by Sarah Miller
A few perceptive tourists did indeed sense that the whole thing was contrived, lending credibility to Noël and Tremblay’s claims—tourists like Gladys Bailey, who was thirteen or fourteen years old when she made the pilgrimage to Quintland. Though she called seeing the quintuplets “the thrill of my childhood,” and was “awestruck” by her first glimpse of them, something about it rubbed her the wrong way. The pristine starched dresses, the dainty white shoes and socks, the “stiff, sterile nurses” hovering nearby as the girls pedaled their tricycles endlessly around the small concrete loop. “I had the eerie feeling as I stared and tried to take everything in that it was a fantasy,” Gladys said. “It couldn’t really be real.” The crowd was light that day, so in spite of her “revulsion,” Gladys got back into line for a second look. “Again the same scene, small children in an artificial scene created for the masses.”
Most extraordinary of all was the rainy-day routine, which blatantly defeated the purpose of the observatory and flaunted the girls’ awareness of the crowds that were supposed to be so carefully hidden from them. “As the Venetian blinds are raised promptly at the appointed hour, like the stage curtains at a play,” the New York Times wrote, “the children, standing on the wide window sills, wave their hands and hold up their dolls to the public.”
Yet Dr. Dafoe consistently reassured reporters that the quintuplet exhibitions would continue “only as long as they are unconscious of it.” That was obviously not the case. Judge Valin’s take on the situation came much closer to the truth than Dafoe’s: “The children’s health and education come first, but we must keep them before the public if we are to interest advertisers in contracts.”
Anyone with the least bit of sense ought to have seen that it took no effort at all to interest advertisers in contracts. The press dubbed the little girls “human nuggets,” for everything Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie touched seemed to turn to gold. Just the sight of their rosy cheeks smiling up from magazine pages prompted consumers to choose Quaker Oats instead of Cream of Wheat, or Karo corn syrup over Bee Hive brand. By their second birthday, the children’s bank account had already reached a quarter of a million Canadian dollars—about $3.3 million US today. “The Dionne Quintuplet fund has grown to the point where the income from it will be sufficient for all the normal needs of the Dionne family for the rest of their lives,” Welfare Minister David Croll bragged in a radio broadcast.
It was one thing to funnel those advertising contracts into the trust fund for the Dionnes’ future. Few could muster any objection to the idea of Canada’s princesses growing up to be millionaires, yet even when Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie showed signs of strain—such as in August of 1937, when “a case of jitters and general irritability” brought on by thousands of spectators clamoring to see them prompted the Pittsburgh Press to conclude “Life in a ‘goldfish bowl’ is proving too much for the Dionne quintuplets”—the exhibitions resumed after only a few days. The truth of the matter was that the sisters’ trust fund was critical to much more than their future.
Quintuplet dollars paid for everything at the hospital, from Dr. Dafoe’s $200-a-month salary to the tins of milk for the guard dog to the electricity and water bills—$1,800 to $2,200 every month. The quint bank account built the observatory and the new staff house where the nurses and guards lived, and paid for renovations to the nursery as the children grew, all to the tune of more than $55,000 (over $750,000 in US currency today). After a good deal of wrangling, Oliva Dionne convinced the board of guardians that it was only fair for the rest of his children to benefit from their five famous sisters’ vast income, and so Ernest, Rose-Marie, and Thérèse were granted tuition to be educated at Catholic boarding schools—$1,168.43 in 1938. Oliva himself also received $100 each month from his daughters’ bank account, likewise on the principle that half the family should not have to pinch pennies while the other half was virtually showered in riches. (Within two years the family’s stipend would triple to $300 a month.)
Anything deemed necessary for the Dionne Quintuplets was fair game for dipping into their trust fund, and necessary tended to be interpreted as broadly as possible. The public washrooms in Quintland were built with quintuplet funds. Even the toilet paper in those washrooms was being billed to the girls’ fund, along with their own birthday gifts.
