They were five: The Dionne Quintuplets revisited
Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 1994 by Wright, Cynthia
When Pierre Berton published his bestselling account of The Dionne Years in 1977, many believed that the full tragic story of the Dionne Quintuplets had at last been told.(f.1) Heavily based on extensive oral interviews, and supplemented by archival and contemporary newspaper sources, Berton’s book appeared so fully researched that very little popular or scholarly work on the Quints has been undertaken since its publication. Any new work, such as this collection of articles, must therefore begin by situating itself in relationship to The Dionne Years. What more remains of importance to say about the Quintuplets?
The marking of the 60th anniversary of the 1934 birth of the Quints, together with the interest generated by the CBC/CBS television mini – series about their first years, Million Dollar Babies (1994), shows that the Dionne story continues to fascinate. Many of the themes identified by Berton in The Dionne Years are echoed in the publicity surrounding the mini – series. The astonishing commercial appeal of the Quints during the Depression years finds its counterpart in the advertising hoopla surrounding the production of Million Dollar Babies, and debate rages even now about who was most responsible — the Ontario government, Oliva Dionne, or Dr. Dafoe — for the tragedy of the Dionnes.(f.2)
But the Dionne story has also taken on new meanings since the publication of The Dionne Years. In an era in which fertility drugs and reproductive technology have made multiple births appear ordinary, the story of the world’s only identical quintuplets still excites attention because it raises complex issues of fatherhood, child custody and the role of the state — all questions with contemporary resonance.
This introduction takes Berton’s book as a point of departure for re – examining the ways in which “the Dionne story” has been told. It will serve both to orient readers unfamiliar with the outlines of the narrative, and to bring into focus the new questions, approaches and interpretations developed in the articles which make up this special issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’etudes canadiennes. In essence, these articles make a threefold contribution: they present new archival evidence, offer new interpretations based on recent theory in the areas of gender, ethnicity and popular culture, and explore important aspects of the Quint story which have received little attention in The Dionne Years and elsewhere. In the second part of the introduction, a discussion of Quintland as a tourist site will further outline some of the complex issues — state and medical power, Franco – Ontarian identity, and the construction of childhood/girlhood — taken up elsewhere in the volume.
Redrawing the Boundaries of “The Dionne Story”
The Dionne Quintuplets — Annette, Cecile, Emilie, Marie and Yvonne — were born in a small farmhouse on May 28, 1934 near the French – Canadian village of Corbeil in northern Ontario. Elzire and Oliva Dionne, the Quints’ parents, already had five children. Just days after the birth of the girls, when it was thought unlikely that they would survive, Oliva Dionne, their father, signed a contract to exhibit the Quints at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition. Elzire was not consulted.
But the terms of the contract were never carried out. As throngs of photographers and press people invaded the small Dionne home, a panic was created in the newspapers over the “fitness” of the Dionne parents, the fragility of the Quintuplets’ health, and the fact that “our” Quints were about to be sold to American hucksters. The Ontario government moved in and seized custody of the Quintuplets. A board of guardians which excluded Oliva and Elzire Dionne was set up to make all decisions concerning the lives of the Quints for the next two years.
Separated from their parents and siblings, the Quints were put on display for millions of tourists at Quintland near the Dionne homestead. The five girls lived in a hospital; Dr. Dafoe, who had assisted at the Quints’ birth, and a succession of nurses made nearly all decisions about their education and daily routines. While the public and Ontario premier Mitch Hepburn pilloried the Dionne parents for making a public tour of Chicago — without the Quints — the Ontario government made millions from the dozens of commercial products endorsed by the Quints.(f.3)
After nine tumultuous years, the Dionnes won back custody of their children, in good part through the efforts of Franco – Ontarian organizations. But there was no happy ending. The Quintuplets never got on with their father, and were not particularly close to their siblings. Two of the five Quints later died tragically, and today the remaining three live in virtual seclusion.
