by Cherie Burns
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Colbert and her two husbands had no children, but she was nonetheless a woman who observed family ties and loyalites. When separated from her first husband, she lived with her mother for seven years, and she stayed connected with her niece, Coco Lewis, throughout her life. Lewis, a Realtor in Fremont, California, told me that an appreciation for jewelry ran in the family. Her father, Claudette’s brother, admired jewelry enough to lavish it on his six wives, including her mother. Lewis grew up appreciating quality pieces and knew that Claudette had a fine collection, including a brooch by Tiffany that she saw later in a public exhibit. But she says she never saw the starfish.
In Claudette Colbert’s later life, when her acting career had cooled and she was widowed by her second husband, she moved at the center of an energetic private life that increasingly came to rely on a woman twenty-seven years her junior, Helen O’Hagan. O’Hagan, single and also childless, had been a marketing executive at Saks Fifth Avenue and worked with designers who created some of Colbert’s clothes on- and off-screen. Claudette befriended O’Hagan and took her under her wing. Colbert, it was well known among her close friends like socialite Leonora Hornblow and Nancy Reagan, did not like being alone. She was an actress to the core and needed, if not an audience, at least a listener. Whether it was her long-term maid Marie Corbin from Barbados, or Helen, she wanted someone to live with her and thought nothing of waking them at night when she came in if she simply wanted to recap her evening or talk. O’Hagan was invited to move into Claudette’s last Fifth Avenue apartment and learned about her, her habits, and her jewelry collection. I hoped that Helen O’Hagan, who had then outlived Colbert by almost twenty years, would know about Claudette’s starfish.
It was a somewhat clouded story.
Since Claudette’s death in 1996, O’Hagan has been the keeper of her flame. Helen blends into the army of trim-trousered and well-heeled women of a certain age on Manhattan’s East Side. Behind her big red-framed glasses, she listened attentively to me outline my quest. She seemed to be trying to place the starfish.
She was executor of Claudette’s $3.5 million estate and also largely her heir, a role that Claudette’s community of friends and distant family did not begrudge her, since she had pretty singlehandedly taken care of the aging actress following a stroke the last six years of her life. Helen says that it was she who had a safe built into their apartment for Claudette’s valuables. Until then, Claudette had preferred keeping her jewelry collection in the safe-deposit box at the Chase bank branch on the corner nearby her Fifth Avenue apartment. There was also a safe in the actress’s Barbados home, a two-hundred-acre plantation estate where she spent most of her time during her later years. In New York, when Claudette planned to go out wearing a piece of her fine jewelry, she sent their maid, Marie, to get it out of her safe-deposit box and carry it home. She was also known for being careless, misplacing pieces or losing track of them. So Helen suggested the safe.
O’Hagan continues to live in the coral-walled apartment that looks down into Central Park. It is kept as something of a shrine to Claudette with newspaper clippings about the actress in open stationery boxes and unfinished scrapbooks scattered around. Unhung artwork stood against the walls, but Claudette’s Oscar has its perch on a corner cabinet shelf. Filled with its pinks and chintzes, the apartment feels wholly feminine, cluttered, and just beginning to slip out of its resident’s control. When I visited, Helen was gracious and charming.
She explained Claudette’s insouciance toward her belongings of value. “She didn’t designate where anything should go when she died,” O’Hagan said, and while some cash went to her maid of forty years, Marie, Helen says that she auctioned Claudette’s personal items of value, like jewelry, through Christie’s auction house in California after her death. She seemed genuinely intrigued by my quest and promised to look determinedly through some of her boxes of photographs to see if Claudette was ever photographed with the starfish. She also referred me to several close friends and neighbors of Claudette’s who might have seen her wear it.
Without seeming to recognize or remember a ruby and amethyst starfish brooch, Helen made several guesses as to what happened to it. Claudette, it seems, was so famously careless with her jewelry that she often impulsively gave a piece away, Helen explained. A persistent note of kindness and generosity runs through most accounts of Claudette’s relationships. Still, it was difficult to imagine that she would have given away the starfish. Claudette was quite astute about the value of things and auctioneers had mentioned that she had sometimes removed the stones from settings that she put up for sale. But perhaps anything is possible with rich women and jewelry.
