On another snowy day in New Mexico several months later a happy surprise awaited me when I checked my e-mail messages. “Dear Cherie, your letter has arrived and yes I do own a starfish brooch which my husband purchased. I am happy to speak with you about it.” She included her phone number and closed, “I would like to hear more about your project and perhaps we can meet. Best, Susan.” I was flooded with an almost eerie sense of relief. It had seemed like an eternity since I had trusted Christie’s to put out my letter of inquiry to the clients whom they knew had bought the starfish. The effort had seemed an empty black hole until that moment.
* * *
After all the cagey dealers and byzantine conversations I had had speaking with people in the jewelry business, those plain, direct words, “I do own a starfish,” had fresh significance for me. Only once we spoke by phone did I detect the slight remnant of a Southern accent that would later help explain Susan Rotenstreich’s friendly and open demeanor. Her name was familiar. It would turn out that we had actually met years before when our children attended the same school in Manhattan.
She gladly shared the story of acquiring and owning her starfish. Her husband had given the starfish to her as an anniversary present in the 1990s. She was a jewelry designer herself at the time. Some of her designs had been photographed and featured in major fashion magazines, but she left the business “when everyone and their daughter was getting into it. It wasn’t a place for me,” she explained. But her eye for fine jewelry remained specific and refined. Her husband, Jon W. Rotenstreich, principal of the Bayer Properties holding company, had seen the starfish at a preview for an upcoming Christie’s auction. “Jon just loved it,” explained Susan. They had talked about it, so it wasn’t a total surprise when several weeks later he presented it to her in a box with a bow in the dressing room of their Park Avenue apartment as she dressed to go out to dinner. “I loved it,” she remembered, her voice rising dramatically. That night she pinned it on her dress and wore it out.
Susan had seen a lot of jewelry as a designer and collector, but what struck her when she first saw the starfish was its articulation. “I so admired the design mechanism. I always checked out magazine and jewelry collections. But this was unique. I knew it was just beautiful and very special.” Just the same, it is a challenging piece to wear and she admitted she had worn it only “from time to time.” Its size and weight make it a difficult piece to wear. “It’s heavy and you can’t wear it if the fabric is too thin to balance it,” she said almost apologetically. Susan wears it on a silk dress or a suit for an occasion such as her birthday or a night at the opera “when you want to feel sort of special,” but she added that she had worn it most successfully on a gold chain at her neck with an open-collared white shirt. I have tried to envision this, since the starfish I have seen is large enough to span a woman’s clavicle, but I assume she can bring it off.
I was reminded that fashionable Parisian women in the first decade of the twentieth century imaginatively found ways to pile on as much jewelry as possible when they stepped out in the evening. Some hung chokers on sautoirs or strings of pearls, donned bracelets on every arm and rings on almost every finger. For the inventive and spirited woman, brooches offered a realm of possibilities; they could adorn the flap of an evening bag or, as Vogue had illustrated in 1937, a hat. A stiffly fitted bodice or starchy lapel would fade from fashion, but one’s jewels could be reincarnated.1
As a brooch Susan finds her starfish looks best on a cream-colored crepe de chine dress rather than on black, and because of its size and brightness she only pairs it with pearl earrings, “which don’t compete with it.” It cannot be worn casually. Susan and Jon are frequently photographed at charitable benefits and parties, in which the diminutive Susan is easy to spot. Her flair tends to arty, often turquoise jewelry, perhaps a pattern-appliquéd jacket. Though she told me she cannot recall being photographed with the starfish, there is a photo of her in 2008 at the Lincoln Center Fall Gala in New York City wearing it on a red dress under a black sweater jacket. The starfish is not wholly visible, partly obscured by her black wrap.
The brooch attracts attention, which is one reason to wear it sparingly. She mentioned security concerns. It is a hard piece not to notice—or forget. “People always say, oh that’s pretty, or, that’s unusual.” The truth is, “One doesn’t wear brooches very much anymore,” she concluded. Most people don’t really know how to deal with a jeweled sea creature the size of a hand. The people it attracts, she noted, are those “with a discerning eye for jewelry.” Her own daughter, now in her thirties, has shown no interest in it. “She’ll inherit it and love it or put it up for auction,” Susan said, laughing. It doesn’t matter to her. Meanwhile the starfish is kept in a safe with the rest of her collection.
