The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

  Still, Oliva hesitated to jump at Spear’s offer. He was a man who preferred to “turn any question over and over in his mind, searching for flaws, avoiding hasty decisions like the plague.” He was also acutely aware of being watched. Callander was a small town, and everyone knew Oliva Dionne was mulling over the prospect of tens of thousands of dollars. “As long as he lived, Oliva Dionne would remember that experience,” a friend wrote later. “The looks on those people’s faces, staring at him as though he were a circus freak. He felt like a man in a fog, all mixed up, and the more he thought about his responsibilities, the more mixed up he became.”

  A decision this momentous could not be made alone. Oliva had already consulted Father Routhier, who had agreed to act as his business manager should Oliva decide to meet with Spear. In addition, Oliva sought Dr. Dafoe’s opinion.

  Dafoe’s exact words have not been preserved. Nor is it known whether he said them to Father Routhier or to Oliva Dionne himself. In typical Dafoe style, the essence of his response went straight to the point: Make what you can, while you can. A complete set of quintuplets had never survived more than four days. In 1866, a single quintuplet in Portugal had managed to live for a record fifty days, but that was it. If Oliva meant to accept the Chicago offer, he had no time to lose.

  Oliva summoned Nurse Leroux’s father, Georges. Together with Father Routhier and Green the Greek, Oliva Dionne climbed into Georges Leroux’s taxi and headed toward Orillia, 130 miles to the south, to meet Ivan Spear’s plane.

  * * *

  —

  The eyes of the continent were beginning to turn toward Corbeil as minute by minute, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie defied five centuries of medical history simply by continuing to breathe. That Wednesday morning of May 30, they were front-page news in Toronto, Ottawa, and Winnipeg. Country Doctor Battling to Keep Quintuplets Alive, said the headlines. Progress of Quintuplets Amazes Medical World. Readers in Pittsburgh, New York, Detroit, and Chicago memorized their names and weights, panting for the next update.

  Dr. Dafoe, just by being willing to speak with the press, was quickly becoming the centerpiece of the newspaper stories. Bruised by his initial encounters with the media, Oliva Dionne was more guarded, often coming off as brusque and defensive. As one article put it decades later, “no one could have been more poorly designed by nature…to become a superstar.” Dafoe was his opposite in every way. Congenial, accommodating, and unassuming, the doctor had rarely refused a chance to show off the basketful of babies to reporters and photographers as though he were the proud father. Already Dafoe had instinctively, or perhaps even accidentally, grasped the power of publicity and harnessed it for the babies’ benefit. Treating the reporters like pals and feeding them any little tidbit on the newborns’ progress kindled the public’s interest, which in turn motivated the press to lend a hand in Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s struggle for survival. After all, the longer those five babies lived, the more newspapers would sell.

  * * *

  —

  At three o’clock in the afternoon that same Wednesday, a car with “a funny-looking box strapped on behind” pulled up to Dr. Dafoe’s curb.

  “My name’s Charlie Blake,” the driver told Dafoe. “I’m from the Chicago American. Am I too late with my incubator?”

  “You’re just on time,” Dafoe said. “Let’s go right out to the house. Guess you’d like to see the babies?”

  At the Dionnes’, things were already looking a little brighter. Dr. Bundesen’s shipment of breast milk had arrived on the morning train, packed in dry ice. It was frozen, but Nurse Leroux thawed and sterilized it, and for the first time in their short lives, all five babies enjoyed a full meal of human milk.

  Nurse Leroux pounced on the incubator. Within minutes, she had scrubbed it out and lined the inner compartment with gauze and cotton. That compartment was something like a boat. Its walls and bottom were hollow, so that hot water poured in at the top filled the reservoir underneath, then gradually rose up the walls, surrounding the occupant with heat from all sides without using a spark of electricity or a drop of kerosene. It was built for just one infant, but the Dionne sisters were so tiny, the Chicago incubator could hold the three smallest if they were laid crosswise.

  “Those babies don’t know what they owe you,” Dr. Dafoe told Charlie Blake as Nurse Leroux transferred Marie to the soft, clean nest and then added Émilie and Cécile for good measure.

