The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

  Their closets bulged with dresses and overalls, ruffled sunsuits and posh wool Hudson’s Bay Company coats striped in green, red, yellow, and blue. In the playroom were storybooks, toy pianos, trumpets, rattles, drums, building blocks, and balls. One whole corner was devoted to their dolls, complete with beds, cupboards full of clothes, and a china cabinet stocked with miniature dishes. Another room contained easels, paintbrushes, pegboards, plasticine modeling clay, pencils and crayons, scissors, construction paper, and paste. On Wednesdays, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie reveled in the delights of their own private carpentry shop, where they pounded nails and sawed through soft wood with man-sized tools. Outside were tricycles, wagons, toboggans, hobbyhorses, and kiddie cars.

  Admirers showered them with gifts, more gifts than five little girls could possibly make use of. Teddy bears and rag dolls. Handmade dresses and crocheted berets. A one-of-a-kind five-passenger deluxe kiddie car from a fan in California. Patchwork quilts for their dolls. Books. Always, the presents came in multiples of five—except the radio-Victrola. A stack of records, ranging from nursery songs to arias from La Bohème and I Pagliacci filled the nursery with music that would evoke “a certain gladness” in Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie for decades to come. “The overwhelming memory is of a wonderful, glowing happiness given, received, and shared,” they said of those early years.

  “Above all else, we had each other,” the sisters remembered. The lack of playmates, or of any visitors other than their parents, bothered them not at all. “We were a club, a society, a civilization all our own.”

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  The only thing missing was love. “We had bicycles, we had dolls—everything but family,” Annette said. Their nurses adored them, yet were forbidden to indulge in the most basic ways of showing it. “They were not supposed to express their affection,” Cécile remembered. “It was very strict on that.” Kisses spread germs. Cuddles risked favoritism, or spoiling. “But I do remember that they were very kind to us,” Annette added. “They were always smiling.”

  Mother was not a word the girls fully understood, either literally or figuratively. “We knew that there was one visitor, who came across the road to see us, whom the nurses taught us to call Maman,” the sisters remembered. But Maman was only a name. It did not signal love and security the way it did for other children. “A normal child, a mother presses to her breast,” Cécile said. “It makes a relationship. We did not know that from a mother.” Their first memory of their mother was seeing her through the observation window at the back of the nursery. Because they had known no other way of life, the strangeness of this situation was lost on Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. “It was not possible for her to be always at our side, mothering us in the true meaning of the word, so how could we miss her on the days she did not arrive, or feel any appreciable sense of loss?”

  No matter how much she hugged and kissed her daughters to make up for the time they’d lost together as infants, Elzire’s brief visits could not compete with the staff’s constant care and attention. “They were always there if we had need of them, to open their arms to us, to join in the laughter and dry the tears,” the sisters later said of their nurses. In their memories, the nurses would meld into “a kind of composite mother,” who evoked the tender emotions that ought to have belonged to Elzire.

  Canada’s leading pediatrician, Dr. Alan Brown of Toronto, saw nothing to object to in this arrangement. “To a child, a mother is only somebody who cares for him,” he said. According to Brown’s way of thinking, round-the-clock attention from a team of devoted nurses compensated for any lack of contact with their own mother. “And a father—Dr. Dafoe is a father to those children.”

  But the nurses themselves had reason to doubt Brown’s convictions. They were there every day to see how the five toddlers reacted when Elzire and Oliva left the nursery. “Always, those babies clamoured to kiss their parents good night,” Nurse Leroux remembered. “When the inevitable moment for departure came, it was always too soon for the little ones. They did not cry. But their mouths drooped, their eyes grew large and puzzled. They shook their heads from side to side, held out their arms, even grabbed at their mother’s skirt or their father’s trouser-leg as their parents scrambled to get out of the nursery.”

  Soon enough, the goodbye routine became normal to the children, too. Before they had turned three, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie no longer made any fuss when Oliva and Elzire left. They had stopped even looking toward the farmhouse or calling for their parents. They were so young when it happened, the sorrowful partings left no imprint on their memories.

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  Just as mother was a foreign concept, the notion of home was different for them than for other children. Little in the hospital was especially homelike. “In the nursery itself there was no living room, no family room per se,” Nurse Doreen Chaput remembered. Their dining room was plain and serviceable—just small tables and chairs. “I always liked to say that they were the poorest little rich girls I ever knew.”

  Rather than trying to replicate a homey atmosphere, life in the Dafoe Hospital was structured like a private twenty-four-hour nursery school. In fact, it was modeled after Dr. William Blatz’s famous St. George’s School for Child Study in Toronto, by none other than Blatz himself. Like the pupils at St. George’s, the Dionnes followed a carefully composed timetable that prescribed every aspect of the day, from the 7:20 morning bath to the bedtime drink of water at 6:40. Mornings began at 6:30 with orange juice and cod-liver oil. A set of chimes mounted on the wall rang for mealtimes at 8:00, 11:40, and 6:00. In between came diversions such as “directed play,” “relaxation,” and “outdoor free play,” at intervals running anywhere from five minutes to two hours. Trips to the washroom, dubbed “elimination routine,” were scheduled for 6:30, 8:30, 12:15, 2:30, 4:00, and 6:30.

