The world of fine jewelry, I was about to learn, is full of contradictions. So dazzlingly cosmopolitan seen through the windows of Fifth Avenue showrooms and jewelry stores in most major cities, it is a swashbuckling frontier in the back rooms and exchanges where fine jewelry deals are struck and fortunes are lost or made. Like most true businesses that traffic in style, it relies on artifice and operates on grit. Jewelers re-create themselves and forge fresh images, as had Murray Mondschein. I kept on, tracking down figures in the jewelry world who could help me understand the mysteries of the starfish and lead me to their current owners. They were a marvelously varied lot.
* * *
When I called the Fred Leighton salon, now owned by the hundred-year-old diamond company Kwiat, and asked for Murray, I was advised to call Pat Saling. All queries for Murray these days, since Kwiat purchased Fred Leighton, must be made through Saling, a colleague of Murray’s for more than twenty-two years. Saling, who now steers her own company, Pat Saling, for fine estate and precious jewelry, also has the dubious honor of being the gatekeeper for her old boss. “Murray says he doesn’t really know anything about the starfish,” she told me when I first called. But when I persisted in asking to make a date with him, at least to hear his overview of the market for such pieces, she scheduled an appointment for me a month later. I traveled to be in New York that day and began early at Verdura, perusing old Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar editions with jewelry features and advertisements alongside Caroline Stetson, a Verdura staffer. When it was time to leave, I told her that I had an appointment with Murray. Ward Landrigan, standing within earshot, raised his eyebrows. “You do? That’s great. That should be interesting,” he chimed in, typically enthusiastic. I was no sooner down on Fifth Avenue than my cell phone rang and it was an assistant in Pat’s office telling me that Murray was not in town and unable to keep our appointment. My attempts to make another date with him were fruitless. I was told that I would have to “call Pat.” Later that day after several visits to other jewelers, I ran into Caroline Stetson on the street who told me she had just passed Murray at the corner stoplight.
I made yet another date with Murray that was canceled and I was again told that he had nothing to say about the starfish. I didn’t wholly give up on him but I figured that I might have to settle for interviewing Pat if she would talk to me. She knew a lot about Murray and his business after their long working relationship.
Pat Saling’s office was on the fifth floor of a modern no-frills building on Forty-eighth Street off Fifth Avenue, the dividing line between the glitzy retailers and the gritty diamond dealers. There was no storefront, no sign, no indication of a major jewelry dealer’s headquarters though her Web site touts “fine estate and precious jewelry.” Her own office was unpretentious—drab, even—with a print of two winged cherubs playing the mandolin, a familiar image from greeting cards and valentines, hung crookedly on the desk behind her. The one high window was in need of washing. Obviously, business was conducted there, not marketing or showbiz. Men in aprons, jewelers one supposes, came and went through a doorway on the opposite wall. “What can I do for you?” asked Pat from the other side of her black leather desk, obviously a bit put out by my insistence on speaking to her or Murray. Heavyset, dressed all in black, and sporting a big emerald ring, she was both formidable and a bit refreshing. She did not try to impress.
I told her I had heard that Murray made reproductions of the starfish in the 1980s. “They’re not called reproductions,” she told me sternly, bristling at the term. “That’s David Webb. He reproduces,” she said, invoking a name I would hear again. “Look, everybody stole something from everybody in this business. It’s not rocket science. You create demand in this business … Jacques Bernard tried to do this with Boivin in the 1980s.” I was having to read between the lines there, but I deciphered later that she might have been telling me Murray made some of the starfish with the last director of Boivin, Jacques Bernard, in the 1980s.
