Diamond Tooth Lil

Diamond Tooth Lil was an American cultural figure popular in the early 20th century as an icon of wealth and libertine burlesque.

[2] In the case of the two most prominent, historians have often confused the lives of Honora Ornstein and Evelyn Hildegard, who both went by the name Diamond Lil around the turn of the 20th century, both emigrants from Austria, with similar ages, careers in entertainment, and diamond-inset teeth.

[4] Lil became known as enigmatic figure, and has been variously attributed as a "dance hall girl, gambler, prostitute, or madam who smoked cigars and carried a gun"—a legacy clouded with myth.

[8] Her stage name, Diamond Tooth Lil, is based on her several diamond-inset dental fillings,[11][12] including ones in her front and canine teeth.

[13] She also collected and wore other diamond-studded jewelry, including a white gold snake bracelet studded with 125 real diamonds that scaled the length of her arm.

[8] Shortly before she divorced her last husband around 1928, she lived in an apartment she had purchased in Seattle and inherited $150,000 from her mother, equivalent to $2.66 million in 2023.

[13] After spending the remainder of her life in state institutions, Lil died in a Yakima, Washington, nursing home on June 18, 1975.

[17] After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake left the city in ruins, Hildegard moved to Goldfield, Nevada, a boomtown of the California Gold Rush.

Though she ultimately spent less than a year in Goldfield, she quickly opened her own dance hall and had a relationship with prospector Diamondfield Jack.

In 1944, she announced that her famous front tooth diamond would be willed to the Idaho Children's Home orphanage upon her death.

[20] "The femme fatale of the Bowery", declared The New York Times of West's Lil in the play's 1949 revival, "bowling her leading men over one by one with her classical impersonation of a storybook strumpet", dressed in "some of the gaudiest finery of the century" with a "snaky walk, torso wriggle, stealthy eyes, frozen smile, flat, condescending voice, [and] queenly gestures"—in all, "a triumph of nostalgic vulgarity".