The Dionne Quintuplets and Their Entourage: Student Papers on Media Representation

The Dionne Quintuplets and their Entourage: Student Papers on Media Representation Introduced and Edited by Françoise Noël Professor of History, Nipissing University With an Epilogue by Amy Bennett Director of the Dionne Quint Museum North Bay, Ontario © 2010 All Rights Reserved Contents Introduction, Françoise Noël 1 Media Representations of the Quints and Quintland The Dionne Quintuplets: Assessing Obituary Newspaper Cover- age, Rory Currie 5 Who Cares About Caterpillars? Media Representations of the Dionne Quintuplets in 1936, Allison Tryon 29 Cakes, Candles, Trees and Toys: The Dionne Quintuplets, Celebra- tions, and Family Rituals, Stephanie Logan 58 Quintland: A Successful but Exploitive Tourist Attraction, Leesa Church 77 The Quints’ Entourage Surrogate Motherhood and the Nurses to the Dionne Quintuplets, Stacy Tremain 94 Public Perceptions of the World’s Most Famous Mother, Elizire Dionne, Danielle Beaulieu 105 From Zero to “Hero”: Country Doctor Allan Roy Dafoe’s Rise to Fame as a Result of the Birth of the Dionne Quintuplets, Amanda Seiler 126 The Visual Story by Fred Davis, Photographer: Two Contrary Constructions of the Quints, Annie McIntyre 149 Collecting the Quints: An Analysis of Dionne Quintuplet Scrapbooks, Lauren Wagner 170 Epilogue, Amy Bennett 188 Bibliography 192 Elzire Dionne with her five identical daughters, born 24 May 1934. This was just the beginning of the media attention they would receive as the Dionne quintuplets or simply the “Quints”. Photo by Dick Railton. Dionne Quint Museum. With the expressed permission of A. & C. Dionne. Introduction Françoise Noël The Dionne quintuplets were born seventy-six years ago on May 24, 1934. Annette and Cécile are the only two still living. Very few people know them or knew their sisters as individuals. Their personal life for the last sixty years or so has been very private. Yet millions of people know of the “Quints” and many of them visited Quintland in its heyday and saw the Quints in person. Others have heard about them from their parents or grandparents and may have, while driv- ing through North Bay on the Trans-Canada highway, stopped to visit their birth home which is now operated as a museum. In North Bay, the memory of the Quints is still very much alive and the impact of their birth on the growth of a tourist industry around Quintland is an important part of North Bay’s history. The history of the quintuplets themselves, however, is a more difficult question to answer. Despite the thousands of articles that have been written about them, the photographs of them that were splashed in the media at every major holiday and on their birthday, the ads that were endorsed by them, and the films they made, the real story of the Quints may never be fully known. Their own books present one perspective on the story as does the books written by some of their nurses. Pierre Berton’s history of their early life attempts to provide a balanced perspective, but he did not have access to all the players. The view- point of Oliva and Elzire Dionne, the parents of the Quints, and of their siblings, is particularly hard to document as it was seldom rep- resented in the media or in the histories of the Quints written to date. Academic historians have been remarkably reticent to approach this topic. An article by Veronica Strong-Boag in 1982 first approached the 2 The Dionne Quintuplets and their Entourage subject with regards to the role of Dr. Blatz in the Dionne nursery. A special issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies in 1994-95 approached several aspects of the question. The most recent book by Gervais, Les jumelles Dionne et l’Ontatio Français, examines the place of the Quints in the French-Canadian community, a previously neglected question. In my study of community life in Northeastern Ontario in the 1930s, I was unable to deal with the history of the Dionne Quints more than peripherally, but it was impossible to not be aware of their great impact on area, particularly the boost they gave to tourism, and all the reper- cussions this on this area. At the time, and since, those writing about the Dionne quintuplets have tended to favour one side or the other in the great question of their early life, their removal from their parents and their display to the public. Particularly in view of their later life and the difficulties they faced in adjusting to “normal” life, it is difficult to not find fault with the way they were placed in an artificial environment and restricted in their ability to learn about the world. And yet, the Quints themselves have stated that life in the nursery was the happiest period of their lives. To avoid passing judgement on the actors involved and the actions that were taken is one of the most difficult tasks of those who move into this field of enquiry. How then, can historians, particularly