In 1896, when Evalyn Walsh was ten, her tough, Tipperary-born father struck gold at Ouray, Colo. Tom Walsh had lived in a boxcar, tended store in Deadwood, and hammered outcroppings for fruitless decades. But when the millions rolled in he twirled the ends of his handlebar mustache, hustled his family off to Washington and swore that his daughter was going to be a lady. Evalyn promptly swore that she wouldn't. She didn't. But in the next 50 years she proved that with $100 million, a wild Irish miner's daughter could do almost everything else under the sun.
She started her career almost immediately. When the Walshes went off to Europe to meet King Albert of the Belgians, she licked Baedekers to make her lips red and practiced walking like Parisian coquettes. (She was 14.) She was unawed by the $865,000 palace her father built at 2020 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington. She swiped creme de menthe from his liquor closet, squandered her allowance on ermine tails, and ruined the nerves of a series of hapless governesses.
By the time she was 18 she had met and startled half the world's celebrities. She took to narcotics after an automobile accident in which her brother was killed and in which she was so badly hurt that her right leg was shortened by an inch and a half. Then she cured herself of the drug habit, married Edward Beale McLean, a handsome, charming, rich man's son, whose family owned the Washington Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Sixty Telegrams. It was a riotous marriage. The newlyweds sailed for Europe with the ceiling of their honeymoon stateroom blanketed with orchids. After one tempestuous quarrel Evalyn chartered a yacht, left her husband. He sent her 60 consecutive telegrams begging forgiveness, and she came back. One day at Carder's, McLean spent $154,000 on a present which was to be inseparably linked with her name for the rest of her life—the baleful, blue Hope Diamond, which had supposedly brought death or disaster to all who had owned it.*
She made fascinating material for the Sunday-supplement writers. Evalyn Walsh McLean was dogged by disaster. She hired detectives to guard her first child, Vinson; she provided a scrubbed, perfumed Negro boy to "keep him from getting spoiled by wealth." But he was killed by an automobile when he was nine. Her marriage ended tragically. Hard-drinking Ned McLean's mind gave way—in a moment of wild humor he sent her a Latvian divorce summons done up in a Christmas box decorated with tiny reindeer and holly. He was committed to an insane asylum a little later, finally died there in 1941.
Evalyn refused to be subdued. She had chosen a reckless way of life, and she pursued it with persistent hardihood. She was constantly moved to outbursts of wild generosity. When the straggling Bonus Army of World War I veterans marched on Washington in 1932, she fed them, bought them cigarets, provided a circus tent to house them.