Berton observes in the final chapter of The Dionne Years that there really is no single Dionne story. The media — to take just one example — reconstructed the Dionne story in midstream after years of portraying Oliva Dionne, the Quints’ father, as the villain of the piece and the Ontario government and Dr. Dafoe as the heroic saviours of what David Croll called “our own royal family.”(f.4) Indeed, two related tendencies shape most accounts of the Dionne Quintuplets. The first is to reduce — much as I have — the entire story of the Quintuplets to the long and intense battle between the Ontario government and the Dionne family for custody of the five sisters. In addition, “the family” is almost always identified with the complex figure of Oliva Dionne. Thus, Berton and particularly John Nihmey and Stuart Foxman in their historical novel, The Time of their Lives, found it necessary to support their critiques of the Ontario government and Dr. Dafoe’s actions with a “rehabilitation” of the much – maligned Oliva Dionne.(f.5)
One result of this binary approach, in which a grasping Ontario government is pitted against a stubborn but proud Oliva Dionne, is that the figure of Elzire Dionne, mother of the Quints, has remained almost completely in the shadows, except for brief references in the work of feminist historian Veronica Strong – Boag.(f.6) Indeed, the erasure of Madame Dionne was a feature of the Dionne narrative right from the beginning. The Globe and Mail’s first account of the Quints’ birth gave Oliva Dionne’s name, but Elzire was referred to as “the little mother.”(f.7) While the recent production, Million Dollar Babies, does attempt to address this erasure, it does so by elevating Elzire Dionne to the status of “perfect mother.” Her house is spotless, her devotion is total and, above all, she is untainted by any hint of “the commercial.” Moreover, as David Welch shows in his contribution to this special issue, the important role played by a number of Franco – Ontarian organizations, including women’s groups, has been obscured.
A second tendency is to tell the Dionne story from the perspective of the actions and motivations — greed, stubbornness, or concern for the next provincial election — of the individual players within the drama. Structural analysis is obliterated. Thus while Berton insists in his introduction that it is not possible to tell the story of the Dionne Quintuplets outside of the context of the social history of the Depression years, in the end his book is organized around individual narratives — hence his heavy reliance on oral testimony.
One of the aims of this collection is to rethink this binary and individual – oriented organization of the Dionne story. However, in doing so, we ourselves were faced with many interpretive problems. We did not always agree, for example, in our evaluation of Oliva Dionne and lamented the scarcity of evidence about Elzire Dionne. While all of us have harsh criticism for the state institutions which regulated the Quints’ lives, the Quintuplets’ own autobiography, We Were Five, raises difficult questions about whether children are always happiest or “belong” with their biological family in all cases.(f.8) Was it possible for us to criticize the Ontario government while simultaneously avoiding the trap of sentimentalizing family, childhood and patriarchal authority?
We found that once new questions were raised about custody and guardianship, it became possible to redraw the boundaries of “the Dionne story” itself to include territory which has remained unexplored. For example, Mariana Valverde questions in her article whether the Ontario government even understood the Quints as children in need of protection by the state when all evidence suggests that, in fact, the Quints’ legal guardianship “managed” the five sisters “as natural resources or scenic wonders requiring nationalization.”
While, the Ontario government may not have managed the Quintuplets as children, Dr. Dafoe profoundly influenced ideas about child – rearing, an influence which has received little attention. Similarly, although child – study expert Dr. William Blatz merits several brief mentions in The Dionne Years, the tremendous — and unauthorized — power which Blatz held in the Quints’ early lives has not been scrutinized. These and other questions relating to power and the production of scientific knowledge are the subject of the separate contributions of Katherine Arnup and Kari Dehli.
Finally, another vital aspect of the Dionne story which has received little serious attention is the vast tourist, film, photo and souvenir industry which was generated around the five sisters.(f.9) Yet such representations of the Quints shape popular understanding of the Dionne story even today. People still visit the Quint museum in North Bay, Dionne souvenirs (including postcards, dishes and the coveted Dionne dolls) continue to fetch good prices and Jimmy and Fay Rodolfos of Massachusetts run a flourishing Dionne Quintuplet fan club which sponsors a “Quinvention” every five years. In the early years after the birth of the five girls, newspaper photographs, newsreels and three Hollywood films (The Country Doctor, Reunion and Five of a Kind) featuring the Quints were especially popular.(f.10)
For most Depression – era people, dreaming of a Dionne doll or watching the Quints on film was as close as they would get to the real Dionne Quintuplets. But millions of others, many of them American tourists, did make the trip to Quintland where the sisters were put on public display. What they found in Quintland was a contradictory combination of ultra – modern hospital, royal family tour, and rustic northern Ontario tourist site. This final section of the introduction will look at the elements that went into the construction of what was in essence Canada’s first theme park.
