Millicent Rogers was attracted to the Boivin starfish for the same reasons it had captivated Claudette Colbert. She always had an eye for stylish jewelry, and liked to make a splash. Her father scolded her in a letter for overspending when she was in her twenties. By the time she was in her thirties and living in Europe, it was a full-blown avocation. Major jewelers like Boivin often saw her coming. They knew she had money to spend and seldom asked the price of something that she wanted, but there was a flip side to her shopping habits. She was a difficult client, full of the sense of entitlement that great wealth bestows. The Belperron archives made note of her attempts to return pieces sometimes years after she had bought them in hopes of exchanging them for newer designs. Rogers was determined to live on the stylish cusp of change, and most shoppers didn’t act like her. With less money to spend, they didn’t have her clout with merchants, who always forgave her excesses.
Millicent was an extravagant collector of jewelry and she learned to make pieces of her own design, both reasons that led her to Boivin in Paris in the 1930s. Boivin’s imaginative and innovative styles had already captivated several Hollywood personalities in the United States. Couturiers like Millicent’s friend Elsa Schiaparelli were acquainted with Boivin because they knew Jeanne’s brother, Paul Poiret, the leading fashion designer in Paris before the war. Poiret was inspired by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to introduce flowing styles that were a precursor to flapper fashions in the United States. The dancer Isadora Duncan and the actress legend Sarah Bernhardt were also clients, and popularized Boivin’s bold jewelry styles. Rogers was attracted to Boivin jewelry not only for the wonderful naturalistic designs that were becoming the rage, but she also found the ambience of a house run by women that also relied on women designers especially appealing as she tried to learn jewelry making for herself. She had sent one of her own early efforts at design to Boivin for fabrication. She was acquainted with Jeanne’s brother, Paul Poiret. They traveled in the same well-connected fashion circles. It was a genial relationship that would lead Rogers, with her appetite for high-quality novelty in clothes and accessories, to come eventually across the Boivin starfish.
* * *
Remember, she was a Standard Oil heiress, and her appetite for collecting was insatiable. Jewelry occupied a central part of her life. Rogers had suffered from rheumatic fever as a child and she suffered throughout her life from a weak heart. A series of small strokes caused some paralysis and tremors in her left arm. Jewelry making, the wielding of small jewelers’ tools and the shaping of wax models, was good for maintaining her manual dexterity. She also liked presenting personalized gifts, like the gold cuff links she made for Clark Gable.
As she did with dress couturiers, Rogers influenced designs with leading jewelers that she patronized. She was instrumental in Fulco di Verdura’s creation of a diamond-thronged scallop-shell brooch and she contributed design motifs to the leading American jeweler Paul Flato. Her design, the Flato heart brooch, was the same one Lee Seigelson gave me to try on when I first met him and Sarah Davis in the Siegelson salon.
In 1938 Rogers married her third husband, the handsome bon vivant Ronnie Balcom, nine years her junior. They occupied a house that she and her second husband, an Argentine aristocrat, had built in Austria, and during the years they spent there before World War II, Millicent exemplified, as Diana Vreeland put it, soignée international fashion style. She shopped in Paris and wore designs by the leading couturiers of the day, including Valentina, Schiaparelli, and Mainbocher. In addition to modeling her style in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, she often accessorized the clothes she wore for fashion shoots with her own pieces of jewelry. She showed up with the Flato heart brooch coming through customs with Ronnie Balcom and on a Schiaparelli suit that she modeled for Vogue. In the photo she sits at the desk of her New York apartment in a Schiaparelli black pantsuit with the starfish pinned to her right shoulder in 1945. Like Claudette Colbert, Millicent bought her starfish for herself in 1938.
