Real Lace (19 page)

Of the Irish Big Four, Mackay was also by far the most philanthropic, and the complete tally of his giving will probably never be known because, when he gave to a charity that interested him, he nearly always insisted on absolute anonymity. He gave and loaned millions of dollars to friends and business associates, and these were also unrecorded. Two of his biggest gifts, however, could not be hidden—the Mackay School of Mines in Reno and the building of the Church of St. Mary's in the Mountains in Virginia City. Throughout his life, he refused to discuss his money, and, when he died in 1902, his business manager told reporters, “I don't suppose he knew within twenty millions what he was worth.”

One of John Mackay's stepdaughters and a sister-in-law married titled Europeans, which displeased him. But real tragedy was to strike John and Louise Mackay with the death of their son, Willie, at the age of twenty-five. Willie, an accomplished horseman, was riding a race horse at his private track in France, and the horse, startled by a shot, shied at a turn and Willie was hurled headfirst over the fence and into a tree, shattering his skull. A second son, Clarence Mackay, made a brilliant society marriage to the elegant Katherine Alexander Duer and settled down on a huge Long Island estate called “Harbor Hill.” “Harbor Hill” in the 1920's was the
scene of one of the most publicized balls of the decade, which the Mackays gave for the visiting Prince of Wales. Despite the sumptuousness of the house, its decor, food, furnishings, and art collection, the only object in which the Prince—who would later become the Duke of Windsor—expressed interest was a small statue by Gutzon Borglum of John Mackay, whom an earlier Prince of Wales had found so “unassuming.”

Clarence and Katherine Mackay had three children—John William, Katherine, and Ellin. Ellin Mackay began publishing articles and short stories in
The New Yorker
in 1925 and, in one of them, wrote, “Modern girls are conscious of their own identity, and they marry whom they choose, satisfied to satisfy themselves. They are not so keenly aware, as were their parents, of the vast difference between a brilliant match and a mésalliance.” Shortly after these words appeared in print, and to the consternation of her family, Ellin Mackay proved that she meant what she said when she married a young Russian-Jewish composer from the Lower East Side named Irving Berlin (born Israel Baline). Though this union horrified her father, Clarence Mackay, long since divorced, later took his daughter's advice, and married a singer named Anna Case.

The story of San Francisco's Fair family is considerably less glamorous. If John Mackay was the most likable of the Irish Big Four, James Gordon Fair was easily the least, and Fair managed to win the nickname of “Slippery Jim” very early in his career. Born in Belfast in 1831, the same year as Mackay, Fair came first to Chicago at the age of twelve, and then moved westward at the age of eighteen. By the age of thirty he had a mill on the Washoe River in Nevada, where he became chiefly responsible—making many enemies in the process—for driving San Franciscans out of Nevada development, which he then managed to take over himself. With his Comstock millions, he got the Nevada State Legislature (which in those days elected U.S. Senators) to appoint him to
the Senate, where his career was undistinguished. “He made no impression on the Senate,” Frederick Logan Paxton has said, “save to advertise it as a haunt of millionaires, and he rarely took part in its debates.… But the gaudiness and irregularity of his life and the social ambitions of his family, to which his wealth allowed full gratification, attracted much attention for two decades.”

In 1861 Jim Fair had married an Irish girl named Theresa Rooney, by whom he had four children—Theresa (“Tessie”), Virginia (“Birdie”), Charles, and James. After an acrimonious divorce, Mrs. Fair retained custody of Tessie, Birdie, and Charles, and Mr. Fair got James. His young namesake hated and dreaded his father and, soon after the divorce, committed suicide. Charles Fair made a youthful marriage which so angered his father that he disinherited him, and shortly after, Charles and his young wife were killed in an automobile accident. Birdie Fair married William K. Vanderbilt, but this, too, was disastrous and ended in divorce. (“Vanderbilts often marry Catholics,” says one of the Vanderbilts, “and always divorce them.”) Tessie Fair married Hermann Oelrichs in a huge San Francisco society wedding—to which her father was scrupulously not invited—and went on to become a reigning dowager of Newport for many years until she underwent a mental breakdown. In his own last years Slippery Jim Fair lived alone in a San Francisco hotel, solitary, bitter, and completely without friends, estranged from his entire family. When he died in 1894, his personal and financial affairs were in such a hopeless tangle that his will offered fifty dollars apiece “to any widows or children” of his who might be able to prove themselves such.

Though the Fairs are no longer prominent in San Francisco, the Floods and Mackays currently decorate the pages of the
Social Register
. Of the third-generation James Floods who live in the horsy suburb of Woodside, a friend says, “The Floods today are all
ladies and gentlemen. Nobody cares at all that his grandfather was a bartender and his grandmother was a chambermaid.” Nobody cares, perhaps, but everybody in San Francisco remembers.

Unlike his contemporaries in Nevada and California, Tom Walsh was not so quickly lucky as he poked about with his pick and hammer in search of gold in the hills of Colorado. Born in Clonmel, County Tipperary, in 1850, Tom Walsh came to America in 1869 and, for a while, worked as a carpenter in Worcester, Massachusetts. At the age of twenty, however, he, too, was struck with what he called “the mining fever,” and headed west, where one of his first mistakes was to turn down a half-interest in a mining venture called the Homestake. The Homestake turned out to be one of the world's largest gold mines, yielding all told nearly $300 million worth of ore, and became the foundation of the fortune of George Hearst, the father of William Randolph Hearst. Still, young Walsh was persistent, moving about from town to town—towns with such unprepossessing names as Leadville and Deadwood. In Leadville, he met a girl named Carrie Bell Reed, and married her in 1879, and this couple went to live in Sowbelly Gulch, where their first home was an abandoned boxcar which had been lifted from its tracks and placed on a foundation of logs with an earthen ramp leading up to the front door. Tom Walsh cut holes in the boxcar for windows, for which his wife made curtains of checked gingham, and planted windowboxes. Even then Mrs. Walsh must have had visions of grandeur. She found the name of Sowbelly Gulch “eructative,” and for a while tried to get the town to change its name to “St. Keven's.”

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.