“Our Own Royal Family”: The Making of Quintland as a Tourist Site
he Quints were big business. According to Berton, they “launched Northern Ontario’s flourishing tourist industry” and rescued “an entire region from bankruptcy.”(f.11) The Quint phenomenon also generated tremendous anxieties about commercialism and exploitation — both of which were heavily identified with American – style hucksterism and slick, fast – talking promoters. The Dionne parents were regarded by many people as somehow too ignorant or simply unwilling to resist the allure of commercial pleasures, an impression enhanced by the Chicago trip, during which they shopped, saw the sights and appeared on a stage. Indeed, whatever the differences — and there were many — that existed between the anglophone and francophone communities, both were troubled by the problem of “commercialism.” In a period in which it was not uncommon for parents with “freakish” children to exhibit them publicly, members of both communities were opposed to the contract which Oliva Dionne signed with Chicago promoters.(f.12) Leaders in both the francophone and anglophone communities criticized Elzire and Oliva Dionne for appearing on a Chicago stage — even though the Dionnes did not involve the sisters. Popular anxieties about “American” commercialism linked two groups otherwise divided along linguistic lines on the question of whether the Quints oughtto be returned to their parents.
The Ontario government, after rescuing the Quints from the jaws of Chicago promoters, was thus constrained to show that Quintland was far from the American freak show model. No admission or parking fees were ever charged at Quintland, even as the Ontario government made millions from the commercial exploitation of the Quints.(f.13) Indeed, the Ontario government dilemma was difficult and unprecedented: how do you organize a tourist site around the daily display of human beings without following the American freak show model?
Because the Dionne Quintuplets were and still are the only surviving identical quintuplets in history, it is tempting to assume that little needed to be done to get millions of tourists to come and visit them. After all, they were a natural wonder even more amazing than Niagara Falls. But just as Karen Dubinsky has argued that the Falls have in fact been constructed in various ways for tourism, so too can it be argued that a “naturalistic” reading of the Quints’ popularity is not sufficient to understand why millions came to see them.(f.14)
The Key Quadruplets of Texas, for example, with whom the Quints were sometimes compared, did not receive anywhere near the attention the Quints did, and not just because they were four rather than five sisters. For one thing, although the Key sisters did dress alike, they otherwise tended to de – emphasize what Physical Culture (“The Personal Problem Magazine”) charmingly referred to as their “quadruplicity.”(f.15) More obviously, the Keys were never nationalized as a commercial resource as were the Dionnes. Two questions therefore need to be asked: how were the Quints represented at Quintland for tourists, and why did people come to see the five sisters?
While the Ontario government guardianship did manage the Quints as a natural resource, Quintland was not quite Niagara Falls. Quintland was not an “empty” landscape; it involved living human beings. Of course, part of the appeal of a trip to Quintland was the apparent remoteness and emptiness of the landscape, particularly for American tourists. Drawing on images which were already familiar in popular culture, Hollywood films featuring the Quints suggested that Canada was a snowy community of gentle idiots, and tourist literature evoked the rustic character of Quintland and its northern Ontario surroundings. The birth of the Quints, while astonishing, seemed fitting in a land already full of natural wonders.
The fact that French Canadians in general and Oliva Dionne in particular were by definition seen as simple peasants facilitated this association between Quintland and “the rustic.” Of course, any reference to native peoples as the original occupants of the landscape was largely obliterated; instead, one of the few commercial opportunities at Quintland was the chance to photograph for 25 cents “a single Indian in a tepee.”(f.16)
This was a safe rusticity: the image of northern Ontario as rough and masculine was edged out during the Quintuplet years, for Quintland was a “family” tourist destination, and dozens and dozens of tourist camps were built to accommodate these new tourists and their cars. “In the eyes of the tourist trade, Quintland’s great value lay in the fact that it was known as a ‘family attraction’ — as opposed to the hunting and fishing holidays that appealed only to men and boys. It was known that if women went along, progress was more leisurely and spending more liberal.”(f.17)
While the appeal to “the rustic” was important, it was obviously secondary to the tremendous draw of the Quintuplets. The Quints themselves were not portrayed as rustics, although some calendar illustrations show the five sisters on canoe trips or in outdoor contexts. But if the Quints were not to be represented as freaks in a circus or rustic souls like their parents, what other meanings were open to the Ontario government, the media and the tourist industry?
