The sentimental 'Stuck On You' is not the first movie about co-joined twins. Stephen Dixon recalls the true story of the Hilton Sisters who prospered in the Vaudeville era.
Organisations representing performers with disabilities very properly campaign for the occasional inclusion on television and in films of actors who are wheelchair-users, or otherwise physically challenged - a proportional reflection of the real world.
Some take it further, suggesting that a character with an impairment should be played by an actor in the same situation. But could a performer in a plight similar to Christy Brown's have played him as Oscar-winningly well as Daniel Day-Lewis did in My Left Foot? Should actors cast as Long John Silver be lacking in the leg department? Would Dame Judi Dench have portrayed Iris Murdoch's tragic dementia so movingly had she herself been afflicted by Alzheimer's?
The subject is being aired again as a response to Stuck on You, now on general release, the Farrelly brothers' feeble comedy starring Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon as twins joined at the waist. Bobby and Peter Farrelly, famous for trash wallows such as Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary, have come over all caring and restrained, and the less than side-splitting (sorry) Stuck on You has been mainly criticised, here and in the States, for not being gross enough.
The New York Times said: "They have to compete with a legacy of their own bad taste, which they compensate for with a quality that some may find even more repellent - sentimentality." TV Guide's Movieguide was on the button: "Here the message - it's not nice to ridicule, mistreat or ignore people just because they're different - verges on the oppressive; more of the Farrellys' trademark over-the-top comedy would have lightened the load."
Naturally - or, indeed, unnaturally - the Farrellys didn't obtain the services of real-life co-joined twins for their movie. Kinnear and Damon do not resemble each other even slightly, and Kinnear looks ten years older (ridiculously explained away by Damon having most of the joint liver, so Kinnear ages faster). The plot involves one twin being shy and humble and the other an ebullient actor with ambitions to be a Hollywood star. Perhaps the fatal failure of a recent attempt to separate co-joined twins meant that Hollywood's masters of bad taste had to soft-pedal on this one.
Had the Farrellys been working in an earlier era, and looked for performers who were actually co-joined, they might have changed the sex of the twins and cast vaudeville bill-toppers Daisy and Violet Hilton as their leading characters. For as well as being genuine Siamese twins (as they were called then) Daisy and Violet could act, sing, dance and play various musical instruments - and pretty good they were, too, by any standards. In Tod Browning's classic circus melodrama Freaks (1932) they act the rest of the strangely-shaped sideshow performers off the screen, and in 1951 they starred in their own cheap and not-too-cheerful movie, Chained for Life, which (unlike Stuck on You) actually attempted to confront a far-fetched but obvious philosophical conundrum that might conceivably involve co-joined twins - one impetuously shoots a faithless lover and pleads guilty to murder, resulting in an intriguing legal predicament. Set mostly in a vaudeville theatre, Chained for Life contains a lasting record of the Hiltons' stage act - they were excellent close-harmony singers - and other strange variety turns, including a man tap-dancing while juggling dinner plates.
Daisy and Violet were born in Brighton in 1908 to an unmarried barmaid, Kate Skinner, who, appalled, immediately gave the twins to Mary Hilton, the amateur midwife who delivered them. Hilton realised the girls could be a meal ticket and took them on the road when they were three years old, playing music halls, fairgrounds and freak shows. The rest of the time they were hidden away. In their autobiography, Intimate Lives and Loves of the Hilton Sisters (1951) they wrote: "We were very knowing and we developed opinions, although we were treated like animals, living in a cage. We were kept in one room, regularly whipped, scolded and trained. We were never permitted to play with other children."
Although it was the most dreadful kind of exploitation, there were compensations: their cruel taskmistress taught them to sing and dance, which meant that later they were able to use these skills to make a successful career (although, of course, their physical oddity was always the main attraction) rather than simply sit passively in a circus sideshow to be gawked at like other "Wonders of Nature".
When Mrs Hilton died in the mid-1920s she willed the twins to her daughter and son-in-law, and the abuse continued. By the time they were 17 they were touring America's Loew and Orpheum vaudeville circuits, earning thousands of dollars a week - of which they saw almost nothing. When they were no longer minors, the girls sued their guardians and after one of the most sensational trials of its day all contracts were dissolved and they were awarded $100,000.
Free at last, Daisy and Violet commendably decided to blow the lot on partying. They continued to top variety bills and also hit the nightclub scene; attractive, charming, wealthy and very unusual, each had numerous lovers and were married and divorced. When it came to sex, Violet said: "Sometimes I quit paying attention. Sometimes I read or take a nap. We've learned not to know what the other is doing unless it's our business to know it."
But showman Anton LaVey, who worked with them, doubted this: "I had the strong impression that the girls shared mutual sensations. I think they were jealous of each other's husband; if one girl was having sexual relations, her sister might be enjoying it more than she did. They were rivals in everything and completely dependent on each other."
Along with many other old-time stars, their fortunes declined as vaudeville faded into history, and in the 1960s they opened the Hilton Sisters Snack Bar in Miami. When that went bust they moved to a trailer park in Charlotte, North Carolina, and got jobs in a supermarket. In January, 1969, the 61-year-old sisters failed to report for work and their bodies were found on the floor by police who broke into the trailer - united in death as they had been in life. What, I wonder, would the tough and resilient twins have made of the sentimental mess that is Stuck on You?