To keep the whole system running, to keep cash churning into their bank account faster than it was draining out, the children must be seen—in person, in photographs, and on film. Every birthday, every holiday, and every new advertising contract demanded new quint photographs. Newspapers and theaters expected photos and films in time for each holiday, so weeks or even months before any special event, the world’s favorite five sisters dressed up and posed for the cameras.
“We poked our heads through cardboard Valentine hearts, carved pumpkins for Halloween, clambered happily on the knee of a Santa Claus who looked surprisingly like Dr. Dafoe behind the whiskers,” the sisters recalled. Their parents and siblings never appeared in these tableaus. The Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicate owned exclusive rights to photograph the Dionne Quintuplets, while Oliva Dionne had sold photo rights for the rest of his family to a competing news syndicate, making it contractually impossible for the two halves of the Dionne family to be photographed together. Consequently, it appeared that Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie had no mother, father, brothers, or sisters. Yet the little girls looked so happy in their photos, no one seems to have noticed what was so obviously missing from their lives—least of all the children themselves. “Picture-taking sessions were as good as parties,” they said. “Whatever the season or occasion, we were delighted to join in.”
Eventually, though, a sense of artificiality began to color these mock celebrations. “For publicity’s sake we were called on to say and do so many things that held no meaning for us,” the sisters realized as adults. “Every small event, they needed a picture,” Yvonne said. “I couldn’t understand why.” At the same time, occasions that ought to have had special meaning—such as their birthday celebrations—were stripped of their significance. These “parties” were lavish affairs with frilled gowns, towering cakes five layers high, and heaps of gifts. But nothing was as it appeared to the eager moviegoers who delighted in watching the Dionne Quintuplets receive their presents and blow out their candles. “The gifts were all empty boxes,” Cécile remembered. “The cake was a big hole. It was always like that. There was no cake at all when we cut it.”
Nevertheless, the girls never failed to do as the photographers requested, regardless of whether any of it made sense to them. As though life were an endless game of dress-up, they donned all manner of costumes from hula skirts to cowboy outfits. “We were obliged to do so many things, so often, that in our head, we didn’t feel that we were able to say No, not this time, another time,” said Cécile.
Entire magazine articles were devoted to assuring a concerned public that Fred Davis and his newsreel counterpart, Roy Tash, had devised an arsenal of equipment and “fool antics” to photograph five children who were “active as a bunch of crickets” without forcing them to strike or hold a pose. At best, Davis claimed, he had forty-five minutes to an hour to get his shots; if the girls showed any signs of fatigue or agitation, Dr. Dafoe or the nurses called the session to an early halt. “Not even for all the millions who love to see these pictures, will they let me get cranky and say, ‘Hey, sit still, will you!’ ” he complained good-naturedly. Despite such careful procedures, the photo sessions had a noticeable effect on the girls’ mood. “We’ve been having grand days,” Nurse Nora Rousselle confided to friends, “except that with the picture taking the babies are a bit cross and irritable and a little harder to handle.”
When 20th Century Fox came to film Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie for a series of three Hollywood features, strict precautions were taken for the sake of the girls’ physical well-being. O
nly five people were permitted in the room with the children, and each one had their nose and throat sprayed with disinfectant first. The director, cameraman, and sound engineer all wore sterile surgical gowns and slippers. The actors’ shoes were not allowed outside the nursery. Every bulb in the floodlights was diffused with blue glass and a silk screen to prevent any glare from damaging the toddlers’ eyes.
“Moving picture staff most cooperative and willing to adjust,” one nursery insider noted, but despite the camera crew’s best efforts, the five little starlets proved neither oblivious nor immune to the inevitable commotion. Time and again, Marie stood frozen when the girls were supposed to run across the playground together, appearing entirely bewildered by all the people shouting instructions at her. Émilie spent one whole morning crying and screaming, preferring to cling to the nearest grown-up rather than be shepherded onto the jungle gym with her sisters. After more than a month of “amusing, coaxing, directing and interfering,” the moviemaking experience had completely derailed the children’s daily routine, created a fierce craving for constant attention, and left them all “overstimulated, and in consequence, emotionally unstable.”
