About Me
We were born in Brighton, England on February 5, 1908 and were joined at the hips and buttocks, sharing the same blood circulatory system. Our mother sold us to her employer Mrs. Mary Hilton shortly after our birth, then at a young age we were touring the sideshows under our adopted name. When Mary Hilton died, she willed us to the Myers, who relocated to the United States and used our money to build a luxurious home in San Antonio, Texas. We spent the majority of the 1920s touring the United States on vaudeville circuits, playing clarinet and saxophone, singing and dancing. We were a national sensation, counting among our friends Harry Houdini, who taught us the trick of mentally separating from one another. In 1932 we appeared in the movie Freaks, which dared to pose the question of whether or not conjoined twins can have a love life. Over the coming decade, it would become quite clear that the answer was yes. Violet, the more outgoing of the two of us, had a string of celebrity boyfriends, including the musician Blue Steel, boxer Harry Mason, and guitarist Don Galvan, before becoming engaged in 1933 to bandleader Maurice L. Lambert. Violet and Lambert began a nationwide search for a clerk who would issue a marriage license to one of a pair of siamese twins. Each of the requests - in 21 states - was denied on moral grounds, and lawyers were brought in to argue on Violet's behalf. One New York clerk refused to issue the license because Daisy was not also engaged. After the decline of vaudeville, we went back to Hollywood. In 1950 we appeared in the film Chained for Life as Dorothy and Vivian Hamilton, vaudeville singers. Chained for Life was a failure, banned in many places due to its lurid subject matter. Having spent nearly all of our money and struggling to survive, we opened a hotdog stand, The Hilton Sisters' Snack Bar, in Miami, in 1955, but the business failed in part due to the objections of fellow vendors who didn't like a pair of freaks stealing their business. In 1962 we arranged to appear at a drive-in movie theater in Charlotte, North Carolina. Here we were abandoned, penniless, by an unscrupulous agent. A kind grocery store manager, Charles Reid, hired us to work in his shop, where we checked and bagged groceries for the rest of our lives.
