Five Little Stars: The Dionne Quintuplets, Motherhood, Film and Tourism during the Great Depression

Abstract

On 28 May 1934, Annette, Emilie, Yvonne, Cecile and Marie Dionne were born to a francophone family living in a farmhouse near North Bay. The Ontario Government would declare the first-ever surviving quintuplets wards of the Crown and relocated them to a specially built nursery under the care of Dr. Allan R. Dafoe. Dubbed Quintupletland, the compound became the province’s most popular tourist attraction during the second half of the decade while the Quintuplets became Hollywood film stars. While other scholars and popular writers have examined the Dionne Quintuplets through various theoretical and emotional lenses, the interconnections between film culture, gender and tourism have not been considered. Drawing from archival and textual evidence, this essay considers the corpus of Dionne films as a significant site of intermedial and transnational socio-cultural exchange rooted in asymmetrical power dynamics and exploitation. It argues that Dionne filmography demonstrates the possibilities of film culture in establishing synergistic relationships between narratives of Hollywood stardom, medicalized gendered discourse and the tourism industry during the 1930s.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Heather Stanley for reading an earlier draft of this essay, and George Withers for research assistance.

Notes

1. Dafoe effectively functioned as their lead custodian. Other guardians included at one time or another: W.H. Alderson (Red Cross); Hon. David A. Croll (Minister of Public Welfare); Oliva Dionne (father); Olivier Dionne (grandfather); Kenneth Morrison (Callander merchant); and Judge J.A. Valin (superannuated jurist). Under the Dionne Quintuplet Guardianship Act of 1935, the sisters were made wards of the Crown until their eighteenth birthday. In March 1998, the three surviving sisters won a multimillion-dollar settlement from the Ontario government as compensation for the years they spent on exhibition at Quintupletland.

2. Pierre Berton, The Dionne Years: A Thirties Melodrama (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977); Million Dollar Babies (North York: CINAR/Sony Music Entertainment, 1994). The miniseries was loosely based on this fictionalized account: John Nihmey and Stuart Foxman, Time of their Lives: the Dionne Tragedy (Ottawa: NIVA, 1986). See Mary Vipond, ‘The Million Dollar Babies and the Media: representations of the Dionne Quintuplets in the 1930s and the 1990s’, Revista mexicana de estudios canadienses 3 (2002), 53–70.

3. Katherine Arnup, ‘Raising the Dionne Quintuplets: Lessons for Modern Mothers’, Journal of Canadian Studies 29, no. 4 (Winter 1994–1995): 65–81; Veronica Strong-Boag, ‘Intruders in the Nursery: childcare professionals reshape the years One to Five, 1920–1940’, in Joy Parr (ed.), Childhood and Family in Canadian History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982): 160–78; Mariana Valverde, ‘Representing Childhood: the multiple fathers of the Dionne Quintuplets’, in Carol Smart (ed.), Regulating Womanhood: historical essays on marriage, motherhood and sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1992), 119–46.

4. Gaétan Gervais, Les jumelles Dionne et l'Ontario français (1934–1944) (Sudbury: Prise de parole, 2000); David Welch, ‘The Dionne Quintuplets: more than an Ontario Showpiece – Five Franco-Ontarian Children’, Journal of Canadian Studies 29, no. 4 (Winter 1994/95), 36–64.

5. Françoise Noël, Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario: the Interwar Years (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009); Françoise Noël, Nipissing: historic waterway, wilderness playground (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2015).

6. Sue Beeton, Film-Induced Tourism (Clevedon: Channel View Publications, 2005), 11. See also Graham Busby and Julia Klug, ‘Movie-Induced Tourism: The Challenge of Measurement and Other Issues’, Journal of Vacation Marketing 7, no. 4 (2001): 316–32; Sine Heitmann, ‘Film Tourism Planning and Development - Questioning the Role of Stakeholders and Sustainability’, Tourism and Hospitality Planning & Development, 7, no. 1 (2010): 31–46; Roger Riley, et. al., ‘Movie Induced Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 25, no. 4 (1998): 919–35.