“Murray doesn’t think he can help you. We’re just merchants,” she explained, suggesting that all this interest in the starfish and their dealers was a bit overheated, in her opinion. She explained that she had been in the business since 1978, and, “Yes, there were great designs, but the end result is to sell something. And there is not an emphasis on brooches today.” She told me she had diamond orchids, violets, lions, and starfish that she thinks are more delectable than the Boivin starfish. She unlocked and opened the safe next to her desk to show me a diamond orchid. But had she seen a starfish? I asked. She breezed along. “Millicent’s was beat-up. We made an offer. There was a broker, no dealing direct. That’s not the same. We all share clients in this business. Sometimes it takes six months to make an offer.” She told me that in the 1980s, Oscar Heyman kept Diana Vreeland’s Maltese cross Verdura bracelet in a safe for years before selling it, to illustrate how sometimes it takes a long period of time to find the right market for a vintage piece. It is an example of the phenomenon that Janet Zapata had explained to me, when “the upstairs money people” are jewelers with pockets so deep that they can afford to invest in six- or sometimes seven-figure pieces and hold on to them for a decade or longer while they appreciate in value.
Until that moment I did not know that the Rogers starfish had been shopped to Saling. “We all saw it,” she sniffed. “Sam wanted a hundred thousand extra.” I took this to mean that Sam Loxton at Lucas Rarities in London had shown it around to New York dealers with his markup before it sold to Lee Siegelson. Obviously, she had passed on the chance to buy it. I was reminded how small this world of New York jewelers is.
Hard-nosed and practical, Saling provided a good contrast to the dewier, more romantic notions about the starfish, though I suspect she is as enthusiastic and addicted to the business as almost every other dealer I have spoken with. “Nobody starts out to be in the jewelry business. We all just washed up on this shore,” she said. “It is a constant treasure hunt your whole life.” She was introduced to the business without the family connections that many jewelers have, she explained. She came from a family of social workers, but when she worked at an antiques show in Hackensack, New Jersey, her three-week stint at selling jewelry grew to five years. For a while she worked in a pawnshop “where a pass-through loan on gemstones was a dollar a point.” I didn’t understand it all, but I got the picture. When I investigated later, I learned that a carat, in describing a stone, is not a size but a weight measure. Each one-hundredth of it is a point. A ten-pointer’s pawn value was ten dollars. A carat was one hundred dollars, and so on. “There was a strict code of ethics. You were given handshakes and words, no contracts. My brother, a banker, was horrified,” she said, laughing. But she explained that “if you do not honor your word one time, there is no next time.” She went to work with Murray Mondschein for a month and ended up staying twenty-one years, mostly running the shop at Fred Leighton while he traveled eight months of the year, she told me. She vividly remembered when she was twenty-seven years old in the 1970s, being summoned at 5 A.M. by Imelda Marcos. “Mam would like to see some jewelry,” the caller from Imelda’s said, and Pat took some pieces to show her, accessing the security to the Marcos’s apartment and standing guard over her jewelry as the shoulder-high safe was opened. Marcos, wife of the president of the Philippines at the time, became infamous for her lavish spending. She owned twelve hundred pairs of shoes, but her jewelry collection, often compared to a royal family’s collection by the press, was also excessive.
The jewelry business is a calling, offered Pat. “It’s a journey, you grow into it.” She remembered the 1980s. “Back then it was about how to find the dollars to buy the jewelry. Now we have the money but there aren’t as many pieces left to buy,” she said, giving me a hint as to why the Boivin starfish have increased in value over the last twenty years. I asked her to explain the starfish’s value to me.
“You know when you hold the starfish what it is. There are no catches, is the first thing. It’s smooth. You have to turn it over and look at it. You can’t see this from a book because a picture isn’t three-dimensional. Boivin was a designer with a sense of design and good craftsmen. Cartier made junk.”
She was relaxing, a little less prickly. “We sold a couple of starfish in the eighties. I know I sold one in 1980.” She can’t be sure, she says, whether it was old or new. I was careful not to interrupt with too many questions. “Claudia Cohen’s must have been bought from us,” she said, mentioning the starfish that had belonged to the late New York celebrity and social journalist for Fox News who was married to billionaire Ron Perelman. “Now he’s a piece of work,” she added, in a rare aside about a client. She continued to tell me that in 2012 she sold a starfish made in the 1980s, one of “the later ones.” In spite of professing ignorance and having nothing to say about the starfish, she seemed quite a compendium of their New York sales history. Then as quickly as she had opened to me, like one of the jeweled flowers in her safe, she closed her petals and snapped shut. Our conversation about the starfish was over.
