by Sarah Miller
Despite all the worthwhile knowledge the Dionne case had provided, Gruenberg cautioned, “we may reach a point beyond which we can continue to learn only the wrong things.” To fully flourish in both body and mind, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie needed a chance to experience the world outside the nursery gates. “Those poor quintuplets,” Helen Watson of the Child Education Foundation agreed, “have not had as much experience of reality as my dog.”
When it finally came, their first taste of the world outside the nursery bore more resemblance to a fairy tale than to reality. In May of 1939, the Dionne Quintuplets were invited to meet King George VI and Queen Elizabeth during the royal couple’s visit to Toronto.
Not once had the five almost-five-year-old girls set foot outside the barbed wire–topped fences that surrounded the Dafoe Hospital. Their lifetime of travel amounted to crossing the Corbeil road at the age of four months, and looping their playground on wagons and tricycles. A week before their fifth birthday, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie piled into a waiting automobile, together with two nurses and a teacher. Their parents, three brothers, and three sisters followed in another car. A police cruiser led the way.
As the cars motored down the road and the wide world began to flash by the windows, the girls could not contain their delight. “Cow!” Marie shouted. “Sheep! Horse!” Émilie chimed in. Until this moment, the animals had existed only in their storybooks.
“Faster!” they all cried, eager to overtake the police cruiser at the head of the procession. “Pass them, pass them!” they begged their driver.
The sun was beginning to set as the cavalcade reached the Fisher Street crossing a mile north of North Bay. Only about forty or fifty people stood waiting. (Eleven miles away in Callander, a crowd of three thousand was beginning to realize they were the victims of a “dirty rotten trick.” By order of the commissioner of the Ontario provincial police, the location of the departure had been switched at the last minute for the Dionnes’ safety.) A gleaming crimson-and-gold seven-car Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway train stood puffing at the crossing. Dubbed the “Quintland Special,” it consisted of a customized nursery car, a combination dining and parlor car, two sleeping cars, a business car for the guardians and railroad officials, a baggage car, and a day coach for the police guards and reporters.
On the back platform of the nursery car waited Judge Valin, one of the children’s guardians. “Hello, Monsieur le Judge,” Marie said.
“Bonsoir, mes chéries,” the old gentleman replied. Good evening, my dears.
To Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie, who had been practicing their curtseys in front of a photograph of George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and “playing ‘King and Queen’ ” for days, it apparently seemed a perfect opportunity to display their new skill. “As though the judge were the King himself, the little girls curtseyed,” the Toronto Star reported. “Yvonne bowed so low, she nearly fell in the dust.”
In contrast to their nurses, the girls appeared “neither nervous nor worried” as one by one they were lifted from the car to the train by officers of the provincial police. Once on board, however, their excitement ran riot as they began to understand all that “going to meet the king and queen” meant.
Five small steel cots decorated with ducks had been installed in the nursery car. As a special surprise, a pair of new scarlet slippers dangled from each one. In the dining car, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie “bounced up and down with shrieks of delight” on the full-sized leather chairs. The bathroom, however, proved a disappointment. “Such great big sighs they gave when they saw it,” said the Globe and Mail. A chuckling Nurse O’Shaughnessy explained, “They hoped there would not be one so that they would not have to take their baths.”
Soon all five of them were bundled into their pink woolen pajamas, ready for what, to them, may have been the most suspenseful moment of the evening. For the first time in their lives, the sisters would sleep divided. Their nursery car contained three bedrooms, each with two cots. Two sisters would share the first bedroom, two more the second, and in the last, a lone quintuplet would have Nurse O’Shaughnessy for her bunkmate.
Anyone who worried that the girls might be distressed by the unfamiliar sleeping arrangements was entirely mistaken. “The quints regard sharing a room with the nurse as a great privilege,” explained the Globe and Mail. “As soon as they were in their pyjamas and their new red bedroom slippers, they solemnly drew straws to determine where each would sleep. Émilie won.” Then they said their prayers, asking a special blessing for the king and queen, and none other than Mama and Papa Dionne tucked them in and kissed them good night. That, too, was a rare enough occurrence to make the papers the next day.
