The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

  This time Yvonne accepted the decision and embraced the secular life as fully as she knew how. She alone of her sisters learned to drive. She indulged in a world tour, visiting India, Israel, Bethlehem, Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, and England. When she returned home, she treated herself to courses in art history, music history, and literature, eventually finding great satisfaction working as a mother substitute in a kindergarten, and later as a library clerk. “I worked a lot on myself, watching myself and trying not to hurt anyone,” she said. “Work helped me a lot, and faith.” Though the church had denied Yvonne one of her greatest desires, the loss did not weaken her devotion. “Just like someone needs food to go on,” she explained, “I need the spirituality to go through all the things I face, to live.”

  In 1963, the weight of the sisters’ memories began to lift for the first time. Intent on setting the record straight about life behind the gates of the Dafoe Hospital and the Big House, Annette, Cécile, and Marie told the story of their lives to author James Brough in a series of thirty interviews. (Yvonne was still a novice in New Brunswick at that time and did not actively participate.) Brough then interwove their personal recollections with his own research to create a book that is half biography, half memoir. Called We Were Five, it reads as though spoken by the four sisters in unison. To whet the public’s appetite and encourage sales, a shortened version of We Were Five appeared in McCall’s magazine in October and November of 1963.

  The McCall’s articles shocked and dismayed the world more than Dr. Alfred Adler’s controversial editorial had twenty-seven years earlier. Though Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie held back the most disturbing of their memories, barely hinting at any kind of abuse, the undercurrent of their lingering pain remained palpable. “Such bitterness,” Nurse Yvonne Leroux said to the Toronto Star. “It is all so long ago. I am sorry for the whole bunch of them….”

  We Were Five struck the harshest blow to Oliva and Elzire Dionne. “There are two sides to every story,” Oliva told the papers, “and Mrs. Dionne and I have ours.” Indeed, they had already had their say. With their approval and cooperation, Lillian Barker had published two books telling Oliva and Elzire’s side of the story—The Quints Have a Family in 1941, and The Dionne Legend: Quintuplets in Captivity in 1951. The second had been withdrawn from sale in Canada almost immediately, allegedly due to “certain inaccuracies discovered in the text.” There’s no doubt that Barker skewed some facts to magnify her readers’ sympathy for the Dionnes, but the more likely reality is that Barker’s bold criticism of Dr. Dafoe and the government of Ontario had shamed and angered the province. (“For Canada, the book is too true,” she remarked to the American press, snorting “with ladylike elegance.”)

  “We have no intention of getting into a big controversy over this, except to say that the magazine article is full of untruths,” Oliva Dionne maintained. “I hate to think it was for financial gain, but if it wasn’t for that, what was it? Our conscience is clear. Mrs. Dionne and I may not have been the best parents in the world and we undoubtedly made many mistakes, but we tried our best under very trying circumstances.” The phone never stopped ringing as Oliva gave his statement. “This is just like the old days,” he remarked.

  Publicly, Oliva reacted with cool dignity, but his private feelings were another matter. “Father’s reaction was violent,” Victor Dionne said. “That book really hurt them, hurt them deeply,” Daniel’s wife, Audrey, confirmed.

  Marie’s husband, Florian, had tried to soften the blow for his in-laws, telling Marie he disapproved of the tone of the book. Marie had surrendered to her husband’s wishes and attended no more meetings with Brough. Not yet satisfied, Florian also attempted to convince Marie and her sisters to cut out the statements he felt were “most impolite and harsh” toward their parents. But Marie would not give that much ground.

  “Everything we said in the magazine is true, true, true,” she told a reporter. Annette likewise maintained for years to come that We Were Five was “a sensitive and accurate account.” Unlike Florian Houle, Annette’s husband firmly supported her decision to go public. Gerry knew how much more she and her sisters might have said, and how much good had come of confessing as much as they did. “You wouldn’t know my wife now,” he said. “She’s not depressed. Before, everything was bottled up.”

  The revelations were nearly as difficult for the public to absorb as they had been for Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie to divulge. “People think that we are perfect,” Annette reflected. “They want us always smiling.”

