Evalyn Walsh McLean
| Evalyn Walsh McLean | |
|---|---|
Portrait of Evalyn Walsh McLean (1914), wearing the Hope Diamond
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| Born |
August 1, 1886 Denver, Colorado |
| Died | April 26, 1947 (aged 60) Washington, D.C. |
| Cause of death | Pneumonia |
| Resting place | Rock Creek Cemetery |
| Occupation | |
| Known for | Last private owner of the Hope Diamond |
| Spouse(s) | Edward Beale McLean |
| Parent(s) |
Thomas Walsh Carrie Bell Reed Walsh |
| Relatives | Robert Rice Reynolds (son-in-law) |
Evalyn Walsh McLean (August 1, 1886 – April 26, 1947) was an American mining heiress and socialite who was famous for being the last private owner of the 45-carat (9.0 g) Hope Diamond (which was bought in 1911 for $180,000 from Pierre Cartier), as well as another famous diamond, the 94-carat (18.8 g) Star of the East. She also authored the memoir Father Struck It Rich together with Boyden Sparkes.
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.
On January 28, 1911, 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 her 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 and eventually her daughter died of an overdose, and one of her grandsons died in the Vietnam war. Evalyn never believed the curse had anything to do with her misfortunes.
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.
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