* * *
On the street, I allowed myself a moment of cynicism over the terminology jewelers used when someone made a piece that was just like a famous piece and quietly put it on the market, which is what I gathered Murray had done. Saling had admonished me for calling them “reproductions.” I gathered that “copy” was not an allowed term, either. So what was the permitted description? “Fake”? or maybe “ripoff”? The ethics of the business certainly got a little squishy when it came to dealing with new versions. They would remain “reproductions” to me.
* * *
I was back on Forty-eighth Street several months later. A museum curator friend of mine who once worked for Doyle, the family-owned auction and appraisal house in New York, suggested I speak with her former colleague Berj Zavian. Berj had risen to national fame in recent years appearing on the Antiques Roadshow television program as the silver-haired straight-talking appraiser. He was a bit gruff when I spoke with him on the phone but he agreed to meet with me in New York. It was a cold January day when I walked down Fifth Avenue from Fifty-seventh Street, past the big showy retail jewelry stores like Harry Winston, Van Cleef & Arpels, Tiffany & Co., and Cartier, all of them open to “foot traffic,” and crossed over to Forty-eighth Street on the west side. I marveled at how the world changes immensely in those nine blocks. Forty-eighth Street is in the diamond district, and the street was bustling with Orthodox Jews in long dark coats, ear muffs under their brimmed fedoras or Cossack hats that wintry morning. The entrance of the building where Cluster Jewelry, Berj’s business, is located had men in groups, mostly Hispanic, placing bets on card games on the sidewalk while they waited to load and unload the vans and armored cars at the curbs. Their breath rose like steam in the cold air as they rolled dollies stacked with boxes up ramps and over curbs. The lighting in the lobby was watery and the men who huddled in the elevator with me made no eye contact, especially the Hasidim, whose religious rules make them uneasy mingling with or talking to strange women. Most, I figured, were delivering jewels to the craftsmen on the floors above. The smell of Chinese food from the restaurant next door seemed to fill the pale green hallways. Everything felt secretive, dark, Middle Eastern. Cluster Jewelry, with its lathes and tools in the entry vestibule, was clearly a workshop. Berj’s daughter Robin sat at the stool behind the counter, stringing pearls. She wore an oversized orange Nike T-shirt. She had warned me to come promptly because she wanted to leave early to practice for the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show she would be performing in the following weekend.
When I arrived Berj had stepped out, but by the time I got my coat off and was ready to ask questions, he returned. I wasn’t certain it was him for a minute. He looked nothing like the sleek silver-haired man on Antiques Roadshow. This man was wearing sneakers and a soiled jeweler’s apron. He had a magnifying loupe on a string around his neck. His nails were long and yellow. He also ignored me. He went back into the shop and started to eat his lunch out of a Styrofoam box. I had to yell to make conversation with him. “Why should I talk to you?” he shouted. I told him again about the book I was writing. He asked if I had a gemology degree. I did not, I told him. He instructed me to go and get one and then come back to see him. I watched Robin carefully. Her eyelids did not flicker. Then he asked me if I would pay him ten percent of my earnings on the book. I didn’t think he was serious. I told him he might be surprised how little that would be. I decided to ignore this scattershot banter and keep asking questions. He answered me with curt yeses and nos. “Maybe I saw a starfish,” he conceded. Then I asked how he got into the jewelry business.
His father taught him, he explained. He had learned from his brother. Those siblings had been born in Baghdad. Berj’s father came to the United States when he was five years old and his older brother was eleven. This story was coming from a man who was talking at me but sitting at a workbench almost out of sight behind shelves, across the room. “Do you want rice?” Robin asked him, interrupting. He complained that his crown had fallen off a tooth and that his hip hurt. Then he swerved back into the subject. “Most jewelers can’t sit at the bench,” said Berj. “You learn about a piece at the bench.” I understood that he was talking about actually making jewelry and that he was proud of his prowess in the trade. I asked how long it would have taken to make a Boivin starfish. He didn’t hesitate to venture that it probably took two to three weeks.