That year she had given Ronnie, a car fancier, a Delage Aerosport coupe that he admired at the Paris Expo. The deal was contingent on the manufacturer’s adopting a new shape she had specified for the fender and rear fin. Rogers never needed an excuse for parity in spending, but that gift is the closest I can come to a motivation for her buying a ruby and amethyst starfish brooch for herself, if she needed a justification. She rarely did. It is more probable that she was simply captivated by the starfish, prized it for its beauty, and bought it for herself. Because she had more money than the men she kept in her life, they did not buy jewelry for her. She bought her own.
Both the first two starfish were bought by wealthy, stylish women for themselves, which suggested a pattern that would continue. It also bore out the theory of some jewelers that the starfish attracted a unique kind of woman. The first shared attribute was being rich, but it went beyond money.
Like Colbert, Rogers had confidence and flair enough to sport a piece as bold as the starfish. This was a woman who had gone to a New York debutante’s ball in a black dress and Chinese headdress for no better reason than to create a sensation. She almost always tweaked the design of things she bought, changing the buttons on coats, mixing rustic and refined elements in clothes, putting her personal stamp on everything she touched. So it is reasonable to assume that she did the same thing with the starfish that she had done in the Delage showroom where she had taken a lipstick out of her purse and drawn the tail fin design she wanted on the car she ordered for her husband. At Boivin, she likely asked Juliette Moutard and Jeanne Boivin to make her starfish a bit different from the one Claudette Colbert had. She wanted hers to be slightly more rigid and to lie flatter than the more articulated variety that Claudette had bought. Records show that she ordered the starfish and a hippocamp piece by Boivin at the same time. She was accustomed to asking for a slightly different, personalized twist to most things she had custom made. She was also known for her great tact with designers, making them feel that she was only suggesting the smallest modification to their own already brilliant creations. Juliette Moutard and Jeanne Boivin either demurred or concurred. It is worth noting that the next starfish Boivin would produce after Rogers’s reverted to Juliette’s original design, fully articulated again and without baguette amethysts around the central cabochon ruby. Perhaps Millicent’s was even the third that was made, though it was the second that sold, if Jeanne Boivin had taken advantage of the French law to make two more of the first design. The evidence suggests that Jeanne and Juliette preferred their original design. As for the phantom third, I was still looking for even one report that someone had seen it outside of the shop.
* * *
The Rogers family, I hoped, would have the story of how Millicent’s starfish had come up for sale in 2011. I took a deep breath. Millicent’s last living son, Arturo Peralta Ramos, had not been the easiest source to deal with while I was writing his mother’s biography. But I was hearing from diverse parties in the jewelry business who had anything to do with the selling of Millicent’s starfish that Arturo had owned the piece, and to make the story even juicier, that he and his wife had at last opened up a safe where he kept it in his New York apartment, formerly his mother’s, along with other treasured and valuable pieces of jewelry. I had perked up when Claudine Seroussi, as part of our early conversation about the Rogers piece, told me the story of a young couple she had met who announced themselves to be Rogers family of some sort and spoke of a storied safe.
Rogers had grandchildren, but none came to mind that fit this description, and the idea of a vault where Millicent’s remaining gems were hidden sounded to me like something right out of Arturo’s storybook. He loved intrigue and secrets. But I listened. I also heard that Arturo and his wife Jackie, who previously spent summers in Turtlewalk, the old hacienda in Taos that Millicent had bought and refurbished in the 1940s, were now living in Taos full-time. Arturo was eighty-seven and in spite of smoking several packs of cigarettes a day he managed to carry on, driving around an old woody station wagon with the tanks of oxygen he needed to keep breathing at an altitude of seven thousand feet in the seat next to him.
I had heard that Jackie, also in her eighties, had been the actual owner of the starfish until it was sold. I made an appointment to speak with her but she insisted that I talk to Arturo first since he had known about the starfish longer than she had.
* * *
A pack of barking dogs announced my arrival at the house. Arturo met me at the top of the outdoor stairs to his study and ushered me inside, ready to talk about his mother’s starfish brooch.