As Valverde observes, the construction of the Quintuplets as royal princesses was the most important strategy through which the Ontario government avoided charges of commercial exploitation. As she explains:
The twice – daily showings of the Quintuplets in their playground to tourists jamming the 1,000 – car parking lot could thus be justified implicitly without fear of commercial taint. Princesses, after all, have a duty to appear before their loyal subjects regardless of personal inconvenience or threat to their privacy. The discourse of royalty furthermore legitimized the girls’ complete segregation from other children, and for that matter from their parents and other siblings (who were not royal)…. While numbers of more common girls around Ontario were made wards of the Children’s Aid Society, the Quintuplets were portrayed more as princesses shut in their castle than as wards of the state.(f.18)
The Quints almost did end up in a royal palace when the Toronto municipal government toyed with the idea of installing them in Casa Loma, a bizarre faux castle built by a Toronto millionaire during the 1920s.(f.19) The construction of the Quintuplets as royalty also served to counter the argument that the state had “collectivized” the Quints in a Bolshevik – style takeover.(f.20) For if the Quints were royals then they, like the British Royal Family, were the collective property of Canadians, and especially English – speaking Ontarians.
In addition to princesses, the Quints invited comparison with Shirley Temple, and not just because the five sisters also made Hollywood films.(f.21) Both the Quints and Shirley Temple, the child star of the Depression years, had the same essentially magical relationship to money: they generated all kinds of it, but appeared to do so more through chance and good fortune than through work or craft. Charles Eckert notes that the Shirley films “obliterate all traces of their craft. They are consummate examples of minimal direction, invisible editing, unobtrusive camera – work and musical scoring, and characterless dialogue.”(f.22) Shirley was regarded as somehow having some elusive combination of good looks, innate talent and charm that made her enchanting on screen, and which separated her from other children, while the Quints were seen as unparalleled natural wonders. The apparently effortless and joyful “play” that the Quints engaged in for tourists was in fact highly regimented by doctors and nurses. Moreover, as the Quints recount in their collective autobiography, they knew they were being watched even though they could not see the crowds. They had a consciousness of themselves as “the Quints.”(f.23)
Both Shirley and the Dionne Quintuplets embodied Depression – era hopes that one might similarly come into all kinds of money through luck. How many parents dreamed that their child might also become a Hollywood star? In both cases, the organization behind the money (whether the Ontario government’s tight management of the Quints’ commercial endorsements or the major financial interests involved in the Hollywood studio system) was effectively masked. Both evaded the taint of commercialism: Shirley because she was often presented as a poorly dressed orphan, and the Quints because the Quintland site was constructed precisely to avoid any criticism of commercial exploitation.
Eckert points out that Shirley embodied the virtues of individual compassion and an all – encompassing love at a time when hard work and private giving, rather than social welfare, were seen as the answer to the economic problems of the Depression. The Quintuplets perhaps could be seen as a Canadian variant of this ideology. As Berton notes, “[t]he popular assumption was that a generous government was laying out the taxpayers’ money to support the quintuplets.”(f.24) The reality, of course, was the reverse: the Dionne Quintuplets made lots of money for the Ontario government while thousands of Ontarians went without the social assistance they desperately needed.