He asked if I knew who David Webb was. I said I did not. “You don’t know who David Webb is?” he repeated, incredulous. David Webb had been a quintessential American jeweler on Fifty-seventh Street in New York for sixty-seven years. Jackie Kennedy, Diana Vreeland, Liz Taylor, the Duchess of Windsor all wore Webb creations that have often appeared in the pages of Vogue and other style magazines. Berj said that his father had sold gemstones to Webb. He explained that from 1936 to 1948 his father, who by then was a platinum dealer, got into the costume jewelry field and “made a fortune.” The Cluster Jewelry company repairs jewelry, some real, some reproductions, and does custom work for clients today. By this time Berj had come forward to speak to me from across the counter. I hoped I was making progress. He said he had seventy-two rings in the jewelry case between us. When he pulled out a selection to show me I reached out to touch one. “Don’t touch,” he said, looking up at me under bushy white brows. I imagined that I had broken some part of jewelry-world protocol, touching the objects uninvited, which reminded me how special the invitation at Verdura to hold a starfish had been. I withdrew my hand and apologized.
I asked again if he had ever seen a starfish. “I might of,” he said. He said he knew Joan Crawford had had one. She did not as far as I knew, but I did not correct him. Perhaps he confused her with Claudette Colbert. He told me that Doris Day had been known for keeping the clothes and jewelry that she wore in her movie roles. He told me how Tiffany had gotten into the jewelry business. When he was a manufacturer of paper and then glass shades, Louis Comfort Tiffany learned that Empress Eugénie in Paris was selling off her possessions in Europe. Tiffany went to buy from her with $5 million he acquired from a backer. When he came back and showed his Fourteenth Street financial partner the jewelry he had, his partner said, “We’re not in the jewelry business.” So Louis got his financing from friends and the rest of Tiffany & Co.’s successful growth story is history.
I asked Berj if he knew Lee Siegelson. “His dad was a gangster,” he said matter-of-factly. I had heard that the late elder Siegelson had been a tough-minded diamond merchant. Berj had his opinions of everyone. When I first called him he had suggested Susan Abeles, the director of U.S. jewelry at Bonhams in New York. He said she was someone who knew jewelry history and with whom I should speak. Trying to steer the conversation back to the starfish, I mentioned Abeles. “I taught her. I picked her out of the silver department,” he told me with evident pride.
* * *
I knew that Berj knew a lot about jewelry history, even though at the moment he was playing the part of a simple jewelry maker at his bench. But he couldn’t help himself. I felt like we were having more of a boxing match than a conversation. One moment he would feign ignorance and humility. The next his wealth of knowledge would take over. He told me he had spent thirty-seven years working in auction houses. He was an expert on South American amethysts. The Boivin starfish have amethysts, I interjected, but he said he didn’t know anything about those. He also said he knew a lot about Ceylon rubies. I mentioned that the starfish had Burmese rubies. He shrugged. “Women used to wear these pieces on fur coats when they went for lunch at Lindy’s,” he said. “They hung their coats on hooks at the door.” The carefree, careless image of well-dressed women flinging furs with big jeweled brooches onto hooks by a doorway without worrying that they would be stolen lingers in my mind. It was truly a simpler time to be a rich woman.
It seemed Berj didn’t have much more to add about the starfish. I put on my coat to leave. Neither he nor Robin said good-bye when I hollered my thanks and said I’d be in touch. I left past the OXYGEN IN USE sign in the hallway. A pile of cardbord boxes was being loaded onto dollies downstairs next to the messengers’ chained bikes. There were signs of industry, not style, everywhere I turned. The contrast with Tiffany & Co., Cartier, Harry Winston, and Van Cleef & Arpels a few blocks uptown was daunting at first, yet I was beginning to understand that gemstones and shared history were links in the glittering chain that bound these two worlds like a pair of sisters. One was posh and glamorous, the other more humble, but they shared the same roots and trafficked in the same wares. They could also disorient the public when they switched costumes and roles.