7. Film Daily (FD), 24 August 1934, 4; Motion Picture Herald (MPH), 29 June 1935, 64.

8. FD, 16 September 1936, 15.

9. The International Photographer (December 1935), 19, 32; FD, 14 December 1935, 4.

10. Gaylyn Studlar, Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

11. MPH, 15 June 1935, 100; FD, 12 April 1935, 6.

12. FD, 20 September 1935, 9; FD, 29 November 1935, 13; FD, 28 April 1936, 25, 34.

13. FD, 2 May 1935, 11; FD, 8 November 1935, 16.

14. Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: the Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Kriste Lindenmeyer, The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 4.

15. FD, 29 August 1935, 14; St. Petersburg Times, 6 March 1936 https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=5DZPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=B04DAAAAIBAJ&pg=7014%2C929323 (accessed 23 October 2015). Blake claims he brought the water-heated incubator to Corbeil when reporting on the birth.

16. ‘Voucher No. 22,’ Verification of Cash Receipts, 20th Century-Fox Files, 1936–1937, RG 4-53-0-196, Box 47, Archives of Ontario, Toronto. RKO-Pathé renewed its exclusive newsreel and short subject rights for three years beginning July 1936. The Country Doctor, Ontario Medical Association Collection, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa (hereafter LAC).

17. Charles E. Blake, ‘How They Got the Quints in Pictures’, Photoplay (March 1936): 21–2.

18. Kristen Hatch, Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 2.

19. Noel Brown, The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 17–64; Photoplay (January 1936), 9.

20. Screenland (September 1935), 26, 85.

21. See Hollywood (March 1936), 23; Modern Screen (March 1936), 34–36; Motion Picture (March 1936), 31; Screenland (February 1936), 63. Brand, who was awarded the Croix de Publicité for best campaign of the year for the Quintuplets, assigned Fox publicist Frank Perritt to promote the girls.

22. Reading Eagle, 2 December 1935, 4. https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1955&dat=19351202&id=mLIhAAAAIBAJ&sjid=dZsFAAAAIBAJ&pg=3081,264005&hl=en (accessed 1 January 2016). Fox employed unionized Canadian photographers and technicians during on-location filming.

23. Movie Classic (March 1936), 31.

24. Hollywood (May 1936), 20, 70. Fred Davis of the Toronto Daily Star, which held an exclusive contract for still photographs of the Quintuplets (including advertisements), was their official photographer until 1939. US syndicate Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) maintained the international rights.

25. Variety, 4 December 1935, 2.

26. See Noel Brown, ‘‘How much do you love me?’ The Child’s Obligations to the Adult in 1930s Hollywood’, in Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow (eds.) Entertaining Children: The Participation of Youth in the Entertainment Industry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 93–110.

27. Hollywood Reporter, 27 February 1936, 3; NY World-Telegram, 13 March 1936, 11, cited in Motion Picture Review Digest (MPRD), 30 March 1936, 32.

28. Movie Classic (March 1936), 26.

29. Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century-Fox: A Corporate And Financial History (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1988), 32.

30. Variety, 3 June 1936, 4. Reunion, Jon Sonneborn Collection, LAC; Five of Kind, UCLA Film & Television Archive, Los Angeles.

31. On Temple and male fandom see Hatch, 55–75. As Hatch argues, contemporary audiences did not see male fondness for Temple as a perverse sign of pedophilic desire, but rather celebrated her civilizing influence on male sexuality.

32. Modern Screen (March 1936), 36.

33. MPH, 21 December 1935, 32.

34. Silver Screen (August 1935), 55. Kristin Hall, ‘Selling Lysol as a Household Disinfectant in Interwar North America,’ in Cheryl Warsh, Lynn Krasnick, and Dan Malleck (eds.) Consuming Modernity: gendered behaviour and consumerism before the baby boom (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013). The Quintuplets’ image was also used to endorse such products as Karo Syrup, homogenized baby foods and Palmolive.

35. Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 3.

36. See Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children (New York: Knopf, 2003); Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Child-rearing in America (New York: NYU Press, 2003). Elzire and Oliva were outspoken critics of scientific rearing, stating that their daughters were not ‘as robust and as well appearing as they should be.’ The Nugget, 25 April 1936, 1–2.

37. Rima D. Apple, Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 9, 105.

38. See Philip A. Kalisch and Beatrice J. Kalisch, ‘The Image of the Nurse in Motion Pictures,’ American Journal of Nursing 82, no. 4 (1982), 605–11; Philip A. Kalisch and Beatrice J. Kalisch, ‘The Dionne Quintuplets Legacy: Establishing the ‘good doctor and his loyal nurse’ Image in American Culture’, Nursing and Health Care 5, no. 5 (1984): 242–50; Rick Shale, ‘Images of the Medical Profession in Popular Film,’ in Paul Loukides and Linda K. Fuller (eds.) Beyond the Stars: vol. 1: Stock Characters in American Popular Film (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1990), 156–69; Todd Wider, ‘The Positive Image of the Physician in American Cinema during the 1930s,’ Journal of Popular Film and Television 17, no. 4 (1990): 139–52.

39. Hollywood (March 1936), 23.

40. The Motion Picture and the Family, 15 March 1936, 6. This was an agency established in 1931 and sponsored by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA).

41. Movie Classic (December 1936), 32–3, 88. Hersholt went on to portray a small-town general practitioner, Dr. Paul Christian of River Bend, Minnesota, in six RKO films and on a Vaseline-sponsored CBS radio series between 1937 and 1954.

42. Radio Daily, 6 October 1937, 7; Radio Star (November 1936), 22–3. Prior to the Lysol contract, Dafoe had a monthly radio program sponsored by Carnation Milk. Health-related radio programs began in the early 1920s. See Alan J. Sofalvi, ‘A Review of Radio Coverage of Health-related Topics in the 20th Century,’ American Journal of Health Studies 20, no. 3/4 (2005), 233–41.

43. Melvyn Stokes, ‘Female Audiences of the 1920s and Early 1930s,’ in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds.), Identifying Hollywood's Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies (London: BFI, 1999), 43–4, 54–5.

44. Motion Picture Daily (MPD), 24 August 1934, 6; FD, 26 February 1935, 30.

45. FD, 12 April 1935, 6; MPH, 2 March 1935, 81; MPH, 16 March 1935, 68; Variety, 12 June 1935, 14.

46. MPH, 4 April 1936, 83.

47. MPH, 4 July 1936, 72; MPH, 6 March 1937, 91.

48. MPH, 7 March 1936, 93; The Motion Picture and the Family, 15 March 1936, 7.

49. MPH, 6 June 1936, 112; MPH, 25 April 1936, 80.

50. FD, 13 December 1935, 6; Photoplay, March 1936, 28.

51. Screenland (March 1936), 18–19, 92.

52. Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 5.

53. The Nugget, 11 June 1934, 46; The Nugget, 4 June 1934, 1; The Nugget, 18 June 1934, 2.

54. The contract provided $250 weekly during the time of the exhibit, living quarters in Chicago, and 30% of all receipts (with expenses to be deducted from the gross profits). Prior to the move to Chicago, the promoters promised to pay the Dionnes $100 weekly for the Quintuplets’ medical care. The Nugget, 1 June 1934, 1; The Nugget, 18 June 1934, 1–2.

55. The Nugget 14 September 1934, 11; The Nugget, 16 March 1936, 15. See Cynthia Wright, ‘They were Five: The Dionne Quintuplets Revisited,’ Journal of Canadian Studies 29, no. 4 (Winter 1994/1995).

56. See Noël, Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario and Nipissing.

57. The Nugget, 10 June 1935, 1.

58. MPD, 28 August 1935, 4. The Dafoe hospital was located roughly halfway between the communities of Corbeil and Callander.

