Born too soon..(another set of conjoined twins)

[SoCalDem]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/articles/2005/01/10/siamese_feature.shtml

Daisy and Violet Hilton were born in Brighton, Easy Sussex, England on February 5, 1908 to a young, unwed barmaid, Kate Skinner. They were "adopted" by their mother's boss and midwife, Mary Hilton. The sisters were pyopagus twins - conjoined at the hips and buttocks. They shared blood circulation and were fused at the pelvis but shared no major organs. Soon after acquiring the twins, Mary Hilton was exhibiting them all over the United States and Europe. They were required to call her "Auntie Lou" and her current husband "Sir". Along with her sixth and final husband, Meyer Meyers, Mary Hilton kept the twins concealed from public view and gave them rigorous training in singing, dancing, piano, violin, clarinet and saxophone. They lived with the Meyerses in a mansion in San Antonio, Texas until the early 1930s.

The twins in 'Chained for Life', 1950. (from The Missing Link)Details of the sisters' early lives are sketchy, since "true life" pamphlets handed out at their shows presented a false childhood. However, according to the sisters' autobiography, written in 1942, Mary Hilton's successive husbands were physically abusive. (Mannix describes the Hilton sisters as happy, well-adjusted women, while Bogdan paints their early lives as a horrific cycle of abuse and exploitation. The truth is probably somewhere in between.) When Mary died, her husband and daughter took over the sisters' act. It was not until 1931, when the sisters filed a lawsuit against their management, that they were awarded independence. They left the sideshow circuit, which they hated, and joined Vaudeville, with a show called The Hilton Sisters' Revue.

In 1932 the twins appeared as themselves in the movie Freaks, which dared to pose the question of whether or not conjoined twins can have a love life. In the case of the Hilton sisters, the answer was yes - they were notorious for their many affairs and allegedly had a strong desire to outdo one another in the area of dating. Because the sisters shared sensations, as suggested by the film, they developed an ability to "separate" themselves from one another mentally. Daisy also dyed her hair blonde because she disliked being called by her sister's name.

from www.seatopia.com Each of the sisters was married separately, although they bore no children and each marriage lasted only a short time. Violet married James Walker Moore at the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas in 1936. The "wedding" followed a series of applications for marriage licenses (each to a different man) in 21 different states. Each application was rejected for reasons of morality of public decency, and each rejection was heavily publicized. Daisy Hilton married dancer Harold Estep (stage name Buddy Sawyer) in Buffalo, New York in 1941. Their marriage lasted two weeks.

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These two sisters would have led very different lives had they not been born in 1908..

I was googling to see how many sets of conjoined twins there have been in Utah (seems like a lot recenly)..and ran across these women.. I remember seeing them in the movie they were in, but truthfully, I did not think they were really conjoined (from what I saw in the movie)..

How incredibly simple it would be to separate them today..and how sad that they never had the chance to live individual lives..

I fear for the two little girls separated today.. That family has a rough life ahead of them..and espeically those two little girls:cry: