Real Lace

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In 1880, off on a prospecting trip in the Frying Pan district west of Leadville, Tom Walsh came upon an abandoned cabin and mine shaft. The roof of the cabin had been covered with the dirt that had been hollowed out to make the cabin floor, and, picking about in this, he noticed promising flashes of quartz, indicating the presence of silver. He took a sample of the cabin roof, had it assayed, and found that the roof contained hundreds of ounces of silver to the ton. What had happened, it seemed, was that the earlier prospectors had built their cabin squarely on top of a promising silver vein, and then had proceeded to sink their shaft fifty feet away, into barren rock. Walsh bought the cabin site for next to nothing and within two months had mined silver worth $75,000.

  From Sowbelly Gulch, the family—which now included two small children, Evalyn and Vinson—moved on to Ouray, Colorado, where they settled in a small frame house. It was there, barely nine miles from home, in his Camp Bird Mine, that Tom Walsh chipped into a rocky hillside and found gold. He was forty-six years old, and had been searching for more than a quarter of a century. His wife, by then, had begun to suffer from headaches and melancholia—a condition defined as “neuralgia”—and spent much of her time in a darkened room. His son Vinson was too young to understand. And so it was to his ten-year-old daughter, Evalyn, that Tom Walsh first confided his “secret,” tiptoeing into her bedroom and whispering, “Daughter, I’ve struck it rich!”

  Of course, Tom Walsh’s secret did not remain a secret long, as the Camp Bird Mine promptly made him a multimillionaire and he moved his family back east, to Washington, D.C., where the Walshes installed themselves in a huge fortress at 2020 Massachusetts Avenue, which Walsh built for one million dollars. Nor could the news of riches have fallen on more receptive ears than those of little Evalyn. From that moment, Evalyn Walsh embarked upon a life-long love affair with money, and all that money could buy. And it would, she discovered, buy a great deal. Tom Walsh was an indulgent husband and gave his wife everything she asked for—furs from Gunther, jewels from Cartier, gowns from Worth in Paris—which did much to assuage the lady’s melancholia. He was equally indulgent with his daughter. When little Evalyn found that walking to school in Washington was “trying for my dignity,” she asked her father if he could “afford to hire a horse and carriage.” A day or so later, she was presented with a blue victoria and a pair of matched sorrels with silver bits, along with a coachman in a silk hat and gloves. “For a moment I was speechless,” she wrote later, “then jumped into Father’s arms and hugged him.”

  At the age of twelve, at a dancing class, Evalyn met Edward Beale McLean, the son of the wealthy Washington Post publisher. For “Ned” McLean, it was love at first sight, according to Evalyn, but she kept putting him off until, after being engaged “dozens of times,” she suddenly married him in Denver. There followed one of the most incredible honeymoons in marital history. The two fathers—Tom Walsh and John McLean—vied with each other as to how much money each should put up for the wedding trip, finally agreeing to giving them $100,000 apiece for “the young people to enjoy themselves.” It was a prewar sum that most Americans would have found difficult to spend, but not the newlyweds. For example, “One day in Leipzig,” Evalyn Walsh McLean recalled in her memoir, Father Struck It Rich, “we lost patience with the fact that we had only one Mercedes and went overnight to Paris and bought an extra one.” Earlier, Evalyn had met Chicago’s Mrs. Potter Palmer, who had let her play with her jewelry—”She let me finger to my heart’s content her necklace of emeralds and diamonds, and seemed to understand the passion in my eyes as I looked at them.” On their honeymoon, to gratify this passion, Ned McLean bought Evalyn the first of her famous diamonds—the fabled Star of the East. That pretty much took care of the $200,000, and the couple had to cable home for money to pay their hotel bill. They left Europe with hundreds of unpaid bills in their wake, and successfully smuggled the Star of the East past customs into the United States.

