by Sarah Miller
Even the girls’ long brown sausage curls caused an uproar. To keep the famous Dionne ringlets looking fresh for each observatory show, they had to be curled twice a day. “Their hair was so long and so heavy that you know, it just didn’t stay up,” Nurse Doreen Chaput explained. Cutting their hair would save the nurses time and effort, but Elzire would not consent. “So finally one day we just decided we’d thin it out,” Nurse Chaput remembered with a rueful grimace. When Elzire learned how the nurses had evaded her wishes, more trouble erupted. The next thing Nurse Chaput knew, the board of guardians received a letter from the Dionnes’ lawyer, threatening a lawsuit over the children’s hair. “They thought we were going to sell it for our personal gain. We had simply thrown it in the garbage.”
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Powerless in the nursery, the Dionnes took their campaign outside the hospital gates, with Elzire narrating heart-tugging magazine articles with titles such as “I Am the Most Unhappy Mother in the World” and “Don’t My Babies Need Me?” Oliva could be just as plaintive as his wife. “This being cut off from my baby girls for so long a time has cut me to the heart,” he told Liberty magazine. “For the Dionne quins, for all their world fame, are still to me just my babies.”
Their anger showed as plainly as their grief, for both Elzire and Oliva had a knack for making piercing remarks about the Guardianship Act—remarks that lingered in the public mind and rubbed many quintuplet fans the wrong way. “Even pigs are allowed to bring up their own young,” Oliva told Maclean’s magazine. He often pointed to his singly born children as proof that their home was just as fit for youngsters as anyone else’s. “This baby is fine, without the government’s help,” he said of his youngest son in 1936. “Why should I cooperate with them in the kidnapping of my children?” Asked in 1935 if she planned to have more children, Elzire had famously answered with a rueful laugh and a twinkle in her brown eyes, “Not for the government.”
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Though the disputes and name-calling appeared petty, public sympathy for Oliva and Elzire’s situation was slowly beginning to gather. Anyone could see that Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were physically normal. Dr. Dafoe had been saying it since they were five months old. Their upbringing wasn’t making them any smarter or better behaved than any other children. Why, then, were they living in a hospital instead of with the family who so desperately wanted them back?
Major news outlets weighed the pros and cons, gathering opinions from experts and fans alike. “Does or does not the best interest of these children include a life in their normal home?” wondered the New York Times. “Is there anything after all peculiarly precious and necessary in the homely joys—in family sharing and hoping, in coming home and confiding in mother, in dabbling in the home kitchen, and playing tag with the neighbors’ children?”
For Elzire Dionne, the answer was a resounding yes. An institutional upbringing left a visible mark on children who grew up without the instinctive love of a father and mother, she argued. “Just visit any orphanage, no matter how fine and clean and well kept,” she told Liberty magazine, “and see the heart-hungry, home-hungry looks on the faces of the children there!”
A number of child specialists agreed, pointing to “a kind of emotional vitamin” found only in a warm and loving home life. Without it, children stood no chance of thriving.
Even David Croll, Ontario’s welfare minister and the Dionnes’ special guardian, had come around to this point of view. “They have wealth, they have money,” he told legislators upon his resignation from the board of guardians in 1937. “What they need now most of all is a normal domestic life, association with their brothers and sisters, the love and discipline which their parents alone can completely provide. There is no substitute for a mother.”
Dr. Charles Gilmore Kerley, president of the American Pediatric Society, disagreed. “It is obvious that the quintuplets have been getting exquisite maternal care from their nurses,” he said, “…or they would not have flourished as they have.” However, Dr. Kerley’s opinion overlooked the fact that hospital life came with steep tolls for the nurses, which in turn impacted Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie.
Though the nurses rarely expressed anything but sheer delight at working with the world’s sweethearts, the rate of turnover at the Dafoe Hospital spoke for itself. Shouldering twenty-four-hour responsibility for the most famous children on earth was a strenuous job that exacted a deep emotional investment. “They are so sweet and they need to be loved so much,” Nurse Jacqueline Noël wrote. “I would stay for their sweet little smiles.” Yet withstanding the intense public scrutiny while simultaneously navigating ongoing squabbles with Oliva and Elzire required an almost superhuman resilience. Privately, Nurse Noël vented to her diary about her isolation, her mediocre pay, and the frustration of watching someone else take all the glory while she did all the work of maintaining the girls’ health, as well as keeping the peace with the Dionnes. Her jumbled feelings were not unique. “It was too much,” another of her colleagues echoed. “The fight was always going on.” Despite their genuine affection for the children, not a single nurse lasted more than three years at the Dafoe Hospital. By the time they were nine, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie would tearfully kiss well over a dozen nurses goodbye. “We could not help weeping,” they recalled, “because we loved them all.”
The nurses were just as devastated. “I left a piece of myself there. Yes, it was like dying a little,” said Cécile Lamoureux of her departure. “One cannot leave them without terrible suffering.” And yet they did go, one after another after another.
