Evalyn Walsh McLean

Early life

Evalyn was born on August 1, 1886 in Denver, Colorado, the only daughter of Thomas Walsh, an Irish immigrant miner and prospector turned multimillionaire, and his wife, Carrie Bell Reed, a former schoolteacher. She had one sibling, a brother, Vinson Walsh (1888–1905), who died tragically in a car accident in Newport, Rhode Island when he was only 17 years old, and she had just turned 19.

The Hope Diamond

On January 28, 1911, in a deal made in the offices of The Washington Post, McLean's husband purchased the Hope Diamond for $180,000 (equivalent to $4,627,000 in 2016) from Pierre Cartier of Cartier Jewelers in New York. The Hope Diamond was associated with a curse, and McLean's first son was killed in a car accident. Her husband Ned ran off with another woman and eventually died in a sanitarium. Their family newspaper, The Washington Post, went bankrupt. Eventually McLean's daughter died of a drug overdose, and one of her grandsons died in the Vietnam War. McLean never believed the curse had anything to do with her misfortunes.

Personal life

In 1908, she married Edward Beale McLean, the son of John Roll McLean and heir to The Washington Post and The Cincinnati Enquirer publishing fortune. They had four children:

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.

Evalyn McLean was also 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 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 other various crimes and civil actions. This 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 Justice Frank 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:

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.

In popular culture

Her highly promoted trip to the Russian SFSR is mentioned in the Cole Porter song, "Anything Goes" in the lines "When Mrs Ned McLean (God bless her) / Can get Russian reds to "yes" her, / Then I suppose / Anything goes."