  From that moment, the lives of the Dionne Quintuplets were inextricably bound with the press, for Charlie Blake and the Chicago American had almost certainly just saved Marie Dionne’s life.

  The Toronto Star could hardly stand the thought of a Chicago paper becoming the Dionnes’ hero. The Star, as a matter of fact, was rarely content to simply cover the news if there was the slightest chance that the paper itself could play a role in the story. So the Star called up Dr. Dafoe’s kid brother, Dr. William Dafoe—a skilled Toronto doctor who just happened to specialize in delivering babies—to find out what kinds of supplies the Dionnes might need. Dr. Will gave the newspaper a list as long as his arm: everything from soap and safety pins to bunny blankets and a bathtub. To this bounty, the Star added a tissue-wrapped basket of delicacies assembled “with particular thought to what might be tempting to the young mother’s appetite.” Bramble jelly, strawberries, cantaloupe, tomatoes, celery, biscuits, sponge cake, and cream cheese, topped off with a box of candy for “the other little Dionnes.” Reporter Keith Munro and photographer Fred Davis were assigned to ferry the carload of gifts to Callander. Accompanying them was “a pretty little nurse with fair hair and soft capable hands” named Jean Blewett.

  Two hundred miles later they arrived at Dr. Dafoe’s doorstep and were welcomed inside by the Little Doc himself, who was “pathetically grateful” for the mountain of supplies. “He was dressed in baggy pants innocent of crease, and a sweater coat,” Keith Munro remembered. “He had a pipe in his mouth. I’ve often thought that he must have been born with a pipe in his mouth.” They talked well into the night, there in Dafoe’s book-lined study, and got the whole story of the birth straight from the doctor’s mouth. “The Little Doc was a newspaperman’s dream,” Munro marveled. “He just told you everything and relied on your sense of decency not to let him down. I don’t think we ever did.”

  * * *

  —

  Keith Munro and Fred Davis were up at four o’clock Thursday morning, May 31, and on their way to the Dionne farm, eager to see the quintuplets while there were still five of them to see. The night before, Dr. Dafoe had told them, “I don’t see how they can live, but they’re living.” Little Marie in particular still had him worried.

  “Our first impression of the place was of lines and lines of diapers hung out to dry,” Munro remembered. “The diapers almost obscured the tiny, unpainted clapboard house where the Dionne family had lived for a couple of generations.”

  He and Davis spoke to Nurse Leroux and loitered outside the house. Just as Dafoe had predicted, Marie had almost not made it to first light. Only the rum, it seemed, had compelled her miniature heart to keep beating. The men waited and schemed, desperate to get their camera into that house long enough to snap a photo. They watched with envy as Dafoe arrived and went in. In a few minutes, he was back out. Before Munro and Davis had mustered the nerve to ask, the Little Doc said, “Do you want to see the babies?”

  “We piled into the house and got one of the big thrills of a lifetime,” Munro remembered. Nurse Leroux lifted the lid of the incubator as though it were a box of cigars. “She rolled back the white coverlet and there, blissfully asleep, were three babes. In a big basket to their left were the other two.”

  “There was something terribly exciting about those babies that made thrills run up and down my spine,” Keith Munro said of his first glimpse of Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. “I can’t explain it.” He wasn�
�t the only one. Charlie Blake dubbed the phenomenon “the Quintuplet Disease.”

  With Dafoe’s and Elzire’s permission, Fred Davis set up his camera and began snapping away. “It was like taking nature pictures,” he said. “Birds in a nest. Little skinny red nestlings.” And then something happened that would frighten Fred Davis every time he thought of it for the rest of his life.

  A flashbulb exploded.

  “Shattered glass flew all around the little room,” said Munro. “It seemed to me that a whole shower descended right on the basket with the tiny heads.”

  The Star men were mortified at the thought that Marie might have died from the shock. But Elzire and the staff took the incident in stride, staggering Munro with their kindness. “The doctor even made some little joke about it,” he remembered. Fortunately, the bedroom was so small that Davis had set his tripod just outside the doorway; none of the shards actually fell in range of Elzire and the babies.

