McLean Bauble

From Newport to Washington last week hurried Evelyn Walsh McLean, wearer of the famed Hope ("Hoodoo") diamond, estranged wife of Publisher Edward Beale ("Ned") McLean of the Washington Post. She went to the bedside of the irresponsible Ned, who had been laid low by myocarditis (inflammation of the muscular walls of the heart), but not just to smooth his brow. Her visit to the Capital had the two-fold purpose of fighting Ned's Mexican divorce, and fighting the proposed sale of the Post in the interest of her three children.

Of the five newspapers in Washington none is great. None, perused by a man from Mars, would suggest itself to him as a journal of the Capital of a powerful nation. All are, to a degree, the provincial organs of ;he District of Columbia. And nearer the bottom of the scale of merit than the top is the Post, of which Oswald Garrison Villard once said: "Its chief claim to fame is that Sousa named an excellent march after it."

The Post is a stablemate of the Hope diamond in the sense that it has been dangled as an ornament to its owner. In fact it has been said that the McLeans were credited with three social attributes in Washington: their huge estate, '"Friendship"; the Hope diamond (variously evaluated from $114,000 to $2,000,000) and the Post. The Post and Cincinnati Enquirer were part of the vast estate left by his father John R. McLean, who made a fortune in natural gas. But Ned's father had so little confidence in him that all real control was vested in trustees, lawyers, bankers, advisers. However, Ned had sufficient hand in affairs to make the Post the leading spokesman for his crony the late Warren Harding and the "Ohio Gang" (see p. 15). Then the McLeans were well able to wear their Post as a bauble. Those were the days of the parties at "Friendship," incredibly lavish affairs attended by "everybody" in Washington. Though she presided as hostess, often wearing the great diamond,* Evelyn McLean seemed by contrast somewhat Victorian, somewhat "sweetly sad."

Prospective purchaser of the Post for $3,000,000, is David Lawrence, smart talker & writer, publisher of the United States Daily. The Daily, which he financed by personally raising a vast sum of money from 72 "sponsors," has shown no signs of prospering. In the Post negotiations the names of Eugene Meyer and Bernard Baruch were mentioned by rumor as backers. But why David Lawrence wanted the Post was not made clear.

*By Sunday-supplement lore, the Hope diamond is "accursed." When the McLeans' firstborn, Vinson Walsh McLean, was killed by an automobile, gum-chewers promptly accepted the tragedy as further proof of the diamond's "curse."

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