The next day I returned to thank the Verdura staff for the party. It was business as usual in the salon, and Ward, summoned from the office in back, came out to see me. I asked if I could look again at the starfish. It was gone, he told me. Gone? My first thought was that someone at the party the night before had bought it. “Where did it come from?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t know,” Ward said breezily, brushing the question aside. I thought he mumbled that his son and partner Nico had gotten it, but in the same beat he directed me to the front salon, where there was some excitement about a new eye-catching piece from the estate of Liz Taylor that he thought I might want to see. For the moment I forgot about the starfish, but before leaving I asked again, a little wistfully, where it had gone. “A jeweler in London, I think,” he said before he waved good-bye and jauntily retreated down the hall to his office.
I was startled that the starfish had disappeared so quickly. Obviously, it had arrived as an honored guest just for the party. I didn’t know then that fine jewelry like the brooch can move at lightning speed in the hands of dealers who want to expose it as widely as possible. And I was only beginning to suspect that for the next several years I would look back with real regret that I had missed the chance to hold one of Juliette Moutard’s ruby and amethyst starfish.
* * *
Soon after the Verdura party I was invited to the salon of another jeweler in New York, Siegelson. I had never heard of Siegelson, which will suggest to jewelry aficionados how little I knew about the fine-jewelry business. I wasn’t even sure why Sarah Davis, the staffer who invited me to visit the office on Forty-ninth and Fifth, wanted to see me, except that it had something to do with Millicent Rogers’s jewelry collection. She told me that she had Rogers’s ruby heart brooch that had been created by the designer Paul Flato, probably the most famous American jeweler in history. They’d love to show it to me. She said that she and Lee Siegelson liked my book. I was flattered.
On my way to Siegelson I marveled that although I had lived in Manhattan for over twenty-five years and peeked into various worlds as a reporter, I’d never brushed up against this hidden world of fine jewelry, salons tucked into high floors above Fifth Avenue. I had shopped for a diamond pendant for our daughter in the diamond district, had looked for a pearl necklace at Mikimoto and Fortunoff, and trafficked in and out of Tiffany for presents and a punch bowl over the years, but I had never stepped behind the curtain of the new world that was inviting me in now.
* * *
Siegelson’s waiting room was a notch less posh and a touch more corporate than Verdura’s chocolate-brown salon up the avenue, but the muted gray walls and sculpted bronze busts that decorated the waiting room created an equally rarefied air. Sarah Davis greeted me warmly. I noticed that my book with its pale turquoise cover was positioned centrally on a bookshelf at the end of the hallway to the spacious office where I was led.
Lee Siegelson, the forty-six-year-old principal in the business, soon appeared. He was an open-faced, somewhat ruggedly handsome ruddy-haired man who sported a sparse beard and a moustache. Self-assured and well dressed, he was unerringly gracious. As promised, he and Sarah Davis brought out the Flato heart brooch, encrusted with tightly set rubies. Millicent Rogers had helped to design it and I had seen a photo of her wearing it with a tweed suit in 1937. Now it was presented to me in a small rectangular display tray. Sarah and Lee urged me to pin it on. It was strangely inappropriate on my own heather tweed jacket, but I was learning not to turn down chances to share a moment with great jewelry. I posed awkwardly while Sarah snapped a photo with my cell phone.
Soon we got down to business. Lee wondered if I could help him get in touch with the Rogers family. He said he was curious to know if there was more jewelry from Millicent’s stellar collection for sale now, sixty-odd years after her death.
He was quick to mention the quid pro quo. If I could help him out a little, perhaps put him in touch with some people, he could probably be of help to me. I didn’t know of any way I could use his help at that time, but I admired his candor and energy. Lee is an operator. I liked him for not beating around the bush. I would learn later, from others in his business, that he is considered to be a total natural, a third-generation figure in the jewelry trade. He has an outgoing personality, is well liked by his colleagues and even by his competitors. His father worked in New York’s diamond district for years, and Lee is a refinement on the hustling world of the diamond exchange; I would often hear from jewelers in the months ahead, “If I had the money and taste Lee Siegelson does,” or, “Lee Siegelson would…” Now, he wanted to know where Millicent Rogers’s jewelry had gone after her death and if I could put him in touch with the family.