  The Star’s story included interviews with Elzire, Dafoe, and, as an uncommon bonus, the two midwives. It would be one of the few times Dafoe gave Auntie Legros and Madame Lebel full credit for their critical role in the delivery.

  “Didn’t you get the shock of your life when all this happened?” the Star asked Dafoe.

  “Shock? No, I was too busy.”

  “And you had no help?”

  “Certainly; excellent help; Mrs. Lebelle [sic] and Mrs. Legros.”

  “But no other medical help?”

  “What do I want other medical help for? Things went along pretty good, didn’t they?” That was Dafoe’s style—to make light of things if they turned out right.

  Madame Lebel was more forthright. “I’d rather have a baby myself than go through that again,” she declared. Auntie Legros agreed. “I think it was the worst experience of my life,” she told the Star.

  “What did you think when Mrs. Lebelle [sic] handed you a second baby, and then a third?”

  “I didn’t think. I was too busy to think anything but that I must get those babies to breathe. You see, we were all alone. The doctor hadn’t come yet….I am not very strong, but I seemed to get strength from somewhere that night.”

  The Star’s in-depth article was one of the first to let the public truly savor the story’s drama: the miraculous birth, the wonder of seeing the babies themselves, all told firsthand. The appetite it whetted would prove to be bottomless.

  One hundred thirty miles to the south, in Orillia, Oliva Dionne had come face to face with the man from Chicago who had promised him so much. Ivan Spear was the very image of a promoter from the big city—“very colorful, very adept, very resourceful, with piercing eyes and a quick smile.” Tight suit, slick wavy hair, and a pencil-thin mustache. With him were two other men: Spear’s business partner, Ted Kopelman, and their lawyer, Luis Kutner.

  The terms of the contract they presented to Oliva were every bit as fantastic as Spear had offered on the telephone. In exchange for exclusive rights to install Oliva’s five daughters in the fair’s Life Exhibit, Spear was prepared to make the Dionnes’ financial worries evaporate. The contract promised to take up the responsibility for Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s medical expenses immediately, before they ever left Canada—up to $100 per week for as many as six weeks. Spear would also arrange for the babies’ medical care en route to the United States, as well as on the return trip. Upon their arrival in Chicago, the girls would reside in a “luxurious private ward,” staffed by experts, furnished with the most modern equipment available, and outfitted with windows similar to a hospital nursery, so spectators could admire the children without disturbing them or interfering with the doctors and nurses. Kutner went so far as to pledge to recruit Chicago’s commissioner of health, none other than Dr. Herman Bundesen, to oversee the babies’ care. Housing, meals, transportation, and more would be provided for the entire family for the duration of the Dionnes’ six-month stay at the fair, and Elzire Dionne would have the right to approve the conditions under which her babies would be exhibited.

  Spear and his team had anticipated and addressed a parent’s every tangible concern. All that remained was the moral hurdle: exploitation. Was it right or wrong for a father to exhibit his daughters in a glorified sideshow attraction for the sake of their health and financial welfare?

  “Ivan had a cheque made out,” Kutner remembered, “and he did a very good thing psychologically. He gave the cheque to Dionne to hold while we drafted the agreement.” The $100 check—worth over $1,400 in US currency today—was the equivalent of more than a month’s wages for Oliva, yet it represented only a fraction of the riches Spear dangled before him. As an advance against ticket sales, Oliva would be entitled to receive $250 a week for every week he and his family lived in Chicago—$250 above and beyond their living and medical expenses, to tuck away in the bank or spend as he pleased. That meant $1,000 a month, guaranteed, with the promise of much, much more when they divided up the profits in December, just for letting people peer through a pane of glass at his five baby girls.

  If Oliva harbored any revulsion about putting his daughters on display, the practical benefits quickly began to obscure the psychological drawbacks. Before signing, however, Oliva insisted that a clause protecting his babies’ health be included in the contract. The promoters readily agreed. The third paragraph of the agreement stated that the Dionne family would not be expected in Chicago until “the physicians in charge of the quintuplets decide that they can be moved without possibility of injurious effect.”

