She was born in a Colorado mining camp and died in a Georgetown townhouse. In between, Evalyn Walsh McLean owned the Hope Diamond, entertained presidents, and watched her family fall apart around her.
Her father, Thomas Walsh, arrived in America as a penniless Irish immigrant. He spent two decades chasing gold before he found it. In 1896, at age 46, he purchased abandoned mining claims in Colorado’s Imogene Basin that others had dismissed.
The previous owners had been hunting silver. They walked past gray rock containing gold telluride, a compound that looked nothing like the gleaming nuggets prospectors imagined. Walsh recognized what they had missed.
He worked in secret, confirming his suspicions with trusted men. When he was certain, he went home to tell his family. His daughter was not yet 12 years old.
He picked her up and spoke five words that shaped everything that followed: “Daughter, I’ve struck it rich.”
The Camp Bird Mine produced $5,000 in ore every day within two years. By 1900, it comprised 103 claims across 941 acres. In 1902, a British syndicate bought Walsh out for approximately $5.2 million.
The family moved to Washington, D.C. Thomas Walsh built a 60-room mansion on Massachusetts Avenue that cost more than $800,000. Presidents visited. Theodore Roosevelt counted Walsh among his friends.
Thomas Walsh died on April 8, 1910. His daughter was 23, unmarried, and suddenly one of the richest young women in America.
Tragedy had already marked Evalyn. In 1905, a car crash in Newport, Rhode Island killed her brother Vincent. Evalyn survived but shattered her leg. Doctors prescribed morphine for the pain.
She kept taking the drug long after the bones healed. The dependency would follow her for years.
In July 1908, Evalyn eloped with Edward Beal McLean, known as Ned. His family owned the Washington Post. Both families objected. Both were right to.
The honeymoon lasted nearly a year. In Paris, Evalyn saw a 94-carat pear-shaped diamond called the Star of the East. Ned paid $120,000. It was her first great diamond, but not her most famous.
In the winter of 1910, Pierre Cartier invited Evalyn to view a stone he had acquired. It was a blue diamond of 45 carats so deep it seemed to hold darkness inside it.
Cartier told her about the curse. The stone had been stolen from a Hindu idol, he said. A French merchant who brought it to Europe was torn apart by wild dogs. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette possessed it before the guillotine claimed them. Everyone who touched it met with disaster.
Evalyn was not frightened. She was fascinated. She had already lost a brother and carried a morphine habit. Misfortune held no terror for someone who had already met it.
The sale closed on January 28, 1911. The price was $180,000.
Much of Cartier’s curse was invention. The merchant had not been killed by dogs. He died in Russia at 84, wealthy and respected. None of that mattered. Evalyn had purchased a legend as much as a gemstone.
She treated the Hope Diamond like a toy. Her great dane carried it around the house in his mouth. During parties, she hid it in sofa cushions and made guests hunt for it. At dinners and funerals alike, the blue stone hung from her neck.
The estate called Friendship covered 75 acres along Wisconsin Avenue. The mansion included formal gardens, stables, and a golf course. Warren Harding was a regular visitor before he reached the White House.
When Harding won the presidency in 1920, the McLeans believed they had secured access to the White House itself. Harding visited Friendship during his time in office. Dinners mixed politics with pleasure in ways that would later seem reckless.
In May 1919, a car struck Evalyn’s nine-year-old son Vincent on Wisconsin Avenue, just beyond the gates of the estate. The boy died.
Condolence letters arrived. So did darker messages. Strangers wrote to inform Evalyn that her son’s death proved the stone carried evil. Ministers urged her to sell it before another victim fell.
Evalyn did not respond. She did not sell. At her son’s funeral, the blue stone hung from her neck.
The morphine dependency deepened. Alcohol joined it. Ned was drinking heavily, and Evalyn matched him. The parties continued. The orchestras played on.
In 1924, the Teapot Dome scandal erupted. Albert Fall, the Secretary of the Interior, had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for drilling rights on federal land. Ned McLean told a Senate committee he had personally loaned Fall $100,000.
The testimony fell apart. The money had come from oil magnates. Fall went to prison, the first cabinet member in American history convicted of crimes committed while in office.
Ned had tried to provide cover for a man who had attended his parties and used his golf course. The favor cost him everything except a cell. Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana led the investigation and made certain every newspaper reported Ned’s perjury.
Ned was never prosecuted. His lawyers argued he was too foolish to have knowingly deceived anyone. The defense was accurate and devastating. Edward Beal McLean was officially too stupid to be held accountable for his own words.
He disappeared into alcohol.
In March 1932, the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped. Gaston Means, a convicted fraudster, approached Evalyn with a tale calibrated to her weaknesses. He knew underworld contacts, he said. For the right price, he could negotiate the boy’s return.
Evalyn handed over $100,000 in cash, then $4,000 more for expenses. The bills disappeared. Weeks of excuses followed.
On May 12th, a truck driver found remains in woods several miles from the Lindbergh home. The boy had likely died the night he was taken. Every dollar Evalyn gave Means purchased nothing but lies.
Means was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. The $104,000 was never recovered. He died in Leavenworth in 1938.
During the worst years of the Depression, Evalyn also fed the Bonus Army. More than 20,000 veterans had gathered in Washington demanding early payment of bonuses promised for their World War I service. Congress rejected their petition. No one left.
Evalyn drove to the camp. She ordered a thousand sandwiches, coffee, and cigarettes. She returned the next day and the day after that.
On July 28, 1932, General Douglas MacArthur led infantry and cavalry down Pennsylvania Avenue. Major George Patton commanded the tanks. Tear gas filled the Anacostia camp. The shanties burned. Families fled with whatever they could carry.
Evalyn watched the smoke rise from across the river. She had fed them sandwiches while the government prepared to burn their shelters.
The Washington Post went at auction on June 1, 1933. Eugene Meyer paid $825,000. Four years earlier, Ned McLean had refused an offer of $5 million.
Five months later, a court declared Ned legally insane. He was committed to Shepherd and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Baltimore. In 1941, he suffered a fatal heart attack there. He was 56 years old.
The Friendship estate was purchased by the federal government in 1942 for wartime housing. The mansion was demolished. Apartment buildings rose in its place.
Evalyn moved to a townhouse in Georgetown. In September 1946, her daughter, also named Evalyn, was found dead from an overdose of sleeping pills. She was 24 years old.
Evalyn Walsh McLean had now buried a brother, a son, a husband, and a daughter. The diamond that supposedly carried a curse had presided over all of it.
Seven months after losing her daughter, Evalyn developed pneumonia. She died on April 26, 1947. She was 60 years old. The Hope Diamond was still around her neck.
In 1949, the family transferred her jewelry collection to Harry Winston, a New York dealer. In November 1958, Winston gave the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution.
He sent it through the United States Mail, first class registered, insured for $1 million. The postage cost $244. The most famous diamond in the world arrived at the museum in a brown paper package.
It remains there today. Visitors line up to see the blue stone that hung from Evalyn Walsh McLean’s neck while her life fell apart around her, one death at a time.