by Sarah Miller
Discipline was gentle, yet absolute. From infancy Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were trained to eat, sleep, take their baths, and swallow their daily doses of cod-liver oil without the slightest fuss, and no exceptions. “The babies were never picked up after lights were out,” Nurse de Kiriline boasted of the nighttime routine. “There was no walking the floor with them at any time to induce them to sleep. There was no rocking to and fro of a disturbed baby, they were never put to sleep in our arms. If any one of them did not fall asleep at once or woke up to cry, the cause of the discomfort or the disquietude was carefully ascertained and eliminated.”
Despite their devotion to such strict routines, the nurses were not coldhearted. Rather, they had been tasked with creating “a kind of gold standard of childhood and child care.” With the most up-to-date scientific equipment, knowledge, and methods available to them, with twenty-four-hour control and no outside interference, every nurse in the Dafoe Hospital faced expectations that amounted to an infant utopia. “There, surrounded by a retinue of trusty guards and servants, [the Dionnes] have been shut away from the dangers, diseases and debasements of this imperfect world,” wrote the New York Times of the hospital. Behind its gates, the babies’ “starched and expert nurses” were “watching and presumably improving every curl of their hair, every tone of their voices.”
Remarkably, the staff appeared undaunted by such lofty goals. Indeed, they were committed to Dr. Blatz’s belief “that the care and effort that is expended on a childhood returns dividends in the form of a happily adjusted adult,” and had every intention of giving Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie the best possible start in life.
Not even the tiniest seed of a bad habit was allowed to take root. No thumb-sucking. No picky eating. No crying for attention. When the babies discovered the ticklish places between their legs, their pajama sleeves were tied to the bars of their cribs to keep their own curious fingers from straying into their diapers while they were supposed to be sleeping.
The staff had a profound horror of bad habits. Once, Nurse de Kiriline admitted, she nearly gave in to the temptation of putting Annette’s favorite toy into the crib with her. “Then all at once the enormity of what I had been about to do struck me. In my thoughtless desire to please Annette, I had nearly committed the sin of starting her on the path of an undesirable habit—to go to bed with toys.” For de Kiriline, the greatest shock was how easy it was to succumb to such a mistake, “deftly disguised into an act of loving tenderness, if one relaxes into thoughtless indulgence of a momentary desire.”
This constant vigilance, even with the noblest of intentions, was inevitably exhausting. Advocates claimed that although the nurses’ work was unrelenting, requiring the sort of round-the-clock devotion more typical of nuns in a convent, they never uttered the words sacrifice or complaint.
“The work was made easy by the sweet nature of the children,” one of the staff confirmed. “I adore these children. I was taken by them the first moment I saw them and I love them with all my heart.”
Critics took a less rosy view of the staff’s situation. “The hospital is a sanitary glass cage for the babies and for the nurses it has become almost a prison,” one writer concluded, with ample reason.
“We had to be cautious who we spoke to,” a nurse remembered. “If we went out through those crowds, if anyone talked to you, you just ignored them. They’d question you about the Quints and quote you, and it would get to the newspapers….When we went out of the grounds, our name was put down and the time we left the grounds. And when we came back the time was logged by the guards. And they’d put down any visitors to your residence: the time they came, the time they left, and how many and who they were….We were under constant pressure from the family, the board of guardians, the public—everybody.”
Tension between the staff and the Dionne family in particular was ever-present. Oliva and Elzire had not spoken to Dr. Dafoe since the first guardianship arrangement was passed. The doctor, in turn, was “no longer friendly,” according to Oliva. “He has the stiff neck when he drives past to the hospital,” Oliva said.
Nurse de Kiriline, who was largely responsible for touching off Oliva and Elzire’s earliest hostility toward the medical staff, was still incapable of making any allowances for their feelings. As long as Louise de Kiriline was at the helm, the children’s health came before their parents’ wishes, regardless of the consequences. In May of 1935, she demonstrated that stance all too vividly.
