Time of Their Lives The Dionne Tragedy Author:John Nihmey, Stuart Foxman A TRUE-LIFE FAIRY TALE THAT BECAME A LIVING NIGHTMARE — The Dionne Quintuplets were at their peak more famous, loved and admired than any children before or since. The tiny babies from the backwoods of Northern Ontario, Canada, the first-ever surviving quintuplets, became the most written and talked about girls on earth. Their miraculous birth, v... more »aliant fight for life, and seemingly ideal upbringing gave hope to a world deep in despair of the Great Depression. "Time" and "Life put them on their covers, Hollywood made movies about them, and company executives scrambled madly to sign them to endorsement contracts, contributing to an unprecedented infant industry worth $500 million to the Province of Ontario. Their faces were everywhere -- on magazines and newspapers, newsreels, ads, billboards, products, calendars -- and still, the public could not get enough. Millions of people traveled across the continent just to see them, turning Quintland into one of the top tourist attractions in North America. Treated like royalty and universally loved, the quints were considered the luckiest girls alive.
Not as lucky were their parents, Oliva and Elzire Dionne. The facade of happiness surrounding their quints, fabricated by a myth-making press, hid the intense battle being waged in the background. For eight years, the Dionnes fought for the custody of the five girls who were taken away from them at birth, locked in a specially built hospital, made wards of the Government, and placed under a board of guardians headed by the obsessive Dr. Allan Dafoe and controlled by Ontario's ambitious premier, Mitchell Hepburn. When the battle became public, the rest of the world cruelly saw the Dionne parents as ungrateful nuisances; the Dionnes saw only their family being destroyed by outsiders. The family's eventual victory proved hollow -- after eight years, the damage was too great, the scars deep, and the tragedy irreversible.« less