At the same time, Quintland was not the same as a Shirley Temple movie. As Berton notes, the tremendous allure of Quintland was that one could see these child stars in the flesh, and for free, whereas “[o]ne might visit Hollywood and never catch a glimpse of a movie star.” At Quintland, there was also the real possibility that one might encounter the rich and famous among the throngs who came to see the Quintuplets.(f.25) Quintland, after all, was a tourist site and not a film, and part of what made it a tourist experience was collective participation in recognizing the place as “touristic.”(f.26)
In another important respect, the Quints differed from both royal princesses and Shirley Temple: they lived in a hospital. To a large extent, the separation from others demanded by the royalty model of the Quints was backed by a medical strategy of isolating them from any potential danger to their health. But after it became clear that the Quintuplets would live, there was little need for them to remain confined to a hospital. What kept them there was the tourist revenues they brought in, contempt for the Dionne parents, and the fact that Dr. Blatz did not want his work with the Quintuplets interrupted.(f.27)
The hospital itself had little appeal as a tourist site although, interestingly, it did gesture to “the rustic” with its log – cabin exterior. Visitors were banned and, as the years went by, many questioned the hospital’s necessity. What would happen as the Quints got older? Could they spend their lives in a hospital? A 1938 issue of Physical Culture imagines this scenario for a June day in 1953 when a potential suitor comes to call for Emilie. The passage is a wonderful evocation of the potential collision between the princess and medical models of the Quints:
The interest that Andre, the young man, evokes is similar to that aroused in a European populace by the son of a foreign potentate wooing a princess…. Before he is admitted to her presence, Andre must pass through the fumigating room. A nurse carefully cleans his hands and his face with a new microbe – killer; another offers a powerful gargle. Then he is permitted to cross the threshold of the sterilized shrine of his lady love…. When finally he entered the room, after having exchanged his jacket for a white tunic, Emilie coyly pressed her antiseptic lips upon his immunized mouth.(f.28)
Of course, nothing like this came to pass and not just because the beloved Emilie was dead by 1954. Ultimately, the problem with the Dionnes was that, unlike Shirley Temple, they had relatively limited use in the most modern of interwar media: the radio and the cinema. Although their faces could be seen everywhere in the print media, the Quints’ cinematic potential was severely limited after their third Hollywood film, Five of a Kind (1938), when they refused to speak English.(f.29)
Since many American tourists and English – Canadians had difficulty accepting (or even imagining) a French – Canadian existence (particularly in Ontario), the promotion of the Quints as tourist attractions had always been somewhat complicated by the fact that the girls were Franco – Ontarian. (As Welch’s article documents, some French Canadians in Quebec wanted Duplessis to remove the Quints to Quebec so that they could feel at home as francophones and be managed for the benefit of the Quebec tourist industry.) To take just one example, the Quints were “anglicized” to become the Wyatt Quintuplets in all three of their Hollywood feature films.(f.30)
However, it was not until the Quints started refusing to speak English that serious problems began.(f.31) Not only did this drastically reduce their commercial potential over time, but it also very much limited the extent to which they could be relied upon to promote in radio broadcasts and rallies the British Empire, Victory Loans and good citizenship in general. Their refusal on one occasion to sing There’ll Always Be an England caused a public uproar. In the end, the war took the Quintuplets off the front pages.
Today, hardly anyone remembers the three Hollywood films made with the Quintuplets, and Quintland as a tourist site no longer exists. The farmhouse in which the Quints were born has been transformed into a museum stuffed with souvenirs and memorabilia and moved to North Bay. While the museum draws its share of tourists, it is the exchanging of souvenirs of all sorts that animates the pages of the newsletter of the Dionne Quintuplets fan club. The actual experience of having been to Quintland is now secondary. MacCannell says of souvenirs that “To prevent the souvenir from becoming elevated in importance to the point where it breaks its relationship with the attraction, it is always represented as a fallen object, as no substitute for the thing itself, as something fallen from its own naturalness, something with a name.”(f.32)
But with Quintland closed and two of the Quints dead, souvenirs and talk about souvenirs are now the primary means through which the Dionne story is circulated. No longer objects of the tourist gaze, the surviving Quints live in near – seclusion, while representations of them circulate in the flea markets and paper shows of North America.
The linked articles that make up this special issue all seek to examine the Dionne story anew. Our aim is not to destroy the pleasures of collecting souvenirs or being a Dionne Quintuplet fan, but rather to open up new questions and interpretations about the Quints, five girls whose construction as a natural wonder, as children, and as a “popular craze” has hitherto made them seem somehow outside the realm of historical analysis.
Footnotes:
I would like to thank the other contributors to this special issue, as well as the anonymous reviewer, for comments and assistance.
(f.1) Pierre Berton, The Dionne Years (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977). Reprinted in 1992 as a Penguin paperback, the book was the basis for the 1978 NFB documentary The Dionne Quintuplets.
(f.2) Producer Bernie Zukerman, in a Globe and Mail article on the mini – series, comments “When national advertisers in LA were going through the slate for next year, this Dionne series was all they wanted to talk about. After all, the Dionnes were the beginning of family endorsement advertising. They sold General Motors, Lysol, diapers, you name it.” Ray Conlogue, “Babes in TVland,” Globe and Mail, 4 June 1994: Cl.
