The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

  There are men who just love babies and it really is a shame,

  Night after night they labor with an acquiescent dame!

  By the time it was over, Dafoe was decked out like a graduate in a pink-and-white bathrobe and a mortarboard with a baby rattle dangling from one corner, the proud recipient of the degree of “Doctor of Litters.” Photos of the Little Doc sporting his newfound honor made the papers coast to coast.

  To Oliva Dionne, it was all a colossal insult. Though meant in fun, the skit salted a wound that had been throbbing from the moment the first newspaper reporter had asked him, “Well, do you feel proud of yourself?” Papa Dionne had been the butt of lewd jokes and crass innuendo about his “litter” of babies ever since. “And any man can get pretty sick of kidding in four years,” one of the clerks at his souvenir shop told a reporter the year before. Even Dr. Dafoe had once admitted that the “nasty remarks” Oliva endured were enough “to break one’s spirit.”

  Anyone else might have laughed off the skit, or simply ignored it. But for Oliva Dionne, a man whose life had been turned so thoroughly upside down that he’d barely managed to keep a grasp on his dignity, watching Dafoe poke fun at his daughters’ birth was intolerable. “We are insulted by the affiliation to pigs and rabbits,” Oliva’s lawyer wrote to the attorney general. “Is it fair that Mr. Dionne should be compelled to keep this clown as guardian of his five children?”

  Oliva struck another blow to his rival in July with a second lawsuit. This one demanded that the doctor produce all the advertising contracts that tied his name with the quintuplets. (That was virtually every one of them; advertisers knew that in the popular mind, Dr. Dafoe was “the sixth quintuplet.”) Oliva believed any money Dafoe had made on commercial endorsements belonged to his daughters, and called for the doctor’s profits to be deposited in their trust fund.

  Dionne Suit May Bring Showdown, the Toronto Globe predicted. Guardians’ Patience over Interference Reported Exhausted. For five years, the board of guardians had been untouchable. Even the king and the pope had declined Oliva’s petitions to intercede and reunite the Dionne family. Suddenly, however, the board seemed to cower under Oliva’s demands. The threat of exposing Dafoe’s financial gain proved to be the critical bull’s-eye. Rather than reveal the tens of thousands of dollars he had made from the Dionne Quintuplets, Dr. Dafoe chose to resign as guardian.

  In exchange, Oliva dropped the two legal complaints against his rival. Both sides agreed no more lawsuits would follow. Though Dafoe would remain Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s personal physician, “in sole charge of their health and hygiene,” as of January 15, 1940, he would no longer have any say in their upbringing. “The physical, intellectual, moral, and religious education and social training of the quintuplets will be under the sole jurisdiction of the Dionnes,” the agreement read. If the children became seriously ill, Oliva would have the right to call in another doctor of his choosing.

  That in itself was a tremendous victory for Oliva Dionne, but it was not all. Over a year and a half had passed since the board had mollified him with the prospect of building a single home for his entire family. Now Dafoe himself publicly conceded that the time to reunite the Dionne family was at hand. “The doctor declares that the quintuplets’ education would remain incomplete unless they are soon restored to family life and atmosphere,” read the agreement. “For that purpose he strongly advocates the erection during the summer of 1940 a common dwelling house for them and their family.”

  “This is the best New Year’s news any family ever has received,” Oliva said.

  * * *

  —

  The Dionnes’ new home—the Big House, as they would call it—was not completed by the summer of 1940. Nor was it finished in 1941, or even 1942. Nearly three full years would pass before the board of guardians and the Province of Ontario fulfilled their promise to unite Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie with their family.

  “A curious lack of reality flavors those years in memory,” the sisters recalled. “We were told nothing of the tumult outside, and we would have had no means of understanding it, no frame of reference, anyway. But the spirit of uneasy compromise that ruled our lives, the need to shield us from the facts, became reflected in a peculiar, unpleasant way. We were brought up, in short, to practice deceit and accept it as a normal part of the pattern.”

  At one extreme, they indulged the cameras by posing as happy little girls leading a normal life—donning uniforms for a Girl Guide initiation ceremony, for instance, despite never being permitted to leave the nursery to attend a single Brownie troop meeting afterward. At the same time, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were helping spread the notion that they were secretly miserable in their nursery and wanted nothing more than to live with their parents and siblings. It wasn’t true. It was just another kind of performance, though these were orchestrated by Elzire Dionne instead of a photographer or a newsreel man.

  With the smallest of rewards—one Life Savers candy apiece—Elzire could entice her daughters to put on a show of unhappiness. Candy and sweets were a treat rarer than hugs and kisses in the nursery. The sisters had not even tasted ice cream until their fourth birthday. “So we were only too happy to say or do anything if Mom promised us a taste of forbidden delight in assorted flavors,” the girls later explained. “More than anything else, she desired us to say, and if possible to believe, that we longed to go home to her. The words had no significance for us, and we were pleased to oblige.”

  The girls played their parts to perfection when reporters and priests visited, sometimes bringing clergymen to tears. Father Francis Talbot recalled being beckoned by Yvonne during a 1941 visit. “She put her hand close to my ear and whispered in French. I did not fully comprehend at first, and asked her to repeat. What she said has haunted me ever since.”