  “Now when I look back, it was a fairy tale,” Genia Goelz, a lifetime quint fan, realized.

  * * *

  —

  At the same time, Annette, Cécile, and Marie were noticing cracks in the fairy tales they’d hoped to fashion within their own lives. One of Cécile’s twin boys, Bruno, had died at fifteen months, leaving a deep wound she had yet to recover from. “I cannot talk of him,” she said. “That is a part of my life that belongs to nobody.”

  By the end of 1964, Cécile was permanently separated from her husband and seeking a divorce. “I didn’t know anything about the world,” Cécile reflected. “So I thought when I fell in love that everything was going to be beautiful and everything will be erased from my past.” It was not the case. More challenging still, Philippe Langlois drank heavily. She soon learned he was also gay and unable to be faithful or honest with her, especially if he’d been drinking. After Cécile turned him out of the house, Philippe never asked to see his children. “It takes a lot of patience and courage to raise children without a father,” Cécile discovered. The absence of Philippe’s income posed a problem as well, for her trust fund interest payments were not enough to support her daughter and three sons. “I try hard to give them security, a sense of stability,” she said. For Cécile, that meant temporarily relinquishing her children to foster homes when her emotional and financial burdens began taking a toll on her health.

  Cécile considered it vital that her children experience normal family life—even if it meant she could visit them only on weekends. “I saw some parallels with my childhood and my mother’s childhood,” her son Bertrand acknowledged. “But me, at least I had the chance to play with other children and neighbors,” he said with a smile, fondly recalling how he collected empty bottles to trade in for candy money. “I consider that I had a normal childhood, even if I was separated from my mother for several years.”

  With no family of her own to support, Yvonne helped ease Cécile’s responsibilities by brightening the children’s birthdays with gifts. “Yvonne was my parent for me,” Cécile said. “She was always there.”

  Meanwhile, Marie was struggling in more ways than her sisters realized. She, too, had separated from her husband, a man Annette remembered as “kind but very reserved.” Behind closed doors, Marie later revealed, Florian Houle had turned out to be authoritarian and controlling. Her near-total ineptitude with housekeeping and handling money didn’t help matters, and in 1964, Marie left with her daughters and rented an apartment in Montreal. For Monique and Émilie Houle, that time rang with laughter and glowed with love. Together the three of them would tumble down the hill in the park like rolling pins, or visit pet shops in search of the perfect parakeet to join their dog, Lassie, and two cats. Marie’s doctor became fond of her, and the two began to date.

  Yet Marie’s friends were “deeply worried about both her physical condition and her attitude toward life.” She had unaccountable fainting spells. Her moods fluctuated from gaiety to deep emotional hollows. Haunted by the feeling of having been brought up in a goldfish bowl, Marie sought out intensive therapy—including electroshock treatments—to soothe her unhealed wounds. Some therapies were more successful than others, and so there were also times when she turned to alcohol for relief. In 1969, she placed eight-year-old Émilie and six-year-old Monique in a foster home run by nuns.

  “I knew that she h
ad been treated for psychiatric care, but I didn’t know she was so unhappy, so alone,” Cécile said. Annette took to calling her sister every day so that Marie would not be so lonely without her daughters. When Marie did not pick up the phone one Monday in February of 1970, Annette thought little of it. By Thursday, Annette knew something was wrong. Marie had not answered, and just as alarming, she had not called all week. Usually she heard from her sister once a day, if not more. Annette called Marie’s doctor friend, Marcel Bernier, and he went with Gerry to Marie’s apartment.

  Later that day, Annette’s phone finally rang. “It’s over,” Dr. Bernier said. “That’s it.” The two men had found Marie dead on her bed. An empty cereal bowl and several bottles of medication stood on her nightstand.

