The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

  The observatory opened to the public on July 1, 1936. It was an immediate sensation. By August, three thousand to six thousand people a day were flocking to Corbeil.

  “Couldn’t even get across the road here for twenty minutes at a time,” a gas station attendant remembered later. “Cars all over the place. People used to be lined up three miles out to the highway, right out to Dionne’s.”

  Across the street from the Dafoe Hospital, watchmen with red flags directed the cars to park in rows a quarter mile long, forming acre-sized blocks that eventually overflowed into what had formerly been the Dionne pasture. An hour before “showtime,” several hundred cars from over thirty states and provinces routinely accumulated. Excitement and reverence mingled to create an atmosphere somewhere between a circus and a religious shrine as spectators approached the double row of barbed wire–topped fence. A sign proclaimed the rules:

  Visitors’ Information and Instructions

  This playground has been erected so you can see the children at play.

  Visitors will by co-operating and following instructions assist those in charge.

  Please maintain silence and keep moving.

  Do not speak to the children.

  You may enter as often as you wish during the visiting period, but in order to be fair to other visitors you must keep moving toward the exits.

  If it is stormy the children will not appear.

  PLAY GROUND HOURS

  9:30–10:30 A.M.

  2–3 P.M.

  NO PHOTOGRAPHS ALLOWED

  TO BE TAKEN OF THE CHILDREN

  “A line, orderly and quiet, forms at the entrance gate to the observation gallery,” wrote an Ohio reporter who came to record the spectacle. “Before 9:30 more than 1,000 are in line.”

  Almost everyone pocketed pebbles from a divided wooden trough placed outside the fence while they waited. Stones from Dafoe Hospital Grounds, the sign above the bins read. “Already legend has endowed these pebbles with mystic powers—it being suggested that under their powerful magic childless homes are soon blessed with babies.” They ranged from coin-sized stones for single births to rocks bigger than softballs for quads and quints. These “passion pebbles” were so prized as good-luck tokens by childless couples that a jewelry firm in New York City offered to make five-stone charm bracelets from them. (In fact, the “magical” pebbles were loads of gravel trucked in from the nearby lakeshore each night.)

  “Up and down the restless line dash small boys with shrill, penetrating voices who offer to check your camera for 35 cents,” a Baltimore reporter noted. ANY PERSON IN POSSESSION OF A CAMERA WILL BE REFUSED ADMISSION TO PLAYGROUND BUILDING, proclaimed a prominent notice. Tourists who risked trying to snap a photo would be stopped by the guards, who seized their film and exposed it to daylight, ruining the entire roll of images. Rumor had it that a Chicago gangster had been arrested—not for toting a gun in a shoulder holster, but for smuggling in his Kodak Brownie camera.

  As nine thirty neared, a hush fell over the crowd, “seemingly filled with a common sense of awe, as though they were about to witness a miracle,” marveled a journalist for Woman’s World magazine. Everyone strained on tiptoe, peering toward the hospital until a ripple of murmurs and gasps signaled the first glimpses of the children, “tumbling out on the little porch of their living-quarters as though popped out of a gun.”

  The children’s very ordinariness bowled the audience over. “The effect on the crowd has been instantaneous. The very human children have made them all human and they chuckle with delight. They had half expected to see five little angels float across their visions, or perhaps five tiny molecules of science.”

  A chain rattled as the guards opened the padlock on the observatory doors and four hundred people at a time passed through turnstiles into the dim observation gallery—half into the left leg of the U-shaped building, half into the right. PHOTOGRAPHING OF BABIES BY VISITORS NOT ALLOWED, a final notice at the doorway reminded. PLEASE CO-OPERATE; SILENCE IS REQUESTED, said another inside the play yard itself. The rules were to keep moving along the corridor, but everyone wanted a chance to pause at the windows for a good long look.

  “It was like viewing a litter of kittens,” one Toronto man said; “they were all so cute, you wouldn’t know which one to pick.” Some spectators burst into tears at the sight of their “breathtaking” beauty.

