Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [46]
Ever since she first stole what she called “fluid emerald” (crème de menthe) from her parents’ drinks cupboard in her early teens Evalyn had been an alcoholic. When her brother died at a tragically young age, grief helped turn her into a morphine addict. “In those days a woman, diamond laden, could buy laudanum by the quart if she would simply pay the druggist what he asked,” she wrote, describing the animal cunning with which she would hide caches of the drug under her bedroom carpets or in the stuffing of furniture.
Her extravagance was legendary. Alice Roosevelt Longworth cattily declared that she loved going to the McLeans’s parties because they were “so endearing in [their] vulgarity.” Evalyn, she said, “could be very likeable with her queer loud voice and great generosity” although Longworth, who despised the Hardings, had dropped her when she became friends with Florence in about 1915.
Perhaps because she showed no interest in sleeping with Warren, or perhaps because they both had notoriously unfaithful husbands, Evalyn became Florence Harding’s only trusted female friend. She found Warren “a stunning man . . . full of life and eagerness to enjoy the world of riches that had been opened to him by politics”—although she added that while he had the charm necessary to succeed, it was his wife who possessed the ambition.
Unlike most of the hyenas circling the President, Ned and Evalyn McLean seem to have had nothing to gain from their intimacy with the Hardings except the cachet of being known to be their closest friends. According to Lillian Gish, their home was “said to be the unofficial White House.” They provided an escape from the pressures of official life in the form of their estate outside Washington, Friendship (which, incongruously, had once been a monastery), where Evalyn’s pet monkey and llama ran wild and Harding did the rounds of the 18-hole golf course. Jess Smith called Friendship “a damn swell layout.” It was on the lawn there during Harding’s presidential campaign that the McLeans burned the entire print-run of The Illustrated Life of President Warren G. Harding, a book exposing Harding’s mistresses and alleging that he was descended from runaway slaves and that Florence had Jewish blood.
Other Harding cronies were greedier. A character in John Dos Passos’s 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer justified graft like this: “a live man, nowadays, wants more money, needs more money than he can honestly make in public life. Naturally the best men turn to other channels.” By this definition corruption was only natural—a form of survival of the fittest and evidence more of a man’s ambition than of immorality or criminality. This philosophy seems to have characterized the men with whom Harding surrounded himself and to whom he felt such a misplaced sense of loyalty.
When he became President, Harding had wanted to make Albert Fall, his former seat-mate in the Senate, Secretary of State, but Republican elders dissuaded him. Fall contented himself with the Department of the Interior. William Allen White thought the six-shooter-carrying Fall looked like a “patent medicine vendor” selling Wizard Oil out of the back of a wagon. Evalyn McLean also found Fall menacing. He customarily wore a black cape and big hat and “the cigar that stuck forward from his angular jaw was about the size of a lead pencil and as poisonous as a cobra.”
Harding had none of White and McLean’s scruples about his friend, but his faith in him was grievously misplaced. A confidential Bureau