I believed that Berj, while ornery and difficult with me, had been honest. I don’t think he knew much about the Boivin starfish, though I guessed he had seen one or two go past when he worked for auction houses. Few dealers could resist telling that they had admired the piece if they had seen it for themselves. I bundled up and readied to walk across the Fifth Avenue line to see James Givenchy. Yes, I thought, I should have known who David Webb was.
* * *
I had begun to notice that James Givenchy and his salon, Taffin, were frequently mentioned among young jewelers and in jewelry blogs. A woman I knew in Paris, who knew all the old players in the French and American business, told me she would “kill to meet James Givenchy.” So I decided to call him.
The Taffin salon on Fifty-fourth Street off Fifth Avenue came as a surprise. Located on the fourth floor of a contemporary brick-and-glass building, it is not open to street trade. The sleek, well-lit showroom with a view onto the buildings across the street smacked of modernity and style. James’s ornate French provincial desk sat across from a seating area for clients with a coral linen couch flanked by low shiny black tables arranged on a sisal rug. The mood was warm and sophisticated. James’s refreshingly open personality and Taffin’s cozy sophistication were a welcome contrast to my morning at Cluster.
Fair-haired and in his early fifties, Givenchy seemed downright boyish, wearing chinos and a zip-neck sweater. His casual appearance and perfect manners were disarmingly French to me, though he is a totally Americanized designer. “Jewelry is much more than the pieces it is made of. Part of its appeal is the people who have worn it before,” he observed, giving credence to the notion that had inspired my interest in the Boivin starfish to begin with. He volunteered to help me. He was hopeful that Simon Teakle, a former head of jewelry for Christie’s in New York, would know something of the starfish.
I phoned Simon Teakle the same day. The Simon Teakle Fine Jewelry store in Greenwich, Connecticut, known for estate and vintage collectibles, is open to the public without appointment. Its dapper owner, a former British gemologist, embodies the jeweler who is always on the prowl for the rare and beautiful. He had a reputation for the spring and energy of the hunter. He was extraordinarily responsive when I called and mentioned that James Givenchy had given me his name. “Yes, yes.” He told me he had seen a Boivin starfish. He had sold one at Christie’s auction house probably fifteen years ago. Finally, a bit of evidence, defining a trail. The 1996 sale that he spoke of began to ring a bell. I had seen the record of a sale in that year in Lotfinder, the online locator records from Christie’s. At last I was starting to be able to make some connections between the sales histories dealers spoke of and a few owners who had come forward to speak with me.
* * *
Auction houses, especially Christie’s, provide the best record of jewelry sales. Catalogues and online services such as Lotfinder are available to the public and are generally counted on to guarantee authenticity of the pieces that are offered for sale. Yet I was soon to learn that advertisement and the public record do not mean that it is any easier to find out where a piece of jewelry that is for sale came from or who bought it after the sale. The auction world operates with a more stylized version of the opacity I had encountered from dealers. It specializes in faux transparency.
* * *
It was another winter morning when I went to visit Daphne Lingon, a senior vice president and jewelry specialist at Christie’s in New York City. Several dealers spoke highly of her and suggested that I consult with her about the starfish. She had, during her nineteen years at Christie’s, organized auctions for Rockefeller heirs, Lauren Bacall, and the record-breaking sale of Liz Taylor’s jewelry. I gathered when I telephoned Daphne to explain myself and make an appointment that she was dubious about speaking with me. When I called to confirm our date, she reminded me that she did not expect to discuss any of the general things we had talked about before. I was forewarned that she had a bit of an attitude. I would be careful to not waste her time with general questions about the jewelry business or the starfish.