There had been thefts. As Helen racked her brain to remember incidents of theft or loss during the years she spent with Claudette, she ran over certain possibilities. There had been a robbery of Claudette’s room in Rome during a trip to visit Wanda Ferragamo of the shoemaking dynasty. Helen had been traveling with her and stayed in the room across the hall when jewelry that Claudette had left out disappeared while she was sleeping. Helen says it was assumed that someone had entered through a door that opened to the balcony. The same memory led her to recall that Claudette had been friendly with the composer Cole Porter. He and his wife Linda Lee were well-known jewelry collectors and aficionados, especially of Verdura. Linda commissioned a jeweled cigarette case for each of her husband’s musicals that opened on Broadway. Helen thinks it likely that the Porters introduced Claudette to Boivin in the 1930s, which would explain how she made her way to the salon on the Avenue de l’Opéra and purchased the brooch in the first place. But the details of the starfish’s disappearance from her life are less certain.
Her best guess is that Claudette lost the piece with a bag of jewelry in the 1950s in Paris. “It was in the airport or train station,” Helen recalled being told. Her relationship with Claudette began several decades later, but Claudette had talked about losing the bag and its contents. Helen rambled back to the story she had heard. It was a blue Pan American carry-on bag, a staple of fashionable transatlantic travelers in the fifties and sixties, that Claudette had left on a seat in a waiting room or train station.
By this point in my search for the starfish I had learned that it is not unusual for heirs or housekeepers to spirit away valuable pieces of jewelry that disappear from public sight. But Helen just didn’t seem the type. There was no reason to believe she was someone who would steal from her mistress. Claudette had cared and provided for her almost like a daughter, and I believed her story. The starfish didn’t seem to register with Helen when I showed her a photo of it. She didn’t remember it. If she was faking, she was an actress to rival Claudette. However, if the starfish had been lost or given away before they met, she could not have seen it. She did remember some pieces of Claudette’s jewelry, like a diamond pin that Claudette’s friend, the collector of Asian art Bob Ellsworth, bought when it came up for sale at auction after the actress’s death. Helen simply didn’t seem to know about the starfish. She only remembered that Claudette sometimes mourned the jewelry that she had lost in that Pan Am bag. With her penchant for drama, the actress had wrung her hands over her foolishness and blamed herself for the loss, but she didn’t itemize its contents during her lament. And Helen’s account, recited to me several times over a year or so, varied slightly. Sometimes the bag was left in the Paris train station, sometimes the airport. It seemed clear that she was trying to help, but she just didn’t know.
Few of Claudette’s coterie of close friends are alive today, but two former neighbors and associates, Bob and Helen Bernstein, still live in New York. The Bernsteins are parents of a friend and contemporary of mine, Peter Bernstein, who put me in touch with them. They seemed slightly amused that I was investigating an old piece of Claudette’s jewelry. Helen Bernstein recalled little beyond Claudette’s understated taste in clothes and that she maintained her fabulous figure. During those days, the late fifties and sixties, Claudette is remembered for
smart but plain dressing and certainly not for any ostentatious jewelry, a category that certainly includes Boivin starfish. Neither Bernstein ever saw her wear a ruby and amethyst starfish brooch.
The other friend in this triumvirate of neighbors on East Sixty-fourth Street who had known Claudette Colbert was Bob Ellsworth, a legendary collector of Asian art in New York. He once had a gallery on East Fifty-sixth Street, and when Claudette traveled between Hollywood and Barbados she often stayed with him before she purchased her own apartment or when it was rented out.
It was freezing cold the day I went to see Robert Hatfield Ellsworth in his wonderfully elegant twenty-room Fifth Avenue apartment in New York. His staff and caretaker had told me he was in fragile health and I was expecting to find a much frailer eighty-eight-year-old man than the one who awaited me when his son ushered me into his study. Ellsworth was wearing a leather vest and a gold-striped shirt with cuff links when he rose to meet me. His impeccably appointed drawing room was brightly lit through five draped windows, two looking into Central Park below. Buddhas, Japanese paintings, and other South Asian artifacts were displayed on the mantel of the fireplace and throughout the room. I was heartened that this man, considered among the biggest collectors of Asian art in the world, and clearly an aesthete, might remember his friend Claudette’s jewelry. I walked across a beautiful rug with a dragon motif woven into its pastel center in front of a glowing fire in the fireplace to sit across from him at his green morocco leather-topped desk by the window. A brass statue of a griffon held a small supply of silk-cut cigarettes. He lit one.
