Madcap May

by Richard Kurin

  Among those British allies was the Sultan of Johore, whose Malay Peninsula domain abutted the island of Singapore. As May reported, the Sultan asked her to sing “Oh Honey, My Honey” and offered to employ Smuts in return. May sang, very movingly, and the Sultan apparently made Smuts the manager of one of his rubber plantations.

  Rubber production was on the rise in the region. The industry had its beginnings in Charles Goodyear’s accidental discovery in 1839 of the key to vulcanizing latex to make durable rubber. Convinced that rubber trees would grow well in the region, and that labor could be organized in the form of plantations to tap the latex sap on a massive scale, the British, in 1877, sent twenty-two seedlings from Kew Gardens (grown from the seeds of a Brazilian species) to Malaya. Those seedlings resulted in a thousand trees that formed the basis of the Malayan plantations. As automobiles—and the rubber tires they rolled on—proliferated in the early 1900s, the market for rubber skyrocketed. In Johore, a railway and improved transportation with adjacent Singapore allowed for dramatic increases in rubber exports.

  Smuts and May experienced the industry’s heyday, and though they did not seem to greatly benefit financially, they enjoyed the stability the plantation provided. May called Singapore “a tiny paradise on earth.”15 She liked the freedom the colony provided, “the right to do as one pleases without apology or excuse.”16 Living there also worked domestically for the couple. Said May, “Oh, I’m satisfied with my husband. It was like vaccination—I had to try three times before it ‘took’.”17

  After three years in Singapore, with World War I still raging in Europe and the couple essentially out of the fray in the Malay Peninsula, Smuts became increasingly anxious to get back into the military. Though he’d been ruled too infirm for British military service in South Africa, he’d heard that he might be able to reenlist through the “back door” in America. The couple concocted a plan to travel across the Pacific to the United States, en route to the front in France. But they had to raise the funds to do so.

  May arranged for a benefit concert at Singapore’s famed Victoria Theatre. Her concert was scheduled for March 20, 1918. Patrons lined up to support her effort. Advertising was aggressive. Public notices in the newspapers made the case:

  Mr. Smuts, who has been planting, is eager to go on active service, and has been accepted by the military authorities, but the only way his wife can go with him is via America, and the heavy cost of that journey has decided her to face the footlights again, and show us how she won the heart of London audiences.18

  Other local entertainers joined May for the variety show at the Victoria. The concert became a cause célèbre for British colonials in Singapore. May drew a full and enthusiastic audience to the concert. The evening was stellar:

  The artiste [May Yohe] had a great reception when she appeared and she quickly proved that she retains all her old charm in giving the songs which she made so popular. Her voice was full and effectively used, and every number was rendered in a way which betokened the true artiste. At her second appearance she wore the famous chic “coon” costume and the audience was still more enthusiastic. Her last contribution was the famous “Oh Honey, My Honey,” which was freely sung and encored to the echo.19

  Others on the program sung patriotic and rousing songs, including “Over There,” composed just the previous year by George M. Cohan after America’s entry into the war.

  The concert was a financial success. The couple sailed to Yokohama and then on to San Francisco aboard the Seiyo Maro, arriving on June 10, 1918. Entering the United States, they listed their permanent residence as Cape Town. Smuts declared his occupation as “planter,” while May listed hers as “housewife.” On the immigration form, in the box for listing their closest relative or friend, they wrote “Sultan of Johore.”

  The couple traveled to Seattle, where Smuts’ visit to the British recruiting office proved disappointing. His injuries were deemed too severe—he would never serve again.

  May and Smuts were broke and broken. May, ever the energetic optimist, took off to perform and give concerts in San Francisco to earn money. While there, she received a letter from her husband. He had found a way to do his part for the war effort. Seattle’s mayor had called upon citizens to work in the shipyards so that vessels might be readied for transporting needed materials for the war. Smuts had gone to the Seattle North Pacific shipyard to ask for a job. Thankfully, he succeeded in getting one. Given his lack of experience, he was taken on as a laborer, riveting and punching for $3.96 a day. May came back to Seattle to take care of him.

