The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

  Each time she went to visit the nursery, Elzire left five disappointed children behind. “Dr. Dafoe says our other children have chronic colds, and shouldn’t visit the quintuplets,” she said. “But Dr. Dafoe hasn’t made any effort to treat them for these colds. The children often ask to go see the babies. We have to tell them no.” It did not matter how much they begged and cried. The antigerm edict was so strict that Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, and Pauline were not allowed inside the nursery—not even to help their baby sisters celebrate their first Christmas. They could only peep at Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie through the big observation window in the office, where select visitors were permitted between two and three o’clock each afternoon.

  Their efforts to glimpse their sisters made for a heartbreaking sight for Oliva. “Crowds came to see the quintuplets, and the quintuplets’ brothers and sisters stood outside the fence that surrounded the new house with them—wistful little boys and girls, the poor kin of wealthy relatives.”

  The Dionnes placated themselves with the knowledge that the situation was only temporary. “It is only for two years. We had to do it,” Oliva told himself.

  When they did come home, though, what then, Elzire wondered? “In order to house them properly—to build a modern, up-to-date house large enough for us all with special nursery equipment for the little ones—and to provide the same expensive scientific care of which the babies had become accustomed and which we realized they might require indefinitely, Oliva and I knew we must have money.” But their daughters’ fattening trust fund was inaccessible.

  Once again a Chicago man came to the Dionnes’ rescue with a proposition—this time a theater agent by the name of Max Halperin. His scheme centered on a vaudeville tour of Chicago, South Bend, and Detroit. All the “wonder parents” had to do was stand onstage for a minute or two, just introduce themselves and thank the public for its interest in their babies. That was it. No performance, no act. For those few minutes, the papers reported, they’d be paid upward of $1,700 a week. Halperin would book them a presidential suite in Chicago and pay all their expenses. They’d call it a “goodwill tour,” lest anyone consider it in poor taste for the Dionnes to be capitalizing on their extraordinary parenthood. “We just want to show them a real good time and let them see some bright lights,” Max Halperin assured the North Bay Nugget. “This is just a visit,” he told another paper, “nothing commercial about it.”

  The Dionnes screwed up their courage and, together with their business manager and two relatives to act as interpreters, boarded a train for Chicago on February 3, 1935. Grandpa Dionne stayed behind to look after Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, and Pauline. It had the potential to be a grand adventure, for this was the first time Oliva and Elzire had been away from home since their 1925 honeymoon.

  “But as we got nearer and nearer to our destination,” Elzire said, “recurrent attacks of pre-stage fright became more and more violent and I recall saying to my husband: ‘If I’d had only myself to consider no amount of money could have lured me from home onto the stage—any stage anywhere.’ ”

  Oliva knew just how she felt. “I am sure, if it had been possible, we would have left the train and run back home,” he said.

  Their apprehension was unmistakable. As Halperin whisked them from nightclubs to department stores, beauty parlors, the fairgrounds, and the stockyards, Oliva and Elzire tried to smile for the multitudes of cameras that greeted them, but the effort showed. Their eyes often shifted downward from all the attention, making Oliva appear stiff and awkward, Elzire shy.

  “Events followed one another in nightmarish order until we stood blinking on a stage, and would have been glad if the floor had opened and swallowed us,” said Oliva. Chorus girls nudged each other and giggled at them backstage. Elzire held Oliva’s hand, trying to be brave as they waited in the wings, and he wrapped his arm around her waist.

  A film of their daughters flashed up onto a screen. The band played “Baby Your Mother Like She Babied You.” Then an announcer told the audience, “These are not actors, folks. They are just pioneers, frontierspeople. Ladies and gentlemen, the world’s most famous parents!”

  Oliva had memorized a single line. “Mrs. Dionne and myself are glad to have the opportunity to thank the people of the United States for their interest in our babies,” he recited. Elzire stepped up to the microphone and managed to add, “Merci beaucoup et que Dieu vous bénisse.” Thank you very much and may God bless you.

