The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets
Page 25
When Bertrand discovered that the Province of Ontario had inflated its gasoline tax to six and eight cents a gallon at the height of Quint-mania—a time when neighboring provinces were charging two or three cents a gallon—he had no doubt that his mother’s and aunts’ captivity had been deliberately prolonged to pump money into the province’s pocket.
Fueled by disgust, Bertrand made it his full-time job to compel the Province of Ontario to right its wrongs against his mother and two surviving aunts. His first victory was teaming up with a Montreal lawyer, Daniel Payette, who took on the task of collecting unpaid revenue from advertising contracts. Nobody had paid the Dionnes so much as a dime for use of their names and faces since 1957. It took months, but eventually Payette won royalties on quint memorabilia and newsreel footage in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, France, and Australia, and gained a 10 percent share of profits from the Dionne Quints Museum in North Bay—more than tripling the sisters’ monthly income. Payette also arranged for Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile to participate in the making of a miniseries and two documentaries about their lives, and brokered a deal with a Quebec publisher for a memoir of their teenage years, Family Secrets, that aired many of the disturbing memories they had held back from We Were Five.
As the untold story of their ruined childhood spread, compassion for Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile mounted. “It’s beginning to seem more and more unpleasant and unsavory to me,” lifetime quint fan Genia Goelz said in 1996. The fact that she had “loved them from afar” lent their suffering a personal quality. A similar sentiment had prompted a media advisor and a second lawyer to join Bertrand’s crusade. “It was a moral obligation,” Clayton Ruby said of his decision to represent the Dionnes, “that some lawyer ought to do it, that given their historical position, any Canadian ought to feel an obligation to them.”
The government, however, appeared entirely unmoved by the sisters’ plea. “We were a scientific curiosity, an object of exploitation for tourists, and we still carry the effects of that life,” Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile had written to the premier of Ontario. “We have suffered all our life….We are asking for compensation for past and present suffering.” They requested $10 million. Months passed with no response—so many months that a new premier, Mike Harris, was elected in the meantime.
Bertrand was encouraged. He had written to Harris during the election and received a favorable reply. A resident of North Bay, Harris sympathized with the Dionnes’ plight. If he was elected, Harris pledged, “your concern and request on behalf of the Dionne sisters will be given our full attention.” Coming from a man who had assured voters over and over again, “I keep my promises,” Harris’s letter gave the Dionnes every reason to be hopeful.
And then? Nothing. Over a year passed before the attorney general of Ontario informed Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile that there would be no offer of compensation. As Harris’s administration saw it, the province had no legal obligation toward the Dionnes. What had happened to them as children had nothing to do with their poverty as adults.
Bertrand knew better. If the trust fund had been properly managed, there would have been twice as much money in those accounts. The deeper he’d dug into the archives, the more suspicious things looked for the government. He knew the first three years’ worth of minutes from the guardianship meetings were missing—everything from 1934 to 1937. It turned out that David Croll, Ontario’s welfare minister and one of the sisters’ first guardians, had refused to turn over the minutes when he stepped down from the board. Fishier still, Croll later burned the documents. Not only that, but the government lawyer who had negotiated film rights and advertising contracts on behalf of the Dionnes quit abruptly—and then went to work for the very companies he’d been haggling with.
Two months after that information went public, Harris’s administration made an offer: $2,000 a month apiece for Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile, for the rest of their lives—as long as they signed a waiver absolving the government from all liability and kept the terms completely confidential. One word to the media and the deal was off.
The offer was an insult to the sisters. It felt to the Dionnes as though they were being placated with an allowance—as though they were still children. At that rate, they’d have to live another 138 years to be repaid what they believed had been stolen from them. “It’s nowhere near what’s owed and I want an inquiry,” Cécile said.
Harris vocally opposed launching a financial inquiry. By the time it was over, he argued, millions of dollars would be wasted and “the three quints will be dead.”
Affronted by such remarks, the Dionnes’ team upped the stakes. On the recommendation of their media advisor, Carlo Tarini, the sisters traveled to Toronto and held a press conference. Summoning every ounce of the training they’d had as children, Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile braved the spectacle with a grace that just about knocked the wind out of Tarini. As he watched, the shyness and feebleness that had characterized all three women since the day he’d met them melted away for the few minutes that they calmly confronted a wall of cameras and reporters. “Every network, local news stations, three national networks—everybody has cameras, everybody’s panning in, they’re really in their faces,” Tarini said. “It starts becoming unbelievable. It’s a celebrity circus all over again. They’re just sitting there, not upset.”