Patricia Mullins left in the spring of 1935, shortly after the Dionnes lost custody of their children. Louise de Kiriline stepped down after clashing with Elzire in May of 1935. Her replacement, Cécile Lamoureaux, departed to be married eight months later. Yvonne Leroux, aware that she was growing too fond of the children, tore herself away in December of 1936. Claire Tremblay and Jacqueline Noël were dismissed simultaneously in February of 1938. Fed up with hospital power struggles, Nora Rousselle “just resigned and walked out” that same July. In 1939, three more nurses left to be married—Louise Corriveau, Cécile Michaud, and Mollie O’Shaughnessy—two of whom simply slunk away without any kind of farewell. Almost a year and half passed before tuberculosis forced Leona Dubeau’s 1941 departure. (“I feel certain,” she wrote, “that conditions at the nursery contributed to my illness.”) Doreen Chaput and Gertrude Provencher retired in 1943.
For Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie, who were more attached to these women than to their mother and father, each departure was akin to losing a parent. A new nurse always came to fill the empty place, but whether this new mother figure would remain for months or years was anybody’s guess. To make matters worse, the sisters’ grief at losing a beloved caretaker widened the gap between them and Elzire. “Mom could not understand why we wept when a nurse departed. It was still another cause of bewilderment and pain for her. It made her angry, and we in turn did not understand the reason for that.”
The sisters’ only chance to form permanent bonds was with one another, a reality that went hand in hand with Oliva and Elzire Dionne’s most deep-seated fear. “The babies will grow away from us,” Oliva predicted. “They will think they are better and will turn from their natural brothers and sisters as though they were strangers.”
The distance between the two halves of the family was indeed broader than the width of the road that separated the farmhouse from the hospital. Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, and Pauline were seeing the world in an entirely different light than their five famous sisters. Unless something changed drastically, it seemed likely that the distance between them could only grow. “Will the five ordinary Dionne children find themselves shoved more and more rudely into the background?” asked Pictorial Review magazine. “Will jealousy and othe
r bitter emotions create lifelong dislike of their five younger sisters…?”
Kathleen Norris, a prominent author and newspaper columnist of the era, scoffed at the idea. “To have glory somewhere in the family ought to be a matter of glory all around,” she wrote. “Jealous? Healthy youngsters whose parents love them and are presumably teaching them some of the fundamental principles of their Faith—charity, joy, peace, patience and the rest, are not much in danger of growing up twisted and embittered and crushed because the miracle of achieving five delicious little sisters at one blow has been vouchsafed them.” Norris’s was a fine sentiment, but it bore little resemblance to the realities of life in the Dionne household after May 28, 1934.
The moment their five baby sisters were born, the uncomplicated childhood Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, and Pauline had known shattered. “We had a normal family life, then everything changed,” Ernest remembered.
Their parents were consumed by the quintuplets—first with anxiety over the babies’ survival, then with the grief of losing custody, followed by the crusade to win their daughters back. “My youth ended because there was so much suffering,” Thérèse said.
The struggles fundamentally changed Oliva and Elzire. Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, and Pauline watched as their parents were shamed and humiliated from all sides. Papa Dionne jokes were all the rage. Childless women tried to touch him, as if their father were a fertility charm more powerful than the bins of passion pebbles outside the hospital gates. At the grocery store in town, people talked openly about their father and his “litter” of babies. Others asked, “Don’t you think it would be a good idea to sew the mother up so she cannot have more children?” If they went to the movies to see their baby sisters’ Hollywood debut, the older siblings also had to endure seeing their father portrayed as a bumbling hick and their mother as a silent simpleton. “They took my father’s pride,” Ernest said through tears decades later; “he never had a chance.”
Through it all, Oliva and Elzire remained devoted to the principle of functioning as a united family. Ironically, their insistence on treating all their children equally sometimes resulted in the exclusion of Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie from family occasions. When Oliva and Elzire arrived at the hospital on Christmas Day of 1935, Nurse Cécile Lamoureux recalled, everything started off “All well and good.” That is, until the older brothers and sisters were barred from entering the nursery, owing to their ever-present colds. “No amount of pleading moved the hospital officials. M and Mme Dionne refused to see the quints unless the whole family could share in the occasion. They left without seeing them.”
Such scenes left a lingering impression on the elder Dionne children. The following year, Rose-Marie asked Santa Claus to bring her five baby sisters home instead of presents, while three-year-old Pauline insisted on “buying back Marie” with the five dollars she’d received for Christmas.
“Nobody would believe what we suffered,” Thérèse recalled. “Half the people had no clue there was anyone else in the family. We were second-class citizens.” It was a state of affairs Elzire Dionne deplored. All of her children should benefit from the “intelligent culture” and “scientific training” the five youngest were receiving, she told the vice president of the Ontario Liberal Women’s Association.
In July of 1936, “the forgotten five” quickly became “the forgotten six” when Elzire gave birth to a son, Oliva Jr. The newspapers had been so eager to see whether the “Callander madonna” might produce another set of quintuplets that Elzire was forced to spend the last suspenseful week of her pregnancy with the doors locked and the shades pulled in hundred-degree heat. When only one baby arrived, the disappointed reporters cleared out as quickly as they had come.
