Wealthy American heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean (1886–1947) purchased two legendary diamonds from Cartier, the Hope Diamond and the Star of the East.
Evalyn was born in 1886 in Denver, Colorado, to the incredibly wealthy Thomas F. Walsh, an Irish-American goldmine owner who had struck it rich in the Gold Rush. She grew up surrounded by wealth and was very indulged by her father.
In 1908 Evalyn married Edward Beale McLean, scion of newspaper magnate John Roll McLean, who owned the highly regarded and very profitable Washington Post.
The newlyweds stopped off in Paris during their honeymoon, and on December 15 they visited the Cartier store on Rue de la Paix. Evalyn had $100,000 that her father had given her as a wedding gift to spend. She chose a platinum necklace embellished with a 32.50-grain fine pearl. Suspended from it were a 34.50-carat hexagonal emerald and the legendary Star of the East, a pear-shaped diamond weighing 94.80 carats. In her memoirs, Evalyn recounts how she was literally hypnotized by the diamond. She told her husband, “I’ll never get away from the spell of this!” The only problem was, it cost a hundred and twenty thousand dollars... That was more than the young bride had budgeted for, but after giving it some thought, she decreed that the necklace would be both her wedding present and her Christmas present!
Two years later, in 1910, Evalyn was once again in Paris. When Pierre Cartier found out she was in town, he sent word that he would like to meet her. She agreed to see him and received him at her hotel, the Bristol, where he arrived with a little wax-sealed package. Modest though it looked, this package contained one of the most extraordinary gems in the world, the blue Hope Diamond. Evalyn was not initially drawn to the stone. Perhaps she had got wind that it was said to be cursed... But the ever-resourceful Pierre Cartier came up with the idea of letting her keep the diamond over a whole weekend. By the end of it, she would no longer consider parting with the stone. It would still take several months of negotiations, though, before a deal was struck.
In 1949, two years after Evalyn’s death, a New York jeweler acquired her entire jewelry collection, including the Hope. He gifted it to Washington’s Smithsonian Institution in 1958, where it has been on display ever since.