The last and longest private owner of the Hope Diamond, Evalyn Walsh McLean led anything but an ordinary life. Evalyn grew up a poor girl in a rough Colorado mining town where her father discovered one of the largest gold mines in the United States. The newly wealthy family relocated to Washington, D.C., where she met and married Ned McLean, who inherited the renowned Washington Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer. With the combined influence of the Walsh and McLean families, Evalyn developed friendships with the politically prominent in the nation’s capital and became the city’s favorite hostess. Notorious for giving magnificent parties, she counted the Tafts, the Hardings, the Coolidges, Alice Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, and Ethel Barrymore among her many personal friends.
The McLeans purchased the Hope Diamond when Evalyn was only twenty-four.Wagging tongues and the diamond’s supposed curse did not, however, prevent her from wearing it. She lost the diamond a few times, too, once by putting it around her Great Dane’s neck. When she left the Hope Diamond to her grandchildren in 1947, it was worth two million dollars.
Evalyn loved her diamonds, but she loved children, pets, and life more. The deep indigo stone is but a single facet of her story. Her autobiography, Father Struck It Rich, became a best-seller in the mid-thirties. Now illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs, Queen of Diamonds is that autobiography with a foreword by her great-grandson and an epilogue describing the last decade of her life.
The last and longest private owner of the Hope Diamond, Evalyn Walsh McLean purchased the diamond when she was only twenty-four; spent more than $200,000 on a fabulous honeymoon and ended up in a Paris hotel without enough money to pay the bill; wandered the gloomy rooms of her home imagining crawling reptiles while overcoming her morphine addiction; and stood in the rain wearing a fur coat and clutching the Hope Diamond as her beloved Washington Post was auctioned. The deep indigo stone is but a single facet of her rags-to-riches story.