student historians just learn- ing the field of history, approach the history of the Quints. This was the challenge which faced the students of my honours history seminar on the Dionne Quintuplets and Quintand at Nipissing University in 2009-10. By and large, the answer was to look at media representations of the Quints and the people who surrounded them. The students were all aware that behind the facade presented in the media lurked the “real” story of the Dionne girls which they could not uncover with the sources available. What they were looking at was the constructed image of the “Quints” and the tourist attraction called Quintland and media representations of the other actors in the story. The media, for example, tended to be much more favourable to Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe, the Quints doctor and guardian, than to their parents, Oliva and Elizire Dionne, who fought to regain custody of their children. How Introduction 3 the media constructed images of those involved for public consump- tion is a valid historical question which can be studied from available sources, largely newspapers, magazines, and advertisements. From its inception, this course was envisioned as one which would contribute research which would be useful to the Dionne Quintuplet Museum and of interest to a more general audience. Under the direc- torship of Amy Bennett, the Museum is very conscious of its respon- sibility to present the Dionne Quintuplet story to a modern audience in a sensitive and responsible way. While the nursery photographs of the Quints still have an emotional appeal, understanding that these images and the many articles which were published about the Quints were part of a media construction of “the Quints” and not their reality, contributes to our ability to construct a meaningful public history of the Dionne quintuplets and their importance to the local area’s history. The student papers presented here have been edited but without altering the students’ viewpoints. Editor’s notes have been added when necessary to clarify a point or to counter an argument. A common bibliography of published books and academic articles has been pro- vided. References to archival sources and the newspaper and magazine articles can be found in the footnotes. That the students faced both the time constraints and limited access to resources should be kept in mind when reading these papers. There is no question, however, that the topic was approached with enthusiasm and that the students gravi- tated to a question which was of particular interest to them. As most of them had very limited exposure to the story of the Quints when they began this course, the questions they wanted to answer are probably the same as those a general audience would ask. The first part of the collection brings together those papers which look specifically at media representations of the Quints and Quint- land. The opening article by Rory Currie on the Quints as memory and as history provides an interesting introduction to the subject. Alli- son Tryon compares local, national and international coverage of the Quints in newspapers in 1936. Stephanie Logan examines the por- trayal of the Quints in terms of holidays and family rituals and using Noël’s study of family life in Northeastern Ontario, contrasts this with 4 The Dionne Quintuplets and their Entourage the experience of the Quints. Leesa Church looks at Quintland as a tourist attraction. The following five papers focus on some of the per- sonalities associated with the Quintuplets. Stacy Tremain looks at the nurses who raised the Quints and argues that many of them were in fact surrogate mothers to the Quints. Danielle Beaulieu is interested in Elizire Dionne. Because of the nature of the sources available, however, she cannot find the “true” Elizire so much as present the various public perceptions of her which were presented in the media. Amanda Seiler is interested in the image of Doctor Dafoe. How did he go from “Zero to Hero”? Her interpretation tends to be more negative than what has been published to date on him. Annie McIntyre’s paper is an examina- tion of the visual images of the Quints taken by their official photographer, Fred Davis. Given the important role he played in their early life, it is noteworthy that Fred Davis is not better known. While this essay is also about representation, it examines the original images, not their published versions, and by focusing on Davis as much as she can, helps to bring him to the foreground. Lauren Wagner writes about “collecting” the Quints, based on an analysis of several scrapbooks which are part of the collection at the Museum. While the contents of these scrapbooks are the media representations of the Quints, the collector is representative of that group of people who made the whole Quint- land phenomenon possible, the interested general public.

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