Diving for Starfish

by Cherie Burns

  The time was ripe for Claudette Colbert when she arrived at Boivin, eager for something different. One can imagine her, a movie star known for her impeccable makeup, turned out in one of her favorite classic Travis Banton suits, sitting across from Madame Boivin and Juliette Moutard as they discussed the starfish, much the way stylists do for runway models today. Juliette and Madame didn’t fawn over people, but they conspired to make bold creations that would appeal to their bold clientele. The relationship between a woman and her jeweler, who made custom designs to adorn the face and figure seated before her, was a highly luxurious and intimate involvement that created a rarefied bond between the two. It was not merely a financial transaction. The attention-getting Boivin starfish, with its cutting-edge design and miraculously hinged joints that allowed it to conform to the profile of the wearer, was more personalized and intimate yet. This was not just a pin to be stuck onto a collar or neckline. It almost grasped (not groped) its wearer. A woman didn’t pin on a Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish without making a commitment to wearing it.

  Chapter Six

  I expected that immersing myself in the world of jewelry dealers, the people who are driven by the financial side of the business, would dispel any romantic expectations I had about jewelry, but I discovered exactly the opposite. The people who worked in the jewelry trade were the most romantic people I had ever met. Sure, money drove many of them, but if you can believe what they tell you, they love their work. I remembered Ward Landrigan telling me how the jewelry business seduced him as a boy in his hometown of Springfield, New Jersey. In order to earn his badge and sash in the Boy Scouts he was required to get a Social Security card and working papers. He was hired by a local jeweler to work in the store after school and holidays. What intrigued him was watching women shoppers put on jewelry and look at themselves in the mirror. “They would purse their lips.” He still remembers how magical it seemed to him. “I was awestruck by jewelry,” he confided. The effect that jewelry had on people was what drew him into the business. “That and that you can hold it in your hand and it’s beautiful,” he added. Every jeweler I met but one spoke of jewelry’s tangible gratification. The pieces, the glittering prizes, seemed to soothe and hypnotize them.

  * * *

  It was a rainy summer day when I stopped by the Stephen Russell jewelry salon on Madison Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street in New York. I was on the Upper East Side on other business when I looked across the street and noticed the store that I had planned to visit later. I decided to stop in and get out of the rain. I must have walked past the awninged salon on the corner dozens of times when I lived in New York, but I never took real notice of it. When Lee Siegelson mentioned to me that Stephen Russell had been his partner in owning one of the starfish, I assumed Stephen Russell was one man, but the name is an amalgam of Stephen Feuerman and Russell Zelenetz, business partners. Lee had also told me that at least one of the three Boivin starfish had passed through Stephen Russell in recent years.

  Even the small storefront entrance had two glass doors to get inside. A doorman built like a prize fighter whose biceps and back muscles bulged through his well-tailored suit let me in after I buzzed. When I asked if the owners were available he hit a buzzer and wordlessly summoned a salesperson from down in the basement, where the business offices are located. I took a seat in front of a little French provincial desk at the back of the salon in a small alcove. A deep blue and gold brocade curtain was draped to one side and held by a gold tassel behind the desk. I looked around the Art Deco–inspired interior as I waited. Russell Zelenetz, dark-haired and smooth-shaven, burst up the stairs in a crisply ironed purple-striped shirt. His eyes were brown and warm as coffee beans. His smile was wide. I watched his expansiveness contract almost perceptibly and his guard rise when I explained that I was not a shopper, but a writer, looking for information about the Boivin starfish. When I mentioned Lee Siegelson, he softened a little. There was no one in the salon except the two of us and I figured maybe he would talk with me just to bide time until the rain stopped and more people would be on the street. Sure, he said, he had time to talk. And yes, he added somewhat proudly, he had seen three ruby and amethyst starfish. Eureka, I thought. I had come in just to test the waters and was surprised to learn that this little jewel box of a jewelry house would have had such exposure to the starfish. My astonishment must have shown because Russell explained to me that Stephen Russell, in contrast to Verdura, which is a gallery retailer, and Siegelson, who is a trader, manages collections and sells from its storefront to the public. These distinctions matter in the jewelry business. It should have come as no surprise that Stephen Russell would partner on certain acquisitions and sales with Lee Siegelson. Siegelson, whose pockets were deep, would acquire a piece of jewelry and then move it on to a dealer like Stephen Russell who had relationships with private clients. Still, I was impressed that Stephen Russell had experience with all three starfish.