Arturo guessed that his mother found her way to Boivin with “Schiap,” her designer and friend Elsa Schiaparelli. “Schiap introduced her to jewelers. My mother had tons and tons of jewelery,” he said, and added that she carried it with her during their trips to Paris, where she often stayed at the Plaza Athénée. These memories swam around for Arturo. He recalled a ring from the 1920s that had belonged to the Russian mystic Rasputin in his mother’s collection. Its connection to a villainous and powerful figure captured his boyish imagination. “She would pay any price if she wanted it,” he said of his mother’s shopping method. Millicent seemed to have few true favorite pieces of jewelry, he recalled, but “she wore the starfish on gowns. I remember that.” He spoke knowingly of Millicent’s visits to Boivin though he could not remember there being a specific time or day that she came home to Shulla House in Austria with a jewelry purchase from Paris, where she often traveled to visit her mother when the family lived in Europe before World War II. He did remember the starfish being in their house and seeing his mother wear it. He told me that Millicent followed a quote from “Johnny” (Jean) Schlumberger, who designed for Tiffany & Co.: “If you can’t wear it, why have it?” She wore her jewelry.
The most provocative new thing Arturo told me about the starfish was his teenage memory of Millicent having two of them. He said that he remembered the starfish because when he saw two of them, he asked her, “Why do you want a second one?” She answered that she was “comparing” them. Stylish women and men to whom I have posed the same question have said that two would have made a fabulous belt buckle. Arturo always remembered having the impression that the second starfish had arrived for Millicent to take a look at and somehow to evaluate or appraise. Whatever the reason, she only kept one for her collection. On occasion she loaned it to friends to wear—or to study. Arturo remembered it being loaned to his grandmother Mary and to the Hollywood actress Janet Gaynor. He thought it may have also been loaned to the Brazilian sculptress Maria Martens, who encouraged Millicent to have confidence in her own jewelry-making talent and designs.
After Millicent died in 1952 her will left certain pieces like her pearl ring and earrings to family members, but Arturo seems to have kept what jewelry was not itemized in her will. He says that after he married his second wife, Jackie, he started giving her a “pin” from his mother’s collection every year at Christmas. The first one he gave to her was the starfish.
Discussing the starfish gave Arturo reason to tell me a touching story that I had heard before but not in such detail. His mother had met his second-wife-to-be when she was just a teenager in the San Fernando Valley. Millicent was in her forties and had moved to Los Angeles to be closer to her new lover, Clark Gable. She was looking at property to buy, inspecting the movie director John Ford’s farm, not far from his existing home in Encino, California, where the thirteen-year-old Jackie rode her horse. Jackie was upset at seeing the surveyor’s sticks on the land where she loved to ride and considered wild, so on three occasions she jumped down from her horse on her daily ride and pulled them up, thinking she could impede any sale of the property. Finally, the third time, Gable and Millicent caught her doing it. According to Arturo, Gable scolded her roughly, threatening to spank her for what she had done “to this lady.“Millicent took a gentler line with Jackie, who explained that she had meant no harm. She simply wanted to be able to ride her horse on the property. “Come and ride here anytime,” Millicent assured her. And Jackie rode home chastened but sure that “the lady,” Millicent, loved horses because of a large pin she was wearing on her shirt. In fact, the pin was Boivin’s famous hippocamp brooch, startling for its image of a half horse, half merhorse: a “hippocamp” dangling a dark gray drop-shaped pearl. The hippocamp would reenter her life again later.
* * *
I went to visit Jackie a few days after I had spoken with Arturo. Jackie was a former couture model easing into her eighties. She was still remarkably attractive. I knew that she had been plagued in recent years by health issues and I expected someone more frail, ravaged even, than the immaculately dressed, creamy-skinned, slender woman who greeted me. The housekeeper ushered me down a hallway lined with blue oxygen tubes to her bedroom. She suffered from emphysema but she was breathing without oxygen when I arrived. There was an element of animated fun about her that is hard to describe, as though she just might jump out of bed and dance the twist or share a secret with you. And she was elegant in chartreuse and black lounging pajamas, her silky blond-white hair pulled back with a headband à la fifties Hollywood. Her nails were neatly manicured and polished to a neutral sheen. Her bedroom at Turtlewalk looked north across the fields of Taos. Majestic Taos Mountain appeared through the large picture window framed with tasseled drapes. Between the foot of her bed and the window a large flat-screen television was on, tuned to horseracing, one of her passions. I asked if we could lower the volume while I sat at the foot of the bed as she talked about her starfish.