  The goal of Blatz’s regimen for the girls was twofold: to maximize efficiency and minimize stress for the nurses charged with the daily care of five boisterous toddlers, and also to provide every opportunity to bolster the girls’ physical, mental, and emotional growth. Unfamiliar with any other way of life, they adapted readily to this routine. “We didn’t know at that time,” said Yvonne, “that the whole way of life in which we were raised wasn’t good for us.” As far as they knew, everything around them—from the nurses and their clipboards to the woven wire fence—was perfectly normal.

  Perhaps the most extraordinary routine in the Dafoe Hospital’s tightly structured schedule took place between two and three o’clock each afternoon: visiting hour. As early as the spring of 1935, tourists were being permitted to file past the guard at the gate and the barbed wire on the fences for an inside glimpse at what Dr. Dafoe called “the baby show.”

  “Visitors still coming by the hundreds,” Nurse Leroux wrote on April 2; “they come in and look at the babies through the observation window in the hall and go out by the kitchen door. The babies are beginning to notice them and in spite of our warnings of ‘no tapping on windows, no calling, no funny faces,’ people forget themselves and scream with joy every time they even move.”

  Less than a week later, the exposure began taking a visible toll on Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. “The babes seem to feel the excitement of the visitors and are very agitated after the hour is over,” Nurse Leroux observed. “They do so try to be entertaining that it makes them tired.” When they began losing weight, Dafoe called off the observation period altogether on April 10.

  But the tourists’ insistence on seeing the Dionne Quintuplets proved difficult to ignore. “It wasn’t a public you wanted to turn away,” explained one of Dafoe’s colleagues. “They were kindly, they cared about the babies.”

  A new tactic debuted by mid-June of 1935. “We are showing the babies on the verandah,” Nurse Leroux wrote on the fifteenth. “We
take them out one at a time and hold them up. The crowd goes wild but we try to make the babes pay very little attention to them.” That was next to impossible. Two thousand people routinely pressed against the fence each day. On Sundays in the summer, there might be ten thousand. Suspended in the nurses’ arms over a placard proclaiming their names, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie kicked and waved, played patty-cake, and threw kisses to their audience. “The babes clap and coo and seem to enjoy the whole thing,” wrote Nurse Leroux, though she also noticed they were still prone to nervousness if the crowds became too large.

  They were shown four times a day—before and after their morning nap, and again before and after their afternoon nap. If one little girl was unwell, the nurses secretly displayed another of her sisters twice, ensuring that everyone left believing they had seen five identical babies.

  Oliva Dionne detested every minute of it. His resentment and bitterness “snaps and crackles in his every tone and word,” said one New York journalist. The government had seized custody of his daughters to protect them from being exhibited on the American stage, then looked the other way as the hospital’s front porch turned into a kind of theater.

  Oliva’s concerns were not unfounded. His little girls were not old enough to talk or walk, yet all five of them appeared to revel in entertaining the crowds. “Not only did those babies ‘play up’ like born prima donnas…they also displayed all of a prima donna’s jealousy,” Yvonne Leroux later confessed. “Everybody wanted to be leading lady. No matter which was picked up first…the other children’s faces drooped in grief.”

  Dr. Dafoe resented the criticism. “When you know people have driven thousands of miles for a glimpse of them, it is hard to see visitors go away disappointed,” he countered. His logic seems off-kilter in retrospect, but then again, Dafoe had learned early on the value of the public’s interest. The lifesaving incubators and breast milk would never have come in time if he had squelched the public’s curiosity instead of stoking it those first days after Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s birth. “Sometimes it seems to me that they have been sustained and kept alive by the love and good wishes of the whole world,” he said. Dafoe felt he was repaying a debt by indulging the visitors’ desire to see the “eighth wonder of the world.”

  The public’s trust in Dr. Dafoe ran so deep that no one seriously questioned his judgment on this issue or any other. Just the sight of his kind, benevolent face “inspired immediate confidence,” the North Bay Nugget said. That changed in the spring of 1936, when Cosmopolitan magazine printed an article on the Dionnes by Dr. Alfred Adler, an eminent psychologist from Vienna.

  Dr. Adler took issue with virtually every element of the children’s upbringing, and his assessment struck Cosmopolitan’s readers like a gut punch. “How will they be prepared for the task of adjusting themselves to life?” Adler asked. “What will be their future?” His predictions were dire. To hear Dr. Adler tell it, the efforts to raise five happy, well-adjusted little girls were backfiring in every way possible.

  Keeping them always dressed alike, setting them to play with identical toys, and forbidding contact with other children would hobble their individuality, Adler warned. Living apart from their family also risked consequences no one much wanted to contemplate: “The quintuplets live like the inmates of a model orphanage,” Adler wrote, “and a certain emotional starvation is inseparable from institutional life.”

  He saw no opportunity for Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie to develop independence or initiative. “Everything for which other children must struggle comes easily to the quintuplets,” Adler pointed out. Continuing to indulge their every whim would turn them into “self-centered little parasites.”