“It is very painful for us to be here,” Cécile read in a clear, steady voice. “After growing up in the spotlight it is the last place we now want to be. We have spent our lives hiding from it. Yet, Mr. Harris’ conduct has forced us to come forward today to speak to you.
“We’re not asking for one cent for the abuse,” she continued. “There is not one cheque that has sufficient zeros to compensate us for having been kidnapped from our parents for nine and a half years and for wrecking our lives. We want only what was stolen from our trust fund. Instead, we received an offer which seems to be drawn to intimidate and bully us. Allow us our dignity.”
The next day, front pages across the country featured a photo of the three sober-faced Dionnes dressed in sweatshirts and old coats and holding a sign between them:
Mr. Harris
WE WANT JUSTICE
NOT CHARITY
The image ignited an outcry in the public and the media that left Premier Harris “looking like a grinch.” Why Has Mike Harris Stiffed the Quints? demanded Maclean’s magazine. While the Toronto Star’s political cartoonist drew the premier as a scowling caveman tossing the three sisters a bone, a deluge of six thousand letters and faxes expressing support for Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile poured into the Star’s newsroom.
Premier Harris’s attitude implied that the three aging sisters were crass and greedy for attaching a dollar amount to their pain, all the while the Dionnes were insisting that what they wanted most of all was an acknowledgment of their suffering and the chance to understand where their money had gone.
By treating her and her sisters as a moneymaking entity rather than as five individuals, Cécile declared to the New York Times, the government had “stolen our souls.”
“And they are still doing it,” Yvonne added.
Premier Harris was at last suitably shamed. Within days, there was an offer on the table for $2 million. Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile turned it down. They shook their heads at $3 million, too. At $4 million—and an investigation of the trust accounts—they accepted.
The premier himself went to Annette’s home to make amends. “It was an emotional meeting,” Harris told the press afterward. “I apologized on behalf of the government of Ontario—all governments—and I apologized for our government’s handling of the situation.” As a token of humility, he brought a mocha coffee cake.
“So far as money is concerned the Quints owe the province of Ontario nothing,” MacLean’s had said in 1941. “They pay their own way. They have never been a public charge. Rather, the shoe is on the other foot.
Citizens of Ontario owe the Dionne sisters a debt that cannot be accurately measured in currency.” Fifty-seven years later, the province had finally acknowledged that debt.
Just as when they turned twenty-one, everyone in the world wanted to know what the Dionne sisters would do with their newfound millions. It was not a simple question to answer, for the fight had never been wholly about money. Four million dollars could not heal the shattered bonds, nor repay the years of turmoil that had riven the entire Dionne family beyond repair.
“I haven’t given much thought to the future,” Yvonne admitted. “There are so many emotions at the same time. It’s difficult to absorb all this.”
“I’m relieved,” Annette said.
Cécile, too, was cautious with her emotions. “Happy is a big word,” she said. “I am content.”
In their hearts and minds, the victory was shared not three ways, but five. The triumph belonged just as much to Émilie and Marie as to Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile. “We feel they are looking down at us,” Cécile mused. “And they might be smiling.”
Stanley Anderson’s cheeks flushed and his eyes began to water as the crowd made its way up the curving driveway. Alongside him, two other elderly residents of Nipissing Manor—the senior care center once known as the Big House—waited with bouquets. Anderson had never met the three women who had been invited to tour his residence, though he had seen them once before, sixty-some years earlier. Their graying hair had been brown then, done up in glossy ringlets.
As his guests approached, shadowed by two police officers and a throng of photographers, reporters, and TV cameras, Mr. Anderson presented his bouquet to Yvonne Dionne. His voice quavered with emotion, but his gaze and his handshake held firm. “Welcome home,” he said.
* * *
—
Two days before, the sisters had been reluctant to call the visit a homecoming. “It’s difficult to describe right now,” Cécile said of her mixed emotions upon arriving in North Bay Thursday evening. This was a town whose business owners had once worried more about their profits than the health and well-being of Cécile and her sisters, the same town that had displayed the girls’ clothes and toys to tourists in the house where they were born without ever offering the Dionnes themselves a nickel, whose residents had looked the other way in spite of sensing something amiss behind the Big House gate.
By the time Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile arrived at Nipissing Manor on Saturday afternoon, the welcomes they’d received had drastically altered their feelings toward the city. Outside the Dionne Quints Museum that morning, a plaque had been unveiled in the sisters’ honor. Former schoolmates met them with hugs and joined them inside the farmhouse-turned-museum, sharing memories as they exclaimed over the photos and exhibits. At Nipissing Manor, cousins and in-laws gathered to greet them. Lifelong fans burst into tears at the touch of their hands, finally able to express what the survival of the Dionne Quintuplets had meant to them in the midst of the Great Depression. Moved by the reception, Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile wandered through the yellow brick mansion, once the scene of so many unhappy memories, “smiling and gushing like schoolgirls” as they explored their former bedrooms.