I noticed that several framed photos in the room contained photographs of Claudette. He had met Claudette, he said, when he worked as an appraiser of Chinese antiques and Claudette was his neighbor on East Sixty-fourth, the same building where the Bernsteins had stayed. His account of her was the same as I had heard before. She was charming, natural, a wonderful friend, and always a lady. When I showed him a life-sized photograph of the ruby and amethyst starfish, he paused for a second and took it in. “I would have thrown it in the fireplace,” if he’d seen it, he said dismissively. It was too big and gaudy for him. And that was the end of that.
I had to accept that Claudette’s starfish brooch, like its prototype that lives under the sea, had silently slipped out of sight.
Yet Bob Bernstein had given me an insight into Claudette. She had an indulgent nature. Claudette did not live entirely in Peter Pan collars sporting small pieces of jewelry. She could be extravagant, a detail that Bob learned from Claudette’s husband Jack, when Claudette had rented a house in the south of France one summer. Bob Bernstein, on the thrifty side, asked why Claudette needed that house when she already had places in Barbados and New York. “Bob,” explained Jack good-naturedly. “You obviously have no experience with movie stars. Claudette wants to buy shoes in Paris. If she has a house in the south of France she can go to Paris for shoes.”
Claudette was clearly a woman with the moxie and money to buy herself a ruby and amethyst starfish brooch the size of her hand for no greater reason than liking it. She did not have to account for herself to anyone. I could imagine Claudette, her fabulous legs crossed at the ankles, sitting with perfect posture, perhaps wearing the toffee-colored Travis Banton skirt suit and lush brown mink coat she had worn at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on Oscar night, poised before Jeanne Boivin at the sweeping counter in the shimmering Paris salon and deciding, with her newfound fame and at the peak of her power, to buy the starfish. It must have been a marvelous high. What is harder to understand is how no one remembers her wearing it, selling it, or owning it. Yet its original purchase by her is recounted in nearly every sale of the brooch since and is widely accepted as fact.
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When Claudette bought her ruby and amethyst starfish brooch it was unusual for women to buy their own jewelry. Few made enough money on their own to purchase such an extravagant piece. Jewelry was invariably a gift given to women by men, yet another reason for so much secrecy in the business. Men often gave jewelry to women besides their wives, a point that Ward Landrigan at Verdura pointed out to me when he explained why most jewelry houses had two entrances in case a wife and a mistress happened to be there at the same time, God forbid, one with the husband. At least one party could escape unobserved. For a rich man with a formal mistress, jewelry was a commodity and a way to transfer wealth unnoticed.
It took a certain degree of confidence and determination to bring off wearing a Boivin starfish. But Claudette Colbert and the glamorous heiress Millicent Rogers, who bought the second, had a bounty of both. Both made their own fashion rules and statements. Before 1930 appropriate jewelry for women had been rather tightly dictated by fashion convention. There were lots of guidelines. Small pieces dominated, especially as American culture experienced the Great Depression. Lavish jewels were worn onscreen in Hollywood to give audiences a lift and a vicarious thrill, but offscreen, dainty and discreet were the prevailing principles governing jewelry fashion for women. Costume jewelry had not come into vogue yet. However, the starfish and a few other pieces that were coming out of Paris at the time began to point jewelry trends for fashionable, rich women in a different direction. Coco Chanel, in league with Fulco di Verdura, was sporting big Maltese cuff bracelets. Other trendsetters, such as Mona Bismarck, Mrs. Harrison Williams, and wealthy women on the best-dressed lists of the day, were wearing big rings, bracelets, necklaces, and brooches and buying them for themselves. The movie star Joan Crawford bought herself a diamond and platinum bracelet. These women were like American princesses and typically bought their own fine jewelry, a practice that would be copied in the 1970s by working women when they altered the dynamic by buying their own, less extravagant pieces.
