Poverty Flat

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH--Evalyn Walsh McLean--Little, J5rown ($3).

Bret Harte might have written the story of Evalyn McLean. This tale of a prospector's daughter whose father struck it rich would have been just his ticket. But he would have fictionalized it, added some homespun sentiment; and he would have stopped the narrative before it became too true to be funny. Evalyn Walsh McLean tells her own story (with the ghostly aid of Boyden Sparkes) with no regard for her readers' feelings. She simply sets down the blatant facts, and though the facts are increasingly adorned with pearls and bristling with diamonds, she never succeeds in decently covering the embarrassingly naked truth. Father Struck It Rich needs no commentary, carries its own devastating criticism with it.

Evalyn's father, Thomas F. Walsh (not to be confused with Montana's late Senator) was an Irish immigrant who drifted to Colorado, left his carpenter's trade for prospecting. He ran a store in Deadwood, owned Leadville's most respectable hotel during the boom there. Evalyn's mother, known to Leadville as "a rather refined lady" because she changed the name of one of her husband's strikes from Sowbelly Gulch to St. Keven's, had gone West to be a schoolteacher. Evalyn was born in 1886, can still remember the two-room log cabin that was one of her early homes. Father's system was to buy up abandoned mines, undeveloped claims. He kept after it for 20 years before he made a big strike: then, in the abandoned Camp Bird Mine, he found the gold-bearing quartz vein that meant he had struck it rich.

The Walshes let no grass grow under their feet. They left poverty flat, went off to Washington, D.C. to spend money, have a good time and become real ladies & gentlemen. That was easy. Father built an $835,000 house on Massachusetts Avenue, entertained lavishly, tipped right & left. When they went abroad King Leopold I of Belgium was his pal, tried, unsuccessfully, to interest Father in a little proposition in the Congo. Writes Evalyn: "It makes me happy to remember now that, after years and years of hard knocks and worry, my daddy was so quickly recognized, when he had riches, as more than just a man with gold." He had a lot of Government bonds too.

But Evalyn was growing up, and there was just no holding the girl. She was high-spirited, and that was a fact. Father chuckled and said she was a caution. They could not keep her in school, she did not seem to like school, but she got all the education money could buy. In Paris, for instance, the Walshes got clubby with Chicago's Mrs. Potter Palmer, and Evalyn was allowed to touch her stomacher. When they let Evalyn go abroad on her own to study French and art and music she had a wonderful time buying clothes and automobiles and giving her chaperones the slip. And she had a strong sense of curiosity. "I learned most of what has been helpful . . . from peeking or from bolder observations." When she was bereft of rouge and lipstick she learned how to get color by licking the cover of a Baedeker. And when she discovered that her family did not want her to marry a certain Italian prince she let herself be bought off with a Mercedes.

There was someone else her parents did not want her to marry, and that was young Ned McLean. The McLeans, who owned the Washington Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer, had struck it rich a generation or so before the Walshes. Even Evalyn could see that Ned McLean was pretty thoroughly spoiled. But "he was a dear when he was sober. . . . When he was not spree-drinking he often led a most exemplary life; he loved to play with horses and dogs, and concerning golf he became, eventually, so keen that he hired a leading professional to teach him." So, after being engaged on & off many times, Evalyn finally eloped with him. Their grinning fathers gave them $100,000 each for a wedding trip, and their blessing.

The McLeans had the finest honeymoon money could buy. To top it off, Evalyn dropped in at Cartier's in Paris, bought herself a jeweled ornament called the Star of the East ($120,000) and smuggled it through the U. S. Customs. Father paid up, of course. Another time when Evalyn and Ned went abroad, to get over having had their first baby, Evalyn won about $70,000 at Monte Carlo and they set off to drive to Paris. When they got there, having beaten the train time by ten minutes, they found that their chauffeur, forgotten in the back seat, was dying of a heart attack. Evalyn's comment: "If he had driven us that day, and died while driving, smashup." So then should she have had to had buy a pretty another jewel. This time it was the Hope Diamond, which had a curse on it, and set her back $154,000.

In spite of Ned's drinking Evalyn tried to be a good mother to the four children she somehow had. When she gave her first little boy a children's party she never spent less than $15,000 on it. And to keep him from becoming a snob she bought him a little colored playmate, had him washed, perfumed, dressed in Paris clothes. That experiment, however, was not a success. When the McLeans became great friends with President Harding and the Ohio Gang, Evalyn had high hopes of Ned's ultimate reformation, but he was inevitably headed for a sanitarium.

Looking back on her 49 feckless years, Evalyn sometimes feels surprised that she is still alive. She has managed to winnow a little wisdom from the chaff, hopes her children will profit from her experience. She does not regret paying $4,000 for her pink satin sheets because, "as any woman knows, forgetful, restful sleep will take out wrinkles." She is still defiant about having been tricked by the notorious Gaston B. Means into paying him $100,000 for the return of the kidnapped Lindbergh baby. And she has told her children: "If you start paying blackmail you will never stop. . . . Fight. Don't pay."

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