  Clad in bonnets and sunsuits—one each in mauve, pink, blue, orange, and yellow—Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie romped in their wading pool, each pushing and shoving to get the fountain’s thin stream of water all to herself. They filled their bonnets with water and drank from them, captivating the crowd and bringing the nurses splashing in ankle-deep to stop them.

  “Right along there, ladies, show a little pep,” the security guards would admonish from behind. “Keep moving so everyone can see. That’s it. A little pep, please.”

  A few moments and it was over. “Take a last look now, and hop it!” another guard said, coaxing the tourists along to the exits. From door to door, the trip was just over seventy feet long.

  Out in the bright sunshine the dazzled spectators exclaimed over what they had just seen. “I thank my Almighty God that I have lived to see this day,” a lady from Maryland declared. “We drove 590 miles to see this,” one elderly woman said. “But, my gracious! It was worth it!”

  * * *

  —

  None of it—from the parking to the pebbles to the trip through the observation gallery—cost a single cent. Nevertheless, money was pouring into Callander.

  Outside the fenced hospital grounds, a carnival-like tourist oasis erupted from the rocky bushland. The papers dubbed it “Quintland,” “Dionneville,” and “Quintuplet Village.” “Long before you cover the 21/2 miles to the Dionne home, the sound of hammering and the smell of new lumber are evident,” a visiting journalist noted. “Souvenir and hot dog stands, selling everything from postcards to pumpernickel, are rising on every hand.”

  The first to cash in had been Auntie Legros, who launched her Quintland career—and possibly Quintland itself—by giving lectures and selling souvenirs from a Coney Island–style tent alongside the Dafoe Hospital. The day before her great-nieces’ first birthday, she graduated to a wood-frame refreshment stand called “Quinstore,” where she and Madame Lebel answered questions and signed their illustrated twenty-two-page memoir of the miraculous birth, Administering Angels of the Dionne Quintuplets. When Quinstore had to be torn down to make way for the observatory in the summer of 1936, Auntie Legros simply put up a larger booth across the road. See Original Basket QUINTUPLETS were placed in after Birth AND use our observation platform—No Charge, her sign proclaimed. Personal interviews and autographing free. In addition to Coca-Cola and Neilson’s milk chocolate, Auntie Legros advertised quick lunches, full-course meals, and a “special interview.”

  Though he deplored the exhibition of his daughters, Oliva Dionne recognized that he could provide a far better living for his family by selling quint souvenirs than by trying to farm his land amid thousands of onlookers. Partnering with a North Bay merchant, he constructed a large booth in the summer of 1936 to sell postcards, photographs, and refreshments. His sign, embellished with giant cut-out silhouettes of his five daughters, proclaimed it The Only Genuine DIONNE BOOTH. Locals guessed it raked in $700 a day, with a comfortable profit margin. Knickknacks and trinkets that cost a nickel or a dime anywhere else in the world sold hand over fist for as much as a dollar in Quintland, with tourists eagerly paying fifteen cents for a pair of penny postcards. At the back of the store, at the end of a “long and patient” line, Oliva Dionne sat at a card table, carefully signing four hundred autographs a day in slow, neat script. At first he left it up to the customers to pay as they liked for this service—until one jokester laid down a single cent. Oliva Dionne was not a man
who appreciated pranks at his own expense. “He has been the butt of yokel humor and sophisticated wisecrack until bitterness has etched lines in his face and suspicion darkens his eyes,” said the Baltimore Sun. After that stunt, Papa Dionne’s autograph cost a quarter. Business was so good, Oliva gradually expanded into two stores, branching out into British woolens, English china and toffees, moccasins, religious articles, and round sticks of ice cream called MelOrols.