I could not help him. I had to admit, I just hadn’t focused that directly on Millicent’s jewelry. She had an extensive collection of Native American silver, and she had made jewelry herself out of eighteen-karat gold that she often gave to her friends and lovers. But none of that was what Lee and other New York jewelers were interested in. He mentioned a rumor about a secret safe. I was clueless, and skeptical.
Lee would tell me later of a story he was trying to make sense of. He had heard that a former boyfriend of one of Millicent Rogers’s granddaughters had managed to acquire Rogers’s ruby and amethyst starfish and some other pieces for several hundred thousand dollars. “Something like that,” he said, typically vague when it came to the cost of pieces, but he continued with the story. The fellow had turned around and sold the starfish for at least twice what he had paid for it. Lee had heard of the starfish before, he said. He had taken note when another one, possibly two, had passed through the hands of his friends at Stephen Russell, fine jewelers on Madison Avenue, in previous years. I quickly registered that comment: possibly two? So there was more than one of these exotic pieces? Lee had even been in on one of those deals, I would learn later, although he didn’t mention that. I assumed he knew Millicent’s starfish had been at Verdura the night of the book party.
He was distressed, he said, that the Rogers piece was heftily marked up when it was shopped around to New York jewelry dealers. Lee would have rather bought directly from the family for a better price and cut out the middleman. I promised when I got home to New Mexico, where I lived, to ask Millicent’s granddaughter, who had been a reliable source for me, when I was writing her grandmother’s biography, if she would be willing to speak with him.
* * *
There was a lot to mull over when I left Siegelson that day, moving into the crowd of shoppers outside of Saks Fifth Avenue, moseying along looking in the windows like any tourist. Normally I didn’t stop to ogle the displays in the windows of Cartier and Tiffany, but now as I headed up toward Central Park I stopped to look. The diamond and sapphire pieces on display were nothing like the starfish I had seen. They seemed small, commonplace, compared with the red and purple starfish that I held in my mind. Though large, it had not been loud or gaudy but it had radiated an unmistakable presence. I was thinking about it a lot. And now, I found, there was more than one! And not only was I impressed by the one I had seen, but it was important enough in the jewelry trade for a person of Siegelson’s stature to be pursuing it. I also understood that I had just stepped behind the curtain for a peek into a world I had not previously known existed. It wasn’t difficult to connect the dots and conclude that the starfish I had seen at Verdura was the same one Lee was talking about that had been bought from the Rogers family. Lee surely knew that but he hadn’t come right out and said so. In fact, the whole topic had been treated almost like small talk. Ward hadn’t mentioned any backstory when he showed me the brooch at the party. The granddaughter Lee mentioned didn’t sound like the one I knew, a new divorcée unlikely to have boyfriends who might try to con her out of her grandmother’s fine jewelry. I was starting to see that the jewelry business was a world of some intrigue.
* * *
I tried to recall what I knew about the starfish. I had thought that it was just another piece of showy jewelry, de rigueur for an heiress like Rogers, who always sought fine and unique adornments. She had been casual about jewelry. There had been a diamond necklace she had cavalierly flung upward that clung to a chandelier until her maid found it while cleaning. There were hundreds of pieces of silver and turquoise jewelry in her collections and she had made gold rings and necklaces that their detractors had considered crude designs. I was certain now that I had seen only a black-and-white photo of the starfish before I saw the real thing at Verdura. I also remembered that Rogers, who did have talent for designing jewelry, had been inspired by the jewelry house of Boivin in Paris, where the starfish was made. Boivin was run by women designers known for their animal-like and “barbaric” motifs. That story I remembered. Now it was time to Google. A description of the starfish in Christie’s auction listings declared that three ruby and amethyst starfish brooches had been made by Boivin and that the American movie actress Claudette Colbert had owned the first one.
