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| (The Gazette. February 4, 1929) |
Daisy and Violet Hilton drew 39 pairs of
twins to the Graham Theatre in Washington, Iowa, on September 1930.
It
was a good promotion. Daisy and Violet knew how to draw a crowd. They’d been
doing it since they were children.
The
girls were 22 when they came to Iowa. They’d worked some of the biggest
vaudeville circuits in the country. A young Bob Hope had even toured on their
bill.
They
earned thousands of dollars a week at the height of their career, but had
little say over where the money went.
Daisy
and Violet were born in Brighton, England, on February 5, 1908, joined at the
lower back. Their birth mother, Kate Skinner, was a barmaid. Mary Hilton, a
midwife and pub owner, took custody of the babies and gave them her name.
She
put the girls on display and took them through Europe. After Mary died, her
daughter Edith and Edith’s husband, Meyer Rothbaum, took over. Rothbaum pushed
the act into American vaudeville. The sisters learned music, dance, and how to
keep an audience watching after its first look.
That
took work. Daisy and Violet played the saxophone and clarinet, sang duets, and
danced with other performers. In 1926, Bob Hope and his partner George Byrne
joined them onstage. The sisters were the headliners.
The act followed a pattern. Daisy and Violet performed; other people asked how they lived. Could they disagree? Did they have separate friends? What happens if one wanted to go somewhere, and the other didn’t?
The
sisters had answers, though the questions must have grown old. They could swim,
play tennis and golf, and drive a car. They had different tastes. They were two
women who’d spent their lives learning how to get along at close quarters.
Their
managers had a much easier question to answer: who got paid?
In
January 1931, a few months after the Iowa visit, that question reached a San
Antonio courtroom. Daisy and Violet hired attorney Martin Arnold and brought a
suit against Meyer and Edith Rothbaum. They wanted control of their work and an
accounting of the money it had earned.
A
1927 contract came up during the hearing. The sisters had played 44 weeks on
the Keith-Orpheum circuit at $3,000 a week. That was $132,000 before
commissions and expenses, when most Americans would see nothing close to that
sum.
Arnold
asked Rothbaum what had happened to the money. He said an agent received 10
percent for arranging the contract. Daisy and Violet didn’t want the rest
because everything they needed had been provided for. He’d kept the rest of the
money in the family, buying stocks or bonds with some of it.
That
may have sounded reasonable to Rothbaum, but the girls felt differently.
Daisy
and Violet said they’d received food and clothes, but hadn’t been allowed to
handle their earnings. One newspaper account said they’d never received some
$200,000 brought in by their vaudeville work.
Their
lawsuit asked where the money and property had gone.
Money
was only part of it. The sisters said Rothbaum had controlled their lives and
held them in bondage. They challenged a ten-year contract for their services,
saying they hadn’t understood what they were signing.
The
case had all the ingredients of a show: famous performers, an enormous fortune,
accusations against the couple who’d raised them. When Daisy and Violet
testified, the spectators applauded.
The
case ended that spring. The ten-year contract was canceled. Rothbaum could no
longer run their careers.
Daisy
and Violet received $80,000 in cash and bonds. They also received their plays,
costumes, stage settings, and other property valued at $20,000.
Newspapers
called it a $100,000 settlement.
The
twins went back to work at $1,000 a week, down from the $3,000 they’d made in
the past. The business was getting tougher, too. Talking pictures were pulling
customers into theaters and pushing live acts off the bill.
Daisy
and Violet kept touring. They also made more room for their separate
personalities. They wore different clothes and changed their hair. One could be
in the mood for music while the other wanted to do something else. They’d
always had separate minds; now they could make more of their own choices.
The
public still wanted a look.
In
1932, the sisters appeared in Tod Browning’s film Freaks. The movie
introduced them to another audience, but it sold much the same curiosity that
had followed them since childhood.
Their
romances brought more headlines.
Violet
tried to marry bandleader Maurice Lambert, only to run into officials unwilling
to issue a license. She married performer James Moore in a highly publicized
ceremony in 1936. Daisy married dancer Harold Estep, who performed as Buddy
Sawyer, in 1941. That marriage lasted only days.
The
sisters wrote about their lives in The Lives and Loves of the Hilton
Sisters, published in 1942. They kept finding stages through the 1940s,
though the bookings got smaller. They made another film and tried other ways to
earn a living.
Back
in Iowa in 1930, none of that was visible from the seats at the Graham Theatre.
The audience saw two seasoned performers. Local twins met them, posed with
them, and carried their photographs home.
Daisy
and Violet packed up and went to the next engagement. Then, a few months later,
they walked into court to ask for what most working performers take for
granted: the right to know what they’d earned and decide what to do with it.
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