Leaving Los Angeles, I took stock of where I was in my starfish hunt. I had verified the existence of four original starfish:
1. Nancy Marks’s thoroughbred beauty, purchased at auction in Paris. It might be Claudette Colbert’s missing version, back through some mysterious process, from years in the outer darkness.
2. Susan Rotenstreich’s slightly smaller piece. An original Moutard version, which seemed to have crept into the lineup with the three (or four?) larger brooches. An alternate thought: who is to say that this smaller starfish wasn’t the first one that Claudette bought that reemerged with Joanne Cummings and then sold to Susan? It seemed unlikely, but possible.
3. Jennifer Tilly’s, bought from Lee Siegelson, who acquired it in Geneva. Very possibly the one that was held back by Boivin or some other “original owner” until 2006.
4. Millicent Rogers’s version with the amethyst baguettes that differentiate it from the others. I had traced it from her daughter-in-law Jackie to Henry Baker to Sam Loxton, to Lee Siegelson, and then to a client of Van Cleef & Arpels whom I could not identify.
* * *
To complicate matters further, because I could not trace the provenances all the way, it is possible that Nancy Marks’s model is the one held back by Boivin and Jennifer Tilly owned the piece first bought by Claudette Colbert.
This was all a snapshot, the best I could do from everything I knew currently. I had to admit, though, that there were previous appearances of starfish that just didn’t fit into the trail of ownership I had puzzled out. The biggest irritation for me was that Millicent’s version, which had gotten me into this whole exercise, and was the only one I could trace with certainty from its birth, had slipped away into unknown hands in the last few years. I didn’t know where it was. I only had a hint from Van Cleef in Paris that its owner lived in New York.
* * *
It was not a neat picture. There were unresolved tips, brief glimpses that didn’t fit into my list of four. I had to think there might be another one out there. Did the friend of Pamela Lipkin’s who was in the midst of a divorce actually own an original? And I was beginning to accept that I would probably never know which of the starfish had been Claudette Colbert’s. I wasn’t even sure that Boivin’s archives and sales records could help solve that mystery. The missing brooch had somehow been thrown back into the sea of jewelers and collectors when it resurfaced from the dark side. Unsurprisingly, it traveled without provenance. It seemed pretty obvious that one of the starfish in circulation had been Colbert’s, but none of the jewelers I talked to would hazard a guess about which one it was.
I had heard the story of a starfish that I thought could have been Claudette Colbert’s, emerging to a new life in Paris in the 1980s. The legendary late socialite São Schlumberger, married to the aristocratic French oil drilling tycoon Pierre Schlumberger, had once owned one. She fit the profile of the kind of woman who had a Boivin starfish. Wildly extravagant right up to her death in 2007, the Portuguese-born beauty lived a French fairy-tale life in a five-story eighteenth-century mansion, in Paris. It was filled with Rothkos, Lichtensteins, and all manner of fine art. Andy Warhol did a silkscreen portrait of São, heightening her legend. Salvador Dalí painted her, too. She gave parties for fifteen hundred guests, wore haute couture, and turned up once at Studio 54 in New York wearing major diamonds and rubies from Van Cleef & Arpels. She loved jewelry. Her husband gave her a fifty-one-carat Golconda diamond ring in a brown paper bag. Everything about her was excessive, including her public affair with the Egyptian prince Naguib Abdallah, whom her husband supported to keep her happy.
Ralph Esmerian had mentioned to me in a letter that New York jewelry designer Christopher Walling, whose innovative designs have been worn by a host of celebrities and society figures, including Queen Noor, Danielle Steel, and Liz Taylor, told him that São had a Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish.
A great raconteur, Walling recalled to me being with São when she asked her husband Pierre which of her many diamonds she should wear to a dinner with the Queen of England. Pierre responed, “All of them! If not now, when?” To criticism that it was vulgar to wear so much jewelry, São also memorably retorted, “It’s only vulgar if you don’t have it.” Walling, a tall, dapper moustachioed man in cowboy boots and a camel’s hair jacket, smiled, eyes twinkling like the gemstones he set in his jewelry designs, as he told me the story. He remembered that São was wearing her ruby and amethyst starfish brooch when he accompanied her to one of fashion arbiter Eleanor Lambert’s shows. Lambert was the creator of the International Best Dressed List. Walling explained that São did not wear her Boivin starfish to fancy dress balls, like those at Versailles, where she arrived in a maroon Rolls-Royce and was more likely to have on a ruby and diamond necklace that had belonged to Marie Antoinette. While the starfish was beautiful, it wasn’t fine or fancy enough for formal royal occasions. He does not know what became of her starfish after her death, but it may well be tied up in the rancorous relationship that she had with her daughter, Victoire. I started conjuring the possibilities. Could São’s have been the one that turned up for sale in 2012 at Emmanuelle Chassard’s La Galerie Parisienne in Paris? Or could it have been Claudette Colbert’s? Walling produced a photograph of a smiling São with her starfish pinned to the left shoulder of her fur coat as she and Walling headed out to a party for the gemstone artist Andreas von Zadora-Gerlof at Malcolm Forbes’s in 1992. In the photograph, apparently taken with a flash, the color of the stones in the starfish is somewhat washed out and I would have mistaken them for sapphires or aquamarines, but Walling is clear. They were rubies and amethysts. With a magnifying glass I tried to see which rays were flipped. The fourth was obviously curled up, but I could not see the top of the ray on her shoulder. As I studied the image of the starfish that Chassard sent to me saying it had sold “recently,” I saw that it had the first and fourth rays turned up at their ends. This is hardly conclusive, but it does suggest that the starfish she sold, for whatever reason, could have been São’s. She died in 2007. Alain, Emmanuelle Chassard’s father, offered another clue when he told me in Miami, the following year, that the starfish that went through the Chassard store was from a special old family, and a special piece. The Schlumbergers’ would meet his description. Emmanuelle had figured prominently in a New York Times story in 2010 about Boivin. She talked about Boivin’s innovative designs and, case in point, a jewelry sale at Christie’s in Geneva a month earlier that included a Boivin starfish, “a mythical piece of which no more than 4 or 5 were ever made,” but when I went back to the auction sale record, that starfish was a larger and later version. A reproduction. It was impossible to know whether it or another had been the one sold from La Galerie Parisienne a year later. Or whether it could have been São’s. Of course, I had asked, but Chassard wouldn’t tell me.
