, who toured it under various titles including Forbidden Love, The Monster Show, and Nature's Mistake. It wasn't until midnight cinema culture of the 1960s that Freaks was critically reexamined and eventually recognised as a work of genuine moral complexity, now considered a cult classic and a landmark of disability representation in film.

In 1952, the twins made a second film, Chained for Life, an exploitation film loosely based on their own lives in which one twin is accused of murder. It was poorly received but has since attracted renewed attention as a document of the sisters' lives.

A group of official looking people. One in a wedding dress. — Daisy Hilton gets married in Dallas on July 29, 1936. Her conjoined twin Violet is on the right.

Marriage, Publicity, and the Question of Privacy

Despite achieving legal freedom, the twins' personal lives remained complicated by their physical reality and by public prurience about it. Violet's attempt to marry Maurice Lambert in 1934 was blocked in New York. Two years later, she finally obtained a marriage licence. Her husband, actor James Moore, was gay, and the wedding was widely understood to be a publicity stunt arranged by their management. At the time of the ceremony, Daisy was visibly pregnant. She gave birth to a son, who was placed for adoption. Moore sought an annulment within months, though the marriage remained legally on record for a decade. Daisy married dancer Buddy Sawyer in 1941. That marriage lasted ten days.

Conjoined twins posing for the camera, one of which is being kissed. — There was no shortage of men unfazed by the thought of marrying conjoined twins, although some, like Violet’s would-be husband Maurice Lambert, eventually tired of being denied official permission

The twins had long claimed, in interviews, that Harry Houdini had taught them to "mentally separate" from each other, allowing one twin to maintain psychological privacy while the other was intimate with a partner. Whether or not this was literally true, it was the explanation they offered publicly for how their romantic lives were possible. The press rarely left the subject alone.

Abandoned and Forgotten

Their final years were defined by a steady decline in fortunes. By the late 1950s, vaudeville was dead, their film career had stalled, and the twins were making personal appearances at drive-in theatres screening their two films as a double bill. In 1961, at a drive-in in Charlotte, North Carolina, their tour manager abandoned them without warning, leaving them stranded with no money, no transport, and no way to get home. Rather than trying to return to show business, they stayed in Charlotte. They approached a local supermarket owner and offered to work for one combined salary. He hired them at two full salaries and quietly designed a two-person cashier station so that customers couldn't tell they were conjoined. The local church found them a small two-bedroom home. They lived quietly, went to church, and largely disappeared from public view.

On 4 January 1969, they failed to turn up for work. When colleagues couldn't reach them by telephone, police were called. The twins were found dead at home, victims of the Hong Kong flu that had swept the world that winter. According to the autopsy, Daisy died first. Violet, connected to her by their shared circulatory system, died between two and four days later. She had not called for help. She had stayed with her sister. They were 60 years old.

They're buried in Forest Lawn West Cemetery in Charlotte, under a headstone that reads: "Beloved Entertainers." It's a more generous epitaph than most of the industry that made money from them ever deserved.