“They were not just smiling to be polite,” Cécile’s son Bertrand said. “When I looked at my mother’s face, she had a shine.”
With the melting of their trepidations, the Dionnes projected an air of graceful gentility to everyone they encountered, including the thirty reporters and photographers zooming in on their every move. To Annette, the media presence was perfectly natural. “Media was very close to us,” she said. There was no simpler way of putting it. The newspapers had not only saved their lives as infants, but awakened fresh sympathy and awareness during the Dionnes’ battle with the government six decades later. “Without you,” Cécile told the reporters, “our voices would have been forever silenced, our plight all but forgotten, our lives and suffering in vain. You have changed our destiny and we are forever grateful.”
Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile had determined to transform others’ destinies as well, they announced that day, through their support of Kids Help Phone, a national hotline for abused and troubled children. As the Dionne Quintuplets, they had raised millions for tourism; now the world’s most famous sisters pledged to use their celebrity for a much more worthy cause. “We were the children everyone looked at and nobody saw,” Cécile explained. “Over the sadness inside, we had to smile and perform. I wish that we could have poured our hearts out to someone who knew that we were just children, like any others, and that we needed the same freedoms, the same understanding, the same love.”
Later that night, Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile were the guests of honor at a gala charity dinner dance. Yvonne’s usually serious face broke into a broad smile at the sight of a Black Forest cake baked in honor of their sixty-fourth birthday. All three sisters grinned at the crowd of 163 guests as they rose from their seats to blow out the candles. The evening culminated with the mayor’s announcement that the North Bay street leading to their birthplace would be renamed Dionne Place. “This is overwhelming,” Cécile said. “When you drive up Dionne Place, look up at the street sign and smile and know we are thinking of you.” Émilie and Marie were part of the celebration, too, in spirit. “You will always be close to our hearts,” Cécile promised her departed sisters in French.
The visit, Cécile reflected upon returning to Montreal, was like “opening the door on my youth.” Unburdened by the worries of the past, she was able for the first time to see and enjoy the beauty of her birthplace. Annette found the trip every bit as transformative. Viewing the scenes of their childhood with a new compassion had brought peace and joy to her heart. “I have no more wounds,” she said.
Elzire Dionne and her five newborns, barely six hours after their birth.
Collection of the author
Oliva Dionne and the “old family”—Daniel, Pauline, Ernest, Thérèse, and Rose-Marie—on the morning of May 28, 1934.
Collection of the author
The five elder Dionne children in 1935: Pauline and Ernest stand behind Rose-Marie, Daniel, and Thérèse. (A sixth sibling, Leo, died in infancy.)
Collection of the author
The Little Doc—Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe.
Courtesy of Callander Bay Heritage Museum
Cécile, Émilie, and Marie Dionne in the Chicago incubator.
Courtesy of Callander Bay Heritage Museum
The Dionnes’ parlor, transformed into a nursery by Nurse Louise de Kiriline. Incubators line the right-hand wall; above them, a washtub and Kleenex box hang on either side of the makeshift window into Elzire Dionne’s bedroom.
Courtesy of Callander Bay Heritage Museum
Nurse Yvonne Leroux placing one of the Dionnes’ babies into an incubator.
Collection of the author
Nurse de Kiriline, Dr. Dafoe, and Nurse Leroux showing off the two-month-old infants.
Courtesy of Callander Bay Heritage Museum
The Dafoe Hospital nearing completion in the late summer of 1934.
Courtesy of Callander Bay Heritage Museum
Ontario Provincial Police standing watch over the Dionnes’ prams on the hospital’s front verandah.
Courtesy of Callander Bay Heritage Museum
Christmas 1934. One of a scant handful of photographs of Elzire and Oliva Dionne with Dr. Dafoe (center).
Courtesy of Callander Bay Heritage Museum
Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s “quintessential” baby photo, sold by their father in his souvenir pavilion.
Collection of the author
Émilie, Cécile, Marie, Annette, and Yvonne lolling beneath their sun lamp in February 1935.
Collection of the author
Oliva and Elzire Dionne trying to smile for a comical turn-the-tables-on-the-cameramen pose during their 1935 vaudeville tour.
Collection of the author
Nurses de Kiriline and Leroux watch Marie, Émilie, Cécile, Annette, and Yvonne delight in their first-birthday cakes. None of the babies’ first-birthday photos includes a single family member.
Collection of the author
A tourist snapped this photo of the three eldest Dionne children on the front porch in September 1935.
Collection of the author