She said Arturo had given the starfish brooch to her for their first wedding anniversary. “I opened the box and it was the pin. ‘Where’d you get this?’” she recalled asking gleefully. Her voice still had a girlish bounce to it. “He told me it was his mother’s.”
She had kept it in the vault of their New York apartment that had also been his mother’s. “I loved the starfish. My daughter didn’t like it and Paullie didn’t like it,” she said, referring to her stepdaughter, Lorian, and Arturo’s younger brother, Paul. She lit up when recounting the occasions when she wore it. “I walked into À La Vieille Russie with it. I was wearing a beige tweed suit with the pin. I loved it,” she enthused. She recalled wearing it one night on a cruise ship. Cole Porter, who was with his wife, Linda, asked, “Is that real?” One can hear her charming them, her lilting voice explaining that of course it was real.
She figures that she wore it two or three dozen times in the forty-seven years that she had it, but she said there are downsides to owning jewelry of its kind, big and highly valued. “You can be robbed or hit on the head,” she said, laughing a little, and I understood why so many people I had met in Taos liked Jackie and had remembered having good times in her company. “But you can’t wear jewelry like it much anymore. It is too big. There is no denying what it is. That’s why it sat in the vault for years and years.” Ever since the day when she rode her horse through property that Clark Gable and Millicent Rogers were interested in buying, Jackie has been a horse fancier. She owned a dozen racehorses and said that it was a string of losses at the track that forced her to sell the starfish. “I needed the money for stud fees. Racehorses are so expensive! The boarding and training.” She rolled her eyes sheepishly, admitting her folly. A stud fee can run $65,000, she complained.
“I was never a jewelry lover, to tell you the truth,” she observed, explaining her frankness in confessing that she had few qualms about parting with pieces in general, but as for the starfish, she said, “I loved it. It was the last thing I let go.”
Abruptly, she asked if I would object to her having a cigarette and then quickly asked me not to tell Arturo that she was smoking. I tried to keep a straight face since the house already smelled of smoke and I doubted Arturo would know the difference. She suddenly procured a pack of Misty, slender, thin menthols. It may have been my question about who she sold the starfish to and why that made her want a cigarette. “He was the biggest crook!” she said, her eyes sharp and alert from a jolt of adrenaline or the nicotine. “I feel so stupid!” The “he” she was referring to, she explained, was Henry Baker.
This was a name I had heard before from Lee Siegelson. When I first asked Lee, before I was into the starfish’s saga with both feet, how he had acquired the Rogers starfish, he quickly ran through the story for me. “A guy” who worked for another jeweler, Oscar Heyman, on Madison Avenue, near Siegelson at 589 Fifth Avenue, made the rounds with the starfish to show to jewelers. Who was this guy? I asked. His name was Henry Baker and he worked for Heyman, one of the finest manufacturers of fine jewelry in the United States today. Lee said he had sold a starfish in the 1990s and Henry Baker probably knew that. I wondered how such a person carried the starfish to shop it around. “He just brought it in in his pocket. It’s no big deal,” Lee explained. He would soon, I learned later, pay three hundred thousand dollars for the starfish to a London dealer who had backed Henry Baker’s purchase of it.
Listening to Jackie, I flashed back to my first visit with Siegelson, when he was looking for the granddaughter who had been instrumental in the sale of Jackie’s starfish. I had never spoken to her, but Jackie was now filling in the blanks.
