Evalyn Walsh McLean

American socialite

• Born: August 1, 1886
• Birthplace: Leadville, Colorado
• Died: April 26, 1947
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

McLean embodied the profligate lifestyle of the incredibly wealthy in America in the early twentieth century. She used the money acquired through inheritance and marriage to become the premier socialite in Washington, D.C.

Sources of wealth: Inheritance; marriage

Bequeathal of wealth: Dissipated

Early Life

Evalyn Walsh McLean was born Evalyn Walsh in a remote central Colorado mining town, the only daughter of Thomas Walsh, a first-generation Irish immigrant who initially settled in Massachusetts. Trained as a carpenter but gifted with business savvy and enormous self-confidence, Walsh headed west in the mid-1870’s to learn the mining business. Initially, he provided equipment for mining enterprises, first in the Dakotas and then in Colorado. He developed a barter system in which he would accept deeds for land in exchange for supplies. For more than a decade, he accumulated titles to numerous productive mines. By the time of Evalyn’s birth, the Walshes were comfortably settled in Colorado’s middle class.

First Ventures

Restless over what he perceived to be sloppy prospecting techniques, Walsh was certain that there was more gold to be found, although most people believed the Colorado gold rush was over as attention was being redirected to the burgeoning silver boom. Walsh went out to the mining fields, and in 1896 he laid claim to the Camp Bird Gold Mine, the largest gold reserve ever tapped in Colorado, producing as much as $50,000 a week. His claim established Walsh as the richest miner west of the Mississippi and his family as one of the richest in America.

Within two years, Walsh, now a captain of the mining industry but hungering to exert political influence, moved his family to Washington, D.C. Evalyn was twelve. A headstrong tomboy, she was now to be the embodiment of the wealthy debutante. She studied French, art, and music. She was sent to study in Paris, where she developed a taste for expensive and often gaudy jewelry. Back home, Walsh’s ambitions were calculated and successful. The Walsh mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, at the time the most expensive private home in America, became a showplace for gatherings of some of the most influential and powerful families during President William McKinley’s administration. The Walsh family’s name became synonymous with unrestricted spending, and they used their money for furnishings, parties, expensive clothes, foreign automobiles, artwork, and extended tours of Europe. After the death of Walsh’s sixteen-year-old son in 1905, his beautiful daughter, who was not yet twenty, became the richest heiress in the nation’s capital.

Mature Wealth

In 1908, Evalyn eloped with Edward “Ned” Beale McLean, the heir to a newspaper empire that included The Washington Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer, then the most influential newspaper in the West. McLean had a hard-earned reputation as a wealthy Washington ne’er-do-well, and the depths of his alcoholic addiction were not fully evident when he married Evalyn. The couple’s marriage was a major news story, and newspapers followed their extended honeymoon tour of Europe and the Middle East, where they indulged every buying whim. They quickly went through the $100,000 that each of their fathers had given them for spending money, but their families happily wired them additional funds. During a stop in Turkey, the couple met Sultan Abdülhamid II, and Evalyn received her first look at the fabulous cobalt-blue Hope Diamond, then in the sultan’s extensive jewelry collection.

Once the McLeans returned to Washington, they became the capital’s most celebrated power couple, hosting lavish parties that routinely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unable to forget the Hope Diamond, Evalyn made discreet inquiries about purchasing the fabled stone. After the sultan’s death, the gem had passed into the hands of renowned jeweler Pierre Cartier, and after master gem cutters reset the stone because Evalyn thought the setting was too Old World, the couple bought the diamond for $180,000 in 1911.

In 1916, McLean’s father died and control of the newspaper empire fell to his son. The couple established themselves in the McLeans’ swanky country estate on Wisconsin Avenue, then in the fashionable outer environs of Washington. The estate quickly became the capital’s social center. The couple’s lifestyle demanded enormous security against the possibility of kidnapping, and the couple’s four children were each assigned bodyguards. Ironically, in 1918 the couple’s eldest child, Vinson (whom the press had dubbed the “Hundred Million Dollar Baby”), then nine, playfully eluded his bodyguard and ran out into Wisconsin Avenue, where he was killed after being hit by a passing car.