  Though Marie’s official cause of death was undetermined, Florian Houle told the press his wife had died of an embolism—a blood clot in her brain. People were beginning to draw their own conclusions based on the reports of Marie’s depression, the pill bottles in her bedroom, and rumors that exaggerated her drinking. For his daughters’ sake, Houle needed that kind of talk to stop. The brutal truth was that Marie had been dead several days by the time Gerry and Dr. Bernier arrived—too long for the medical examiner to be certain of what had happened. Marie was thirty-five years old.

  * * *

  —

  Oliva, Elzire, and six of Marie’s eight brothers and sisters traveled to Montreal for her funeral. It was the first time the majority of the Dionnes had been together since Cécile’s wedding twelve years earlier; Oliva and Elzire had not even met all of their grandchildren. Yet their shared sorrow did not bring the two halves of the family nearer. Everyone but Yvonne and Cécile refused Annette’s invitation to return to her house for a sort of reunion after the funeral service.

  “I would have given anything in the world to have them come to our home,” Gerry said. “Not for me, but for Annette. She has been terribly upset by Marie’s death—I wake up nights and find her crying.”

  * * *

  —

  Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile took comfort in one another. Yvonne and Cécile moved to the same Montreal suburb where Annette and Gerry lived, and Annette’s home, “the gravitational center for the Dionne sisters,” became a tighter circle than ever. Daily rounds of phone calls began first thing in the morning. As the day progressed, the three of them inevitably ended up hopscotching from one house to another. Gerry had once quipped, “If more want to move in I just add rooms,” but now Cécile and especially Yvonne’s constant presence began to corrode his own relationship with Annette. “My husband thought he was married to three women,” Annette explained.

  It was more than that. Gerry, who had watched his wife blossoming like a bud in the early years of their marriage, sensed a disappointing change. “After the sisters came, the flower closed, they went to their old world, their private world,” he said. In that world, Gerry always took second or third place. It infuriated him to find that plans he made with Annette in the morning were changed by Yvonne by the time he returned from work. At the time, Gerry neglected to take into account that Annette had no one but Yvonne and Cécile for company all day long. “I was working all the time, day and night,” he eventually admitted. “I didn’t realize what was going on.” Gerry could only see that Yvonne held more sway in his home than he did himself.

  “Finally I got fed up,” Gerry said. The only solution he could see was to break Annette free of the circle of sisters and try to begin again with her, somewhere else. “I told Annette, Your sister goes out of here or I go out myself.” It was not a choice Annette could make, so Gerry made it for her. After sixteen years of marriage, he filed for divorce.

  * * *

  —

  Two more irreversible losses followed. On November 14, 1979, word arrived that their father had died. He was seventy-six years old. “Oliva Dionne was not the plodding, backwoods farmer as he has often been portrayed,” the North Bay Nugget eulogized the man the world had never regarded as anything more than Papa Dionne. “Rather, he was intelligent, industrious and a gentleman who showed great courage in facing up to the many complex problems which arose when his family was suddenly thrown into world prominence in 1934.” Oliva Dionne had spent most of his life in pursuit of two things he prized above almost all others: his five daughters and his dignity. Both had eluded his grasp.

  Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile returned to Corbeil for their father’s funeral. No one expressed any happiness at their return, including Elzire. “Mom said if our father was dead, it was our fault,” Cécile remembered. “If he had so many worries, it was our fault.”

  Six years later, their mother was gone, too. “Her great love for her family is evident in her every action,” the Nugget had said of Elzire Dionne in 1955. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s greatest misfortune was perhaps that they had rarely experienced anything from their mother except the blunt force of Elzire’s thwarted affection.

  “I felt badly when Mom died,” Annette said, “that we’d had no opportunity to straighten things out.” Yvonne shared the same regret. “I would have liked that she asked for us,” Yvonne reflected. “But she didn’t. I saw the reality and I accepted it.”

  Oliva’s and Elzire’s wills contained identical clauses: “I declare that I have made no provision in my Will for my daughters, ANNETTE ALLARD, CÉCILE LANGLOIS and YVONNE DIONNE, by reason of the possession by them of their own adequate means.”

  But those clauses were entirely mistaken.

