Evalyn Walsh McLean — the Mining Heiress and the Hope Diamond

Summary

Evalyn Walsh McLean was the last private owner of the Hope Diamond, the most famous and most fabled "cursed" gem in the world, and one of the great spenders of the American Gilded Age. The daughter of a poor Irish immigrant who struck it rich with a Colorado gold mine, she married into the family that owned The Washington Post, and for a time she commanded a fortune that let her treat money as something that simply appeared.

In January 1911 her husband bought the Hope Diamond from the Paris jeweler Pierre Cartier for $180,000, and Evalyn wore the 45-carat blue stone to parties as a casual ornament — even, by her own telling, letting her great dane wear it. She delighted in its reputation as a bringer of doom, but her own life would deliver tragedy after tragedy: the death of her young son, the disintegration of her marriage, the loss of her daughter, and the steady erosion of the wealth that had once seemed inexhaustible.

McLean's spending was legendary and ceaseless, and the family's income could not keep pace. Her husband, Edward "Ned" McLean, drank himself into mental collapse, lost control of the Post, and was eventually declared legally insane. In one of the most notorious episodes of her life, she was swindled out of more than $100,000 by the con man Gaston Means, who claimed he could recover the kidnapped Lindbergh baby through underworld contacts.

By the time she died in 1947, the great Walsh-McLean fortune had largely dissolved into debt, and her jewels — including the Hope Diamond — were sold to settle her estate. The diamond passed to the jeweler Harry Winston and, in 1958, was donated to the Smithsonian Institution, where it remains. Evalyn Walsh McLean's life stands as a parable of inherited wealth spent faster than it could ever be replaced.

The Fortune

Evalyn Walsh was born on August 1, 1886, in Leadville, Colorado, the daughter of Thomas Walsh, an Irish immigrant prospector, and Carrie Bell Reed, a former schoolteacher. Walsh's luck changed forever in the 1890s when he recognized the value of overlooked ore at what became the Camp Bird Mine near Ouray, Colorado, one of the richest gold strikes in the state's history. The mine made the family enormously wealthy, and the Walshes moved to Washington, D.C., to live as new American aristocracy.

Evalyn grew up suddenly rich, sent to Europe, indulged, and accustomed to spending without limit. In 1908 she married Edward Beale "Ned" McLean, heir to The Washington Post and The Cincinnati Enquirer, uniting two great pools of money. The young couple were famous for extravagance even by the standards of the age, reportedly running through their allowances and then their inheritances on travel, jewels, parties, and estates.

It was in this atmosphere of seemingly bottomless wealth that Evalyn became a serious collector of jewels. She had already acquired the great Star of the East diamond, and on January 28, 1911 — in a deal made at the offices of The Washington Post — Ned McLean purchased the Hope Diamond from Pierre Cartier of Paris for $180,000, an astronomical sum at the time. Far from fearing the stone's storied curse, Evalyn embraced it as a conversation piece, wearing the deep-blue diamond constantly and treating one of the world's most valuable objects as an everyday accessory.

The Cracks

The "curse," real or not, seemed to arrive with the family's tragedies. In 1919 her son Vinson, only nine years old, was struck and killed by a car near the family estate — a loss from which Evalyn never fully recovered and which the public quickly linked to the diamond's legend. The grief settled over a marriage that was already straining under Ned McLean's worsening alcoholism and erratic behavior.

Ned's decline accelerated through the 1920s. He drank heavily, behaved increasingly irrationally, became entangled in the Teapot Dome scandal, and gradually lost the capacity to manage either himself or the family's business affairs. The marriage broke down — the couple's divorce was finalized in December 1932 — and control of The Washington Post slipped away; the paper was ultimately sold at a bankruptcy auction in 1933. A jury declared Ned legally insane on October 31, 1933, and he died in a psychiatric hospital in 1941, leaving Evalyn to hold together a household and a fortune that were both fraying.

Meanwhile her spending never stopped. She maintained grand homes, threw lavish parties, and gave generously and impulsively, all while the income that had once supported such a life dwindled. The most damaging single episode came in 1932, when, in the frenzy following the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the swindler Gaston Means persuaded her that he could use criminal connections to recover the child. McLean handed him more than $100,000, plus thousands more in expenses, to ransom and rescue the baby; Means delivered nothing, the money vanished, and in June 1932 he was convicted of larceny and sentenced to prison.

The Collapse

The Gaston Means swindle crystallized a larger truth about Evalyn Walsh McLean's finances: money flowed out far faster than it came in, and she had little defense against either con men or her own habits. The Camp Bird fortune and the McLean inheritance had been vast, but decades of unchecked spending, the loss of the Post, and her husband's collapse steadily hollowed out the family's wealth.

Through the 1930s and 1940s she clung to her grand style even as the underlying capital eroded. Her jewels — above all the Hope Diamond and the Star of the East — represented an enormous share of what value remained, and they were as much collateral and emergency reserve as ornaments. The woman who had once bought a fabled diamond on impulse now lived increasingly on the strength of assets she could not bear to part with.

The final blows were personal as well as financial. In September 1946 her daughter Emily "Evie" McLean died at the age of twenty-four from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, and the cumulative grief and exhaustion of a ruinous life caught up with her. Evalyn Walsh McLean died of pneumonia on April 26, 1947, in Washington, D.C. Her estate was so encumbered that her famous jewels had to be sold to satisfy creditors and heirs, ending the family's ownership of the gems that had defined her.

What Went Wrong

After

Evalyn Walsh McLean's estate was settled in part by selling her jewelry collection. In 1949 the New York jeweler Harry Winston purchased the McLean gems, including the Hope Diamond and the Star of the East. Winston exhibited the Hope Diamond for years as the centerpiece of his traveling "Court of Jewels" before deciding it belonged in public hands.

In 1958 Winston donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution, mailing the priceless stone to Washington in a plain box by registered mail. It became the cornerstone of the National Gem Collection at the National Museum of Natural History, where it remains one of the most visited objects in the world. The diamond that Evalyn Walsh McLean had worn so carelessly thus passed permanently out of private ownership and into the public trust.

McLean's own legacy is double-edged. She is remembered as a generous, vivacious Washington hostess and as the last private keeper of the Hope Diamond, but also as a cautionary figure: an heiress who treated a vast fortune as inexhaustible and outlived it. Her memoir, "Father Struck It Rich," published in 1936, recorded both the dazzle and the disorder of a life lived entirely on inherited money.

Lessons

References

• Evalyn Walsh McLean Wikipedia
• The History of the Hope Diamond Smithsonian Magazine
• Hope Diamond Wikipedia
• The Fabulous McLeans and Their Hoodoo Diamond New England Historical Society