“But to sleep?” the Globe and Mail mused. “Well, would you—if you were their age and were on the train for the first time in your life…and if you were going to wear beautiful new long white organdy dresses…and be presented to the King and Queen?” One reporter imagined them “saucer-eyed and excited—and perhaps a little frightened” in their cots, each cuddled up with a favorite plaything. “Little Émilie lies there in the berth beyond us, hugging her three-year-old toy monkey. She hasn’t yet given up the idea that she might be allowed to sleep with the Queen.”
As usual, it was Dr. Dafoe who indulged the reporters with choice tidbits about the happenings in the nursery car. The whistle and swaying of the train kept the girls awake. They wanted glasses of milk and water. Nurse O’Shaughnessy listened at their bedroom doors until their chattering died down, and, the Star reported, “the Dionne daughters spent their first night away from home in tearless and sleep-filled wonder” as the crimson-and-gold train “trundled south through a rainy spring night to the serenade of croaking frogs.”
The children were not the only ones who were reluctant to settle down. “I don’t know whether the newspaper people will go to bed,” the Globe and Mail’s reporter confided. The press car rattled with the sounds of typewriters, and of playing cards snapping onto the tables. The reporters were as excited as the five little girls, and as preoccupied with the youngsters’ safety as the police. One American journalist was biting his nails so nervously, someone asked if he thought there was a bomb on the train tracks.
* * *
—
Émilie and Marie were up first the next morning, clapping their hands at the sight of the Toronto Irish Regiment’s pipe band swinging by the siding where the train had halted. “Now we are in Toronto. Now we can see princesses!” they chanted.
After a familiar breakfast of soft-boiled eggs, bacon, and brown toast, Nurse O’Shaughnessy and Nurse Corriveau dressed the girls in their traveling clothes: double-breasted blue flannel coats over pale blue silk broadcloth dresses. The “sweet little dresses” boasted puffed sleeves and white collars trimmed with dark blue stitching. Three inches of “delightful” dark blue and pink smocking bordered two rows of pearl buttons. Fine white straw poke bonnets woven through with pink ribbon and blue forget-me-nots framed Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s dark curls. White buckskin slippers and little white “chamo-suede” gloves completed the dainty ensemble. Once again, the nurses came across as more excited than the children. Unnoticed by almost everyone, “the other Dionne children, looking on with grave, wondering expressions, roved restlessly here and there…as a couple of police were set to guard the box of clothes which will be worn by the girls for their presentation.”
At nine-thirty, Nurse O’Shaughnessy and Nurse Corriveau led the girls off the train.
“Les journalistes!” Mrs. Dionne sighed as reporters pressed close. Her daughters did not share her dismay. “The Quints blew kisses to the crowds as they left the train and broke into a hearty laugh as Dr. Dafoe approached them from another coach,” Nurse Corriveau recalled. Dr. Dafoe, decked out in a formal morning suit complete with a silk top hat and tails and a pink flower in
his buttonhole, struck the children as absurd. “It’s crazy, the doctor’s hat. It’s crazy!” Émilie said, rolling her eyes and pointing.
At the sight of the seven-passenger automobile that would carry them to the Parliament building, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie “began dancing and yelling ‘Voiture, voiture!’ ” Carriage, carriage! The motorcycle escort that whisked them through the cheering streets of Toronto was just as dazzling, and as they had done the night before, “the children shrieked for more speed and clapped their hands.”
“The girls were especially entranced by the kilties and the bagpipe band,” Nurse Corriveau remembered, “and asked why the people were laughing and yelling so much.” Nurse Corriveau answered as simply as she could: “The people are happy to see you.” (The children were not quite as innocent of their fame as the nurses wanted to believe, however. Years later the sisters would reflect, “Now we had a much better idea of what went on behind the screens at the observatory, what those dim shapes really looked like when the camouflage was removed. They waved to us all along the route, and we waved back and threw kisses, just as if this was one more observatory show.”)