During our interview a light went on in Christopher Walling’s head and he brightened as he said, “I think I know who has Rogers’s now. At least I can make an educated guess.” Without giving away the name that had come to mind, he promised to check out his hunch and get back to me. A few days later, he told me that Ann Ziff had two starfish. He thought he remembered seeing her with one when they flew together in her G5 aircraft some years back. This news gave me a fresh shot of adrenaline. Ziff was a well-known jewelry fancier, she now designed jewelry herself, and she was a recognized patron of the arts. The only doubt I harbored was Nicholas Luchsinger’s assertion when I interviewed him at Van Cleef in Paris that the client who had the Rogers starfish was “very, very private.” Ziff was not that private, but I still hoped. My excitement was short-lived. I wrote to Deep Throat, who had told me that while he/she could not tell me outright who owned the Rogers starfish, he/she would confirm it for me only when I discovered it on my own. The answer came back promptly. “No!” I explained I had heard that Ziff had two. “Ask her to show it to you,” was the only riposte.
Walling continued to think that one of Ziff’s starfish might be Millicent Rogers’s. I asked him why he thought someone would want two. The answer was obvious to him. He put his hand to his waist. Two would make a fabulous belt buckle, he explained. Oh. And here I had been straining in my fantasies to figure out how I might wear one starfish the size of my hand. So pedestrian. I recalled that Millicent’s son Arturo thought he remembered that a second starfish had shown up for his mother to consider when they lived on their estate in Virginia during World War II. Millicent had also seen the appeal of wearing two, fashioning them into a belt buckle, yet in the end she did not keep the second starfish.
Several months later, I spoke with Ann Ziff. She had had two starfish, but only one was ruby and amethyst. Ziff fit several of the categories Deep Throat had outlined for me in his/her clues to the owner of the Millicent Rogers brooch. She was deeply involved in the musical arts. Her mother had been a famous opera singer and Ziff herself had been chair of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She also, in her present configuration and encouraged by her late husband, the magazine publishing magnate William Ziff Jr., designed her own jewelry and was the principal in Tamsen Z, a fine jewelry store on Madison Avenue in New York. She was extremely easy to speak with and forthcoming about her jewelry.
“I first saw a starfish in the 1980s,” she told me. Echoing Lee Siegelson’s inability to recall the woman who was wearing the piece, but distinctly remembering the sight of the starfish, Ann said unabashedly, “I loved it. I didn’t care who had it. I just thought to myself, there’s one. I didn’t ask her about it, but I kept an eye out.” When one showed up for sale at auction through Sotheby’s in Geneva in 1991, she bought it.
Ziff had an early appreciation for Boivin. The starfish was among a Boivin lobster, a “salamander with a click tail,” and a ring with bangles that she and her husband William flew to Geneva to bid on. She remembered, “We bought probably fifteen to twenty-seven pieces.” All Boivin. The starfish was among them and she says that she did not know whose collection they had come from.
There were also several small tiger’s eye and citrine starfish in her collection, but she said that she wore her ruby and amethyst Boivin starfish “all the time. It was perfect on a suit jacket. I just put it on the shoulder pad.” Somewhat hostage to etiquette, Ziff said she felt correct wearing the starfish during the day because it was made of colored gems. It used to be, “you didn’t wear diamonds during the day,” she explained. But she also wore her starfish at night on an off-the-shoulder pleated evening dress made of heavy black satin. When she owned both an emerald and aquamarine starfish, and a ruby and amethyst one, she wore them together. “The green one on one side, the red one on the other,” she explained. And she wore the ruby and amethyst starfish at her waist on an evening gown.