  “Father, will you pray for the Quints, so that very soon they may go to live with Mamma and Papa? Will you please pray?”

  Later he heard Émilie or Marie, he was not sure which, beg, “Father, bring us to our home right away, to where our Mamma and Papa live….Will you please help us? Will you please pray for us?”

  Father Talbot was so moved by their pleas, he wrote a four-page article for a Catholic weekly magazine, urging that the five little girls be returned to their family, “and thus save them from the danger of becoming neurotic and psychopathic.”

  But the fraud itself was having more immediate effects on the girls than the separation from their parents. Now, for the first time, they distinctly felt the two sides pulling at them. For the five sisters who knew themselves to be “eager to please anybody and everybody,” it was an excruciating position.

  “They were fine until the parents came,” Nurse Doreen Chaput remembered, “or someone from the family and you could just feel that sort of…tension.” As long as their parents remained in the nursery, the girls deliberately distanced themselves from the nurses they dearly loved.

  According to Elzire Dionne, Nurse Chaput retaliated by poisoning her daughters’ minds behind her back. “Yvonne and Émilie whispered to me that she had told them they mustn’t love their family,” Elzire confided to Lillian Barker. “She said, ‘Your people are dirty, jumelles—all of them, Papa, Mama, and the brothers and sisters. You don’t want to love dirty people, do you? You want to love Dr. Dafoe.’ ”

  Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were seeing more of their family now than they ever had before. Daniel, Pauline, and Oliva Jr. were coming to the Dafoe Hospital—rechristened Pouponnière des Jumelles Dionnes, Nursery of the Dionne Quintuplets—to have lessons in their sisters’ private schoolroom, and every Sunday the five girls dutifully crossed the road to have dinner around the big kitchen table in the farmhouse where they were born.

  If the nurses did indeed worry that these Sunday reunions would divert the girls’ affection, their fears w
ere entirely misplaced. “It would be fitting to say that we delighted in these visits and spent the week looking forward to them,” the sisters said. “That was the impression that was created, but it was entirely untrue. The five of us sat through the meals like strangers.”

  They were strangers. Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, and Pauline had spent the first two years of their sisters’ lives looking at them through a pane of glass instead of playing with them. The first time Rose-Marie had held Yvonne’s hand, it was through a gap in the fence. In the meantime, new babies had arrived in the Dionne home, patching up the hole the quintuplets had left behind—Oliva Jr. and then Victor, born in 1938. “Émigrées from our home but never from our hearts,” Oliva had called his five daughters, but the girls themselves were unable to summon the same depth of feeling in return.

  “We knew instinctively the emotions of joy and contentment that Mom and Dad wanted us to feel every time we walked through their weather-beaten front door. But no matter how hard we tried to behave as we were expected to and to feel in our hearts what we were supposed to feel, it was no use. It did not work. We preferred the nursery, familiar, safe, and dear as it was to us.”

  * * *

  —

  The best Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie could do to please their parents was to substitute obedience for love. The five of them obeyed unquestioningly, without any understanding of the consequences they were capable of setting in motion. At six years old, how could they? All that mattered to them were their parents’ smiles, and the taste of candy.

  And so on Mother’s Day of 1941, the sisters startled the continent when they deliberately spoiled a radio broadcast aimed at American tourists. They had two lines to say. First Yvonne was to ask, Won’t you come up and see us this summer? And then Marie would add, We hope that all mothers are very happy today. As a finale they would all sing “There’ll Always Be an England.”

  “People on the program drilled us in our lines all day before the show was to go on the air. But we had held a private rehearsal of our own under Yvonne’s direction before that,” the sisters later revealed. “Mom had chosen her to be the ringleader.”

  On the morning of the broadcast Yvonne told her astonished nurses, “I don’t want to speak English.” Coaxes and threats would not sway her into giving up the candy she had been secretly promised as a reward.

  Cécile was called upon to substitute. Midafternoon, she and Marie both mutinied. “Five little chins became stubborn,” the Nugget reported as Annette and Émilie followed suit. “Five little mouths became fixed in obstinate lines.” The panicked adults had no choice but to give in and allow the girls to speak the two lines in unison, in French. They did not sing.

  From the way the public reacted, Canada’s five sweethearts might as well have shouted obscenities over the airwaves. Four thousand angry letters arrived at the Provincial Tourist and Travel Bureau in the space of three days. Complaints jammed the director’s phone lines. “We, the English-speaking peoples of Canada, have not the slightest objection to the ‘quints’ speaking in French, but insist that they also give it to us in English. If that is refused they should not be heard at all,” one listener informed the editor of the Toronto Star. “If the quints won’t speak English, they might, in deference to the visitors from across the line who have contributed so much to their fortune, at least speak American,” griped another.

  The “insurrection” was only half over. Two weeks later, on their seventh birthday, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie again stood before a radio microphone. This time, the script was in French to avert another last-minute standoff. All they had to do was say Oui, oui, Monsieur Thomas to the show’s host, and then send a get-well message to Dr. Dafoe, who was recuperating from a major operation in Toronto. (Unbeknownst to the public, he was being treated for colon cancer.)