  Then he asked me a question. “Why do you say there were three of them?” I explained that was what I had learned from the histories on auction sheets and it was the prevailing knowledge about the starfish. What did he think? I asked. “More like five,” he said. I was startled again. I began to ask lots of questions. It seemed that a few starfish had been made in the 1980s, some even bearing the Boivin name, but they were larger than the original and somewhat easy to identify as later models. I picked my words carefully. Evidence of additional starfish made me uneasy. Just how many were there? Who had made them? There was a pause when I asked him for a count. There might have been a fourth made in Paris in the 1930s, he said, and then, haltingly, he added there had been some made in the 1980s. I had heard this rumor, and further, had heard that Murray Mondschein might have been involved. Mondschein, a cabdriver’s son from the Bronx who sold Mexican arts and crafts, had transformed himself into Fred Leighton, one of Madison Avenue’s finest names in jewelry, a dominant personality in the field. I took a leap. Was Mondschein involved? I asked. Yes, said Zelenetz lightly, moving on to add that he had seen a “later starfish,” but “I didn’t like it.” He was telling me, in short, that Stephen Russell only trafficked in originals, but he tiptoed delicately around this mention of Murray.

  I was concerned that these later starfish would cloud the matter and skew my reporting if they could not be distinguished from the originals. I wondered if the workmanship and design were as wonderful as the one I had seen. The idea that there might be an assembly line in the Bronx, Paris, or anywhere else stamping out copies horrified me. Would they dilute the treasure pool I was exploring? Russell shrugged. Murray, a legend in the New York jewelry business but reportedly now retired, was the uncle of his partner, Feuerman, I would soon learn.

  We glanced off the subject, and I was somewhat reassured that while there might be five starfish moving around, the three that were my quarry were the originals. The possibility that there were more posed nagging questions and could make the job of identifying them more difficult. Five starfish in the world still weren’t very many, Russell added, reassuringly. They were still rare, and the later ones were distinguishable from the originals, he said. That seemed to get talk of any troublesome reproductions out of the way for the moment.

  I could see that the more questions I asked the more frustrated Russell became. We were limited by our roles: I wanted the kind of information that it was part of his job to withhold. We circled our subject. I sensed he often knew the answers to what I was asking but he wasn’t telling me, especially about who owned the starfish now. “The worst thing that can happen in this business is to reveal a buyer. Everything is confidential,” he explained. He added that it was rare to know the lineage of a single piece of jewelry. Jewelers are more concerned with authenticity. Is a piece of jewelry what the seller says it is, made by the designer the seller claims and containing the stones the seller says it does? Beyond that, dealers don’t care a lot about a piece of jewelry’s history of ownership, unless it has been held by someone famous, whic
h would increase its perceived value. Of course, the Boivin starfish, and a few other pieces such as the Van Cleef tutti-frutti bracelets, attracted well-known and often glamorous buyers whose names become associated with the designs when they are talked about, but it is rare to know the exact provenance and complete lineage of a single piece through the decades. If I didn’t know already, I was beginning to understand how difficult the goal I had set myself was going to be. I would be able to learn where starfish had been and who some of the owners of them had been over time, but I might never be able to draw a straight line and know exactly which starfish had belonged to whom. This was not going to be a straightforward reporting job, I knew already.

  I asked Russell to talk to me about what he could. We exchanged awkward conspiratorial smiles. He had first seen a Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish brooch in 2006. He had seen another in 2008, and he had recently seen one that had gone to a private collector. I figured that was the one that had belonged to Millicent Rogers that Lee Siegelson had recently bought or sold, the one he had been chasing when he invited me to his office salon to meet him and was advertising to his clients when I saw him several months later in Palm Beach. But I might have been a step behind.