59. Valverde, 119–46.

60. MPH, 4 April 1936, 53; Willis Thornton, The Country Doctor (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1936), 104.

61. Literary Digest, 6 June 1936, 36; The Nugget, 16 September 1935, 1; The Nugget, 27 September 1935, 1.

62. Noël, Nipissing, 166.

63. Noël, Nipissing, 153.

64. Allan Roy Dafoe, ‘Dr. Dafoe’s Column on the Quintuplets and the Care of your Children’, New York Journal (1939). http://quints.northbay.ca/digitize/LOCATION/COHTML/02040022.htm (accessed 6 April 2016); ‘The Dionne Pebbles’, New York State Medical Journal, 15 January 1936: 133.

65. Senate of Canada, Report and Proceedings of the Special Committee on Tourist Traffic (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1934), xi.

66. Variety, 27 February 1935, 67; Hollywood (March 1936), 23.

67. Quintuplets’ Second Christmas and Quintuplets at Play (1936) are extant at LAC.

68. FD, 18 February 1938, 8; MPH, 26 February 1938, 42; MPH, 19 November 1938, 77. Quintupland, Ontario Medical Association Collection (LAC).

69. In 1938, Collins left Pathé and became in charge of filming activities at the New York World’s Fair. The Nugget, 25 March 1938, 3.

70. Shirley Temple scheduled a visit in June 1938, which her mother claimed would be the highlight of her two-month long vacation. Screenland (March 1938), 74; FD, 16 June 1938, 2.

71. Ernie Pyle, ‘How the Quints have changed’, Ogdensburg Journal, 17 August 1938, 10. http://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn84031165/1938-08-17/ed-1/seq-10.pdf (accessed 4 April 2016).

72. Modern Screen (February 1937): 8.

73. ‘The Dionne Quintuplets’ Part in the Picture,’ 20th Century-Fox Collection, USC Cinematic Arts Library, Los Angeles (hereafter USC).

74. Dana Benelli, ‘Hollywood and the Travelogue’, Visual Anthropology 15 (2002): 3–16.

75. MPH, 21 December 1935, 32.

76. The Nugget, 21 August 1936, 1; The Nugget, 4 September 1936, 2; The Nugget, 27 November 1936, 14.

77. The Nugget, 3 June 1938, 1.

78. Los Angeles Examiner, 6 March 1936.

79. Cinema Progress, 4, no. 1–2 (June-July 1939): 9.

80. ‘Memorandum for the Minister,’ 6 February 1936, D. Leo Dolan Papers, MG 30 E259 Vol. 1 Minister Folder 2 (LAC).

81. The Nugget, 11 September 1936, 11; The Nugget, 24 July 1936, 1.

82. The Nugget, 27 November 1936, 15.

83. ‘Original Screenplay by Levien based on story idea by Gould,’ 6 February 1936, Reunion file 1667, 20th Century-Fox Collection (USC).

84. The Nugget, 27 November 1936, 17.

85. The Nugget, 19 August 1936, 1; The Nugget, 27 November 1936, 14.

86. ‘Quintuplets #3, Story Suggestion by Boris Ingster and Milton Sperling,’ 22 January 1937, Five of a Kind file 1805, 20th Century-Fox Collection (USC).

87. The Nugget, 14 February 1938, 1; Hollywood, 27, no. 8 (August 1938): 57.

88. Hollywood, January 1939, 13; Variety, 19 October 1938, 9.

89. MPH, 24 December 1939, 51.

90. MPH, 15 April 1939, 77; MPH, 18 November 1939, 65. Five Times Five received an Oscar nomination for best short subject at the 12th Academy Awards.

91. Variety, 19 April 1939, 1; MPD, 16 May 1940, 2.

92. RKO-Pathé’s exclusive contract expired in 1938 and was not renewed. Northern Neighbors and Vacationing in Quintupletland, J. J. Burns Collection (LAC).

93. Thornton, 91.

94. My use of the term ‘emotional healing’ comes from John F. Kasson, The Little Girl Who Fought the Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014).