  It was not long before Evalyn Walsh McLean, through the good offices of Pierre Cartier, and for $154,000, became the owner of the most famous diamond in the world, the blue 44½-carat Hope, set in the center of sixteen other large stones. The purchase alarmed her mother because of the Hope Diamond’s reputation for bringing its owner bad luck. It had supposedly belonged to Marie Antoinette, and a later Greek owner was said to have leaped to his death from a cliff. A third owner had gone down with a ship at sea after disposing of the diamond. The Hope Diamond’s “fatal power” worried Evalyn McLean only slightly, but she did agree to ask a priest to “lay the curse.” The priest, one Monsignor Russell, received Mrs. McLean in his chapel, donned his robes, and placed her “bauble” on a velvet cushion. Just as he was about to begin his blessing, lightning flashed across the sky and there was a giant clap of thunder and a great rush of wind without rain. Still, the Monsignor continued with his incantations, and the curse was pronounced removed.

  But was it? At her huge Washington estate, “Friendship,” Evalyn Walsh McLean became one of the first great Washington hostesses, in whose footsteps such women as Perle Mesta and Gwendolyn Cafritz have tried to follow. Even though Evalyn rarely rose before five in the afternoon, and was usually too dazed from drink and drugs to recognize her guests, her parties were legendary, and the only qualification needed for an invitation to one of them was that the guest be either rich, famous, or preferably both. Her addiction to morphine became extreme, and she secreted packets of the drug under carpets, behind mirrors, and in slits cut in furniture upholstery. When she tried to withdraw, she suffered agonizing pain and had visions of monsters crawling under her bed and up her wall. For a while, an upper floor of her house became a private sanitarium, with nurses and doctors in attendance, because her husband refused to have her put away. Her escapes from morphine were terrifying, and tragically brief.

  Her husband, meanwhile, had a drinking problem even more severe than his wife’s, and an associate at the Washington Post, Alfred Friendly, has written of McLean’s exploits, which, as he has put it, “reached a new high, or low, in ingenious profligacy, inventive wildness, and general hell-raising of a sort that this enfeebled age, thirty or forty years later, simply cannot conceive of, much less match.” In bars, Ned McLean enjoyed knocking fedoras off other patrons with his cane, then stamping and crushing them, while his two bodyguards went patiently about taking orders for new hats. Mrs. Harding was understandably irked when McLean urinated into the fireplace of the East Room of the White House, nor was the Belgian Ambassador pleased when Ned McLean urinated down the leg of his striped trousers. A Post reporter woke up one morning aboard a transatlantic steamer—drugged and kidnaped because McLean wanted company on the trip. McLean once hired ten prostitutes to pose nude on pedestals in his garden for a party, and at a New Year’s Eve gala all the guests were stripped naked and ordered to run around the block to celebrate the New Year. He had a pet seal named Colonel George Harvey which itself consumed a quart of Scotch whisky a day, delivered regularly by a Post reporter from McLean’s inexhaustible cellars. In his drunkenness, McLean agreed to commit perjury in telling the transparent lie that he, not Ned Doheny, had given the $100,000 to his good friend Albert Fall, at the time of Teapot Dome. At times, because of his alcoholic tremor, he had to tie a bar towel around his wrist and make it into a pulley around his neck so that he could get his drinking hand and his glass up to his lips.

  When Evalyn McLean’s son, Vinson, was born in 1909, both she and the baby nearly died. The following year, Tom Walsh painfully died of cancer, driving his daughter to renewed bouts with drugs. Little Vinson, whom the press christened “the hundred-million-dollar baby,” was the subject of repeated kidnap threats, and the McLean house bristled with guards and burglar alarms. Although Mrs. McLean often complained that her husband was “spoiled,” she did her thorough best to spoil her own children. Because Ned McLean had had a Negro playmate as a child, it was decided that little Vinson should have a black friend too. “We could not buy a colored boy, of cours
e,” she commented, “although it was our habit to buy anything we wanted.” She did, however, make arrangements with his parents to hire a five-year-old named Julian Winbush to live with the family, and Julian’s parents agreed to relinquish all control of him for ten years. The experiment was not a complete success. There were awkward moments with Pullman porters traveling to Palm Beach in those Jim Crow days—even on Ned McLean’s private train, which went everywhere with the whistle blowing at full blast. And as for little Vinson, he could not have cared less. “So far as he was concerned,” Mrs. McLean wrote, “I would have done as well to have borrowed a playmate from the zoo.”