  As the broadcast began, the Nugget reporter noticed Cécile steal a glance at her mother and indulge in “a private little chuckle.” Their cue came…and the airwaves crackled with silence. Host Lowell Thomas asked again if the girls would help him. No response. Perhaps the message for Dr. Dafoe? he suggested. Nothing. The only sound the sisters conceded to make came from Annette, who plunked out two verses of “Frère Jacques” on her miniature organ.

  “I do not know what got into them,” guardian Judge Valin said of the incident. “It may be that someone has been making suggestions to them that should not have been made.”

  Blame for the two fiascos immediately fell on Oliva and Elzire. Though Oliva insisted—“in excellent English”—that he was as puzzled over his daughters’ behavior as the rest of the world, the denial rang hollow in the public’s ears. Everyone knew how the Dionnes felt about Dr. Dafoe, and if Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie refused to speak English, it meant they could no longer communicate with their parents’ rival. Their refusal even to wish him well in French certainly did nothing to quell such suspicions.

  When Dafoe returned from his long convalescence in Toronto, he witnessed for himself how the girls’ allegiance had shifted in his absence. Photographers were on hand to capture what they expected would be a gleeful reunion: the Dionne Quintuplets, welcoming home their beloved Dr. Dafoe after months apart. The girls’ subdued reaction was impossible to overlook. “They just wouldn’t go near him,” Nurse Chaput recalled, shaking her head. “We literally had to push them.”

  “He looked much older and very frail,” the sisters themselves remembered. “We politely wished him health as a kind of goodbye, but we showed him none of the old warm affection, and we did not hug him as before. We were old enough to know that Mom and Dad did not want us to do that. We were anxious to please. The little doctor did not allow the hurt to show on his face or in his manner.”

  In the privacy of his home, however, Dafoe made no attempt to hide the bitterness of his disappointment over being ousted from the girls’ affections. “Do you think,” an acquaintance asked him, “that there was a better way to have handled this business? Perhaps a greater understanding of the parents’ point of view?”

  “Maybe,” the doctor conceded. “I don’t know. My job was to keep the babies alive.”

  “But maybe if someone had taken the time to explain things to Oliva…”

  “Impossible,” Dafoe said, jabbing at the air with his pipe. The doctor claimed that Oliva could not comprehend the necessity of sterilizing diapers and bottles, apparently confident that the public would believe that a northern Ontario farmer could be so ignorant as to deny the existence of microscopic organisms. “His babies were dying of dysentery and he wouldn’t believe it because I couldn’t show him the germs. How could anybody talk sense to a man like that?”

  * * *

  —

  The following February, Dr. Dafoe resigned from his position as Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s personal physician. “I feel that my usefulness for the five lovely girls has come to an end,” he told the press. “They were sweet children,” he added with a glance at the office wall where their photo hung.

  Two weeks before Dafoe’s resignation, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie attended a groundbreaking ceremony for the new nineteen-room home they would share with their family.

  Anyone could see that the guardianship was on its last legs. Tourist traffic was tapering off, and it wasn’t solely due to the radio debacles. The United States had joined World War II, shifting Americans’ attention from the petty skirmishes in Callander, Ontario, to the literal battlefields of Europe and the Pacific. Gasoline and tire rubber were rationed, curtailing long-distance road trips. And Nurse Louise de Kiriline, with her characteristic brusqueness, voiced something everyone else was too tactful to say. “I was disappointed in them,” she told a reporter after visiting Quintland that spring of 1942. “I thought they were not as pretty.” Five ordinary-looking seven-year-olds simply did not have the same pull on em
otions or pocketbooks as a quintet of rosy-cheeked toddlers with bouncing ringlets.

  For the first time, the press’s sympathy was firmly with the Dionne family. Liberty magazine, which in 1935 had praised the Dafoe Hospital as “exactly the sort of place you’d want your own baby to be,” had done an about-face. Since the miraculous quintuple birth, Liberty had published a stack of at least ten articles wooing the public over to Dafoe’s side, compared to only two favoring the Dionnes’ point of view. In 1940, Liberty printed a scathing indictment of the children’s upbringing, secretly written by none other than Nurse Yvonne Leroux. “I wouldn’t want children of my own kept permanently in cotton wool or in velvet-lined cases as a sort of museum piece,” she said of the hospital. “If you knew them as well as I do…you would be sorry for the quintuplets.”

  Nurse de Kiriline’s sympathies had likewise shifted. During her 1942 visit, the lock on the front gate affected her in a way it never had before. “The guards wouldn’t let me in the enclosure until they got permission,” she told a reporter. “I saw in a flash how Mrs. Dionne must have felt all those years—waiting to have a locked gate opened so she could see her own children.”

  As the guardianship fractured, more and more people began to give serious thought to the lingering effects that eight years of controversy might have on the children themselves. They debated over the quins, fretted about the quints. No one seemed to take into account that “the quints” were five separate people, each of whom might react in her own way. Their fans knew them only through photographs and newsreels, where the seven-year-old sisters appeared so very much alike that it was almost impossible for anyone who did not know them personally to fully appreciate their differences.