  Russell was far more forthcoming when talking about the joys of being in the jewelry business. “It’s a passion,” he said brightening. “You can’t think of it strictly as a business.” Stephen Russell had been in business almost twenty years, having moved to its East Side location from the Trump Tower address downtown in 2008. When a young woman in jeans arrived at the front door our conversation stalled. She was soon joined by an older woman, presumably her mother, and the two of them got down to the serious business of looking at vintage diamond earrings with Russell’s partner, Stephen Feuerman. He is an open-faced sandy-haired man with a vague resemblance to Albert Finney. When he was listening he cocked his head in a way that reminded me of a Welsh terrier I once owned. When the shoppers left, both men grew easier. They wanted to talk about themselves and how they got into the jewelry business. Both were students of fine art and design. They spoke emotionally about their feelings for certain fine pieces they’ve handled. In one instance a necklace was sold, but the buyer postponed collecting it. Eventually he changed his mind and decided not to buy it. “We were so relieved because we liked being near it,” Russell admitted. Stephen agreed. Eventually the necklace sold to someone else, someone the two men felt better about having it. If someone had come into our conversation late and not known the subject, he or she might have thought we were talking about a dog rather than a piece of jewelry. Russell and Stephen told me they felt the same way about an Alexander Calder necklace that Stephen said he felt real affection for. “I was happier when it was still here.” He shrugged. Their enthusiasm for jewelry extends to their private time, as well. They both said that when they were on vacation they scouted for jewelry. During a recent air travel delay Russell was stranded in Dallas. He called ahead to Stephen to tell him he would be returning late to New York. “What are you going to do with yourself while you’re there?” Stephen asked. Russell told him he was heading into the city to look around at jewelry.

  I had to ask what it was about the starfish that had attracted them. There were pieces of jewelry worth more money. Designs that were easier to sell. “The first time I saw it I just loved it. Always,” said Russell, like a true lover. It was the starfish’s beauty that had impressed him and has caused him to pursue them whenever one has been in reach. He was the closest I would come to meeting a starfish hunter, one who went out of his way to track down and buy a starfish. Indeed, as I became able to draw a trail for the starfish, three of them would pass through Stephen Russell. Russell unapologetically explained that devotion such as his is subjective. “Jewelry is almost like art. If you don’t like it, it doesn’t matter what it’s worth,” he declared with that jeweler’s hubris I would come to love and distrust.

  * * *

  When I left Stephen Russell I knew Murray Mondschein was going to be an important presence in my quest. I can’t recall who first mentioned him to me, though I was quick to learn that “Murray” is spoken of like a godfather in the jewelry world. Neither do I remember how I learned that Fred Leighton and Murray Mondschein are synonymous. Everyone assumes that everyone else already knows. Murray is one of the most important jewelers in the world. Now eighty-two, he has been on the jewelry scene since the 1970s. When I asked Ward Landrigan at Verdura when he had first seen or become conscious of the Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish brooches, he paused to think back. “The first time I saw it was at Murray’s.” That was back in the 1980s when Ward worked at Christie’s. “I thought, my God, that’s fabulous,” Ward remembered. “There was just something about it,” he recalled. It was the red and purple color combination, unusual in his opinion, that made a lasting impression.

  Chapter Seven

  The starfishs’ value, I had heard over and over again, rested not in the value of their gemstones, but in their design. I wanted to know what had inspired them. In a sense, I was asking how starfish are born, and I wished the question had been as easy to answer as learning about starfish in the ocean.