  They delivered the simple greeting five times daily. In between, Elzire played solitaire and hummed hymns while Oliva paced the stuffy dressing room and chain-smoked.

  Audiences cheered at every performance. The spectators, in fact, were the only ones enjoying the Dionnes’ tour. Just two days into the trip, Elzire was homesick for her babies and cried to return to Corbeil. Oliva was slapped with a $1-million lawsuit by Ivan Spear for breach of contract. (The contract Oliva had signed the year before granted Spear the exclusive right to exhibit and exploit the entire Dionne family, and entitled Spear to 70 percent of any profits.) By week’s end, Max Halperin was regretting his promise to pay all the Dionnes’ expenses. The tour, he claimed, was $900 in the red. Halperin blamed it largely on the Dionnes’ appetites. The food bill had reached $456 in four days—though he neglected to mention that was for the entire party of five, not just Oliva and Elzire. He groaned to the press about the quantities of ginger ale and ice cream they consumed, and the thirty-five-cent cigarettes he said Oliva was constantly borrowing. Their fondness for out-of-season strawberries alone was running Halperin seventy-five cents to a dollar a bowl. “They eat them three times a day,” Halperin complained. “They’ve never had lobster before but they ordered it for dinner and baked ice cream at a dollar a throw.”

  The newspapers, likely resentful of Oliva and Elzire’s habit of dodging photographers and wincing at the sight of reporters, followed Halperin’s lead and took to making fun of them. No aspect of their appearance or demeanor was out of bounds. That Little Shrimp There, Yep, That’s Papa Dionne, one headline pronounced. Fascinated by the physical contrast between husband and wife, the article went on to remark that the size 44 dress Elzire admired in a department store “would never be big enough.” Another called Papa a “stooge” and discussed Mama’s underwear purchases. Papers in Canada and the United States alike seized every opportunity to mock the Dionnes’ plain tastes, taking particular delight when Elzire grimaced at her first taste of caviar, then scoffing when the “backwoods” couple ordered six bottles of strawberry soda pop instead of champagne. Dionne Tour a Flop, the Toronto Globe decided. The Pittsburgh Press dubbed the whole affair a “circus tour.”

  No one was more displeased with the trip than Ontario’s premier, Mitchell Hepburn. “It’s nauseating to Canadians, it’s disgusting, revolting, and cheap,” he declared, seemingly unable to find enough adjectives to condemn it.

  Oliva and Elzire insisted that they’d undertaken the stage appearances for the purest of motives. “I want my babies to have the best possible chance in life,” Elzire told a reporter. “We must have more bedrooms in our house. There is to be electricity—a new bathroom. It will cost much money!”

  Premier Hepburn was not convinced. “They are far from destitute,” he told the press. “If two of those babies died where would they be? They would be forgotten in no time,” he asserted. “They have no value except as parents of the Quintuplets.” As he saw it, Oliva and Elzire’s repeated susceptibility to promoters’ schemes, coupled with their new willingness to appear onstage for money, was a glaring danger signal. “You can rest assured these children are not going to be put on exhibition to the detriment of their health. That stands, whatever happens,” the premier said, and he had every intention of putting his full power behind that promise.

  Premier Hepburn made good on his vow to protect Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie immediately. �
�We returned to Corbeil,” Oliva remembered, “and just then a new calamity overwhelmed us.”

  By the first of March, a bill that would make the Dionne Quintuplets special wards of His Majesty the King until their eighteenth birthday was headed to the Ontario Legislature. The Canadian government intended to seize custody of the girls until adulthood—without their parents’ consent.

  The news left Oliva and Elzire reeling. “Elzire could not speak,” Oliva recalled. “I could not speak. The children gathered around us wondering what had happened. ‘Is anything wrong?’ they asked. ‘Is it les petites?’

  “We could not answer them. This seemed the end. We had been given five wonder children; but because they were wonder children they had been taken from us.”