When I got home to Taos, New Mexico, where my husband and I had spent most of our time since leaving New York ten years earlier, I dug out my copy of the black-and-white photograph of Rogers from Vogue magazine in 1945. She was wearing the starfish with a black Schiaparelli pantsuit. She posed in her New York apartment with one of her beloved dachsunds perched on her desk, the starfish brooch pinned to her right shoulder. The photo, I realized, didn’t do it justice. In fact, the first time I had seen the photo, I had taken closer note of the dachsund on the desktop than the jewelry. I clearly wasn’t enough of a jewelry fancier for it to catch my eye in black and white. The starfish needed to be seen in color to be captivating.
Several weeks later I received an e-mail from a woman I didn’t know. Claudine Seroussi in London. She explained that she researched the history of jewels and was currently writing a booklet for a dealer in London, Lucas Rarities. Her job was putting together a catalogue for a showcase of jewels that included three pieces of Rogers’s jewelry. She added that “they were purchased directly from one of her descendants.” She attached dazzling color photos of two of them, an emerald and sapphire starburst brooch made by Verdura and an odd hippocamp brooch with a dangling dark pearl that was made by Boivin in Paris.
The third, she explained, was a ruby and amethyst starfish brooch! She was looking for photos of Rogers wearing the starfish beyond the one we both knew of with the dachshund at her desk in New York taken by the photographer Richard Rutledge in 1945. I said I would try to help. I needed to review the photos that I had seen of Millicent. I also needed to think. While I dutifully sorted through the images I had of Rogers I kept running over what Claudine had told me. So the starfish I saw at Verdura’s in New York was now at Lucas Rarities in London. In my next exchange I asked Claudine if she knew that the Rogers starfish had been at my book party. She did. It had been sent to Verdura from Lucas Rarities, her employer. “Ward requested it for your party and several days later it was returned to London,” she responded, answering the question I had asked Ward but that he had sidestepped.
The query from Seroussi about the starfish picked up my pulse again. I had no idea the starfish was of such interest or so important to jewelers. My excitement was partly due to Seroussi, who was a witty and literate correspondent with the answer to just about anything I asked her. She knew the jewelry business, and she reveled in being able to explain its machinations and identify the players. She was irreverent and funny. Yet I would eventually come to find in Claudine the same anxiety that I learned was endemic to the profession. She worried needlessly, I thought (and hoped), about exposure for talking about a business whose distinguishing feature is secrecy. Sometimes the questions I asked didn’t seem very sensitive or controversial to me, but in her world, she told me, they were grenades.
The jewelry trade, I was learning, is a shadow business. Seroussi, who had worked for jewelers in Europe for the past ten years, put it succinctly, explaining to me her own reluctance to be associated with anything that might be written about three pieces of jewelry created nearly eighty years ago. I thought that if I decided to write about the starfish it would be a simple story of a list of owners and dealers who had in one way or another dealt with them. She set me straight. “The jewelry trade is not like the art market. People don’t write about players and they don’t talk about them. [It is] very private and discreet and in many respects operates in the shadows. This trade runs on reputation. It’s as simple as that. The jewelry trade is a very fragile ecosystem within which everything is held by a very delicate balance.” She was warning me that even a modest reporting effort was going to meet with resistance.
* * *
Shortly after the message from Claudine Seroussi I got up from my desk at home and walked into the living room, where a fire was murmuring in the fireplace. Three ruby and amethyst starfish brooches cartwheeled through my thoughts, sparkling and teasing. They seemed to wink from the real flames. They beckoned me. They were worth chasing.
* * *
A different kind of story was unfolding in front of me. I was hearing some tantalizing rumors: Claudette Colbert lost her starfish, or it was stolen, and nobody seemed to know when or where it happened. A legendary Parisienne beauty, a possible starfish owner, persuaded her husband to buy her the jewelry she wanted and to support her lover as well. A Bronx salesman of Mexican crafts and clothing who operated under a prestigious-sounding British name became the industry’s top purveyor of classic antique jewelry and imitations. I was also starting to hear that there were possibly more than three starfish, maybe even five. I would start with what little I knew about jewelry, do my research, and then tackle the dealers and the experts, the people who knew all about these starfish. If they really knew. And if they would tell me.