Although Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were doing a remarkable job of taking all the fanfare in stride, there were moments that betrayed what a sheltered existence they were accustomed to. “On their way to the legislative building the Dionnes passed a bugle and drum band which was playing at full blast,” the Toronto Star noticed. “The noise seemed to frighten the children and they ducked their heads until the car passed the band.”
The Star also observed that “the happiest in the entire group seemed to be Mrs. Dionne”—perhaps because unbeknownst to almost everyone, Elzire carried a letter addressed to Queen Elizabeth in her purse. It began:
Your Majesty:
Is it permitted for a mother who is very unhappy to solicit your kindly intervention to the end that her family be united? You are a mother and consequently in a position to realize the sadness that wrings our hearts when we are separated from our five little girls.
It was Elzire’s hope that her heartfelt plea for help—bolstered in no small part by witnessing her daughters’ irresistible charm firsthand—would move Queen Elizabeth to intervene to reunite the entire Dionne family. Only “a word of astonishment at this separation” would be enough, Elzire asserted.
With this mission in mind, Elzire mounted the steps of the Parliament building, clutching the arm of her confidante, Lillian Barker of the New York Daily News. Elzire’s grip was so insistent, Barker was ushered past the police guard preventing reporters and photographers from entering the building. “Don’t go away,” Elzire whispered. “You’re not just a reporter. You’re my friend.”
Barker made it as far as the anteroom where Nurse Corriveau and Nurse O’Shaughnessy were helping the girls change into the court dresses they would wear to greet George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Dubbed by one reporter “the last word in little-girl loveliness,” the ankle-length gowns were confections of white organza, complete with cape collars, puffed sleeves, and wide taffeta sashes. Black patent-leather slippers peeked from beneath the ruffled hemline, and for a finishing touch, the girls wore old-fashioned white lace mittens. “As the children walk,” Dr. Dafoe promised the press, “the skirt will move gracefully like a cloud of mist about them.” To help distinguish the five sisters from one another, a different flower was nestled into the dark brown curls under each bonnet brim: a sprig of heather for Yvonne, a spray of green for Annette, Scottish bluebells for Cécile, pink rosebuds for Émilie, and yellow rosebuds for Marie.
At the door to the chamber where the royal audience would take place, an official in a coat trimmed with gold braid informed Elzire that six of her children would not be admitted—only the quintuplets and their caregivers. Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, Pauline, and Oliva Jr. would have to sit and wait while their parents and their five identical sisters were presented to King George and Queen Elizabeth.
For weeks, the six of them had dreamed of nothing else. “We’re going to meet the King—the King,” Ernest had proudly crowed as the family inspected the Quintland Special just days before. In truth, no one was certain whether they would be formally presented to George VI and Queen Elizabeth, but, the North Bay Nugget reported, “they had been told that they would be granted the great privilege of at least seeing the Royal couple.” Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, Pauline, and Oliva Jr. had no reason to doubt this promise. Their parents had taken them out of school and bought new Eton jackets for the boys and organdy dresses for the girls especially for the momentous occasion. The disappointment of their last-minute exclusion would ache for years to come.
With her letter to the queen, Elzire Dionne intended to put an end to such divisions between her children. “Keep your fingers crossed,” Elzire told Lillian Barker before they were parted. “I just hope I can give it to her.”
Seven members of the Dionne family, Dr. Dafoe, and the children’s attendants were ushered into the lieutenant governor’s music room. Its high ceiling, sparkling chandeliers, and lush draperies reminded Oliva and Elzire of a movie set. Their five daughters climbed up onto a lounge and sat kicking their feet as they awaited the royal couple.
In strode King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, accompanied by Prime Minister Hepburn and Mrs. Hepburn. The girls were entranced. Annette could not take her eyes from the woman in the powder-blue dress and hat. “La belle Reine,” she said. The beautiful Queen.
Prime Minister Hepburn grandly presented Dr. Dafoe to Their Majesties: “This is Canada’s most famous doctor.”