When the Boivin starfish first came up in my conversation with Sarah Davis at Siegelson, she told me it was likely that the designer had cleverly distinguished each starfish from the others by turning up two different rays on each one. If you numbered each of the rays, or arms, from one to five clockwise with number one pointed up at the top, the combinations would vary. Two and five, one and three, or one and four, and so on. When she said this I thought it would be easy to know which starfish was which. Every time I saw a photograph of one in a jeweler’s advertisement or auction catalogue I quickly looked to see which rays were flipped slightly at their tips. But the photos didn’t help much. I couldn’t be sure that all of the starfish had been photographed in the same way, with the pin that attaches them to their wearer squarely horizontal across the back. Sometimes it seemed that the same stock photo was being used to announce the sale of any starfish, and I couldn’t know if a piece had been pivoted for the most aesthetically attractive photo, which seemed likely. I asked Susan which two of her starfish’s five rays were flipped at their ends, revealing a sliver of gold on their underside, like the hem of a flirty skirt. Perhaps the only way that the flipped rays on each piece could be evidence of which of the originals were being inspected was to have all three of them in front of me. That did not seem very likely to happen. Still, I kept a record of which rays were flipped. As a means of comparison, asking their owners to describe them this way worked, but I learned later that the two pins that attach the starfish are meant to be vertical in order to give it the best support.
I also asked Susan if her starfish was signed or bore a maker’s mark. She put me on hold to go and get the brooch from her safe. When she returned she said that the engraving was small but she could make out “R. Boivin.” There were some other marks, but nothing visible with the naked eye. No snake poinçoin, Boivin’s hallmark. From her description I gathered that the second and fifth rays were the ones turned up at the end. She promised to send me a photo and we agreed to meet during my next trip to New York. She was intrigued by what further information I might have to share with her about the starfish. She did not know a lot about the starfish’s history or the current interest in them. I asked her if she knew who its previous owner was. She paused to think. “I want to say Joanne Carson. A real estate person, I think,” she said tentatively. Was Cummings the name? I asked. Yes, she corrected herself, she thought that was it. As soon as we hung up, I got out the Christie’s auction records.
There is record of a starfish sale in April 1996 from the “Magnificent Jewels & Jewels from the Cummings Collection” at Christie’s New York. I figured this must have been the starfish that Simon Teakle mentioned helping sell at Christie’s that year. The text, in a typical example of the jewelry industry’s lack of transparency, only reads, “The Property of A LADY.” The description of the piece is the generic one that tells how sea life captured the imagination of Madame Boivin in 1936. Juliette Moutard, who joined Boivin in 1933, was the designer … Claudette Colbert had the first … I knew it now by heart. Françoise Cailles finished her description poetically by explaining, “Each arm was entirely articulated so that the jewel could reproduce the crawling movement of a living starfish.” Well, not exactly. Despite this rather poetic claim, the starfish were more likely articulated so they could fit and conform to the place where the wearer chose to pin one. On a shoulder or bust or hat. Christie’s added that “rubies and amethysts simulate the actual ‘tube feet’ and muscles that carry the creature on its way across the bottom of the sea.” I can also see that while the projected sale price or value of the piece was estimated to be between $40,000 and $50,000, it sold for $79,500. Sadly, in the spot where the photo usually appears with the listing, there was a blank. “Image is not available,” it read. Later, and after I had actually seen Susan’s starfish for myself, I would see a photo of it in an old Christie’s catalogue.
Neither were there more clues on Lotfinder, the search engine for auction sales, as to just what the Cummings Collection was. The auction house practice of naming sales for a collection that is included in an overall larger sale, even though other pieces of different provenance are added, made this more confusing. The title of the sale does not always suggest who owned the piece. I had previously asked Ward Landrigan about the name Cummings. “Nathan Cummings.” He knew right away. “Mr. Sara Lee.” That was how he had remembered who Nathan Cummings was. Jewelers, like art collectors, always know where the money comes from.
I remembered Sara Lee cakes, especially the frozen ones in the flat aluminum pans with banana cake and banana frosting. They’d been a treat in Richmond, Indiana. The company and Nathan Cummings had made a fortune.
Cummings died at age eighty-eight in 1985. He had amassed a huge art collection, including six hundred pieces of pre-Columbian art that would eventually go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many of his fine pieces had at one time covered the walls of his ninth-floor apartment in the Waldorf Towers in New York City. Widowed from his first wife, Ruth Kellert, he married Joanne Toor, thirty-two years his junior, in 1959. They divorced in 1976.
During their marriage, the lively Joanne helped amass a collection of art, furniture, and fine jewelry. It is noteworthy, as I would soon learn was true of almost all the women who owned Boivin starfish, that she as a person was about more than baubles and bangles. Joanne had a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International Relations. Besides the philanthropy that she and Cummings sponsored, she had been a member of the National Committee of American Foreign Policy for nineteen years and its president for five. She wore designer clothes and beautiful jewelry, and when her estate was auctioned after her death, Christie’s published a catalogue entitled “Jewels from the Collection of the Late Joanne Toor Cummings.” The starfish was among them.