  My quest would draw me back to Jeanne Boivin and the ways that she had guided her jewelry house in new directions after her husband’s death. She hung on to the master jewelers who kept Boivin’s quality high, but the designs that flourished under her direction were different from the Cubist and geometric styles that were popularized during the Art Deco rage. These designs were softer, figurative, and feminine. Like her brother, who had rejected corsets for women’s styles, she chafed against bourgeois “good taste,” which she considered to be stultifying and uninspired.1 Rather, Jeanne sought styles in jewelry that were figurative and suited to women, their fluid body movements, and their clothes. Much of the jewelry of the time more closely resembled military insignia. Boivin’s was informed by a new philosophy that embraced sumptuousness and exotic forms. It was not surprising that wealthy trendsetters like Louise de Vilmorin, who was considered the most stylish woman in Paris in the twenties and thirties, European royalty, American movie stars, and stylish American heiresses had all climbed the stairs to the Boivin atelier. De Vilmorin came with her handbag brimming with francs but always stashed one bank note back into her bag as she left. She explained it would be her reason for returning to visit with her friend Jeanne.2 Business and society strode side by side in the jewelry business at the time. The world of rich and fashionable clients was relatively small by today’s global standards, and word traveled fast about Jeanne Boivin’s distinctively chic new designs and the pleasure of basking in the glow of her charming jewelry salon.

  Inspiration for design is more difficult to assign. It was assumed that René Boivin incorporated flowers into his jewelry designs because he was an avid gardener—and the flowers showed up in his sketchbooks. Jeanne Boivin took long walks along the coast of Brittany that put her in mind of seashells, pebbles, branches, and other bits of nature along the shore. Whatever sparked it, a fresh naturalist influence began to creep into Boivin designs. Shells and sea creatures were often cast in gold. Madame Boivin asked her designers for seashells, and one young new designer in particular heeded her call.

  The progression of the Boivin look and style owes a great deal to a young designer whom Jeanne Boivin hired in 1925. Suzanne Belperron started as a salesgirl but would go on to great design fame, as a recent retrospective of her designs at Christie’s in 2012 attests. Jeanne began to teach her the tools of the trade and Belperron’s real talent soon emerged. Though she is often referred to as a former sales clerk because that was her entry-level job at Boivin, in fact, Belperron had already studied design when she took the position. She moved quickly out of sales and into the workshop, where she made her way into the pantheon of great jewelry designers of the twentieth century. The five years that she spent at Boivin seemed to solidify the house’s reputation as a bastion of innovative women designers. The jewelry they made derived its
primary value from original design and excellent craftsmanship rather than simply the quality and worth of the gemstones. This would become a distinguishing characteristic of Boivin jewelry and ultimately a way of knowing its creator, especially since Jeanne Boivin and Suzanne Belperron did not sign or otherwise mark their jewelry. They stubbornly believed that the eminent design, at least its distinctive character, was evidence enough of who had made the pieces that came out of the salon. It hardly came as a surprise that when Suzanne Belperron’s work began to embody her own personal style, these two strong-minded women would conflict. According to a former employee of Boivin, both were obstinate and strong-willed, and in 1930, Belperron left Boivin.

  The concern, as in most jewelry business ruptures, was that the younger designer would also take clients and designs with her. The matter of creative ownership plagues jewelers. Jeanne would continue to think that Belperron’s talent was a hybrid of their collaboration, though Belperron and her followers see her as an original genius. The different point of view still sparks quarrels in the jewelry community.

  In trying to assign provenance to the Boivin starfish, Suzanne Belperron is often suggested. There are several starfish in her sketchbook. They are chubbier and smaller overall than the ruby and amethyst starfish, and in the drawings, at least, they have little curls at the ends of all the arms, whereas an identifying feature of the Boivin starfish is that two rays of each starfish are flipped at their ends. There seems to be no question that while Belperron was employed at Boivin, her employer, Jeanne, requested seashell and other maritime designs. It is also easy to assume that all fine Boivin design during her tenure and shortly thereafter was inspired by Belperron because her archives are accessible and Olivier Baroin, a French jeweler and archivist who has digitized them, is a champion of her work. As recently as 2012, Cathy Horyn wrote in The New York Times that “her designs are so singular—bold, playful, anti-ornamental—that they tend to strip away one’s assumptions about jewelry in the latter half of the 20th century, if not in the period before World War II.” She was undoubtedly a star.