  The Dionnes had hardly dared to voice objections to the first guardianship arrangement with the Red Cross. In March of 1935, they broke their silence. For the first time, Oliva Dionne granted extensive interviews with the press, protesting the government’s intrusion into his family in no uncertain terms. “They can do that in Russia,” he told the Toronto Star, “but they can’t do that here.” To the Dionnes, the premier’s insistence that their babies’ health must be legally safeguarded was ludicrous, for Oliva and Elzire were confident their daughters had already been blessed with the ultimate protection. “Do you think the quintuplets could have lived if it had not been God’s will?” Oliva challenged. “No doctors or nurses on earth could have saved them but for that.” Furthermore, he told the press, God had singled them out as parents for these babies; no man-made edict had the authority to overrule that.

  When the government did not budge, the Dionnes tried a compromise, conceding that the Dafoe Hospital was the best place for their babies for the time being. If they retained their rights as parents, they would not remove their daughters from the hospital. “I know that we are not the smartest or most worldly wise of people,” Oliva said, “but as parents we have a certain responsibility to all our children. It is our duty to give them all a good education, and equal advantage, and the parental care they have a right to.”

  Premier Hepburn remained unmoved. On March 8, the bill went before the legislature for its first reading. The bill designated the minister of public welfare of Ontario, David Croll, as the babies’ “Special Guardian.” Oliva would be recognized as his daughters’ “natural guardian,” but all decision-making power rested with Croll and a board to be appointed by the government.

  Oliva vehemently opposed the welfare minister, for David Croll seemed to believe that the Dionnes saw nothing but dollar signs when they looked at their daughters. According to Oliva, Croll had instructed him “to go back to my farm and forget about the babies until they are eighteen, and then we would have a million dollars.” But the core of the issue was not money, Oliva insisted—it was the sanctity of his family as a whole. All of his children should have the same opportunities and upbringing, Oliva said, flatly refusing to accept Croll’s promise of wealth as a substitute for allowing half of his children to be raised as “state babies.”

  “All we want is a chance to prove that we can raise our babies,” Elzire echoed. “We’ve never had a chance to show just what we can do. The babies were taken away from us, and now we are like two separate families, and if this bill passes the government we will always be two separate families.”

  To Croll, it was incomprehensible that anyone could oppose an act that had precisely one purpose: “to prevent professional, quick-talking exploiters and so-called impresarios from exhibiting these children in penny arcades.

  “These children are our own royal family,” he argued as the bill was debated during its second reading before the legislature. “To ballyhoo them under a tent would be an insult to the babies and their parents. We want to make it possible for them to lead normal lives at home with their brothers, sisters and parents.”

  His reasoning sounded contradictory, for granting custody of Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie to the government would almost certainly widen their separation from their family, but the welfare minister’s point was that a guardianship act would put an end once and for all to Ivan Spear and his million-dollar lawsuit, along with anyone else who might try to follow in Spear’s footsteps. “We don’t want them exhibited between some sword-swallower and bearded woman on the Chicago midway,” the premier reiterated.

  That was the one element everyone from Oliva and Elzire Dionne to Premier Hepburn could agree on. Some more conservative members of Parliament, however, thought Hepburn’s solution overstepped the government’s bounds. “You must protect the father and mother as well as the children,” Ontario’s former attorney general insisted. “I never saw such drastic legislation.”

  “Extreme cases require extreme measures,” Premier Hepburn replied. If he were Mr. Dionne, Hepburn said, he would welcome the bill’s passage.

  “Who would like to have their children taken away?” Oliva retorted in the press. “All other Canadians look after their children, why can’t I?”

  No one opposed the bill more strongly than Elzire Dionne. The day before the vote she announced, “If the bill goes through, I’ll go to the hospital and take my babies myself, even if I have to die on the spot.”

