Free The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins by Dean Jensen Page B

see the twins. Those radio appearances accounted for much of the traffic that streamed into their tent.” 13
    Daisy and Violet were completely at ease in their radio interviews and invariably charmed their hosts. They were probably no more preoccupied with their mortality than other nine-year-olds, but over and over their interviewers asked how they would feel if one of them should become gravely ill and die. Violet once answered the question this way: “We were lucky enough to come into the world together, and when the time comes, we’ll feel blessed to go out the same way.”
    Through the publicity Myer kept engineering for them over the air-waves and in newspapers, Daisy and Violet became widely known in households across America. But there remained only one place where the public could see them, their performing hall on the midway. Myer absolutely guarded against appearances by the twins in such public places as department stores, restaurants, and movie theaters, or for that matter, even inside the tents of the other midway attractions. Like almost all of the edicts he issued for the twins, his logic wasmotivated by greed. “Why would anyone buy a ticket to see you if they can see you for free at a hotdog stand?” he would ask.
    Myer quickly ascended to the position of prince of the midway. He relished everything about his elevated stature. He savored the looks of envy that appeared on the faces of other show operators when they walked by the United Twins’ theater and saw the swarms of customers waiting for a chance to go inside. In their face-to-face encounters, these presenters of five-legged cows and alligator wrestlers regarded him with deference, but Myer knew they were green with jealousy. Scouts from Barnum & Bailey’s Greatest Show On Earth, as well as other circuses and carnivals, regularly called on Myer, trying to persuade him to show his United Twins with their operations. 14 After listening to their offers, he promptly sent the emissaries on their way.
    The dimes, quarters, and dollar bills that were pushed through the ticket windows for the United Twins’ accumulated to such a staggering sum by the end of the 1917 season that Myer felt like Croesus. He wondered how he was possibly going to be able to spend so much money. He certainly tried.
    After having established a residence in Phoenix the previous year, Myer moved with his blended family to San Antonio, the winter quarters for several large railroad carnivals, among them two or three owned by Clarence Wortham and the Dodson Brothers World’s Fair. Myer made such a display of profligacy that San Antonio’s other citizens of wealth, most of them cattle barons and oilmen, started to wonder if the short, fat newcomer was one of the principal beneficiaries of Andrew Carnegie’s will. Myer’s first major purchase was a small ranch on the city’s outskirts into which he moved the family. Next he acquired three or four houses in San Antonio as investment properties. He also bought a vacation home on Medina Lake, forty miles from the city. In Poteet, he bought an interest in what wasdescribed as “one of the finest horticultural farms in Southwest Texas.” 15 Still he had money left. He invested tens of thousands of dollars in bank and railroad securities. He assembled a domestic staff of maids, handymen, and a chauffeur.
    Daisy and Violet were held in near solitary confinement even during the months when the carnival was off the road and the family was at its San Antonio ranch. Camille Sweeney, daughter of Emmett Sweeney, a prominent local attorney and businessman, may have been the only youngster from San Antonio ever allowed at the ranch, and, as it turned out, she had special entrée. She was goddaughter to Daisy and Violet.
    Camille Sweeney, who years later would marry Frank Rosengren, a screenwriter and playwright, had this girlhood recollection: “No neighborhood children were allowed to visit Daisy and Vi, nor were they allowed to leave