Just four days before the babies’ first birthday, Elzire’s cousins from Montreal paid a visit. After dinner, they asked to see their five famous relatives. It was not visiting hour, but Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were napping in their carriages on the hospital’s little front porch. Elzire led her guests up the front walk, rather than toward the office door on the side of the building.
When she smiled up at Nurse de Kiriline, who had come out onto the porch, the nurse warned, “Don’t you come up those steps.”
Elzire stopped.
“But we only meant to take a little peek,” one of the cousins protested. “See, they are asleep, and the wind is blowing away from them. Surely there can be no harm; and we have come so far.”
“Don’t come up those steps,” Nurse de Kiriline repeated. Rules were rules. Elzire and Oliva were permitted at any time, but not the cousins. They must wait until the visiting hour and look through the observation window in the office.
The encounter left Elzire stunned and saddened. “I am glad that my babies, my five little ones, are safely at their first birthday, yes,” she told a reporter the day her daughters turned one. “But I want them myself, to feel that I am their mother, and have some say about what is done for them. I would keep them in the hospital, certainly, but with people there who would smile at me when I entered, and not turn coldly away, and who would say ‘how do you do,’ and not act as these people there now do. They won’t even look at me. I am treated worse than a stranger.”
This “brusque drama” proved the undoing of Nurse de Kiriline. Just one day short of a year as head nurse to the Dionne Quintuplets, the indomitable Louise de Kiriline permanently stepped down from her post. If Oliva and Elzire had taken such a strong dislike to her, she believed, there could be no peace in the nursery unless she left.
Not until years later would Nurse de Kiriline recognize the true blunder at the root of the Dionnes’ hostility toward the entire staff. “They felt that they had been ousted and, of course, they were,” she admitted. “Mind you, my concern there, of course, was just to keep the babies alive—just to do that. Now, I think, I would take much more time with the parents—realize much more their feelings….I really was quite brusque.”
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Cécile Lamoureux took over for Nurse de Kiriline on June 1, 1935. “She is very excitable and so excites the babies very easily,” Yvonne Leroux noted in her diary. That excitement came with an agreeable trade-off, for head nurse Lamoureux had made a wise move in her opening relations with the Dionne family. “I made a conscious effort to invite, as warmly as possible, Mme. Dionne, so that the overwhelming ostracism that she must have felt would be forgotten.”
It worked. Within a matter of days, Elzire and Oliva were visiting the nursery more often and behaving more pleasantly toward the staff. “Mrs. Dionne is a charming woman,” Nurse Lamoureux decided. Yet she also recognized that there was more to the shy young farmwife than met the eye. She saw in Mrs. Dionne a woman who knew “how to keep smiling in the face of tomorrow’s uncertainty. One who prepares without public display the revenge she will have for her children.”
Outside the hospital gates, the world was becoming less and less pleasant for Oliva and Elzire. The Dionnes were being battered by bad publicity. “As a burnt child dreads the fire,” Elzire later said of reporters, “we dreaded to see them coming.” “They tell lies abou
t us,” Oliva said. “Everyone believes the other side.” Only the North Bay Nugget made a continual effort to give equal weight to the Dionnes’ side of the story and present their point of view accurately and respectfully. In return for such courtesy, Oliva Dionne favored the Nugget with exclusive interviews.
Beyond North Bay, however, backhanded compliments were the best Oliva and Elzire could hope for as their babies’ fame spread through newspapers and magazines around the world. The Dionne family was routinely praised for its ancestral hardiness and “unspoiled, clean-bred stock.” If not for these qualities, Dafoe and de Kiriline maintained, no amount of doctoring could have saved the quintuplets. Pure, simple, and strong, the articles said—all words that should have been complimentary but instead came off as subtly condescending. They might have been describing a particularly fine breed of draft horse rather than human beings.