  By 1937 a colossal stand at the corner of the hospital grounds invited visitors to SEE Babies Picture Gallery upstairs and the Original Basket Babies Were Placed In After Birth. (That made two “original” baskets. Eventually, there would be three baskets vying for authenticity in Quintland.) A large notice on two sides of the building boasted, MADAME LEBEL (midwife of the quintuplets) Extends to You a Personal Welcome and Will be Pleased to Answer Questions—Autograph—No Charge. The two-story pavilion featured a giant clock tower atop one corner of the building. The clock’s long red hands did not keep time, but were instead repositioned twice daily to correspond with a sign announcing Next Showing of the Babies.

  Opportunities to cash in weren’t limited to those directly connected with the quintuplets. Nearly anyone in Callander could find a way to make money from Quint-mania. “Leave your car for a minute and you’ll return to find two bright-faced urchins scrubbing the windshield and dusting off the fenders,” one journalist discovered, “their eyes twinkling with expectation of tourist coins.” Kwint Kabins “sprang up like dandelions” along the roadway for tired motorists. Dr. Dafoe’s neighbor squeezed three cabins along his lot line, so close that the lodgers could gaze into the Little Doc’s windows. Dafoe put up a fence. Other residents threw open their doors to the sightseers. “We had a big house down at the south end of Callander,” Jack Adams remembered, “and we slept out on the back porch on a couch or a mattress on the floor while Mother rented rooms to tourists.” Uncle Leon Dionne’s service station in Callander painted its five gasoline pumps bright red and emblazoned each with a name in gilt: Émilie, Annette, Cécile, Marie, and Yvonne. Those with more limited means peddled peanuts, popcorn, gum, and soda pop outside the hospital gates, hollering out their wares like vendors at a ball game.

  To some, Quintland was a thorough delight, an antidote to the grim, gray mood of the Great Depression. “Everything here was new, spic and span, the latest type of modern construction,” the Pittsburgh Press gushed. Others found it hopelessly tacky. “The Dafoe Hospital, the Dionne homestead, the souvenir stands, are raw looking, despite bright paint and feeble efforts at landscaping,” declared the more cynical Baltimore Sun. “It is all as incongruous as a gold-rush town and pathetically lacking in charm.”

  “People are coming in here from all over the world,” Dr. Dafoe told newsreel cameras. “We are trying to make their visit as enjoyable as possible, and we hope that you will be able to come up and see these babies.”

  Tourists took the Little Doc at his word and came flocking like never before. Everyday folks who’d slept in their cars to scrimp on motel fees arrived alongside limousines chauffeuring Hollywood royalty like Jimmy Stewart, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, and Clark Gable. Child star Shirley Temple, the only little girl as famous as the Dionnes themselves, was begging her parents to take her to Canada to play with them. Celebrated pilot Amelia Earhart visited Callander just ten weeks before she and her plane disappeared forever over the Pacific Ocean. Twenty mailbags of postcards a day left the Callander post office. When the visitors pulled back onto the highway headed south, stickers and pennants bragging We Have Visited the Dionne Quintuplets decorated their bumpers and back windows.

  By the summer of 1937, Quintland had become a more popular tourist destination than Niagara Falls.

  The success of Quintland hinged on a single principle: no hint of the spectacle could penetrate the walls of the playground and hospital. If the children became aware of their celebrity, the whole experience would be sullied.

  From the outside, there seemed no cause for alarm. Visiting reporters always took pains to claim that “the famed quintuplets go about their daily routine of playing and sleeping and eating, utterly unmindful of the hubbub outside the gates of their snug haven.”

  That was not entirely so. “Of course we knew we were watched every minute that we spent at play there,” the sisters said years afterward. The inevitable chuckles and squeals of delight from behind the windows had proven impossible to muffle or disguise. For Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie, the audience’s mirth became a kind of reward to seek out. “I remember that we laughed when we heard them,” Annette said of the sounds from within the observatory.

  Sometimes there were quick glimpses, too. “Those one-way screens were, in truth, two-way screens. We could always see through them, as one can see through frosted glass.” A person in white, or a contraband camera lens pressed against the glass, showed up almost clearly through the mesh. Émilie, already aware that photos by anyone other than their official cameraman, Fred Davis, were forbidden, took to covering her face whenever the round eye of a camera appeared.