  The animosity between the two sides was palpable from Toronto to Corbeil. Again and again, Nurse Leroux bemoaned in her diary the “hateful” undercurrents flowing through the nursery. The two sides seemed to be making no attempt to understand each other. Louise de Kiriline remembered hearing one of her fellow nurses remark, “I often wonder if it would not, after all, have been fairer to the babies to have left them alone when they did not want to breathe.”

  In spite of “bitter controversy,” the bill moved through the legislature with astonishing momentum. “The Dionne quintuplets nearly caused a riot on the floor of the Ontario Legislature today,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on March 15, the day of the vote. Nevertheless, the Dionne Quintuplet Guardianship Act passed. Legally speaking, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie belonged to the government of Ontario until they turned eighteen.

  Oliva and Elzire took immediate action. In protest, they packed their bags and marched across the street to the Dafoe Hospital, determined to show that no act of Parliament had the power to keep them from their children.

  “What a mess,” Nurse Leroux lamented to her diary. “The Dionnes moved in today. He & She came over with trunks and walked in and sat down.”

  Though the standoff did not breach the nursery itself, its nine-month-old occupants were not immune to the incredible tension inside the hospital. “The trouble is that all this emotional upset is a terrible strain on us and the babies sense it and become difficult to handle,” wrote Nurse Leroux.

  Persuaded by the “eloquence” of a provincial police constable, Oliva and Elzire consented to return home two hours later. The crisis had come to an abrupt halt, but its reverberations would echo through the nursery for years to come.

  Everyone in the world wanted nothing less than the best for the Dionne Quintuplets. Their lives had all the makings of a real-life fairy tale, if only the people most devoted to Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie could have agreed what “best” meant. On one side stood Oliva and Elzire Dionne. On the other, Dr. Dafoe, the nurses, and the board of guardians. Though Oliva himself had a seat on the board, its other three members—Dafoe, Welfare Minister Croll, and Joseph Valin, a respected French Canadian judge from North Bay—outvoted him so consistently that Oliva soon gave up attending the meetings at all.

  As a result, Dr. Dafoe enjoyed complete control of daily life in the nursery. Or so it appeared to the public. For all his growing fame as a miracle worker, Dafoe was in truth an “extraordinarily adequate” physician, and he recognized how small a role his skill had played in his five most famous patients’ survival. “You know it is only just good luck that the babies are alive,” he’d told Nurse de Kiriline. “
I mean—don’t let’s kid ourselves….”

  In reality, Dr. Dafoe had a trio of experts prescribing his every move. Dr. Alan Brown of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, “the continent’s best-known baby doctor,” was the ultimate authority on the babies’ health. Dr. William Blatz, director of the University of Toronto’s Institute of Child Study, oversaw their mental and emotional development. For daily advice on less consequential issues, Dafoe telephoned his brother, Dr. William Dafoe. Armed with their recommendations, he instructed his staff.

  And so it fell to the nurses to enact the experts’ directions on a day-to-day basis. While Dr. Will’s and Dr. Brown’s instructions dictated what to do for the children, Dr. Blatz’s ideas were perhaps most influential, for he told them how to do it. How to act and how to speak every minute of the day as they fed, dressed, and bathed their little charges. “To the whole world these children represent childhood,” Dr. Blatz said. “They need protection, they command the affection and sympathy of the multitude.”

  For starters, “bickering or misunderstanding” between those in charge was not permitted anywhere within earshot of the nursery. Such disruptions made the little girls “peevish and petulant,” even as infants. “Now there is the strictest rule that only smiles are allowed around the children,” Dr. Dafoe said. He prided himself on “not only the physical hygiene but the moral hygiene of our ideal nursery.”

  No less than perfect serenity and ironclad firmness was expected of the nurses. It was a daunting combination to pull off. “It is necessary to control even your voice, your expression with a baby. That’s not easy,” one of them admitted. “Sometimes you forget. But you ought never to scowl and say sharply, ‘Émilie, don’t do that!’ You can use those very words, only speak them firmly, not crossly.”