  Adler reserved especial disapproval for the way the children were exhibited on the verandah. “Life in a glass house is not conducive to normal human development,” he admonished. “Five little guppies living in a fish bowl may not be distracted by constant exposure. But babies are not fishes. Children accustomed to being exhibited are never happy unless they elicit attention.” Luckily, Dr. Adler saw no evidence that the publicity and exposure had harmed them—yet. That luck would not hold much longer, though. “There is danger ahead,” he cautioned.

  All of his points were valid and well reasoned. But then Adler committed a stunning tactical error. His solution—splitting the not-quite-two-year-old sisters apart to be raised “incognito” by five different families, “to destroy the uniqueness of their position, and to make them forget they are quintuplets”—made the public’s jaw collectively drop.

  “In city after city,” the Toronto Globe reported, “people jump at him from doorways, wait for him in hotel lobbies and buttonhole him at dinners asking: ‘Do you really think that the quintuplets ought to be separated?’ ”

  Humorist Will Cuppy summed up the world’s reaction to the article in a single stinging quip: “Why not divide Dr. Adler into five neat parts for his own good and see how he likes it?” All the common sense the psychologist had spoken was drowned in the outcry.

  Dr. Dafoe scoffed at Adler’s alarm, insinuating that an article published in a fiction magazine should not be taken seriously. What was more, Dafoe said, Adler had been miffed when he found he could not observe the children any more closely than an ordinary tourist. “He was sore when he found the rules were real rules and he couldn’t break them no matter who he was.”

  Nurse de Kiriline, however, spoke out in defense of Dr. Adler’s less controversial concerns. Though she no longer had any sway over the happenings at the Dafoe Hospital, she expressed her opinion forcefully, particularly when it came to exhibiting Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. It was one thing to showcase the children as examples of good care and common sense, she said. “But to use them as a dumping place for indiscriminate curiosity is an abuse of their rights as individuals,” she asserted in a national women’s magazine. “It can be of no advantage to the babies’ mental development to be shown off like baby bears in a zoo.”

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  The controversy did little to dissuade the tourists. They just kept coming—hundreds, if not thousands, by the hour—and the board of guardians showed neither the willingness nor the ability to fend them off. “Whether they like it or not, whether their guardians decree it, whether their parents give their permission, those five famous tots in Callander, Ontario, are the little princesses of the entire world,” one journalist decreed. “As such, they are already in and must remain in the public eye as long as the world demands it.” The board fell in with this logic, taking the position that gawkers were inevitable, and the more the crowds were thwarted, the more obnoxious they would become. Welfare Minister David Croll reasoned that if the government didn’t take the upper hand and find a tasteful way to display the Dionne Quintuplets to their adoring fans, encroachment on the children’s privacy would spiral out of control. “We have found that we have to do something to keep hot dog stands and peddlers from our front door. One is so close now that the children smell hot dogs all day long,” Croll told the Toronto Star. A stairway to the stand’s roof invited tourists to climb up and peek into the babies’ play yard. That sort of nonsense had to stop.

  With the exception of Oliva Dionne, the guardians were not opposed to satisfying the public’s curiosity. “These children are the treasures of the world,” Judge Valin said. “Why should they not be seen?” The difficulty was keeping Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie from realizing they were being stared at. In that one regard, the board agreed with Dr. Adler: the children were rapidly approaching an age where they could no longer be displayed in front of the crowds like goods in a shop window, and everyone from Oliva Dionne to Dr. Dafoe was adamant that the little girls should not become conscious of their celebrity. “Those babies have a right to some privacy,” Dr. Dafoe told the press, “and we are trying to work out some plan that will give th
em more of it.”

  The board turned the predicament over to Dr. Blatz, who proposed a one-of-a-kind solution: a playground surrounded by a U-shaped observation gallery. This gallery would be an empty, unlit hallway, five feet wide, lined with windows facing the playground. Floor coverings of cork and felt would muffle the sound of any footsteps from within. With screens of fine white mesh covering the glass, the spectators’ presence would be obscured from the outside.

  To the public, these windows were billed as one-way glass. Hundreds of people would be able to stand inside the dim gallery, gazing through the mesh-covered panes at the frolicking toddlers, who would be conscious only of “blurred silent shadows.” A low fence kept the girls from approaching the windows and discovering their audience. A wading pool, sand pit, swings, and jungle gym filled the grassy space enclosed by the observatory. A concrete path for tricycles and wagons ran around the perimeter of the play area. Twice a day, health and weather permitting, the children would be shepherded into the play yard so the public could ogle them.

  “This at first seems like cold-blooded exploitation of these five children,” Dr. Blatz conceded, “in spite of the fact that no admission is charged to the thousands upon thousands of the curious who have travelled miles in order to see them.” But since a similar arrangement had proven harmless to the children at Blatz’s own high-profile St. George’s School for Child Study, he argued, it ought to be suitable for the Dionne sisters. “One cannot help but feel that, aside from the fact that these children must be daily on display, one could ask for no more ideal physical arrangements for bringing up children,” Blatz boasted of the hospital-playground complex.