Her stepdaughter, Lorian Buckley, Arturo’s daughter from his first marriage, is an art historian who has friends in the jewelry business in Connecticut. When she heard that Jackie wanted to sell some of her jewelry to cover expenses for her horses, Lorian made the connection with an old friend who dabbled in jewelry and was also a friend of Henry Baker’s.
Numbers are not things that any of these people, sellers, dealers, or buyers want to talk about, but I gathered that about $140,000 was paid for three pieces of jewelry that Henry purchased out of the Ramos’s safe. They were the starfish, the hippocamp that the teenaged Jackie had seen Millicent Rogers wearing when she was caught pulling up the surveyor’s stakes in Encino, and a starburst pin. Their sales would later tally more than a million dollars. Jackie fumed over the thought that Henry had made a killing. “Oh, someone comes and sits and talks to you and you buy their phoniness and the lies,” she said, knocking the horse magazine near her feet off the bed. “I loved it and it was the last thing I let go. I am so ashamed,” she said. But she quickly justified the sale, explaining that she did it for her horses. “They are my children!”
Buckley shared her own magical memory of the starfish. When she was eight years old it belonged to her mother, Dusty, Arturo’s first wife. “I remember Mother’s dressing table and that there was this thing sitting on a red leather jewelry box and seeing that it was bigger than my hand and the most amazing thing to look at. I’ll remember it for a hundred years!” she said excitedly. “It and the hippocamp,” she said, referring to the half-horse, half-sea-monster creation, also by Juliette Moutard. Millicent’s hippocamp was a golden seahorse in an emerald-lined scallop shell serving as Poseidon’s chariot. A saltwater pearl dangled from a ruby bow. In fact, the history of the hippocamp, perhaps inspired by the mythical sea creatures in the Trevi fountain, is more complex and fantastic than the starfish, but it is a hard piece of jewelry to like, let alone wear. If it is difficult for contemporary women, even some of the present-day owners like Susan Rotenstreich, to wear the starfish because of its size and the large statement it makes, try pinning the hippocamp to a lapel. (Of course, Millicent Rogers had pulled it off with aplomb, as the teenaged Jackie had witnessed for herself.) Cluttered instead of classic, it pales next to the starfish, yet both are believed to have been ordered by Rogers at the same time. Both pieces now claim a seminal place in jewelry history.
For Lorian Buckley, the appeal of the starfish was more personal and primordial. “It was red and it was an animal. And starfish are such neat creatures anyhow. I was fascinated with this one made of rubies sitting in my lap.” She vividly remembered playing with it before her mother wore it out the same night. Though Millicent’s starfish was not as fully articulated as the other two made by Boivin, its rays had some range of movement so it would conform slightly to the contour of the wearer’s body. The joints are visible from the back, and Lorian said, “The intricacy of the spiderwebbing on the back is the first thing you see when you turn it over.” She saw her mother wearing it on an evening dress on several occasions but cannot remember the dress, just the starfish. As an adult, she more eloquently summarized its appeal. “The starfish is a very tactile thing and the tendrils underneath are part of it. It appealed to both senses. On one hand it looks like the sea. And looking at how it is made was also fascinating.”
When her parents divorced the starfish went with her father and eventually to Jackie, his last wife. Lorian remembered seeing Jackie wearing it with a big black hat. The starfish was “big and wonderful. Not a flimsy little thing.” She suspects that it was the strong impression of the starfish on her beautiful stepmother that contributed to her lack of interest in owning it later.
So when Jackie asked, “Would it crush you if I sold it?” Lorian readily deferred to her stepmother. “It was her piece, not mine, and horses are the true love in her life.” She understood that the proceeds from the starfish would go toward Jackie’s racehorses. Lorian also believed that she could help her to sell the jewelry. She did not want to carry it herself in a pocket up and down Fifth Avenue to jewelry dealers. “I’d be hysterical.” So she went to a friend, someone whose opinion she trusted in a world that she considered to be “a slimy business.” The friend mentioned Henry Baker.