Cartier came into the McLeans’ suite at the Hotel Bristol carrying the Hope diamond in a package tightly closed with wax seals. He recounted the history of the diamond, describing how Tavernier brought it from India and sold it to Louis XIV. In a new twist, according to Evalyn:
He told us that Tavernier had stolen the gem from a Hindu god. My recollection is that he said Tavernier afterward was torn up and eaten by wild dogs. Marie Antoinette wore it, so we understand. Marie Antoinette was guillotined and the Revolutionists seized all the wealth.
I might have been excused that morning for believing that all the violences of the French Revolution were just the repercussions of that Hindu idol’s wrath.20
The stone disappeared after the revolution. According to Cartier, it was stolen. Cartier recounted how the diamond had later appeared in London in the possession of the Hope family. Lord Francis Hope’s fortune as well as his marriage to May Yohe dissolved. Cartier asserted that the diamond was then sold to Selim Habib and the Turkish Sultan. He said the Sultan was deposed and his paramour, who’d been wearing the diamond, had her throat cut.
Evalyn could wait no longer. “Let me see the thing,” she implored.
Cartier unwrapped the package with great flourish, revealing the Hope diamond. As Evalyn later wrote:
Cartier told me things he did not vouch for; that it was supposed to be ill-favored, and would bring bad luck to anyone who wore or even touched it. Selim Habib is supposed to have been drowned when his ship sank after he had disposed of the gem. We all know about the knife blade that sliced through Marie Antoinette’s throat. Lord Hope had plenty of troubles that a superstitious soul might seem to trace back to a heathen idol’s wrath.21
Wrote McLean,
You should have heard how solemnly we considered all those possibilities that day in the Hotel Bristol.
“Bad luck objects,” I said to Cartier, “for me are lucky.”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “Madame told me that before, and I remembered. I think, myself, that superstitions of the kind we speak of are baseless. Yet, one must admit, they are amusing.”22
Despite the alluring story, Evalyn and Ned did not purchase the diamond. Evalyn was disappointed with the setting.
Later that year, Pierre Cartier sailed for New York on the Lusitania, carrying the Hope diamond with a new setting. He visited the McLeans in Washington and came to terms on January 28, 1911. Cartier valued the purchase at $180,000. The agreement included the condition, “Should any fatality occur to the family of Edward B. McLean within six months, the said Hope diamond is agreed to be exchanged for jewelry of equal value.”23
The story of the cursed diamond, as told by Cartier to the McLeans, circulated quickly and widely. The New York Times reported the sale on its front page the next day. “J.R. McLean’s Son Buys Hope Diamond” read the title, with an ominous subtitle, “Credited with Bringing Ill-luck to Its Possessors.”24 Newspapers around the world picked up the story.
The next day, the Chicago Tribune notified May Yohe about the sale of the famous “hoodoo” gem to the McLeans, looking for a reaction. May responded bluntly,
It may be worth a lot of money, but I wouldn’t give anyone a tin nickel for it.
Superstition never has been anything more than a word to me. I was born in room 23 in my grandmother’s hotel at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and I am not afraid to walk under a ladder or open an umbrella in the house. Still, I firmly am convinced that the diamond once held an evil influence over me, as well as everyone who owned it.25
May wrote to Evalyn McLean urging her to give up the diamond lest its influence harm the McLean family. Some years later, May even reported on a conversation that she and Lord Francis reportedly had about the diamond only a few days after their marriage. The story is certainly apocryphal, but nonetheless reveals May’s willingness to keep the curse story alive:
Tell me truly, Francis, do you believe the Hope diamond curses those who wear it? … A shade of anxiety passed over his face; then, quickly recovering, Lord Francis Hope replied with a smile:
‘It certainly hasn’t cursed me, Maysie dear, because it has brought me the greatest good luck a man can have—the dearest little wife in all the world, your own precious self” … Of course a diamond could not bring bad luck. What nonsense! … And yet there was a sinister shadow over the lives of every person who had ever owned this diamond.26
As the Hope diamond curse story circulated ever more widely, the press and the public permanently associated May with the diamond. Much of what she did—her divorces, her failings, her ills—all invoked the baleful influence of the diamond.