Oliva and Elzire themselves were most often depicted as rustic peasants. The more charitable writers described them as poor, undereducated, and therefore blameless for their inability to provide scientific hygiene and child care. Other journalists blatantly deemed them shiftless, dirty, and willfully ignorant.
Whether positive or negative, stories about the Dionne family usually emphasized their “primitive” living conditions. Their one-and-a-half-story clapboard farmhouse was called “ramshackle” and “dingy”—“the miserable Dionne shack.” Occasionally more tactful descriptions such as “unpretentious” or “modest” turned up, but such sensitivity was not the norm. The Dionne Quintuplets were a rags-to-riches Cinderella story, so the press spotlighted the rags aspect for maximum effect.
Little wonder, then, that Oliva and Elzire found sympathy difficult to come by. If their children were receiving better care than they were able to provide—indeed, better care than virtually any parent in Canada could provide—what right had they to complain? When they baffled the public by failing to take part in the first-birthday festivities for Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie, forsaking even the special Mass celebrated in their children’s honor, their image took its sharpest turn for the worse. What kind of parents would refuse even to thank God for their babies’ extraordinary survival?
If the Dionnes were to garner any support for reuniting their family, they sorely needed to change the public’s perception of them. That spring of 1935, the woman who would help them do it walked past the No Admittance sign nailed to the gate and knocked at their back door.
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Lillian Barker’s first glimpse of Elzire Dionne came through the crack of the kitchen door—a “decidedly handsome” woman with dark hair and eyes in a yellow house dress and matching apron. That apron caught Miss Barker’s attention at once. “A kitchen apron, full skirted with five quint heads embroidered in brown across the bottom.”
“From the very day the quints were born I’ve wanted to write your biography,” Miss Barker told Elzire in French through the latched screen. Yes, she admitted, she was a reporter, for the New York Daily News. That in itself was a strike against her. Reporters, Elzire warily informed Miss Barker, had already made fun of her and Oliva and “printed unkind and untrue things.”
Yet everything else about Lillian Barker conspired to keep Elzire talking against her better judgment. Barker was a Catholic, and she spoke French. She was patient, persistent, and above all, considerate. There on the Dionnes’ back porch she promised never to write anything about Elzire without her permission. “Whether you let me do your biography or not, I’d like to know the real truth about you,” Miss Barker told Elzire. “You can’t imagine how much I’d like to know it.”
Elzire unlatched the screen door.
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Beginning in May, readers the world over became intimately acquainted with Elzire Dionne. First came a two-page interview: Most Famous of Mothers One of the Unhappiest, the headline read. A series of biographical articles entitled “My Life and Motherhood” followed, appearing in newspapers from Iowa to Australia that fall and winter.
Free to speak her own language with a reporter she felt safe confiding in, Elzire related columnsful of anecdotes from her childhood, courtship, and early marriage, which Lillian Barker translated into English. Interspersed with those memories was the story of the quintuplets’ birth and first year, also told from Elzire’s point of view.
Identifying how much of this autobiography came directly from Elzire’s memory and how much detoured through Barker’s imagination is a dicey proposition, for Barker wrote in a melodramatic “sob sister” style that today might earn her the title of drama queen. Sob sister reporters aimed straight for women’s hearts, hoping to sway their opinions by deliberately ratcheting up the emotional stakes in their stories.
For the Dionnes, thirsty for sympathy from the public, that style was an ideal match. The story itself was also tailor-made for Barker, complete with Elzire’s brush with death during the miraculous birth, and her anguish at losing custody of her babies not once but twice. The result is something more akin to a soap opera script than a news report.
Nevertheless, it’s certain that Oliva and Elzire approved of what Lillian Barker wrote. Had she portrayed them in a way they found objectionable, there is no doubt they would have withdrawn their friendship. After all they had been through with the press, it is impossible to imagine the Dionnes tolerating any further abuse of their trust.