Despite writing to the Cummings Foundation and Joanne’s sister Suzanne Tarpas in New York, I could never find out how Joanne Cummings acquired the starfish. No one who had known her personally was alive to tell me. It was well known that Nathan had started buying fine art in Paris in 1945. But at that time he was married to his first wife, Ruth. Their daughter, who lives in Chicago, inherited her mother’s jewelry, but it did not include a starfish. Her best guess is that her father bought the starfish for Joanne. Nathan was also friends with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and the duchess was a well-known jewelry collector.
* * *
It was nearly six months before Susan Rotenstreich and I managed to meet for tea in New York. She arrived by chauffeured car at our appointed East Side location, and she was as pert and petite as the woman I had seen in photos online standing next to her tall husband in which the top of her head barely reaches his shoulder. She was an East Side version of Dolly Parton without the chest, I kept thinking. That may not do her justice. Her girlish energy, though she must have been nearly sixty, made her instantly likable. We thought we might have recognized each other from serving on the parent safety patrol at our children’s high school. She was dressed smartly in tailored gray slacks that had a pearly sheen and a gray jacket. As we made small talk she told me that she was originally from Alabama, and that Southern-style warmth still shone through her sophisticated New Yorker patina. As I settled myself with a pad and paper to make notes she coyly took the starfish from her bag and placed it on the couch between us. She smiled at me playfully. “There it is.” I was immediately taken aback by its size, but said nothing. I hoped I was concealing my disappointment. It was my second time encountering an actual starfish and I quickly picked it up, turned it over, and looked at its underside. This starfish was smaller and denser than the others, maybe fewer than four inches across. The original I had seen was almost five. Its impression was more compact, chubbier and tighter, than the one at Verdura, though its rays were beautifully articulated. Its movement was like a well-oiled piece of suit armor or an armadillo, as I imagined them. “Encrusted” was the word that came to mind. I counted the cabochon rubies that ran down the tops of its five rays. There were only five, not six, as I have counted and seen in the photos of those that have moved through Christie’s since 1996 and been seen at Stephen Russell. Some of those, it is possible, were the same one being resold, but all of them were of the bigger design. Susan and I tried with our naked eyes to read the maker’s mark on the underside. I have been told that two little engraved eagle eyes is the symbol that indicates eighteen-karat gold and sometimes the fabricator also had an engraved mark, but we could not make them out. “I don’t really wear it that much,” said Susan, a little apologetically, but it was clear that she admired it. I snapped a photo with my cell phone and this time savored its weight in my hand. Its relative small size confused me, but there was no reason to doubt its authenticity with the Boivin signage (I know, there remains that catch-22 about Boivin not signing them…) and the documentation from Christie’s that accompanied its sale at auction. I thought the size might be an anomaly that I would just have to come to terms with, but I resolved to ask Françoise Cailles about it. I remembered that Jeanne Boivin liked to vary her designs slightly. There were two versions of her mermaid clip and several of a black-enameled gold ram. These variations, perhaps added by the designer both for creative fun and to help identify the pieces, definitely added fun and confusion for the chronicler—me.
Having accomplished our mission of looking at the starfish together, Susan and I made small talk for a few minutes while we finished our tea. She had already told me how she got it and how she wore it. Now Susan told me that she had embarked on a new profession, that of a licensed therapeutic touch practitioner, a modern-day healer who works with nurses and doctors to aid and hasten patients’ recovery. Years ago I did a story on the nurse who pioneered the field, so I knew what she was talking about. “I love it. I’ve found my calling,” she said, busting every preconceived notion I could have harbored about a wealthy New York woman who attends charity balls and has a collection of fine jewelry at her disposal. It would turn out that every woman I met who had a Boivin starfish was some sort of professional, fulfilling the premise that I had heard from dealers repeatedly that Boivin starfish attract a special clientele, a sophisticated thinking woman and not just a pampered rich pet. Imelda Marcos never had one. Not that I know of.
* * *
The size of Susan’s starfish threw me for a bit of a loop. It was lovely, but it just didn’t look like the photos in Cailles’s book on Boivin or any of the other publications that featured Boivin’s starfish. Yet it had come from Christie’s with all the proper documentation. I couldn’t know if perhaps Claudette Colbert’s long-lost version had been smaller. Or if a smaller one had been made after Millicent Rogers’s. I would have to wait to see another one to reach an informed conclusion. I sent a photo of it to Françoise Cailles and asked her opinion. There was no reply.
I had located one. There were three to go.