Evalyn Walsh McLean was an American mining heiress and socialite who was famous for being the last private owner of the Hope Diamond, as well as another famous diamond, the Star of the East. She also authored the memoir, Father Struck It Rich, together with Boyden Sparkes.
Early life
Evalyn was born on August 1, 1886, in Leadville, Colorado, the only daughter of Carrie Bell Reed, a former schoolteacher, and Thomas Walsh, an Irish immigrant miner and prospector. She had one sibling, a brother, Vinson Walsh, who died in a car accident in Newport, Rhode Island, when he was 17 years old. When she was twelve years old, her father discovered a gold mine and became a multimillionaire. The family moved to a large mansion on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. At the age of fourteen, Evalyn moved to Paris for singing lessons. Instead she lived a wild life, coloring her hair and drinking alcohol. She began adding rouge to her cheeks to adopt the look of prostitutes.
On January 28, 1911, in a deal made in the offices of The Washington Post, McLean's husband purchased the Hope Diamond for $189,000 from Pierre Cartier of Cartier Jewelers in New York. The Hope Diamond was traditionally associated with a curse, but no tragic events befell the couple until eight years later. Due to the rumors of a curse, Evalyn's friends, and her mother-in-law, urged her to sell it back, but Cartier refused to buy it.
Personal life
In 1908, she married Edward "Ned" Beale McLean, the son of John Roll McLean and heir to The Washington Post and The Cincinnati Enquirer publishing fortune. They had four children:
Vinson Walsh McLean, who died aged 9, after being hit by an automobile
John Randolph "Jock" McLean II married three times:
*Agnes Landon Pyne Davis Bacon, in 1941
*Elizabeth Muhlenberg “Betty” Brooke Blake Phipps Reed, in 1943
*former model Mildred W. "Brownie" Brown Schrafft née Brown, in 1953. In 1976, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt rented Brownie McLean's Palm Beach estate, El Solano, and used it as a background for published photographs. In January 1980, she sold the mansion to Yoko Ono and John Lennon. She turned down the Hope Diamond in 1952, when offered to her by her husband, after his mother's death, due to the alleged "curse" associated with it.
*:Evie's daughter Mamie Spears Reynolds, was the first woman to qualify for the Daytona 500, and married Luigi "Coco" Chinetti Jr., the son of Italian race car driver and Ferrari agent Luigi Chinetti, in 1963; they divorced two years later. She later married Joseph E. Gregory, with whom she had two children.
Edward Beale McLean, Jr., married Ann Carroll Meem, in May 1938. Their divorce was granted in July 1943 and, in August, he married actress Gloria Hatrick, with whom he had two sons, Ronald and Michael. Ronald died, in 1969, from enemy fire, while serving in Vietnam as a first lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. McLean and Hatrick divorced in January 1948 and, that October, McLean married Manuela Mercedes "Mollie" Hudson, who had been the first wife of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt Jr. In August 1949, Gloria married actor James Stewart. McLean Jr. and Hudson-Vanderbilt separated in the 1960s, then divorced in 1973, after which he married a fourth time, to Patricia Dewey.
The site of the McLean home, Friendship — a sprawling country mansion built for her father-in-law by John Russell Pope and which was located on Tenleytown Road, N.W. — is now a condominium complex known as McLean Gardens. The original house was demolished in the 1940s though some of the property's garden features remain intact, as does the Georgian-style ballroom. A later residence, also known as Friendship, is located at the corner of R Street, N.W. and Wisconsin Avenue, and remains a private home. Her childhood home, a grandiose Second Empire-style mansion at 2020 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., is now the Indonesian embassy. McLean was a friend and confidante to Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Florence Harding, the wife of Warren G. Harding, the 29th President of the United States. McLean and Harding frequented movie theaters and played bridge together and had a close relationship. McLean and her husband made a highly-publicised journey to Russia, shortly after the October Revolution, in an effort to get Ned's uncle, George Bakhmeteff, reinstated as the Russian ambassador to the US. An American diplomat, William Bullitt, had to talk McLean out of flaunting the Hope Diamond on the streets of Moscow as a symbol of the superiority of capitalism. McLean was a victim of Gaston Means, a former BOI agent, murder suspect, and grifter, who claimed he had set a deal to free the Lindbergh baby for a ransom of over US$100,000, which Evalyn McLean advanced him. Means disappeared with the money, only to resurface months later in California, and ask McLean for additional funds. Suspicious of Means' activities, she helped lead police to him; he was also wanted for various other crimes and civil actions. That ultimately led to his conviction and imprisonment on larceny charges. Edward McLean eventually died in a mental institution in 1941.
Death and estate
On April 26, 1947, Evalyn Walsh McLean, aged 60, died of pneumonia, and was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington D.C., in the Walsh family tomb, alongside her daughter. The Reverend Edmund Walsh, S.J. vice president of Georgetown University read her funeral service, which was attended by family, and close friends including United States Supreme Court JusticeFrank Murphy. Upon her death, the principal of her estate and her jewelry, including the Hope Diamond, were left to her seven grandchildren, to be managed by four trustees until the five oldest grandchildren passed their twenty-fifth birthdays. The trustees were:
Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, American bishop and later archbishop of the Catholic Church
The Reverend Edmund Walsh, S.J. vice president of Georgetown University
Her sons, however, received the proceeds of the Walsh Trust, which was established by her father Thomas Walsh, who had died in 1910. She gave her son-in-law, the former United States Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, lifetime use of the McLean home, Friendship. If the home was sold by the Trustees, he was to receive the proceeds of the sale for his own use.
Her highly-promoted trip to the Russian SFSR is mentioned in the Cole Porter song, "Anything Goes", in the lines "When Mrs Ned McLean / Can get Russian reds to "yes" her, / Then I suppose / Anything goes."