While on the vaudeville circuit through 1911, May became romantically linked to Jack McAuliffe, a former boxing champion known as “Little Napoleon.” McAuliffe told the press that he’d known May for decades and had been engaged to her before she’d left the United States to marry Lord Francis. McAuliffe embraced the idea of marriage, as did Yohe:
Just think, he’s carried my picture for twenty years! We’re having a vaudeville sketch written called ‘The Uplift.’ You’ve seen in the papers that we’re going to be married. Maybe we are. Anyway, why not try once more? First I had a peach, then a lemon. This time at least there may be a good pair.27
May Yohe depicted as May McAuliffe, 1911. (photo credit 11.4)
McAuliffe seems to have had a good effect on May. His own emphasis on physical fitness, exercise, and diet served May well. He put her on a buttermilk diet. The Philadelphia Inquirer, commenting on one of her appearances, noted that May looked great, had lost a lot of weight, wore a Worth gown, and was most entertaining. May’s performances during the year occasioned fine reviews—she performed Silk Attire in Chicago, headlined a variety show in Minneapolis, and received no less than four curtain calls at Brooklyn’s Olympic Theatre. She started to look for better venues. In New York, appearances at the Casino and the Palm Garden were filled to capacity and drew fine reviews.
Costumed in an up to the minute evening gown, Miss Yohe’s appearance caused an excited flutter in the capacity audience. She sang two songs and proved that she has not lost her voice. She was greeted with a storm of applause at the close of her act.28
By September, the press was announcing nuptials. In November, May and McAuliffe were staying together as man and wife at the Saratoga Hotel in Chicago. Variety reported their marriage at Christmas time. May and McAuliffe did not in fact marry, but the possibility seemed to enliven May. “I’m on the upgrade!” she publicly confided.29
May planned, among other things, a return to England in a sketch satirizing British society. She even auctioned off more of her things to help finance the tour herself. She reveled in her independence: “I’ve learned that the only really independent woman is the one who can rub a few hundred dollars of her earnings and savings together.”30
May was back at the top of her game. She became more outspoken about women’s issues. “Two things that are most worthwhile are my mother and my work,” she told a reporter.31 She railed against those who thought she was beyond her prime and could not stage a comeback. “A woman is not old until she is dead,” she wrote in a Washington Post column. “We are in our mental prime at 40 years of age. We have just begun to live … and realize, what is life? At 40 we have suffered. And suffering makes the stage player.”32
Through her comeback, May sought to generate more appearances and a higher salary. She hyped the Hope diamond connection, ordering a fine blue crystal copy to be made in Paris and then having it placed in a new, Cartier-like setting by a New York jeweler in order to wear it regularly for her performances.
When bookings looked slim in the summer of 1912, May staged her own disappearance as part of a publicity stunt. Some of her clothes and a handbag were found in Central Park, along with a note suggesting suicide. May’s maid, Josephine Scott, was questioned. May was nowhere to be found. For several days articles speculating about May appeared in the press. The police were searching for her body. The lake in
the park was about to be drained. Just then, May reappeared in Atlantic City; she’d been on a business holiday with friends, she claimed, performing in two- or three-act shows in some small “jay towns” and “cleaning up a few hundred a week.”33
May’s ruse worked. Offers came pouring in. Hammerstein upped her fee and she “packed them in” at his Roof Garden Theatre. The papers also complied, “May Yohe is proving herself to be not merely a freak act, but a genuine entertainer,” declared the National Telegraph.34
May resented attempts to curb her ambition, or, for that matter, the ambitions of any woman. “Ambition,” she said, “should be encouraged in every human being. Only the depraved and degenerate are without it. Ambition is forcing me back to the stage. Ambition is the essence of hope and without hope we are beasts.”35
But many disagreed. May’s arguments inspired her former brother-in-law, the duke of Newcastle, to rail against the woman’s suffrage movement when he came to the United States. “This woman-suffrage movement is a perfectly senseless one,” Archibald declared. “To be a good wife and mother is a far greater honor. The place for the woman is in the home. If she succeeds in being a vote caster and a legislator she will put herself out of the sphere in which nature designed she should direct all of her efforts.”36 May retorted, “Most people think the bonds of matrimony are the only bonds for a woman. But they never paid me a dividend. Of course,” she added, “I didn’t play by the rules.”37
Little could anyone, including May, imagine how that sentiment would animate the next, surprising chapter of her life.