  One task remained: negotiating how to divvy up the profits from ticket sales. The promoters offered 10 percent to Father Routhier as business manager and 20 percent to Oliva. Luis Kutner remembered, “They were talking back and forth in rapid French and very meaningful overtones. Ivan Spear and Ted Kopelman and I looked at each other and thought we’d blown the whole deal. We thought, well, maybe we should’ve offered more.”

  They needn’t have worried. Oliva and Father Routhier came to their own agreement between themselves: 23 percent for Oliva, and 7 percent for the priest.

  Oliva Dionne signed.

  * * *

  —

  Back home, the babies were losing weight. From 13 pounds, 6 ounces total they had dropped to 12 pounds—with their clothes on. Newborns often shed a few ounces in the first few days, but Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and especially Émilie and Marie, had none to spare.

  “Babes holding their own and that’s all,” wrote Nurse Leroux. “All kinds of blue spells.”

  The problem was more than a matter of getting enough food in. Not enough was coming out, either. The mixture of cow’s milk and corn syrup that had undoubtedly kept the babies from starving for the first fifty-two hours of their lives was proving difficult for them to fully digest. Their diapers were wet, but that was it. On the surface, fewer soiled diapers was a mercy, for it meant less work. It also meant that waste was gradually building up in the babies’ bodies. Their skin was turning yellowish, their movements languid. Dr. Dafoe ordered magnesia added to their formula, hoping it would loosen their sluggish intestines. “Praying every minute,” Nurse Leroux wrote.

  Reporters. Cameras. Gawkers. By the time Oliva returned from Orillia on Friday, June 1, a full-fledged media circus had erupted outside the Dionne farmhouse.

  “I don’t know what this town did before the babies were born,” a seventeen-year-old Callander girl told the Pittsburgh Press. “We must have been completely dead, because no one for miles around is talking, thinking or wondering about anything but the Dionne babies and whether or not they’ll live.”

  Folks who a scant few days earlier had never heard the word quintuplet now fancied themselves worthy of becoming intimately acquainted with “the quints” or “the quins.” It was “a constant fight,” Dr. Dafoe remembered, to keep everyone from long-lost cousins to perfect strangers from swarming the place. “They simply
could not be made to understand why they might not hold the wonderful quintuplets, examine them minutely, even kiss them!”

  Yet reporters were still allowed in, and plenty of them. “Newshawks,” the Toronto Star called them, from Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Some were downright deceitful, such as the two French-speaking nuns who were admitted to the house to pray for the babies, only to be exposed as reporters when Oliva caught them gloating in English about the trick they’d played.

  An agent from Ripley’s Believe It or Not! “Odditorium” was said to be courting the Dionnes in hopes of adding the five babies to its world-famous collection of human anomalies. A nightclub owner offered no less than $500 a week for the chance to display Mrs. Dionne and her daughters for twenty weeks.

  Oliva could not even walk to his outhouse without being filmed by newsreel crews. “We wanted some more shots of Papa Dionne if we could,” cameraman Ross Beesley said, “so we focused on the walk down to the privy; we figured this poor guy would have to go eventually to the outdoor biffy, but he never did.”

  “Our little world was topsy-turvy,” Oliva said of that time, “and I knew not which way to turn for the quietness and seclusion I had been accustomed to.”

  * * *

  —

  Signing the Chicago contract had not relieved Oliva’s worries. If anything, the scrutiny had intensified.

  Ivan Spear had not wasted a moment to begin publicizing the quintuplets’ impending appearance at the World’s Fair. Before Oliva was back in Corbeil, Spear had broadcast the news of his spectacular contract, and by Friday morning the figures were in all the papers. Anyone in North America could see exactly how much Oliva Dionne stood to gain by exhibiting his daughters, and the numbers were dazzling. Every weapon of modern medicine would be at their disposal, too. But could the babies withstand the seven-hundred-mile trip?