Dr. Dafoe started to bow. “But I was only halfway down when the King held out his hand, and I shook it. You couldn’t help feeling perfectly at ease with him.”
Then the doctor introduced the nurses, and Mr. and Mrs. Dionne. Finally, it was the children’s turn. Dafoe, the newspapers claimed, “came to the royal audience in fear and trepidation, for he thought at least one of the famous little girls would stand on her head, grab the King’s gloves or otherwise behave as five-year-old children often do.”
The five sisters known as Canada’s princesses stepped forward as, one by one, Dr. Dafoe introduced them. They curtseyed, just as they had practiced, and called out their names for the king and queen. A pause followed. No one had told them what to do after that. The king and queen smiled. Some spontaneous signal passed from Cécile to her sisters. They looked at one another “and then took a headlong rush toward the royal pair.”
With Cécile in the lead, the children “kicked up their heels to court etiquette,” put their arms around Queen Elizabeth’s neck, and kissed her. Annette, still captivated by “the beautiful lady,” presented her small bouquet to the queen. One nosegay, and another and another followed. “Wherever will I put them all,” Queen Elizabeth asked with a laugh.
Yvonne took it into her head that the king was not receiving his share of attention, and ran to his side to put her hand in his. “His Majesty stooped over and whispered something to her,” the Star recounted, and the two shared a hearty private laugh. “Marie then decided that her sister was having too much fun with the tall man in the blue sailor suit, so she ambled over and handed the King her bouquet.”
Émilie, ever fascinated by “mechanics or gadgets,” touched the brass buckle on the king’s belt. “Just like Mr. Ouellette’s buckle!” she told Nurse Corriveau.
“What did she say?” asked King George.
“The buckle on your belt is like the one Mr. Ouellette has on his belt,” Nurse Corriveau answered. “He is one of our police guards.” The king smiled broadly and knelt down to explain each of the bright decorations on his uniform. Enchanted, Émilie stretched out her arms and puckered her lips. The king blushed like a schoolboy. “Kisses are for the Queen,” he protested, but Émilie would not budge until His Majesty King George VI had kissed her upturned face.
&nb
sp; “There was no majesty stuff in that room,” Dafoe boasted to the press when it was all over. “I think for a few minutes the king and queen forgot all pomp and ceremony and were just loving parents.”
Even Nurse Corriveau was not immune to the peculiar magic the Dionne Quintuplets seemed to work upon the emotions. “What a scene it was; I had a lump in my throat!”
“You must be proud of your little daughters,” Queen Elizabeth said to Elzire as the visit was drawing to a close. Elzire Dionne could not have contrived a more perfect opening for her letter. But she did not act upon it. Her nerve failed, or the opportunity was too fleeting. As they were escorted out, her plea to the queen remained hidden in her purse.
When Dr. Dafoe returned to Callander, triumphant over his brush with royalty, a lawsuit greeted him like a slap in the face. Dionne Accuses Dafoe of Libel, the papers announced. The doctor, Oliva Dionne charged, had insulted him in the press.
The grounds were a charity luncheon in honor of Dr. Dafoe, given the month before in New York City by the Circus Saints and Sinners Club of America. There Dafoe took part in a skit that was equal parts sketch comedy and celebrity roast. He arrived onstage in a horse-drawn buggy labeled Rural Free Delivery, carrying a black doctor’s bag marked Dr. A. R. Dafoe—Mass Deliveries. A paper cutout stork swooped overhead holding a sign proclaiming Dr. Dafoe unfair to organized storks. No mass production of babies.
One of the players—a slim fellow clad in lumberjack plaid with wildly unkempt hair and a narrow mustache like Oliva Dionne’s—put a coin into a machine labeled Matrimonial Slot Machine Co. When “Papa Dionne” pulled the lever, out tumbled five grown men in baby bonnets and nighties. “Yvonne! Marie! Émilie! Annette! Cécile!” they shouted one by one before bursting into song:
