On this tour I made a great deal of money. Somehow I began to see the differences between the men I met—the real, world-experienced men and Bradlee. Many men made love to me. I began to realize, too, what a difference there was between their love and his. I determined again to divorce Strong and free myself of him forever.52
May filed for divorce while in Berlin. Opined the Washington Post, “The country will be the better off if May and the Captain are compelled to live together.”53
Strong took up residence in Japan, and then lived in China and Malaya for several years. Given his foreign residence and May’s own peripatetic career, it took years for her to divorce Strong—an action that finally took effect in 1910.
Though Strong and May would physically meet only once more during their lifetimes, their paths would also cross for an encore that no one expected. In the 1930s, in one of the strangest court cases ever adjudicated, their marriage was examined in order to determine the fate of their alleged son.
A woman is not old until she is dead!
—May Yohe1
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Independent Woman
MAY BANKED ON HER FAME allowing her to appear on stage after Strong left. Her performances were universally regarded as awkward and amateurish, drink no doubt contributing to her slide.
May’s descent from venues such as Hammerstein’s Roof Garden on Broadway to cheap, ten-cent vaudeville theater, restaurant and café shows around the U.S. paid the bills, but were a far cry from the success and acclaim she’d achieved on the London stage when she drew praise from the likes of George Bernard Shaw. Willie Hammerstein noted he was able to book May at $75 a week rather than the $1,500 he’d paid just a few years earlier. The Los Angeles Times reported, “Now she has returned to her original name, save that now it illumines on the grime and slime of the slum theater.”2
The years following Strong’s departure were harsh for May. She was virtually destitute. She sold the house in Hastings-on-Hudson in 1905 to Oliver Gribben, an Oriental rug and tapestry buyer for Macy’s. May had loved the house and the artistic, creative community that was sprouting in Hastings-on-Hudson. Architect William Sanger had designed the house next door and was about to move in with his wife Margaret. Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, who had been inspired by May’s performances in Chicago decades earlier, was planning to build his mansion, Burke Estate, there.
May auctioned off some of her treasures and memorabilia. She said at the time, “To be quite frank, I am out of money and must work. I love the theatrical life anyway and may stay in vaudeville for a long time.”3 She never settled her financial claims with the Strong family; she confessed with her typical candor, “They’d rather see me dead.” She knew she was paying for her own willfulness, because, as she said, “I divorced him, he didn’t divorce me.”4
May reflected on her life, “Certainly I was happy with Lord Francis, until I became infatuated with Captain Strong. My mother always calls it hypnotism. We speak of him in our home as Svengali.” To one interviewer, she said,
People often ask me how I can bear it. People who knew me when I was Lady Francis Hope, and I had my own yacht and my beautiful homes, the jewels and al the rest of it. But really, I’m not unhappy. I realize that I have made a terrible fool of myself. I have lost everything. I was sick for a long time after my trouble with Captain Strong. Now I have to face it and go back to work. Sometimes the papers and people have been terribly unkind, and I have to bear that too. I just have to begin all over again.5
She was quite candid about her stage career:
What do I do here? What could I do? They don’t want to hear me sing. They just want to look at me. So I just go out there and sing a few little songs. Meanwhile I have pleasures in my own way. I crochet and embroider.6
To say May’s only avocation was home crafts would be an exaggeration. She still had some of her “Madcap” verve. A performance at Hammerstein’s Rooftop Garden in 1906 drew some praise, with Vanity Fair opining, “She’s full of life and energy.”7
May considered appearing in a review, Mam’zelle Champagne, slated for Madison Square Roof Garden in the summer, but was in London instead. At the fateful premiere, millionaire Harry Thaw walked up to Sanford White, America’s preeminent architect, drew a revolver, and shot and killed him. Thaw was accompanied by his wife, Evelyn Nesbit, a beautiful former model and chorus girl, who had been White’s lover years earlier. Jealously enraged, Thaw maintained that White still had an influence over Nesbit. May was an older friend of Evelyn Nesbit; they both shared difficult family upbringings in Pennsylvania, and Evelyn, as a “Floradora” girl, performed in the chorus on some of May’s bills.
The shooting and subsequent news and trial consumed New Yorkers and the theatrical community. The show, though, went on. May joined the cast to play the lead role when Mam’zelle Champagne moved to the Berkeley Lyceum Theatre in the fall.
May was linked romantically with several men, all rumored to be married to her, engaged to her or living with her in a common-law marriage. One was Newton Brown, reportedly a childhood friend of May’s from Philadelphia. Out on a date late one April night in 1907 in New York, they tried to get married, perhaps half seriously. They couldn’t get the hotel chaplain or a clergyman to officiate, and dropped plans to cross the river to New Jersey to find a justice of the peace. Nonetheless the story persisted, probably with May’s encouragement. The New York Telegraph reported that the couple were married at May’s Hotel Dunlap apartment in the presence of her Japanese maid and then enjoyed a bridal supper at Churchill’s. May supposedly owned up, “Yes, we’re married.”8 Another newspaper sought Newton Brown’s view on any marriage to May. “Nothing doing, do you think I’m crazy?” he was quoted as saying.9
After reading about May’s theatrical decline in the California papers in early 1908, another suitor, this one an unnamed San Francisco millionaire, became intrigued by May’s story. He started courting her, and reportedly gave her $5,000 worth of diamond jewelry on their first date. Though rumors swirled, there was no marriage.
While May was sliding toward obscurity, the Hope diamond was back in the news, tempering her fall. A 1907 New York Times gossip column had reported that ladies were decorating themselves with colored gemstones: “Diamonds in black, yellow, blue, topaz, green, and gray are highly prized.”10 The column cited the Hope diamond as the world’s most famous blue diamond and noted the special attention it had received in London as a result of May Yohe’s marriage into the Hope family.
Despite the Hope diamond’s fame, Frankel’s had apparently been unable to sell it at a good price after acquiring it in 1901. In the ensuing years, rumors circulated that J. P. Morgan, Charles Schwab, J. J. Hill, former Senator William A. Clark, and even Lord Francis Hope’s older brother Duke Archibald were interested in buying it. A banker’s panic in 1907 occasioned a tough recession. Wealthy Americans were not buying diamonds in the amounts and sizes seen in earlier years.
By New Years Day 1908, Frankel’s as well as several other jewelers faced severe financial challenges, even bankruptcy. They could not pay off loans used to build up their inventories. Frankel’s debt amounted to about $4.5 million, and even though the firm claimed assets of over $6 million, it was faced with potential liquidation as creditors began to call in their loans.
A January 7, 1908 article in the financial pages of the New York Times lamented the woes of Joseph Frankel’s Sons & Co., which had much of its capital tied up in the Hope diamond. On January 19, the Washington Post published an item in its “Gossip of Society” column:
Buy the famous Hope diamond and besides getting one of the world’s greatest jewels you will help the multimillionaire firm of Frankel’s Sons out of its financial difficulties. It is said that this jewel, valued at about $250,000, was partly responsible for the troubles of Joseph Frankel’s Sons, whose inability to pay pressing bills resulted in the appointment of trustees for it and three correlated concerns.11
This was follow
ed by a commentary, “All that Glitters is Not Gold,” which appeared in the Los Angeles Times and directly connected bad luck to both the Hope diamond and May Yohe, who was then at her low point, performing in cheap vaudeville theaters on the West Coast.
It is interesting to note that a contributing cause of the liquidation of one of the firms was the possession of the Hope diamond, which May Yohe wore in the days when she and the gem were scintillating rivals. That jewel … has been found to be … dead capital, for, in these dull days, the New York firm cannot find a purchaser for it. Even the Pittsburgh chorus girl chasers are keeping their hands in their pockets when it comes to diamonds.
The Hope diamond … has brought some of its possessors bad luck. No doubt the woman [May Yohe] now appearing before the footlights of a Main-street vaudeville house wishes she had never seen the bauble, but as she says, she “played her own dope.”
This much is certain, the possession of diamonds is not necessary to happiness … Diamonds came to May Yohe … and what girl in Los Angeles would change places with her?12
These articles led to further elaboration and a much more fanciful article in the New York Herald republished in the Washington Post, “Remarkable Jewel a Hoodoo—Hope Diamond has Brought Trouble to all who have Owned It:”
Deep behind the double locked doors hides the Hope diamond. Snug and secure behind time lock and bolt, it rests in its cotton wool nest under many wrappings, in the great vault of the great house of Frankel. Yet not all the locks and bolts and doors ever made by man can ward off its baleful power or screen from its venom those against whom its malign force may be directed.13
According to the author,
Every gem has its own power for good or evil, and this power never dies, though it may wax or wane under the circumstances, may lie dormant for centuries only to reappear with redoubled energy when terrestrial and celestial conditions combine to bring into play the mysterious forces hid beneath its glittering surface.14
The article presented a fractured history of the Hope diamond, beginning with Tavernier’s original acquisition of the gem. The diamond was implicated in bringing Louis XVI’s “head to the ax,” or rather the guillotine. The article falsely claimed that May had worn the diamond in her tiara, errantly stated that Lord Francis Hope sold it only months after his divorce from May Yohe, and incredulously suggested that it was to blame for his “marital and financial difficulties.” The author also recognized the recent troubles of the jeweler, Simon Frankel. “There are those who say they will never regain their old position of supremacy in their trade so long as the Hope diamond remains in their ownership.”15
May’s own decline, her leaving Lord Francis, his bankruptcy, the failed relationship with Strong, and now her own hard times were all fodder for the stories. May was back in the news, but it was as a victim of the unlucky Hope diamond.
In 1908, May was performing vaudeville in venues in the Pacific Northwest, accepting bookings on the Sullivan-Considine circuit, one of the syndicates that organized the cheap but popular theatrical performances across the country.
May made Portland, Oregon, her home base, living at the Perkins Hotel. She was again linked to various lovers in the region, among them a former English army officer, John Baxter Rowlands, who lived in Creston, British Columbia, just over the U.S. border. Later that year, Rowlands was shot and wounded by an irate husband, Lord Sholto Douglas, when the latter unexpectedly returned to his home from travel abroad only to find Rowlands bedding his adulteress wife. Such was May’s sexual notoriety that she was rumored not only to have had an affair with Rowlands, but also with Lord Sholto.
May found a lover and benefactor who enabled her to move from the Perkins Hotel into a five-room cottage on Northrup Street and set up a household with staff.
By year’s end, May was signing her name as “Mrs. James Fellows.” James Fellows, a Canadian from Vancouver, would come down on weekends and stay with her. He paid the bills. As court documents would latter reveal, they were intimate. May and Fellows lived as man and wife and were known as such around town. But because May had not officially divorced Strong, they could not be married. About the same time, there were numerous newspaper reports that May had married a Canadian lumberman named Murphy and even had a son with him whom she put up for adoption. As such stories emerged, May abruptly decamped from Portland and, using the pseudonym “Mrs. Bellinger,” embarked on a tour of the Orient.
May Yohe in Oregon. (photo credit 11.1)
A half a world away, the Hope diamond’s story became even more complicated in 1909. Frankel’s had sold it to a mysterious gem collector, Selim Habib, who, running into his own financial difficulties, was reselling it in Paris. An article published in the The Times of London on Friday, June 25, 1909, declared [the Hope diamond’s] story “is largely blended with tragedy … murder, suicide, madness, and various other misfortunes.”16
The article was a fanciful one, asserting new fictional claims about the history of the Hope diamond. It falsely claimed that Tavernier had lost all his money after selling the diamond to Louis XIV. It apocryphally blamed the diamond for the downfall of Louis XIV’s mistress and his chief of finance. Both Marie Antoinette and her bosom friend supposedly lost their lives because they wore the diamond. Fictionalized thieves who stole the diamond faced ruin, starvation, and suicide.
The Times article blamed Lord Francis’ bankruptcy, his rocky courtship of concert hall singer May Yohe, May’s divorce, and her tribulations with Strong on the evil influence of the blue gemstone. The article invented new, totally fictionalized victims of the stone—a French broker gone insane, a Russian prince who was assassinated, a Greek magnate driven off a cliff, and a Folies Bergère star who was shot. The fantastic account blamed three major revolutions—the French Revolution, the 1905 Russian revolution, and the revolt of the Young Turks in Ottoman Turkey, on the blue brilliant.
The tongue-in-cheek story, chock-full of clearly erroneous, easily-dispelled material presented in the guise of news, declared the unlucky diamond’s alleged adventures to “beggar the wildest fiction.”17 It wasn’t until some eighteen months later, in 1911, that T. Edgar Wilson, the editor of the Jewelers Circular Weekly wrote a general rebuttal published in the New York Times, and another corrective article in the Metropolitan came out. By then, it was too late. The story took on a life of its own.
May’s 1909 tour of the Orient took her to Yokohama, Japan, where for a few hours she saw Strong in her hotel suite in a thoroughly chaperoned visit. May thought the meeting cordial and cold.
May next visited Hong Kong for a theatrical appearance, and was then off to Singapore, where she performed at the Victoria Theatre. She went on to India to visit her “old friend,” the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, and gave several somewhat private “drawing room entertainments.” From there, she visited Ceylon and Australia before returning to the United States.
By late 1909 May was appearing in a routine called Silk Attire, which was basically the old monologue about her adventures with Hope and Strong. She played Atlantic City and other venues. She settled back in Oregon to establish residency so that she could formally divorce Strong. She filed papers, and without any response or dispute from Strong, the divorce was ordered by the Circuit Court of the State of Oregon on April 25, 1910.
That summer, May got help and encouragement from Evelyn Nesbit Thaw to get back on the stage. Said May, “I’m going back to the stage to show them I’m not a has-been.”18 She lined up appearances in San Francisco. They were in small venues, cafes, and restaurants. Performing in one she was singing “Bring me a Rose” and had reached the words “I’m so tired of violets; take them all away” when she was stricken with a paralytic attack and literally fell off her chair. Physicians came to her aid, and though the effects seemed temporary, she was incapable of performing. Public attention again came her way, pointing to the unlucky diamond and to her failed marriages. One newspaper, heralding her demise, headlined its story “May Yohe nearing the end o
f a career speckled with sin.”19
May recovered and rumors of another marriage surfaced almost immediately. Now she was supposed to have married F. M. Reynolds, a musician in a touring musical comedy company. Reynolds denied the marriage.
In 1910, another chapter in the Hope diamond tale was added when it came into the possession of the Cartier brothers. Pierre, Louis, and Jacques were prominent Parisian jewelers with a prestigious list of royal and wealthy customers from Europe, India, and America.
The brothers were at the center of yet another Orientalist period of jewelry design, fashion, and cultural movement in Europe. Things Indian were all the rage. The brothers were familiar with the Indian origins of the Hope diamond, Tavernier’s diaries, and Indian gemological texts recently translated from Sanskrit into French. The Cartiers were also intrigued with Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. They took the tale of the cursed yellow moonstone and grafted it anew onto the 1909 London Times article about the unlucky blue diamond to craft their exotic story of the Hope diamond for one of their American customers—Evalyn Walsh McLean.
May Yohe as a vaudeville actress, c. 1909. (photo credit 11.2)
May Yohe on the vaudeville circuit, c. 1910, with a 1926 inscription and signature. (photo credit 11.3)
Evalyn and her husband Edward (“Ned”) were vacationing in France, staying at the Hotel Bristol in Paris in September 1910. The couple was in their mid-twenties, alcoholic, very spoiled, and very wealthy. Ned McLean was the son of the affluent owners of the Washington Post. Evalyn was the daughter of Thomas Walsh, a gold miner who struck it very rich and was called “the Colorado Monte Cristo.” Pierre Cartier knew the couple; his firm had sold them the “Star of the East,” a 94¾ carat diamond, for $120,000 during their honeymoon two years earlier.
Madcap May Page 14