by Cherie Burns
She had first seen a starfish in 2007 with Lee Siegelson, whose acquisitions she often researched, she said.1 She believed Claudette Colbert’s was the first one made by Boivin in Paris. Then Millicent’s was the second. Lee had also owned the third. “Jewelry gets stuck in vaults,” she explained. Dealers wait patiently for certain pieces to make an appearance on the market. The characteristic that distinguished the starfish for her, among the many pieces of jewelry that she has studied and observed, was simple. “These pieces move. They are not stationary. They are big and their design came up through the Art Deco period. In the thirties there was a figural change that they were part of,” she said, offering her grounded understanding of the starfish’s appeal. “Jewelry became an art form in that period.” She added that the later ones, those extra two or three that were made in the eighties and nineties, “they were the same design but stiffer.” One that came up for sale at Christie’s that had belonged to the designer Oscar de la Renta was a “later one.” She told me that if I saw one I would know the difference. It was more than just a matter of size, even though the newer ones were a few centimeters bigger than the originals. I must have looked dubious. “You’ll just know,” she assured me.
I could see that unlike the dealers I had spoken with so far, Janet’s attachment to the pieces we were discussing was much more objective. She did not have the passionate personal connection to the pieces or get the same buzz from having them around her that the dealers did. She mentioned how she had watched dealers, especially the men, fall in love with jewelry. “They love their work. Unlike all the other decorative arts, you touch and wear jewelry. It becomes part of you. You can hold it and carry it. There is no big box.” She went a step further, hypothesizing that the attachment men have to jewelry often substitutes for extramarital intrigue. “Men in the jewelry world don’t cheat. They relate to women differently. As experts. The jewelry is what is always there the next day for them,” she said. “You can put it in your pocket and touch it. That is what is so special.” And the chase never ends.
When I asked for her overview of the jewelry business in general, she was quick to answer. “Everyone has a secret. The jewelry business is very secretive, what they have and who they know. To be a dealer, you have to have a lot, a lot of money. They control it. They buy and sell jewelry every day, and because of the money, it is very secretive.” She explained that every shop was somewhat in hostage to “the money people,” either partners, lenders, or banks. “The dealers in those stores own a percentage but not usually all,” she said. There were “upstairs jewelers,” like Siegelson and Verdura and “money people,” in the parlance of the industry. I assumed that Siegelson, because of what I had heard about the fortune he had inherited from his father’s diamond business, fit both models.
She told me a little self-deprecating story when we talked about the kind of women who wear Boivin starfish brooches. “They usually have vast wealth and are women who are self-assured and out at all events. As you grow into your personality, your jewelry gets bigger. All have important jewelry. Other people just get more diamonds, which is not the same thing as a starfish. It takes a sophisticated someone who has an eye to go into this. The average person wouldn’t want to buy a starfish or understand it. It’s too threatening.” Where did she fit into this? I asked her. Again she laughed. When she worked at Tiffany, she said, her employer had called her in at one point and said that she was a “little jewelry” person. The big pieces, like the starfish, were not her own style.
I told Janet that I would soon need to go to Paris and London to delve further into the starfish history. She mentioned several people whom I should speak with. I could see the wheels turning in her mind. “Tell them you talked to Janet and perhaps they can help you figure out the puzzle.” That was what attracted her to this line of work. The puzzle.
* * *
I had heard that Audrey Friedman, a principal with Primavera Gallery in Chelsea, was an expert on Boivin. When I e-mailed her we agreed to meet at the fine art and jewelry show at the Park Avenue Armory, where Primavera had a booth. As I approached the Primavera booth, I knew that the woman with jet-black hair, dark lipstick, and white skin as smooth as porcelain with a large Alexander Calder pin on her black dress had to be Audrey Friedman. There was something very ladylike and old-world about her on one hand and modern and savvy on the other. Phlegmatic now, after forty years Audrey knows her business from both sales experience and tireless research. She writes about and lectures on French jewelry from the 1930s and 1940s. “One of the reasons for the superior workmanship of French jewelry was the apprenticeship system, whereby a person would begin to learn his trade at age fourteen. This gave rise to a class of jeweler who was skilled in all aspects of jewelry work to a degree almost unknown today, and it is one of the things that made French jewelry so special,” she told me. It was the design and craftsmanship that attracted her. The Primavera Web site boldly asserts, “We are not interested in large diamonds or masses of precious stones—this, for us, is geology rather than jewelry. We are interested in great style, exciting design, and integrity of workmanship.” Design, not rocks.
She lamented the end of the days when “you could find Boivin and other pieces from this period because other dealers didn’t know what they were. Nobody was paying attention.” But Boivin has been in demand again recently, she reported. And Boivin pieces are harder to find. “The dealers are gone. There used to be ten dealers on Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris,” she said. Now there are perhaps two. The starfish appeal, in her opinion, to the same people who wanted them in the 1940s. “Sophisticated women with money. Their appeal is visual and feminine.”
The business of buying jewelry like the Boivin starfish has always been based, in her experience, on one criterion. “Does the piece make your heart beat faster?” She said that she had been caught by this herself. A woman dealer can more easily flaunt her wares by wearing them. A Boivin bracelet, the Alexander Calder pin she wore when I met her at the Armory show, and other favorite pieces have become part of her private collection. “My heart often beats fast, that’s when I have to have it.” She laughed. “If I wanted pieces that we acquired, I kept them. It has always been about the piece for me.” She added regretfully, “Unfortunately, it becomes about the money. It is so expensive these days that you have to sell them.” But the sale, even of an expensive piece that makes a profit, can generate a sense of loss. “I miss knowing I have it,” she said, smiling. I heard the echo of Russell Zelenetz and Stephen Feuerman telling me they liked having the necklace around that the buyer didn’t claim. “When you have them you connect with the spirit of the maker. Like listening to music,” she added. Abiding affection for what they do seemed to distinguish and unite jewelers as a class. Most will tell you that they can’t imagine doing anything else, or like Audrey, they tried other professions and gave them up.
We were sitting in the Primavera gallery in Chelsea late in the afternoon while the winter sun went down over the Hudson River out the window. The lights in the Art Deco lamps on display around the gallery came up and threw their warm glow around us. She and her husband and business partner, Haim Manishevitz, who had sat quietly in the back while Audrey and I talked, joined in to tell me the story of a male client who bought jewelry for his wife. “In one case we suspected that when the wife of the man who bought a piece was away he put it on and walked around the house.” Audrey chuckled.
Chapter Nine
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 myste
ries 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 journalis
t 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.