By the 1930s, word among the stylish international set was, “Everyone goes to Belperron or Boivin.” Daisy Fellowes, Josephine Baker, and Lady Diana Cooper were already clients. When Claudette walked in she was looking for something special. Her everyday look was generally a strand of pearls at her throat and diamond earrings, but she wanted something different. Something bold. Helen O’Hagan can imagine the appeal of the starfish because Claudette was partial always to maritime motifs. Even in her house in Barbardos, some years later, she had starfish sink faucets and dolphin fixtures on the tub.
In the mid-thirties, articulated pieces were also catching on, if not the rage. Belperron had created butterflies with wings that could move on hinges. Her designs in the late twenties, while she was still working at Boivin, were hailed as “bold and barbaric” by Vogue. By 1933 the fashion magazine’s editors wrote of the revival of “big jewels,” and by 1934 sea motifs, shells, and other creatures were cropping up in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar (March 1934) and Vogue. This drift to finely articulated naturalism wasn’t wholly due to whims of taste and style, but also to metallurgy, especially the appearance of platinum, which gave jewelers a metal with more strength to work with. Of course, the starfish are eighteen-karat yellow gold and the pairing of yellow gold with colored stones was based on trend as much as practicality. Goldsmithing was being constantly refined. Working with real gold allowed pieces to be crafted by hand without the excess involved in using the lost-wax casting method that would take hold in the 1950s. Fabricators discussed their progress with designers sometimes daily, eliminating missteps and extra costs. Boivin tapped thirty workers in Paris who were considered the best in the city and the best paid.
Stone setting and polishing had also evolved. Diana Vreeland, Elsa Schiaparelli, and the trendsetting Daisy Fellowes, heiress to the Singer sewing machine empire, all had Boivin pieces by 1938. They were massive and personal. “If you have but one jewel, do have a colossal one,” trumpeted Vogue in its July 15 issue in 1933. The starfish could only have been a purchase for a buyer of means, yet it appeared as an “it” accessory in a 1937 edition of Vogue. “René Boivin turns out a bit of realism in ruby-studded gold. He made the star-shaped clip amazingly lifelike and flexible so that it moves rath
er appallingly when it’s touched,” wrote Harper’s Bazaar ten months later.
In some ways Millicent’s jewelry tastes and the shopping habits that pointed her to the Boivin salon mirrored Claudette Colbert’s in the 1930s. These were independent-minded, glamorous women with the money to indulge themselves and liked jewelry to mirror their verve and good looks. I hoped that the path of Millicent’s starfish out of Paris would be easier to follow than Colbert’s seeming dead end. It was also a puzzle to me how various versions—subtly different—of such a wonderful design were produced in that magical French atelier, acquired by glamorous buyers, and then scattered or disappeared, their uniqueness to be undermined by copies. Colbert’s had mysteriously vanished, and what had become of the third? I had to seek people who knew the game, but were not, at least to my knowledge, current players.
Chapter Twelve
French jewelry design history and business practices have evolved ever since Napoleon I determined to make France the epicenter of luxury goods and style for the Western world. I sought out a reputable, seasoned French jeweler in New York to help me understand. André Chervin of Carvin French Jewelers on Madison Avenue, I hoped, would sort out questions about the conditions under which Boivin would have made several copies of the same piece, the landmark starfish brooch.
In his unembellished office behind a series of white security doors, Chervin, unpretentious in a short-sleeved dress shirt, strove to be as generous and helpful as possible to me in my quest to understand Boivin. He had been in the jewelry business for seventy years, he told me with an amused twinkle and a smile. He asked me about my story and the progress I had made so far. “People in the jewelry business can be petty, I think,” he said in his soft French accent when he heard that some jewelers were reluctant to discuss the pieces. He was dubious that people tell the truth. “These are not state secrets. They are industry secrets,” he said, gently mocking the attitudes of the jewelry trade. He once had a Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish in his salon that was brought to him for repair but he says he could not accept it. “It was too … Perhaps it had been dropped.” He shrugged, but he remembered its striking beauty. People always remember its beauty.