All the while, nearly every newspaper and magazine story about the Dionne Quintuplets emphasized the care that was being taken to keep the exposure and publicity from interfering with their health and happiness. Yet between Dr. Adler’s Cosmopolitan article, the rise of Quintland, and the children’s Hollywood debut, it was becoming harder and harder to pretend that this sort of childhood qualified as any kind of normal. By 1937, Dr. Dafoe had abandoned the charade.
“They can’t live the normal life of ordinary individuals so there isn’t any point in bringing them up as normal children,” he admitted. “They must have the training of Royalty, to give them reserve and stamina and calm acceptance of the interest and curiosity of the multitude. They must learn to be looked at, talked about, written to and studied, without losing their sense of proportion or their ability to enjoy life. And because they will always have to buy their privacy and pay dearly for it, as all people in the glare of publicity must do, we are trying to build up sufficient funds to make it possible for them to have peace and freedom as the years go by.”
The government had taken custody of the quintuplets to save them from being exploited—to keep crowds from gawking at them, and to prevent promoters from using them to line their pockets with cash. Now thousands of people stared at the children twice a day, while Karo, Palmolive, Lysol, and dozens of other companies enjoyed unprecedented profits. What made this different from what Ivan Spear had proposed to do in Chicago?
Granted, no one was charging admission. It would never cost a cent to enjoy the sight of the five little girls splashing in their pool or scaling their jungle gym. And no one could use Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s likeness without making a hefty contribution to their bank account. Indeed, the sisters’ earning power was so closely guarded that the Ontario Legislature passed an act trademarking the words quintuplet, quints, quins, and cinq jumelles (five twins). It was for their protection, the lawmakers said—to ensure that no one in Canada but the Dionne girls could use those words to turn a profit without the written consent of the board of guardians. Nor would there be any knockoff products, like generic quintuplet baby dolls, to divert profits from the Madame Alexander company’s phenomenally popular Dionne Quintuplet Dolls, for example.
To the children themselves, such niceties made no difference. “There was a terrible tendency on the part of some people to think of us in terms of property and scarcely ever in human terms,” they reflected. “We were an object of curiosity, and therefore we could be used to make money.” The curiosity that compelled quintuplet fans to visit Corbeil felt to the sisters themselves like “a tidal wave.”
“It is not possible to imagine its force until you have felt it personally,” they said. “It is mighty enough, unless your parents are very watchful, to contort your lives so that you will not be thought of as human beings with hearts and minds and souls, but as a tourist attraction like Niagara Falls or the Empire State Building.” In August of 1936, it was also mighty enough to cause a five-thousand-person stampede that trampled several women and children waiting outside the nursery gates.
The more people streamed north, the clearer it became that the whole of Ontario stood to benefit from exhibiting Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. As one newspaper report bluntly put it, the children were “the Province’s national resource and the community’s gold mine.” The five little girls locked behind the fence in Quintland were every bit as valuable as $500 million locked in a bank vault. By one accounting, the Dionne Quintuplets were bringing $25 million tourist dollars (about $326 million US today) into Ontario each year.
Dr. Dafoe’s bank account was swelling just as handsomely, though it was impossible to tell by looking at him. He lived in the same brick house, wore the same rumpled suit and otter fur winter coat, and often contented himself with suppers of baloney, cheese, and crackers. New books were about the only thing he treated himself to.
These simple habits endeared him to the public. He appeared to be a man impervious to fame, devoted solely to the welfare of Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. So if Dr. Dafoe proclaimed that “Only Palmolive!” was gentle and pure enough for the Dionnes’ skin, mothers the world over rushed to buy Palmolive soap for their babies.
