One month before the Beatles would take the Ed Sullivan stage in 1964, the Singing Nun appeared on the program, marking a momentous milestone of a flash-in-the-pan career that would end in a tragically ironic death on March 29, 1985. Jeanine Deckers was a Belgian nun who dominated the Billboard charts in 1963 with her Grammy Award-winning track, “Dominique.”
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Religious conflicts, a shadowy personal life, poor mental health, and financial instability pockmarked Deckers’ too-short life. Her death would have been a tragedy regardless of the specific circumstances. But as fate would have it, the Singing Nun left the world just as the problems she was crumbling under were about to dissipate.
The Rising Star Of The Singing Nun
Jeanne-Paule Marie Deckers grew up in Brussels, Belgium, where she joined a local chapter of Girl Guides and began playing guitar at the organization’s events. When she was in her mid-20s, Deckers joined the Missionary Dominican Sisters of Our Lady of Fichermont and adopted the religious name Sister Luc Gabriel. The hobbyist musician regularly sang and played guitar to the delight of her religious colleagues. In 1962, her superiors pushed her to record an album at Philips Records in Brussels. The album she recorded included the song that would propel her to fame, “Dominique.”
The easy listening gospel song quickly ascended the charts, making history as the first No. 1 single in the U.S. by a Belgian artist. She appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show under the stage name Sœur Sourire, or Sister Smile, on January 5, 1964. (The Beatles would take the same stage nearly one month later on February 9.) Money from the song went back to Gabriel’s church, which dictated much of her creative output to remain optimistic, pleasant, and happy. The dissonance between her own failing mental health and the public image the church wanted her to maintain was a heavy burden.
Gabriel was never able to recreate the success of “Dominique,” slowly fading into obscurity as each subsequent release received less and less popularity. The shift in her career was unfortunate but a reasonable consequence of the global shift away from happy-go-lucky folk and toward rock ‘n’ roll. Gabriel’s increasing conflicts with the Catholic church led to her leaving the convent, which caused Philips Records to drop her from their roster and forbade her from using her original stage names Sœur Sourire and the Singing Nun. She would blame later failures on this restriction.
The Tragically Ironic Death Of Sister Smile
After releasing a song praising contraception in 1967, Jeanine Deckers grew even more alienated from the Catholic church, her original support system. She started a school for autistic children with her long-time friend and, later, lover, Annie Pécher. But that, too, grew financially unsustainable and shut down. By the end of the next decade, the Ministry of Finance of Belgium told Deckers she owed over $60,000 in back taxes. She tried to contest the debt by saying she gave the proceeds from her music to her church. However, this monetary burden would follow her for the rest of her life.
On March 29, 1985, Deckers and her partner, Pécher, took their lives in a double suicide by overdosing on barbiturates and alcohol. Their suicide note cited financial troubles as a primary factor in their decision and clarified they wanted a joint burial and a Catholic service. They also wrote letters to one another, thanking the other for their years of loyal partnership. (Although Deckers always refuted the idea she and Pécher were lovers and insisted they were only intensely loyal companions, her diaries would reveal they did have a romantic aspect of their relationship.)
The greatest irony of the death of the Singing Nun was that on the day she died, unbeknownst to her, the Belgian association in charge of collecting royalties paid her $300,000 or over 570,000 francs. While money wouldn’t have necessarily saved Sœur Sourire from her religious trauma and mental health issues, the grim twist to the story adds even more heartbreaking intrigue to the story of the “Dominique” singer who would go on to become an icon in the LGBTQ+ community, particularly the more religious subsects.
Photo by Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images
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