  At the age of twenty, Vinson was run down by an automobile and killed. Ned McLean had, meanwhile, taken up with Marion Davies’s sister, and the affair went on for months all over the United States and Europe. Evalyn McLean’s brother Vinson was also killed in an automobile accident, in which she herself was seriously injured. At the age of twenty, Evalyn McLean’s daughter married fifty-seven-year-old Senator Robert Reynolds of North Carolina, and later died of an overdose of sleeping pills. Still, Evalyn Walsh McLean continued to mock the story of the curse of the Hope Diamond, even lending it to Army brides married at her home during World War II. But in the end, her body racked by drink and drugs and malnutrition—her habit completely destroyed her appetite for food—she died with a scream as awful as the sound of the thunderclap that shook Monsignor Russell’s church so many years before.

  Money, as Grandpa Murray used to point out, can divide a family. It can also destroy one.

  Chapter 13

  MR. RYAN’S FORTUNE

  The Ryan family in America has long considered itself quite superior to such families as the Dohenys of California, as well as to the Murray-McDonnell-Cuddihy family axis in New York. The Ryans, in fact, if asked which was the First Irish Family in the entire United States, would answer that without question it is the Ryans. Their feelings in this matter are based on the fact that there have been Ryans on these shores longer than almost any other Irish-American family. The Ryans did not, as the others did, emigrate to America as a result of the potato famine, nor did they come directly from Ireland. The first American Ryan, Philip, went from Ireland to England during the reign of James II and then, after some unrecorded difficulties with the Crown, made his way to the Colonies, where he first appeared in Virginia around 1690. Philip Ryan married a girl named Whitehead, whose father is said to have been a ship’s captain, and the Ryans settled in Lynchburg, where a number of Ryans—not rich—can be found today.

  Those Ryans today who are rich very much resent having the founder of the family wealth, the appropriately named Thomas Fortune Ryan (his mother’s maiden name was Fortune), described as having started out in life “penniless.” Cleveland Amory, for example, in Who Killed Society? has stated that Thomas Fortune Ryan “was left orphaned and penniless at fourteen,” and that he “walked the streets” as a youth. Not so, counter the Ryans, who point out that an early Lynchburg business directory lists Thomas Fortune Ryan’s father’s occupation as “tailor,” and that the family was probably respectably prosperous—though they may have lost some money at the time of the Gvil War. Also, though Thomas Fortune Ryan was indeed an orphan at age fourteen, he did not take to the streets but, rather, went to live with his maternal grandparents, the Fortunes.

  But at the age of seventeen, in 1868, Thomas Fortune Ryan did indeed leave home, as Ed Doheny had done, and made his way to Baltimore. Baltimore was even then known as one of America’s “Catholic cities”—the others being New Orleans, St. Louis (both French Catholic), San Francisco (Spanish Catholic), and St. Paul, Minnesota (Scotch-Irish). Baltimore alone was of English Githolic origin. The first Lord Baltimore, George Calvert, one of the most powerful of all the colonial governors, had embraced Githolidsm early in the seventeenth century, and both he and the city had taken the name from a tiny fishing village of Baltimore on the southern coast of Ireland because it was considered “the Catholic parish closest to America.”

  When Thomas Fortune Ryan arrived in Baltimore, he was not himself a Catholic. But he did go to work for a dry-goods commission merchant named John S. Barry, who was a Catholic. Ryan promptly fell in love with Mr. Barry’s daughter, Ida, and, in Horatio Alger fashion, married her. This undoubtedly was one factor in his conversion to Catholicism, but Ryan himself always claimed that his interest in the Church was first sparked by a man he met who was a line manager on the Southern Railroad and who gave him his prayer book to read.