The pal I have been searching for through all the world is by my side and I am content.
—May Yohe1
CHAPTER TWELVE
War Bride
MAY AS A CARING NURSE, a housewife, a janitor, a chicken farmer? It is hard to imagine anything more unlikely. Yet these were the roles the former stage queen and lady of the realm came to play. And, to hear her tell it, she was never happier.
This unlikely plot twist in May’s life began when she met John Smuts in 1913.
That year, May and her mother Lizzie headed back to England, now twenty years after their first visit, and with a renewed confidence. May had a strong sense of herself as a woman, fueled not by youthful bravado, but by maturity born of experience. She was also well along the theatrical comeback trail, having signed on to appear in a musical revue, Come Over Here, at the London Opera House.
The production included an extraordinary, well-paid, allstar cast. As the papers said, there were “fat envelopes changing hands.”2 May sang some of her old-time pieces like “Oh Honey, My Honey,” but in a more “jazzed up” way, backed by a robust modern band. May was quite a success, despite the fact that in one scene she looked almost comical, dressed in a costume reprising her Little Christopher Columbus role, with her large bosom overflowing her chemise and waist.
May Yohe, 1912. (photo credit 12.1)
Newspapers noted that Lord Francis was in a house box, coming twice to see the show and, presumably, May. Though she avoided looking in his direction while on stage, rumors suggested that he’d been touched by the performance, and headlines followed. “May Rewed May Yohe” screamed one.3 The next day another headline, “Lord Francis Hope Emphatically Denies London Yarn” put them to rest.4 May and Francis were never to meet or see each other again.
During the show’s run, May became enmeshed in a dispute launched by scathing attacks in the press on chorus girls. The London World railed against the rising incidence of English youth—“young dogs of the age”—being taken in by the “limitless greed of some young harpy of the stage.” The paper excoriated the “cult of the chorus girl,” referring to such women as “expensively-clothed Amazonian armies.” The attack went further:
We are faced with the edifying spectacle of young England doing obeisance to scullery-maids who do not possess humanity. The chorus girl, selected for her physical attributes, is often drawn from the uneducated class. Her only training is in the curses of musical comedy. She learns to dance a few steps and bleat commonplace vulgarities.
[The chorus girl] centers her few brains on catching one or more of those raw young men who will provide her with the clothes, pocket-money, and food which she covets so intently.
The young men of today must know they are merely being exploited, regarded as a banking account, and identified with a gilt-edged menu.5
As the London press proclaimed, it was “May Yohe to the Rescue.”6 In what was described as “spirited language,” May took the attackers to task. “The attack is cruel and unjust, and uncalled for,” she said:
The public goes to the theater in comfort and has no consideration for the girls on the stage. They don’t think of the hours of hard work which have to be put in before the show can be produced. They see pretty faces, and they wouldn’t go to the theater at all if they didn’t, but paint and tinsel doesn’t do everything. The girl has got to be pretty behind the tinsel, and bright and vivacious and just because a young man falls in love with one of these girls when his people want him to love some society girl, it is no reason why revenge should be taken on all chorus girls.7
May was an articulate defender of working women, and of course, as everyone in London knew, she spoke from profound experience. The one-time prima donna now seemed wise and compassionate.