  We settled down then to a home-y life. Captain Smuts came home to me each evening, very dirty and tired, and found a hot dinner waiting for him—cooked by May Yohe, of “Little Christopher” fame, who once had owned the Hope diamond and who might have been a duchess!20

  The seemingly idyllic working-class poverty of the couple took a turn for the worse later in 1918 when Smuts, like one-third of all people on earth, fell prey to the influenza epidemic. He couldn’t work for three months. Afflicted by the dreaded disease, his health degenerated. May and Smuts were desperate for income.

  Of that crisis, May later wrote, “What was I to do? I could not earn money on the stage and remain in Seattle taking care of my sick husband.” She did the unexpected.

  I put on a gingham dress and a cotton apron, tied my hair in a knot on top of my head, wrapped an old shawl about me and went to the shipyards. ‘Please let me help a bit, “I said, ‘even if I have to scrub the office floors.”

  They asked me who I was and I told them, “Mrs. Smuts.” The name meant nothing to them. They asked me if I were experienced with the mop. Once I had played the part of a slavey in a comic opera [Lady Slavey], and during one of my songs waved a mop back and forth over the stage floor. So I said I was an adept scrubwoman.

  I was told to report for duty at seven o’clock that evening—night shift—and that I was to be the office janitress at $18 a week.

  So every night for many long weeks I scrubbed those office floors. The night force of clerks and managers sat at their desks all around me. Some were gentle and thoughtful of the ‘janitor woman’ and dropped kindly greetings to me as I mopped around them. Others were curt and overbearing. Quite often I would hum while I worked, and sometimes if the office were quiet I would sing snatches of my old songs—especially the one which helped me to become famous, “Oh Honey, My Honey”

  Many times while I swung that mop I wondered what these men would say about me if they knew their janitress was May Yohe, who had been Lady Francis Hope, and whose throat, now covered with grime and perspiration had glistened white behind the great Hope diamond and countless other gems men liked to hang upon it.21

  May Yohe as a scrubwoman. (photo credit 12.2)

  May’s role as scrubwoman was publicly discovered after about five or six weeks. She was inadvertently exposed by John Considine, a major vaudeville circuit producer who had booked her to perform at Seattle’s Coliseum in 1907. He’d paid May $1,000 a week. Recognizing May at work he yelled, “My god, Maysie, is this a farce comedy or what?”

  Without missing a beat May shook out her dust mop and replied, “It’s what!” Considine then shouted out to all those about, “Do you know who this is?” When met by silence from the puzzled shipyard workers, he answered, “She is Lady Francis Hope—May Yohe!”22 The incident became well-known and widely published. May’s story about the vicissitudes of life and the elasticity of human fortune received a lot of attention.

  One editorial had it exactly right. May’s life “reveals the stretch of human emotion and the possibilities of the human heart.”23 For her part, May told reporters, “The Maysie of the stage, the Maysie of scandals is gone. The former Madcap May insisted that this May is now going to live a quiet life.”24

  Smuts recovered and went back to work. A reporter noted, “The plucky woman [May] had fought the desperate battle for her husband’s life and won,” as May said, “the greatest happiness I have ever
known.”25

  May’s beloved mother Lizzie, who had been living with relatives in New York, died on May 17, 1918 and left some money to her daughter. The armistice that ended World War I was signed on November 11, 1918. In 1919, the couple moved to Los Angeles where the climate was better for Smuts. With the inheritance, they bought a modest chicken farm in Lomita, then on the outskirts of the city, now in south-central Los Angeles. May fell into the routine of a farm wife:

  I am up early in the morning cooking breakfast while my husband stirs around in the garden. While he attends to business I am sweeping and dusting and chatting with the neighbors about our chickens. Saturday nights we go to the movies and Sundays we take long walks, hand in hand, out along the boulevards—and Mrs. John Smuts, housewife, is happier than May Yohe ever was!26

  May was apparently a good sport, finding rural life on the chicken farm incessantly fascinating. She was humble with neighbors. No one knew who she was, and she didn’t put on airs. May would daily walk to the grocery store, more than a mile from their home, and sometimes she’d get a ride with neighbors, white and African American. Yet, despite it all, the chicken farm was quickly going bust financially.