(f.3) While the Dionnes were still in Chicago, the Ontario government set up a second guardianship. According to the provisions of the 1935 Guardianship Bill, the Quintuplets were to remain wards of the Crown until their 18th birthday. See Berton, the articles in this volume, and Mariana Valverde, “Representing Childhood: The Multiple Fathers of the Dionne Quintuplets,” in Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality, ed. Carol Smart (London: Routledge, 1992).
(f.4) As cited in Berton, The Dionne Years, 132. Croll, later a senator, was the minister of welfare during the administration of Ontario Premier Mitch Hepburn. For more on the critical role he played in the Dionne story, see Berton; Mariana Valverde, “Representing Childhood”; and John T. Saywell, “Just Call Me Mitch”: The Life of Mitchell F. Hepburn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).
(f.5) John Nihmey and Stuart Foxman, The Time of their Lives: The Dionne Tragedy (Ottawa: Niva, 1986). This novel forms the basis for Million Dollar Babies. Sid Adilman, “Parents’ anguish a key to Dionne Saga, author says,” The Toronto Star, 4 June 1994: L10.
(f.6) Veronica Strong – Boag, “Intruders in the Nursery,” in Joy Parr, ed., Childhood and Family in Canadian History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982).
(f.7) Peggy Hill, “The Quints and Me,” Globe and Mail, 28 May 1994: D2.
(f.8) James Brough, ed., We Were Five (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965). According to Bertrand Langlois, the son of Cecile, the surviving Dionne sisters are preparing a new book about their lives. Peggy Hill, “The Quints and Me,” Globe and Mail, 28 May 1994: D2.
(f.9) Nor does it receive the attention it deserves in this special issue. We hope that these articles will stimulate further research in the area of the Quints and popular culture.
(f.10) John Axe, The Collectible Dionne Quintuplets (Maryland: Hobby House Press, 1977). Axe’s Chapter V, “Movie Stars,” although short and of a general nature, provides a rare account of these Hollywood films, all made during the 1930s.
(f.11) Berton, Dionne Years, 2.
(f.12) Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). The Franco – Ontarian community, however, was more consistent: Dr. Dafoe was criticized by the Dionne camp for his undignified behaviour on a New York trip. The anglophone press reserved its scorn for Elzire and Oliva Dionne only, and treated Dr. Dafoe — an anglophone and a professional — with deference.
(f.13) Berton, Dionne Years, 199.
(f.14) Karen Dubinsky, “‘The Pleasure is Exquisite but Violent’: The Imaginary Geography of Niagara Falls in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Canadian Studies 29, 2 (Summer 1994), 64 – 88.
(f.15) Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, “Will ‘Hothouse’ Life Weaken Dionne Quints?” Physical Culture (January 1938), 92.
(f.16) Berton, Dionne Years 199.
(f.17) Ibid., 196. For more on northern Ontario and the “rough” and “masculine,” see Karen Dubinsky, Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880 – 1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Karen Dubinsky and Franca Iacovetta, “Murder, Womanly Virtue, and Motherhood: The Case of Angelina Napolitano, 1911 – 1922,” Canadian Historical Review 72 (December 1991), 505 – 31. For an interesting account of the British tourist camps of the 1930s, see Alan Tomlinson and Helen Walker, “Holidays for All: Popular Movements, Collective Leisure, and the Pleasure Industry,” in Alan Tomlinson, ed., Consumption, Identity and Style: Marketing, Meanings, and the Packaging of Pleasure (London: Routledge, 1990).
(f.18) Valverde, “Representing childhood,” 125. Berton also discusses the royalty model of the Quints. See, for example, Dionne Years, 162, 172 and 188.
(f.19) Berton, Dionne Years, 227 – 28.
(f.20) For an invocation of “the rights of parents” against the Soviet model, see Phyllis Griffiths, “Papa and Mama Dionne: A Canadian Tragedy,” Chatelaine (March 1936), 14.
(f.21) Valverde briefly compares them in “Representing childhood,” 125 and 130 as does Berton, Dionne Years, 205. The following analysis of Shirley Temple relies on Charles Eckert, “Shirley Temple and the House of Rockefeller,” in Peter Steven, ed., Jumpcut: Hollywood, Politics and Counter – cinema (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1985).