Throughout the 1920’s, the couple’s parties became legendary, and they sometimes entertained thousands of people at a time. Extravagance was routine. A birthday party for Evalyn’s poodle cost more than $1 million, and the dog wore the Hope Diamond on its collar during the fete. Evalyn herself was a close confidante of President Warren G. Harding’s wife, Florence, and both McLeans enjoyed close relationships with the Harding White House. Although Ned was a force in Republican politics, he never sought political office. (He would eventually be implicated in numerous influence-peddling investigations that dogged the Harding administration.) Ned’s life fell into a downward spiral. His stewardship of his inherited newspaper empire was a disaster, and his alcohol abuse deepened. He had numerous affairs, culminating in a move to Hollywood in 1929 to take up with a starlet. Evalyn, who had begun taking morphine after she was in a 1905 car accident that killed her brother, developed a powerful addiction to the drug. During the 1920’s, she increasingly immersed herself in a profligate lifestyle, and she was forced to sell off much of her jewelry to finance her extravagance.

The stock market collapse in 1929 ended the McLeans’ flamboyant lifestyle. Estimates suggest that the couple had spent nearly $200 million of their shared inheritance. Facing the reality of exhausted accounts, Evalyn tried to regain control of her life. Despite her husband’s abandoning her, Evalyn would not petition for divorce, although Ned secured a kind of legal divorce through a court in Latvia, which he delivered to his wife on Christmas Day, 1932. In time, Evalyn had Ned committed to a Baltimore sanatorium in order to treat his alcohol dependency. In 1932, she lost control of her husband’s newspaper empire when it went into receivership and was sold.

Depression America had lost its taste for celebrity wealth, and Evalyn slipped into obscurity. She briefly made headlines in 1932 after the kidnapping of aviator Charles A. Lindbergh’s baby, when she contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and sold several lucrative real estate holdings to finance the $100,000 ransom, only to find that an FBI agent’s information about the kidnapper was bogus. (The agent was later convicted of larceny.) Over the next ten years, Evalyn struggled with her diminishing fortune, and her husband languished in the hospital, where he would die in 1941. In 1946, her only daughter, who had married a much older man rumored to have been Evalyn’s lover, committed suicide. A year later, struggling with depression, Evalyn died from complications of pneumonia after walking her dog in the rain, although friends suggested her daughter’s suicide had taken away her will to live. What was left of her estate, including the Hope Diamond, was sold to settle her considerable debts.

Legacy

In her successful 1936 autobiography, Father Struck It Rich, Evalyn portrayed herself as a kind of Cinderella, a poor girl from the Western plains who came to Washington a wealthy heiress but never lost her frontier sense of independence and plainspokenness. However, it is difficult to see her story as anything but a cautionary tale of a spendthrift whose lavish lifestyle was uncomplicated by any interest in responsible money management. In exhausting two family fortunes, Evalyn, by her own admission in her autobiography, simply craved the thrill of reckless spending. For two decades, she lived a life shaped only by her determination to avoid boredom. She and her husband never added to their family fortunes through work or investment, never financed public charitable causes, and never endowed any institution. Rather, they simply spent money on a staggering scale, a fortune that by today’s standards would total in the billions of dollars.

Bibliography

Anthony, Carl Sferrazza. Florence Harding: The First Lady, the Jazz Age, and the Death of America’s Most Scandalous President. New York: Harper, 1999. Careful and highly readable account of Washington, D.C., during the 1920’s includes assessments of the McLeans’ influence in Harding’s numerous scandals.

Gregory, Joseph. Queen of Diamonds: The Fabled Legacy of Evalyn Walsh McLean. Franklin, Tenn.: Hillsboro Press, 2000. Updated and edited version of McLean’s autobiography, Father Struck It Rich. Includes a helpful introduction that recounts her life.

Kurin, Richard. The Hope Diamond: The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem. New York: Harper, 2007. Scholarly work that carefully separates fact from the often lurid stories told about the diamond. Includes a careful account of the diamond while in Evalyn’s possession.

Murray, Robert K., and Katherine Speirs. The Harding Era: Warren Harding and His Administration. Newton, Conn.: American Political Biography Press, 2000. A probing and careful look at the tangled legacy of Harding’s era. Includes accounts of the Washington social scene and the role it played in the many instances of influence peddling.

Roberts, Chalmers M. In the Shadow of Power: The Story of The Washington Post. Cabin John, Md.: Seven Locks Press, 1989. Authoritative history of the newspaper that includes fascinating accounts of both Evalyn and her husband in their heyday and during their spiral into financial ruin.