  From Baltimore, young Ryan and his bride—backed with a small dowry from her father—made their way to New York, where Ryan worked for a while on a newspaper and then as a clerk in a brokerage house. It was here, in the mid-1870’s, that Ryan had the good luck to meet William C. Whitney, the transit entrepreneur. Whitney was so impressed by the young man that he eventually made him his partner, and, while still in his twenties, Ryan was able to purchase his own seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

  Thomas Fortune Ryan was a strikingly handsome man, tall—over six feet two—and with intense and burning eyes, who could exercise, when he wished, enormous personal charm. The “Ryan charm,” in fact, has become a family trait. But he could also be withdrawn and quiet and austere, and when the Irish smile faded from his lips, it was possible to glimpse the strength of the will behind the easygoing façade. He was, according to Whitney, “the most adroit, suave, and noiseless man that American finance has ever known.” Others have spoken of the power of Ryan’s “silences,” which conveyed worlds of meaning, and Bernard Baruch, with whom Ryan also became friendly and with whom he was also soon working on elaborate Wall Street deals, has written of Ryan’s imposing presence, combined with “the softest, slowest, gentlest Southern voice you ever heard. When he wanted to be particularly impressive, he would whisper. But he was lightning in action and the most resourceful man I ever knew intimately in Wall Street. Nothing ever seemed to take him by surprise.” Baruch concedes that “Many people spoke harshly of him as ruthless and not to be trusted.… Still, I found him exact in all his transactions with me.”

  It wasn’t long, working with men like Whitney and Peter A. B. Widener, before T. F. Ryan’s affairs were a complicated—but hugely successful—network of railroads and street railroads, lighting systems and coal companies, life insurance companies and diamond mines. With Whitney, he consolidated and soon controlled the New York City transit system, and presently Ryan was ready to invade the tobacco empire of James Duke. Duke was no easy man to tangle with, but, using men like Baruch as his chief lieutenants, Ryan embarked upon what became known on Wall Street as “The Great Tobacco War.” Ryan put together a syndicate which purchased the National Cigarette Company. National Cigarette was then artfully merged with the Union Tobacco Company, which, though independently chartered and organized, was actually controlled by Ryan, Whitney, Widener, and Anthony N. Brady. By 1898 Liggett & Myers remained the only tobacco company in the country not controlled by either Mr. Duke or Mr. Ryan. Ryan had ordered Baruch to “get Duke,” and at one point became so alarmed at the possibility that he would actually succeed that he rushed into Baruch’s office, saying, “I want to annoy them, not ruin them.” (“But I knew he was pleased,” Baruch commented.) The result of the “Tobacco War,” with stocks in the various companies being driven up and down by the two opponents and their hired manipulators, was that both Duke and Ryan ended up making huge profits, and both men were pleased. “As hard as I fought the dissolution of the Tobacco Trust,” Duke commented cheerfully afterward, “I’d fight even harder any effort to put it back together again. We made more money after we were broken up and had competition.” In fact, it was rumored at the time that there had been no real war at all, and that Duke and Ryan had acted in secret collusion to achieve just such a result—more money. If true, it was a successful strategy for both operators.

  Ryan’s operations went on to extend into coke, coal, oil, lead, and typewriters. His activities spread from New York City to Ohi
o, Virginia, West Virginia, and Illinois, and into the Belgian Congo, where he was asked to reorganize the diamond mines by none other than King Leopold of Belgium himself. By 1905 Thomas Fortune Ryan, at the age of fifty-four, was worth fifty million dollars. A few years later, he was worth a hundred million. In 1924 he paid $791,851 in income tax—the tenth largest in the country. He built a huge mansion on Fifth Avenue, in which an area equal to one-third of a city block was devoted entirely to statuary—mostly busts of himself, three of them by Rodin—and in which almost as much acreage was given over to his private chapel. He was a heavy contributor to the Democratic Party and to the Catholic Church (giving the Church, all told, some $20,000,000, including New York’s Church of St. Jean Baptiste). Like Estelle Doheny, Ida Ryan was made a Countess of the Holy Roman Empire by Pope Pius X.

  Not all of his operations, of course, may have been entirely within the law. After William Whitney’s death in 1904, and an investigation into the pair’s consolidation and complete takeover of New York’s rapid transit system, and the accompanying collapse of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company, a grand jury found that with such tactics as stock-watering and franchise-buying Mr. Ryan had done “many things deserving of severe condemnation … dishonest and probably criminal.” Still, as so often happens after investigations into the affairs of rich American businessmen, no action was taken against Mr. Ryan.