The Dionnes, on the other hand, delighted in their new son. “This one will never go away,” Elzire said.
In 1938, Oliva Dionne landed his first punch in the fight to unite his family under a single roof. Concerned that his daughters’ trust fund was being “dissipated” by “extravagance,” he requested that the attorney general open a judicial inquiry into the children’s finances. He charged that Dafoe was engaged in “schemes to divorce the affections of the quintuplets from their parents,” and that the doctor habitually jeopardized Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s health to please the public.
Oliva also wanted some say in the hiring and firing of the nurses who cared for his children, and he was adamant that his four-year-olds ought to master French before anyone attempted to teach them English. They ought to be raised “as Catholic and French children should be brought up” and not trained to be pint-sized Hollywood starlets.
Perhaps the threat of financial investigation spooked the board of guardians. No probe into the $600,000 trust fund ever materialized, and for the first time, Oliva Dionne was granted some control over his daughters’ upbringing. Not only would he enjoy the authority to reject or confirm new nurses and teachers, but the board had also promised to hire an architect to design a new “dream home” for the entire Dionne family—a home that could be divided in half to quarantine the family in case of infection.
“Well,” Oliva said, “that’s the first time I was given any satisfaction.”
The press hailed “a new spirit of cooperation” between the girls’ parents and guardians, but quint fans were not so keen on the changes. Because Oliva had used the quintuplet trust fund as his leverage, Dr. Dafoe believed the Dionnes had become the puppets of “outside interests” trying to get control of the girls’ wealth. “That $600,000 bank account is a pretty juicy plum, you know,” he said with a grin.
“When the children were poor and had no money, there wasn’t so much interest shown in them,” Dafoe told the Nugget, and the public was more than willing to believe that Oliva and Elzire were only after their children’s trust fund. “We, the people, are with you!” a Cleveland admirer wrote to Dr. Dafoe. “If it were not for you, Dionne would be glad to get potato parings. What’s wrong with that damned frog?”
In reality, though, nothing had significantly changed for anyone. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie remained in the hospital, where Dr. Dafoe retained his sole authority over their health. Oliva and Elzire still hoped for the day when their family would be united. Talk in the papers had been that the Dionne dream home might be ready as soon as September, yet September came and went and the house remained on the architect’s drawing table. Meanwhile, their latest attempt to wrest their children out from under the government’s protection had given rise to a fresh wave of anti-Dionne sentiment.
“As with most primitive people, emotion has triumphed over reason with the Dionnes,” one especially blunt journalist remarked. “Consciously or unconsciously they cannot bear the prospect of their famous children acquiring a culture superior to the six little Dionnes at home. Already they see signs of what highly intelligent twig-bending does to children, for the quints are infinitely prettier and more attractive looking than the other children, and that would still be true if the quints were put into the same clothes as the six at home wear. They have acquired a certain graciousness and charm as a result of superior association and training.”
It was true that Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie quarreled “surprisingly little.” They also did better at sleeping, washing, dressing, undressing, and putting away toys than a group of similarly aged children at St. George’s School for Child Study. Those results were enough for the editor of the Parents’ Magazine to gush that “the five little sisters stand as the most remarkable demonstration that has ever been made of the value of scientific methods in child care.”
There was no doubt that the example set by the Dionne Quintuplets was doing good in the greater world. When Dr. Dafoe credited pasteurized milk for their health, for example, it led parents to trust the pasteurization process, which meant that fewer children suffered milk-borne illnesses such as
tuberculosis, salmonella, listeria, and E. coli. Photos of Marie and Yvonne Dionne tearlessly receiving a diphtheria vaccination likewise prompted apprehensive parents to have their own babies inoculated against “that deadliest scourge of childhood.”
Yet as the children continued to thrive, some wondered whether guarding Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s health so intensively was doing them more harm than good. “Today they are five splendid physical specimens,” Chatelaine magazine explained. “But take them away from their special environment…leave them open to infection, exposed to disease, and Dr. Dafoe doesn’t believe they could stand up to it.” (A suspiciously convenient problem for the Province of Ontario, considering that Quintland had become “the greatest tourist attraction Canada has ever known.”) According to Chatelaine, Dr. Dafoe was of the opinion that “the quintuplets haven’t the stamina yet to face the rough and tumble of daily living.” That was the logic behind keeping their brothers and sisters out of the nursery until the girls were two years old. Cats and dogs were likewise forbidden, as were woolly toys, all for fear of spreading infection.
The situation led Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, director of the Child Study Association of America, to envision an eerie glassed-in future for Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie—a future in which their suitors would be fumigated, immunized, doused with microbe killer, and garbed in sterile white gowns before entering their home for a date. “The excessive care to protect them from infection may save their bodies but chains them to the necessity of living permanently in the shelter of a hospitalized incubator,” she predicted in an article entitled “Will ‘Hothouse’ Life Weaken Dionne Quins?” Even if the Dionnes’ care proved that total isolation could guarantee a disease-free childhood, what practical use was that to anyone else? Every youngster in the world could not be sealed into an air-conditioned chamber for eighteen years.