  May was at a loss about what to do next. Just then, fate sadly provided a new opportunity, bringing the former Lady Hope and the famous blue diamond back into the public eye.

  The Hope diamond?

  It looked like a bum sapphire. Why, I gave the old stone more publicity than it ever had before or since.

  —May Yohe, reflecting on the diamond1

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Cursed

  THOUGH SHE MAY NEVER HAVE ACTUALLY WORN IT, May helped make the Hope diamond the well-known icon it is today.

  May repeatedly contended that she had worn the Hope diamond twice, the first time at the Rothschild dinner in January 1895, the second at the duke of Newcastle’s dinner in September 1900. In 1911, Lord Francis denied that May or anyone else had worn the diamond. He asserted that it had been sitting in a vault at Parr’s Bank since 1894. Whether this was true or not, May nonetheless made good use of the diamond—wearing a replica of the famous gem in her performing career and tying herself and her failed marriage to Lord Francis to the diamond’s infamous history.

  May was not the only one to flaunt her association with the diamond. Evalyn Walsh McLean, who had recently bought the diamond from Cartier, did her part to promote the curse, sharing its story with her high-society crowd in Washington, wearing and showing it off provocatively, and even having it blessed by a priest.

  Whether playfully considered or not, the reputation of the Hope diamond changed on May 18, 1919. Ned and Evalyn McLean were in Louisville for the Kentucky Derby. Their eldest son, nine-year-old Vinson, who had been termed the “hundred million dollar baby” when he was born, was playing near the road in front of the family’s northwest Washington, D.C. estate. A former gardener had pulled over to the roadside. He had some ferns in his car. Vinson playfully grabbed a few and was making his getaway when a Ford, coming down the road at about eight miles an hour, banged into him. Vinson was knocked to the ground and his head hit the concrete. The boy was carried into the house. An army surgeon who was in the area was summoned.

  Vinson’s condition was serious and declining. The McLeans were called in Louisville. They left immediately for home via a specially chartered train. A specialist from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a brain surgeon from Philadelphia, and another physician from Washington all joined to help.

  Despite an emergency operation, young Vinson died. A New York Times report noted,

  When news of the death of the boy spread throughout Washington tonight, it was at once remarked that this was another tragedy to be added to the long string of misfortunes that had followed the successive owners of the Hope diamond.2

  Ned went on a drinking binge, devastated by the death of his son. Florence Harding, wife of Warren Harding, then still a senator, tried to console her friend and mentee Evalyn. And family, friends, and the public wondered if the Hope diamond was truly cursed.

  May and others commented on the tragedy and consoled the McLeans. May noted the effect upon her own life. “Its curse fell upon both of us [her and Francis]. It was under the malignant influence of the gem that I committed the most tragic and unhappy mistake of my life. Far better that a millstone be hung around my neck than that I should wear it again.”3

  Evalyn Walsh McLean and Edward Beale McLean with their oldest son Vinson and his brother John. (photo credit 13.1)

  May and Smuts spent the summer of 1919 in Quebec at the vacation home of cousin Adeline Parke (aunt Anna Yohe’s girl) and her husband Harry Cummings. The couple’s daughter Dianne, eight years old at the time, remembers May and Smuts as a couple “very much in love, with never a cross word spoken.”4

  Clearly affected by Vinson’s horrific death, May decided to take on a big project, and to tell, in her own dramatic fashion, the story of the Hope diamond. She had time on her hands to do it, especially because the chicken-farming operation was going belly up.

  May, capitalizing on her fame and her own brief history with the diamond, was able to secure a deal to write a nationally syndicated series of articles under the title The Hope Diamond Mystery. Her stories would appear in Hearst newspapers across the country. That deal enabled her to convince producer George Kleine, a German American from New York, to take the lead in making a silent movie serial as well.