The Elzire Dionne who emerged from Barker’s articles was not the bashful, timid farmwife who for the past year had been more likely to beg her husband, “Tell him, tell him,” than answer a reporter’s questions directly. This Elzire spoke for herself, in an “emphatic way” and with “lightning-quick intelligence.”
As Elzire told it, she and her husband had not attended Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s birthday celebration because the “daily torture” of being separated from them was something she could no longer hide. “Separation by death is one thing, and inevitable, a thing we have to accept, while separation from living babies is something else, entirely different,” Elzire said. “I know; I have had both experiences.” Living apart from her five daughters was “more and more a crucifixion,” she said, harder to accept than the loss of her fourth child, baby Leo, to pneumonia in 1930.
“How could I…present myself at the hospital and mingle with guests in festive, gay, chattering mood,” she asked, when her grief had become impossible to conceal? Her absence was not a matter of ingratitude, as so many assumed. “To every one who has ever done the least little thing for my five little ones I shall always be grateful,” Elzire declared.
“So many people don’t understand our position,” she explained. “When we first relinquished our parental rights my husband and I—bewildered, distraught and anxious as we were about the babies—felt we were doing the best thing for them. That was why we made the sacrifice—agreed to the separation.” All that changed when the government added sixteen years to the guardianship. “Don’t, I beg you, talk to me any more about the protection of the government,” Elzire said. “What I want is my babies and will never stop fighting until I get them.”
Elzire’s interviews won her a measure of the sympathy she craved, yet her voice could not dilute the controversy entirely. Instead, debate escalated as mothers of less fortunate quadruplets and quintuplets found themselves compelled to speak out in favor of the Guardianship Act.
To Mrs. Lawrence Wycoff of Sac City, Iowa, the Dionnes’ scorn for the government aid their babies were receiving was “perfectly disgusting.” The mother of quadruplets born less than two weeks after the Dionnes, Mrs. Wycoff found Oliva and Elzire’s attitude toward the Dafoe Hospital “almost unthinkable.” It was hardly a surprising reaction, considering that the smallest of her four babies had not survived. “Baby Lorraine might have lived if she could have been in a real incubator,” Mrs. Wycoff pointedly informed the Des Moines Register.
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Another bereaved mother, seventy-eight-year-old Elizabeth Lyon of Mayfield, Kentucky, shared Mrs. Wycoff’s sentiment, though she expressed herself far more gently. In 1896, Mrs. Lyon had given birth to five baby boys—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul—all of whom starved to death in heartbreaking succession before they were fourteen days old. “I’m sure I could have raised them all if they had had the attention the Dionne children have,” Mrs. Lyon told a reporter.
Moving though the Wycoff and Lyon stories were, those tragedies were irrelevant to Oliva and Elzire. All five of their babies were alive and thriving, and the Dionnes wanted nothing more than to be reunited with their little girls.
As the fight to bring their daughters home lengthened from months into years, Oliva and Elzire overlooked one glaring complication: as far as Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie themselves were aware, they were home. For the rest of their lives they would look back on their time in the nursery as “the happiest, least complicated years of our lives.”
Sheltered from the controversy between their parents and guardians, the five sisters grew up believing the world revolved around them, for in that small hospital, it did. “We had everything we wanted, everything within the limits of our knowledge and imaginations,” they reminisced as adults. “In that house of fives, we were treated like princesses. We were the cause and center of all activity.”
The New York Times called their nursery “a compendium of Lilliput luxury.” All the furniture was specially scaled to their size, from the dinner tables to their five cushioned rocking chairs. Their beds, porridge bowls, hot-water bottles, and everything in between were inscribed with their names. Until they learned to read, small picture-medallions affixed throughout the nursery showed the children which chair, peg, cubbyhole, and toothbrush belonged to each of them. Yvonne’s special marker was a bluebird. Annette had a maple leaf, Cécile a turkey, Émilie a tulip, and Marie a puppy. Each also had a color that belonged to her: pink for Yvonne, red for Annette, green for Cécile, white for Émilie, and blue for Marie.
