May Yohe
Dorchester Illustration 2657
Some Dorchester residents live here all their lives, others arrive and stay a long time. But sometimes people are here only a year or two, but their stories are still interesting. I think that is the case with the riches to rags story of May Yohe.
The top photograph shows May Yohe as a young woman and the bottom photo was taken while she was living in Dorchester in 1934.
May Yohe was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1866. She became a famous star of the stage in her 20s and was considered a beauty. Her debut took place in Chicago in a role in The Arabian Nights. The following year she appeared at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York City in Natural Gas.
Her romances became a topic of wide interest. She was said to have a relationship with Jack Mason, leading man of the Boston Museum Company. In 1893, she appeared in London in The Magic Opal, and enjoyed the same popularity that she had in America. In 1894 she married Lord Francis Hope, heir of the Duke of Newcastle. May said that she wore the Hope Diamond only twice and declared that it looked like a “bum sapphire.” The diamond had a reputation for causing bad luck. Her husband went bankrupt and May claimed that her stage earnings paid off mortgages on the family estate. She became a close friend of Edward VII, Prince of Wales, who helped her with relations with her snooty in-laws. She didn’t stick around long enough to become a duchess. May eloped in 1901 with Captain Bradlee Putnam Strong, whom she married after the divorce from Lord Hope was finalized. Strong divorced her in 1910. Her third husband was Capt. John Smuts. She returned to the stage but did not meet with the hoped-for success.
May and John had little money, and May worked as a janitor for a short time. They tried ranching in California, tried farming and running a tearoom in New Hampshire. They came to Boston, where May regained her American citizenship, which she had given up when she married Lord Hope, so that she could work as a clerk in the Works Progress Administration.
May and John Smuts lived at 11 Granville St. in Dorchester from 1931 to 1933 and later lived at 406 Gallivan Boulevard. May died in an apartment in the Back Bay in 1938.
“Whatever I do, I do with all my heart. I have learned in life’s school that the only independent woman is the one who can rub a few hundred dollars of her own earnings and savings together in her purse; a dead-broke woman is a football that any clown can kick.”