“Government bulletins and other authorities on child rearing tell parents many of the same things I do,” Dr. Dafoe admitted. “But they won’t listen as they will to anything that comes directly from experience with the quintuplets.”
“My mother fed me the same food they ate,” Connie Vachon, a contemporary of the Dionnes, confessed with a laugh. “If they switched to Carnation milk I had to have that as well.” As a child, Connie was aware that she was eating certain foods and playing with certain toys because they were Dionne-endorsed. “I guess my mother just felt that what was good for them was good for her child—because they were given the very best.”
The idea that Dr. Dafoe was being paid to endorse everything from Colgate toothpaste to Baby Ruth candy bars seemed never to enter the public’s mind. That was the way Dafoe wanted it. He wasn’t the sort to brag about such things, nor the $30,000 he received from 20th Century Fox for serving as a “technical adviser,” nor the $1,000 he could command for a single radio appearance.
The Little Doc had become nearly as beloved as the girls themselves, for as far as the public could see, without Dr. Dafoe, there would be no quintuplets. Figures from Toronto’s Burnside Hospital showed that more than 80 percent of premature babies who weighed under three pounds at birth died, yet in the words of one admirer, this unsophisticated backwoods doctor had “made super-babies out of those five bruised-bodied midgets so sure to die.”
From the first, Dafoe brushed off attempts to paint him as the hero of the story. “Rubbish,” he’d say. “I did what any other country doctor would have done in a premature birth—one or five. Is there anything remarkable about that?” Compared to the night-and-day duties he’d been carrying out alone, acting as doctor, dentist, and veterinarian for the isolated and impoverished people of the district for the past twenty-six years, Dafoe said, “This was nothing. It was over in two hours, and afterward there was the world to help me.”
Such comments exuded modesty, and the public loved him all the more for it. Because he refused to be a hero, Dafoe’s admirers compromised by viewing him as a saint. “Anyone who ever spent more than seventeen seconds with that grand country doctor up in Callander, Ontario, would have to come out with some kind of inspiration,” Charlie Blake of the Chicago American said. “He radiates everything everybody is searching for in the way of human beings and humanity.” In 1934, Dafoe was nominated for a Nobel Prize. The following year, King George V awarded the Order of the British Empire to the Little Doc.
Dafoe’s initial indifference
toward his own celebrity may well have been genuine. There was no question that he recognized his limits as a physician. “I wasn’t especially bright at school,” he admitted. “I just pulled along, you know?” When Marie contracted a painful ear infection that Dr. Dafoe was unable to relieve on his own in April of 1935, he hadn’t hesitated to summon his brother and Dr. Alan Brown from Toronto to treat her. “Thank God he is not so small that professional jealousy bothers him,” Nurse Leroux wrote that day.
By the time Jacqueline Noël joined the hospital staff, however, another side of Dafoe was revealing itself to close observers. He had been quick in the beginning to give credit for Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s survival where it was due—to the midwives and nurses, the supplies sent by the newspapers, and especially to his brother. As the months added up to years, however, Dafoe’s praise for others tapered off.
To her diary, Nurse Noël privately confided her belief that the Dr. Dafoe she knew “does not really care for the children…as long as he has a great crowd around.” Nurse Noël’s dislike for Dafoe ran deep—so deep that she may have misinterpreted the pleasure he took from hobnobbing with the crowds. “He was in fact the loneliest man I have ever met in my life,” Dafoe’s secretary revealed decades later. “It was startling. I don’t remember a purely social occasion having happened—a friend dropping in—I don’t remember that happening. Dafoe sitting down and having a time with a pal….Never did happen.”
Aside from his detective novels, the children appear to have been Dafoe’s only source of enjoyment. “He may unconsciously have come to regard us as something akin to his own children,” the sisters acknowledged, despite the fact that Dafoe had a son of his own. Looking at his Christmas cards—custom-made with die-cut fronts that open to reveal hand-colored photographs of himself with Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie—it’s hard to think otherwise.