Friday, March 29, 2024

did Frank Lloyd Wright design home for Hilton twins

Mark Sloan. Hoaxes, Humbugs and Spectacles. NY: Villard Books, 1990, p. 41—

Born in England in 1908, Violet and Daisy Hilton were perhaps the most successful of all Siamese twins [conjoined twins]…At the height of their extraordinary career the lived in a house in San Antonio, Texas, designed for them by Frank Lloyd Wright.

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Bexar County Historical Commission Oral History Program. James Moore, as interviewed by Esther MacMillan on June 30, 1978, in San Antonio TX—

JM (James Moore): …from the time they [the Hilton sisters] were very young…they built a home out on Vance Jackson Road [in San Antonio].…it was a very expensive house and a very ornate, elborate house, but a very cold house. It was built on a sort of a Japanese or Chinese style, with the curved-up corner, pagoda type. It was built out of blond, light colored brick.

M (Esther MacMillan): …in one reference, it said that the plans came from Frank Lloyd Wright, not that he built the house, but that they got plans…

JM: I don’t know about that.

M: And somebody said that it just didn’t look like Frank Lloyd Wright. …I never saw the house.

JM: I think that was a little bit of…

M: Fluff?

JM: …they didn’t exactly tell a fib, but they sort of glamorized it.


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Sideshow World website at <https://www.sideshowworld.com/>—

When Mary Hilton died, she willed the twins [Violet and Daisy Hilton] to Edith and Myer [Myers]. The Myers relocated to the United States and used part of the twins' fortune to build a luxurious, Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home in San Antonio, Texas. Daisy and Violet spent the majority of the 1920s touring the United States on vaudeville circuits, playing clarinet and saxophone, and singing and dancing. The sisters were a national sensation, counting among their friends a young Bob Hope and Harry Houdini, who allegedly taught them the trick of mentally separating from one another.