(f.22) Eckert, “Shirley Temple,” 50.
(f.23) Berton, Dionne Years, 207.
(f.24) Ibid., 136 – 37.
(f.25) Ibid., 206, 198.
(f.26) Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 137.
(f.27) Berton, Dionne Years, 186 – 88.
(f.28) Gruenberg, “Will ‘Hothouse’ Life Weaken Dionne Quints?” 10, 91.
(f.29) Berton, Dionne Years, 247.
(f.30) Roy Dupuis and Celine Bonnier, who play the Dionne parents in Million Dollar Babies, asked to speak in French in some of the production’s scenes, but were refused because the mini – series is to air on American TV. Ray Conlogue, “Babes in TVland,” Globe and Mail, 4 June 1994: Cl.
(f.31) The question of language and the Quints is dealt with at length in David Welch’s contribution to this special issue.
(f.32) MacCannell, The Tourist, 159
Copyright Trent University Winter 1994
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Wright, Cynthia “They were five: The Dionne Quintuplets revisited”. Journal of Canadian Studies. FindArticles.com. 17 Sep, 2010.
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Three Dionne Quintuplets Say Father Sexually Abused Them
By CLYDE H. FARNSWORTH
Published: September 26, 1995
TORONTO, Sept. 25— The Dionne quintuplets, who drew world attention in the 1930’s and became the subject of three Hollywood films, were sexually abused by their father for years, the three surviving sisters have charged on Canadian television and in a new book.
Annette, Cecile and Yvonne Dionne, now 61, made the allegation in an interview on the Radio-Canada television network in Montreal over the weekend. Asked why they had waited so long to break their silence, Yvonne spoke of their need to find “inner peace.”
Annette said, “We’ve come to a point where we had to liberate ourselves from the past.” Cecile added, “It’s a long time, but that’s normal for something so deep.”
The three now live in the Montreal area. Yvonne never married. Annette and Cecile are divorced, and both now use their maiden names. The two other sisters — Emilie and Marie — are dead.
The interviewer, Denise Bombardier, said she found the revelations “apocalyptic.”
“These women are completely destroyed psychologically,” she said.
Jean-Yves Soucy, a Montreal writer who was co-author with the three sisters, said, “This is a story not just of sexual abuse, but harassment and physical and verbal power abuse.”
The five girls were born May 28, 1934, in Corbeil, Ontario, near the Quebec border, to Elzire Dionne and her husband, Oliva. Mr. Dionne, a dirt-poor farmer before the birth of the quints, died in 1979.
As the first quintuplets on record to survive more than a few days, the infant girls were taken from their parents and made wards of the Ontario government, which turned them into what the Canadian Encyclopedia calls a “$500 million asset to the province.” Three million people trekked to “Quintland” in North Bay in northern Ontario to watch the babies at play behind a one-way screen. Oliva Dionne fought a nine-year battle to regain custody of his children.
In the 1960’s the four sisters then surviving — Emilie died in 1954 — told their often bitter story in a book titled “We Were Five.” But there was no mention of sexual abuse until the new book, “The Dionne Quintuplets: Family Secrets.”
The mistreatment the women now describe took place after they rejoined the family in the 1940’s.
The incidents of sexual abuse occurred when they went for car rides with their father, the sisters said. Their father took them for rides one at a time, and touched them in a sexual way, they said.
The sisters never told their mother “so as not to aggravate the situation,” Annette said. But when they did try to discuss the abuse with a school chaplain. Annette said, they were told “to continue to love our parents and wear a thick coat when we went for car rides.”
Other brothers and sisters of the quintuplets are denying that their father ever abused any of his children.
“We assert that we had good parents, and that to our knowledge our father was certainly not a sexual abuser,” said Therese Callahan, an older sister, in a statement to the newspaper The North Bay Nugget. “That’s all I want to say right now because it hurts too much.”
She said she was speaking on behalf of three brothers and two sisters: Oliva Dionne Jr. and Claude Dionne, both of nearby Corbeil; Victor Dionne and Pauline Dionne, both of North Bay, and Rosemarie Girouard of St. Catharines, Ontario.
Photo: The surviving Dionne quintuplets, from left Annette, Yvonne and Cecile, who assert that their father sexually abused them as children. (Associated Press)
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