The Boivin pieces appealed to her aesthetic and jewelry-making senses. “The appeal of those pieces is the engineering. Now jewelers don’t study and know how to do that. It’s too labor intensive. That tippy end on the starfish tentacle. You touch it and the whole thing moves.” She spoke with childish glee over the marvel of the starfish. “They are works of art,” she concluded. In fact, Ziff’s “salamander with a click tail” turned out to be a chameleon with a click tongue, but the pleasure of making it change colors is the same no matter the anatomy involved. “When you wear it, people see it change from ruby to green. It’s fun.”
Ziff loaned her aquamarine and emerald Boivin starfish to soprano Renée Fleming to wear for her performance of Cesar Franck’s Panis Angelicus at the Mainz Cathedral in Germany in 2005. It shone resplendently on her low-cut off-the-shoulder brown-and-beige-colored taffeta gown. The image of her wearing it was broadcast this year when she was designated a musical treasure by the Library of Congress. Though Fleming’s rich voice rises above any competition, the starfish, moving with her breath and trills, did, however, distract the viewer.
Ziff sold her starfish in 2014, four years after she opened Tamsen Z and started making jewelry of her own. “People always asked me if I made what I was wearing,” she said. She wanted to emphasize her own designs at the time. So in 2014 she sold both her ruby and amethyst and emerald and aquamarine starfish through Christie’s in New York. She now speaks in the past tense about being a starfish owner, and she said she does not know who bought hers. She kept it for twenty-three years, and even though hers has moved on in the world, she still admires a starfish when she sees one, as she did “five or eight years ago on a Met board member.” She cannot recall who it was and she suspects “it was more modern.” Such sightings seem rare even among the women who have had Boivin starfish. This caused my antennae to twitch a little. It had been only four years since the Rogers starfish had sold, so I had to assume that the starfish she had seen could not have been Rogers’s. Uncertain about the sales dates and location of the starfish when we spoke, she promised to have her office provide them to me later.
* * *
Serendipity played its part in my starfish hunt. I was experiencing a lull in my starfish discovery during a July spent in Nantucket when I jumped out of a boat into the harbor on a steamy hot day. When I came to the surface my friends noticed that I was wearing only one pearl earring. Several days later I went shopping to replace it and ended up at a store called Water Jewels on Center Street. Its British owner, Barbara Harris, lectured me sternly for swimming with pearls. She could not help me replace a single earring, but as we talked I said that I was writing about some jewelry and mentioned Boivin. I was trying to prove to her that I wasn’t a total fool, even if I had gone swimming in my good pearl earrings. She immediately came to life. Barbara knew a lot about Boivin and the starfish brooches. She had seen one in Paris thirty years earlier when she was a design student. I went back to her shop the following day to ask her some questions.
Barbara had happened upon a ruby and amethyst Boivin starfish in the Marché aux Puces in northern Paris, where permanent stalls house the flea market that is something of a French institution. As Rebecca Scherm wrote in her novel Unbecoming, which describes the Marché, “it was perhaps the only flea market in the world where a six-thousand-euro Louis XIV love seat sat outside on the sidewalk.” Barbara prowled the market when she was studying in Paris. She took immediate note of the starfish the day she saw it. “It made me gasp, it was so beautiful,” she said. She asked its price of the old woman who was selling it, and remembered, “It was a lot. Probably fifty thousand francs, even then.” The old woman in the tiny enclosure eyed her thoughtfully. “Who is buying this?” Barbara asked her. “Americans,” was the answer. The woman explained that the starfish had been made by a small French maker for the haute bourgeoise Frenchwoman. “She said it was a little intellectual, and it was collected by Americans. I was so intrigued,” Barbara said. I was intrigued, too, wondering if Claudette Colbert’s lost starfish could have washed up in a flea market stall some forty years after it went missing.
I asked Barbara a variant of the same question that she had asked the old woman in the market: why do women buy starfish? Her answer was thoughtful, as though she had arrived at it over many years as a jeweler. “Buying them is the most perfect escapism. It is just you and a whimsy. There is not enough whimsy in lives today. It’s a sea creature! The moment you buy it is a pure moment of definite whimsy for those who can afford it. You can’t put a price on the experience.”
I found myself thinking about this every time I came close to an owner of the starfish, and I began to understand why some owners wouldn’t talk about their starfish. The thrill was in the secrecy, the private moment of owning the piece and putting it on at will. It was a little like a love affair. To go too wide with it, too public, was to diminish the thrill. It was difficult for the owners to explain, some magic alchemy of glee and greed that, I suppose, is not something most of us want to own up to. Mine. That was what Ann Marie Stanton remembered about watching Oprah Winfrey at the Oscars one year when a reporter inquired about a piece of jewelry on her dress. “Whose is that?” the reporter asked, expecting Winfrey to name the jeweler who had loaned it. “Mine,” said Oprah, taking everyone aback.
* * *
It was a Christie’s attendant who was showing me a starfish, in a preview to its sale, who distilled the matter down to its essence. She was girlish, lightly slipping the starfish back into its case. “Don’t you wish these pieces could talk?” she asked. Yes. Yes, I did.