The success of May’s London appearance led to a performance tour in South Africa. There, May met Captain John Addey Smuts, said to be a cousin of the famous Boer general, Jan Smuts. John had served the British in the Cape Police and fought with the Dennison’s Scouts against the Boers in the Anglo-Boer War. By 1913, Jan was a government minister and perhaps the second highest ranking official in the relatively new Union of South Africa, a dominion of the British crown.
John Smuts, nine years younger than May, was a tall, broad man with rugged features, kind brown eyes, and a reassuring grin. May wrote that the courtship went very quickly between her and John. She found him “a man set apart for me.”8 Smuts provided an alternative to both the carefree Strong and the doting Hope. Strong was totally undisciplined. May thought Hope overly generous, treating her as a golden goddess and gratifying her slightest whim. May reflected on her own personality: “Spirited, untamed, headstrong as I was, I needed a firm hand on my reins.”9 Smuts, with his military bearing and experience, was her man.
May returned to New York in January 1914 and told the press that she would soon be married—but refused to name her future husband. She then returned to South Africa, opened an inn near Cape Town, and was prospering. Later in the year, according to May, her wedding to John Smuts took place with great state fanfare, with numerous Boer officials and luminaries in attendance.
May and John then planned to travel, but World War I intruded. German South-West Africa (now Namibia) was a colony adjacent to South Africa. With Great Britain and Germany at war in Europe, conflict also erupted between these neighboring states in southern Africa. Jan Smuts formed the South African Defense Force and cousin John Smuts took command of a unit.
John Smuts went to battle under the command of General Botha against the German colony garrison, and May followed him and his troops as a British Red Cross nurse. According to newspaper accounts, May “behaved with exemplary patriotism and public spirit … The former actress and society woman was now transformed into an earnest soldier’s wife and friend of all good Allied fighting men.”10 As May later recalled, “I was in the thick of the fighting, never far from my husband’s side.”11 Fighting was brutal and care wanting in Southwest Africa.
May became “a proficient war nurse, skilled in treating the soldiers’ wounds, in preparing food for the sick and ever ready to endure all the horrors of war without flinching … while she has become a thoroughly devoted and skillful nurse, her old talent as an actress and singer is of great value in cheering up the sick and convalescent.”12
John regarded May as “my little trooper,” so loyal and so devoted was she in the war effort. More
than one reporter editorialized about May. She has “changed so that her friends of reckless Bohemian days would scarcely have known her,” said one. “May Yohe has regained her own soul. She has paid nobly for the sins of the past.”13
John Smuts was wounded several times. May and others treated him at the front, and after his repeated injuries, he was sent to a hospital back home. May tended to him there as well. Apparently the most serious of his injuries affected his foot, making walking difficult and painful. He became an invalid, and in 1915 he was sent to India with May to recuperate.
May and Smuts fell into a familiar spousal relationship for her. Smuts was the stalwart hero, the father figure who could keep May safe and secure. He was also the son she could care for and who could tag along while she played the starring role.
“His American wife nursed the captain tenderly back to health,” reported a newspaper.14 In India, they lived off of his meager pension, and May was able to line up several performances to generate additional income. Smuts ineffectually looked for business opportunities, but found nothing promising.
They headed for Burma, apparently strapped for cash. In Rangoon, Smuts ran into trouble paying his boarding house bill and was arrested by the police. They then traveled to Singapore, where May knew the Sultan of Johore from earlier tours and performances across the Orient. Singapore was still in shock over a mutiny of its Indian colonial troops. Many of those troops were Muslim and had reacted violently to rumors that they would be sent to fight fellow Muslims—Ottoman Turks—in the Middle East, where Turkey was allied with Germany against Britain. The mutiny was put down and several hundred troops arrested and imprisoned. Nonetheless, it had unnerved colonial authorities and local Malay allies in the region.
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