  By the 1990s, the fortune that Welfare Minister David Croll had proudly decreed vast enough to provide for “all the normal needs of the Dionne family…for all time to come” had dwindled to nearly nothing. Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile were not rich, nor even comfortable. Instead, the three sisters were living together, pooling their three pensions so they could they get by on just $746 a month (about $850 US today).

  Where had it all gone? A three-bedroom bungalow and a weekend lakeside chalet had consumed tens of thousands from Annette’s account during the early years of her marriage. After Gerry left, she found that $40 in child support combined with her monthly interest payments of $345 were not enough to raise three boys, so Annette remortgaged her home for $40,000 to make up the difference. Twenty-five years later, she had a debt and a leaky roof.

  Cécile’s $10,000 wedding, her husband’s “particularly lavish” spending, legal fees for her divorce, and a $16,000 house had drained her share of the trust fund to $6,000 by 1988. That money went toward an expansion of Annette’s house in 1992, so that she could move in with her sister. Alone, Cécile had not the slightest hope of making ends meet on her monthly pension of $27.41.

  A year later, Yvonne joined the household. Though she had enough money to live modestly, Yvonne’s delicate bones, painful arthritis, and two hip replacements had left her feeling fragile enough to give up living alone. Besides, if her sisters needed her help, there was no question where Yvonne felt she belonged. Without her $5,000 savings and $399 pension, Annette and Cécile would have had only $347.93 to survive on each month. “I had no choice,” Yvonne said.

  * * *

  —

  Cécile’s son Bertrand could not sit by and witness his mother’s diminished circumstances. Something told him she and her sisters were entitled to much more. “I had a feeling that the quints had been robbed,” Bertrand explained.

  His hunch had been simmering for decades. When he was ten years old, he remembered, someone brought a Dionne Quintuplets pencil to school. Bertrand had recognized the images of his mother and aunts immediately. “My mother was struggling to pay the bills and I was wondering how come there’s some pencil with their faces, and they don’t receive any money from that?” he recalled. “That was the beginning of my fight.”

  Acting on his suspicions, Bertrand traveled to Toronto to launch his own investigation of the Dionne guardianship files in the Arc
hives of Ontario. What he uncovered there sickened him. “I think it’s more disgusting every time I think about it,” he said. He accumulated suitcases full of documents, showing that the way his mother’s and aunts’ account had been managed, they might just as well have been robbed.

  At age two their trust fund amounted to $500,000. At four it had swelled to $1.8 million. But by June 30, 1944, half of it had disappeared, leaving $945,000. Although a grand total of $2,086,747 had been collected from advertisers, photographers, and filmmakers during Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s childhood, $1,114,033 had been paid out over the years.

  Nearly everyone involved had treated their trust fund as though it were a bottomless piggy bank. Each time Ontario’s Official Guardian traveled north to review the Dionnes’ accounting, he charged “every plate of fish and chips eaten in North Bay hotels to the quints’ trust fund rather than his own government department.” Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie had paid for Dr. Blatz’s research expenses—everything from the researchers’ train fare to the camera, tripod, and film used to photograph them. In the 1930s Blatz’s charges came to $1,998.12. Today the bill would amount to more than $26,000 in American currency. They paid for Dr. Dafoe’s stamps—$18 in January of 1938—and picked up the tab for telephone calls and telegrams at a monthly rate that varied from $71.48 to $834 in today’s US dollars. The nurses’ tennis court? Courtesy of Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. On their seventh birthday the board of guardians donated a $1,750 ambulance to the Red Cross and funded $20,000 worth of war bonds in the sisters’ names. As much as $15,000 went to furnish the Big House in 1943. Bertrand discovered that beginning in the 1940s his grandfather had charged the current equivalent of almost half a million dollars a year to the quintuplet account without ever providing receipts to justify his expenses. “Mom would tell us on August 27 that Dad was going out to get his birthday gift,” Yvonne remembered, “and she would laugh and we would wonder why, and it was a new Cadillac.” Annette recollected her brothers all had cars, too. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie had even borne the operating costs of their beloved Villa Notre Dame—$72,000 every year, or $618,000 US today.