  “Most of the time we yelled and shrieked with the joy of living,” the sisters recalled, “and we developed a shrewd idea of what would please the crowds most.” They waded into their shallow pool with shoes and socks on, enlisting their invisible audience in the mischief. Émilie’s specialty was posing at the tip-top of the jungle gym to tantalize the spectators with the suspense of whether or not she might fall.

  Watching what the five toddlers did when the observatory emptied left little doubt of their awareness of what was going on. Scooping up their big hollow building blocks, Dr. Blatz observed, “the children would scamper through the gates in the low fence encircling the playground, place the blocks against the side of the observation building, clamber up, and gleefully wave through the screen to the non-existent spectators.”

  “They couldn’t see them,” Nurse Cécile Michaud said, “but they began to realize as they got older that these people had come to see the Quints. They’d say that in French: that people were coming to see the Quints. They knew that they were the Quints. But they weren’t excited about it. I don’t think they realized how important ‘Quints’ meant.”

  “But most of the time,” Blatz insisted, “they go about their business without a thought of spectators.”

  * * *

  —

  Two nurses, Jacqueline Noël and Claire Tremblay, disagreed vehemently. “To the observer at first glance it seems nothing at all,” they said, “but on studying the question in a very critical manner always keeping the children’s welfare as the important thing, any person interested in child welfare may see it is very detrimental to the children.” The question of when and why the two women decided to challenge Blatz’s expertise complicates matters, however.

  By October of 1937, Dr. Blatz had become aware that Tremblay and Noël were “uncooperative,” especially when it came to teaching the children English. They were also deemed too strict—“almost pathological,” Blatz noted—about the children’s modesty, and were teaching the little girls to steer clear of all men. Their behavior might have made more sense to Blatz if he had known that Nurse Noël believed Dr. Dafoe was molesting the children. The way Dafoe positioned his hands when they sat on his lap disturbed her so deeply, she called him “the dirty man” in her diary and warned Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie, “If you go near him, Little Jesus will cry.” In February of 1938, Tremblay and Noël were dismissed.

  The following month the two nurses wrote to the board of guardians, describing their objections to displaying the little girls in Blatz’s playground. Their criticisms filled four pages. Regrettably, the timing of their letter made it appear that Noël and Tremblay’s claims were a form of retaliation against Blatz and Dafoe for firing them, when perhaps in reality they finally felt free to voice their concerns without jeopardizing their jobs. (Another nurse, Mollie O’S
haughnessy, believed two years of isolation at the hospital had mentally unhinged the two women to the point that they were suffering paranoia and crying jags.) In any case, the picture Tremblay and Noël created of the playground’s effect on Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie was darker than any other observer would record.

  “Daily the children run to the adult exclaiming about the people viewing them,” Noël and Tremblay wrote. “On many, many occasions they were very frightened, hiding themselves and refusing to play.” Nightmares often followed these playground upsets, they said.

  The two nurses also brought up concerns about the location of the playground. Built on low-lying land that had once been a swamp, it was surrounded on three sides by the observation gallery, and on the fourth by a lattice fence. “The children are therefore forced to remain in this enclosed space, the air of which is filled with the fumes of so many automobiles just a few feet away.” What was more, there was no shade apart from what umbrellas could provide. Yet when Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie wore sun hats to protect them from the heat, complaints inevitably followed. People wanted to see their faces, and so to the nurses’ dismay, the sun hats were dispensed with.

  As the two of them saw it, the public’s demands regularly outweighed the children’s welfare. If all five sisters did not appear together, the tourists protested. Quintland’s policy was that the girls would appear health and weather permitting, yet Tremblay and Noël revealed that they were “forced” into the playground “when not feeling well and even with high temperatures in all kinds of weather.” And then if the children didn’t frolic, the tourists still weren’t happy. They had to be cajoled into romping about, regardless of whether they felt like it, “to avoid criticism from the public.”