  Newspaper article in the Atlanta Constitution, July 13, 1919. (photo credit 13.2)

  The newspaper series was published weekly for months in 1920 with the byline given as “May Yohe (Lady Francis Hope)” even though May was now Mrs. John Smuts. Articles typically took up a full newspaper page and were quite boldly produced. They included images from May’s original photographs, copies of historical paintings, and original illustrations.

  Each week an editorial lead-in promised,

  The story of May Yohe’s career will be told from week to week in these pages by May Yohe herself. Few plots in drama or fiction equal the extraordinary real life experience of this remarkable American girl. And the curse of the Hope diamond? Something indeed seemed to cast its sinister shadow over her life and pursued her relentlessly in America, in Asia, in Europe, and even in South America. She follows its sinister trail down through the centuries to the shocking death of little Vinson Walsh McLean, whose parents now own the ‘cursed’ stone.5

  Much more fanciful than either the London Times or Cartier’s account, the articles offered fictional history, May’s recollections, and bizarre imagination. The plot roughly followed Collins’ Moonstone story. In Yohe’s ethnographically puzzling account, Tavernier is supposed to have discovered the blue diamond in the breast of Brisbun, a Tibetan jade statue of Buddha in a Sita Ram temple in Burma. A “cult of pagan priests” is “bent on recovering the stone.” Its agents wreak havoc on the owners of the Hope diamond as they try to steal it back in order to restore it to the “jade idol in the wilderness.”6

  Yohe liberally inserted her own biography in the tale, including her own, seemingly fictionalized experiences with the diamond. For example, she describes meeting with an ascetic in India who is supposed to have revealed the unknown, early history of the gem.

  May found in her failed marriages with Lord Francis Hope and then Putnam Bradlee Strong the long reach of the Hope diamond curse. Appearing to run out of steam at several points, she inserted all sorts of fictional elaborations about the Hope diamond and its owners. One week, for example, she totally made up an account of how the diamond had been loaned by Frankel’s to J. P. Morgan, who was mysteriously stricken by illness until the deadly diamond was returned. In another piece, she fabricated an episode in which the Marquess of Queensberry owns the diamond and evil befalls his family.

  Through the series, May offered her own life as a lesson in humility exacted by the curse of the diamond. It is she, bedecked with the Hope diamond and other jewels, who is reduced to working as a scrubwoman
in the Seattle shipyard. With many dramatic flourishes, she places herself among the high and mighty brought low by the cursed gem.

  As May was writing the articles, Kleine formed Kosmik Films, Inc., to produce the silent film serial. Kosmik’s treasurer, Jack Wheeler, put together financing, and Kleine signed up Stuart Paton to direct the series. May started writing the script, but the film took a turn away from her story as Kleine hired other writers to finish the screenplay for what became The Hope Diamond Mystery. Paton lined up William Marion to play the owner of the Hope diamond, a Lord Francis figure. Vamp Grace Darmond played the heroine. May Yohe played herself—Lady Francis Hope. The most interesting figure was the turbaned Indian, Dakar, the priest of the cursing deity Kama-Sita, played by a young Boris Karloff.

  May Yohe as a janitoress in the newspaper serial “The Hope Diamond Mystery.” (photo credit 13.3)

  Poster for the movie The Hope Diamond Mystery, 1921. (photo credit 13.4)

  May Yohe in a promotional photograph for the 1921 movie, The Hope Diamond Mystery, Brown Brothers BB–17597–172J. (photo credit 13.5)

  The plot was incomprehensible. Its episodes, played out over a 15-week period, included “Hope Diamond Mystery,” “Vanishing Hand,” “Forged Note,” “Jewel of Sita,” “Virgin’s Love,” “House of Terror,” “Flames of Despair,” “Yellow Whisperings,” “Evil Eye,” “In the Spider’s Web,” “Cup of Fear,” “Ring of Death,” “Lash of Hate,” “Primitive Passions,” and, finally, “Island of Destiny.”