* * *
When I arrived at Christie’s in Rockefeller Center, I was escorted from the reception to the tightly secured jewelry business floors. Daphne’s assistant guided me down the muted corridors to her office, but because other business was being conducted there, Daphne asked me to follow her to a plain uncluttered cubicle down the hall. A pale-skinned dark brunette, she had a plush lavender cashmere pashmina tied loosely around her neck. She wore high heels. The long wild hair, the heels, and her feminine clothes added up to a softly pretty presence, but the studious black-framed glasses that she wore lent her a strictly business air. We started cordially.
* * *
I knew that the machinations that move a piece of fine jewelry like the starfish from a family who has held it for years to the current marketplace, like Christie’s, are simple and typically begin humbly. Families don’t want to attract attention and they usually start the process of selling tentatively, to test the waters. Ward Landrigan had told me that clients had walked into Verdura carrying a dozen fine heirloom pieces in a paper bag. He recalled two sisters from Philadelphia who brought him fifteen pieces of jewelry that way on the train to New York. “Cloth-coat types,” he remembered. Another client who had carried her jewelry in a paper bag had gone shopping at Pratesi and left the bag on the floor. Ward had helped her recover it.
Daphne had similar tales to tell. “People can just walk in with jewelry,” she said, and shared the story of a woman who dropped in to Christie’s from her morning jog with a seventeen-carat diamond bracelet that she had been meaning to get an estimate on. “She just didn’t know its worth,” she explained. A $1.5 million Kashmir sapphire came through the door with an unsuspecting owner not too long before. Pieces, even rare fine pieces, often make their way to auctions or estate dealers without a lot of fanfare. Old family pieces come up after any of the three ds: debt, divorce, death. Often the owners, and sometimes the dealers, don’t know the real value of the jewelry until it is sold. What she didn’t mention, and I was yet to learn, was that reproduction jewelry, whatever you want to call it, typically enters the market through auctions. Auctioneers, like dealers, are punctilious about not revealing where items for sale come from, and sometimes the history or catalogue copy about them is vague.
Daphne elaborated on the rarity of a Boivin starfish. “There are not so many things in the jewelry market that there are so few of. If you want a five- or ten-carat diamond, they are readily available,” she said. “But there are very few starfish and a collector must wait until one comes up for sale.” There is no way to know when that might be. Did she think there were more than three? I asked. She gave me an unknowing shrug. But significantly, she volunteered what I was just learning. “Not all of them are old. Maybe a handful are recirculated, reconsigned. You ask yourself, ‘was that the one?’” This had the same effect on me as Russell Zelenetz’s comment that there could be five starfish. It made me queasy.
Daphne directed me to Christie’s Web site and said that the record of sales on Lotfinder and Artfacts were the best she could do to help me discover the history of a piece. Surely there was someone in-house who could remember the 2006 and 2008 sales whom I could speak to? I asked. I saw my query move across her expressive face. I imagined that she would like to help me and I got the impression that she knew who this person would be, but it was against policy to tell or help. She is disciplined. She was sorry, she said. I asked her to consider letting me speak with someone else. How can it be so sensitive to discuss wonderful pieces of jewelry that were made seventy-five years ago and sold ten, fifteen, and twenty years ago? I prodded her. The corner of her mouth twitched and she looked down. She was either amused or thought I was an idiot. Maybe both.
She reminded me that like dealers, auction houses do not reveal their consignors or buyers. For a brief moment I also saw a trace of conflict, that she would like to help. She said that she would speak with someone else in the department on my behalf; she was not hopeful. But there was one thing she could do to help me, she said coolly.
I could write a letter, a to-whom-it-may-concern variety, that explained my purpose and the book I was writing about the Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish brooches. Christie’s would, from its records, forward it along to the parties who have bought the starfish over the years. But that would be the end of it. Either the buyers decided to respond to me on their own or they did not. I could not know their names or follow up with them directly. Christie’s would not lobby on my behalf. It was one shot in the dark. Of course, I agreed.
I knew that this effort might not amount to much, but I was delighted to leave Christie’s offices with something hopeful, finally. I almost, but not quite, bounded out into the snowy day like a happy puppy.