FoundSF

Historical Essay

by Mark Ellinger

Annie May Wyant, born 1867 in New Orleans, arrived in San Francisco sometime in the early 1890s and by 1895 at the age of twenty-eight was boarding at Mrs. Nina Hayman’s place at 225 Ellis (the same establishment that madam Dolly Adams held sway over some twelve years earlier), taking Jessie Mellon as her house name. Near the end of 1898, madam Nina Hayman retired to marry a wealthy San Francisco lumber dealer. As the house favorite, young Jessie took over her mentor’s name and business, and it was as Jessie Hayman or “Diamond Jessie” that she became famous.

It is not my intent or purpose to tell Jessie’s full story here. For those who are interested, it has been told with great warmth and wit by Curt Gentry in his book The Madams of San Francisco.* Suffice for me to say that she was strict yet fair and generous with her girls, her parlor houses were the most lavish and fashionable in the district; she was an elegant and shapely redhead, a lover of diamonds, whose charms (and prices!) were legendary in her own time, as illustrated by the following anecdote.

In the late 1890s, after being introduced by Jessie’s friend, photographer Arnold Genthe, a Grand Duke of the Imperial Russian Empire wanted to take her back to Russia with him. When Jessie politely declined, the Grand Duke commissioned a life-size enlargement of an Arnold Genthe portrait of her. At a Newport luncheon in the Grand Duke’s honor the day before he returned to Russia, His Royal Highness proposed a toast: “To the most beautiful woman I have met in your country. She shall be nameless. Even if she were not many miles away, she would not have been included in this gathering. I ask you all to drink her health.” And thus it was that ladies of unquestioned virtue, the cream of American society, raised their glasses and drank to a demimonde, for a request from a Grand Duke was a command.