Diving for Starfish

by Cherie Burns

  She said Arturo had given the starfish brooch to her for their first wedding anniversary. “I opened the box and it was the pin. ‘Where’d you get this?’” she recalled asking gleefully. Her voice still had a girlish bounce to it. “He told me it was his mother’s.”

  She had kept it in the vault of their New York apartment that had also been his mother’s. “I loved the starfish. My daughter didn’t like it and Paullie didn’t like it,” she said, referring to her stepdaughter, Lorian, and Arturo’s younger brother, Paul. She lit up when recounting the occasions when she wore it. “I walked into À La Vieille Russie with it. I was wearing a beige tweed suit with the pin. I loved it,” she enthused. She recalled wearing it one night on a cruise ship. Cole Porter, who was with his wife, Linda, asked, “Is that real?” One can hear her charming them, her lilting voice explaining that of course it was real.

  She figures that she wore it two or three dozen times in the forty-seven years that she had it, but she said there are downsides to owning jewelry of its kind, big and highly valued. “You can be robbed or hit on the head,” she said, laughing a little, and I understood why so many people I had met in Taos liked Jackie and had remembered having good times in her company. “But you can’t wear jewelry like it much anymore. It is too big. There is no denying what it is. That’s why it sat in the vault for years and years.” Ever since the day when she rode her horse through property that Clark Gable and Millicent Rogers were interested in buying, Jackie has been a horse fancier. She owned a dozen racehorses and said that it was a string of losses at the track that forced her to sell the starfish. “I needed the money for stud fees. Racehorses are so expensive! The boarding and training.” She rolled her eyes sheepishly, admitting her folly. A stud fee can run $65,000, she complained.

  “I was never a jewelry lover, to tell you the truth,” she observed, explaining her frankness in confessing that she had few qualms about parting with pieces in general, but as for the starfish, she said, “I loved it. It was the last thing I let go.”

  Abruptly, she asked if I would object to her having a cigarette and then quickly asked me not to tell Arturo that she was smoking. I tried to keep a straight face since the house already smelled of smoke and I doubted Arturo would know the difference. She suddenly procured a pack of Misty, slender, thin menthols. It may have been my question about who she sold the starfish to and why that made her want a cigarette. “He was the biggest crook!” she said, her eyes sharp and alert from a jolt of adrenaline or the nicotine. “I feel so stupid!” The “he” she was referring to, she explained, was Henry Baker.

  This was a name I had heard before from Lee Siegelson. When I first asked Lee, before I was into the starfish’s saga with both feet, how he had acquired the Rogers starfish, he quickly ran through the story for me. “A guy” who worked for another jeweler, Oscar Heyman, on Madison Avenue, near Siegelson at 589 Fifth Avenue, made the rounds with the starfish to show to jewelers. Who was this guy? I asked. His name was Henry Baker and he worked for Heyman, one of the finest manufacturers of fine jewelry in the United States today. Lee said he had sold a starfish in the 1990s and Henry Baker probably knew that. I wondered how such a person carried the starfish to shop it around. “He just brought it in in his pocket. It’s no big deal,” Lee explained. He would soon, I learned later, pay three hundred thousand dollars for the starfish to a London dealer who had backed Henry Baker’s purchase of it.

  Listening to Jackie, I flashed back to my first visit with Siegelson, when he was looking for the granddaughter who had been instrumental in the sale of Jackie’s starfish. I had never spoken to her, but Jackie was now filling in the blanks.

  Her stepdaughter, Lorian Buckley, Arturo’s daughter from his first marriage, is an art historian who has friends in the jewelry business in Connecticut. When she heard that Jackie wanted to sell some of her jewelry to cover expenses for her horses, Lorian made the connection with an old friend who dabbled in jewelry and was also a friend of Henry Baker’s.

  Numbers are not things that any of these people, sellers, dealers, or buyers want to talk about, but I gathered that about $140,000 was paid for three pieces of jewelry that Henry purchased out of the Ramos’s safe. They were the starfish, the hippocamp that the teenaged Jackie had seen Millicent Rogers wearing when she was caught pulling up the surveyor’s stakes in Encino, and a starburst pin. Their sales would later tally more than a million dollars. Jackie fumed over the thought that Henry had made a killing. “Oh, someone comes and sits and talks to you and you buy their phoniness and the lies,” she said, knocking the horse magazine near her feet off the bed. “I loved it and it was the last thing I let go. I am so ashamed,” she said. But she quickly justified the sale, explaining that she did it for her horses. “They are my children!”

  Buckley shared her own magical memory of the starfish. When she was eight years old it belonged to her mother, Dusty, Arturo’s first wife. “I remember Mother’s dressing table and that there was this thing sitting on a red leather jewelry box and seeing that it was bigger than my hand and the most amazing thing to look at. I’ll remember it for a hundred years!” she said excitedly. “It and the hippocamp,” she said, referring to the half-horse, half-sea-monster creation, also by Juliette Moutard. Millicent’s hippocamp was a golden seahorse in an emerald-lined scallop shell serving as Poseidon’s chariot. A saltwater pearl dangled from a ruby bow. In fact, the history of the hippocamp, perhaps inspired by the mythical sea creatures in the Trevi fountain, is more complex and fantastic than the starfish, but it is a hard piece of jewelry to like, let alone wear. If it is difficult for contemporary women, even some of the present-day owners like Susan Rotenstreich, to wear the starfish because of its size and the large statement it makes, try pinning the hippocamp to a lapel. (Of course, Millicent Rogers had pulled it off with aplomb, as the teenaged Jackie had witnessed for herself.) Cluttered instead of classic, it pales next to the starfish, yet both are believed to have been ordered by Rogers at the same time. Both pieces now claim a seminal place in jewelry history.

  For Lorian Buckley, the appeal of the starfish was more personal and primordial. “It was red and it was an animal. And starfish are such neat creatures anyhow. I was fascinated with this one made of rubies sitting in my lap.” She vividly remembered playing with it before her mother wore it out the same night. Though Millicent’s starfish was not as fully articulated as the other two made by Boivin, its rays had some range of movement so it would conform slightly to the contour of the wearer’s body. The joints are visible from the back, and Lorian said, “The intricacy of the spiderwebbing on the back is the first thing you see when you turn it over.” She saw her mother wearing it on an evening dress on several occasions but cannot remember the dress, just the starfish. As an adult, she more eloquently summarized its appeal. “The starfish is a very tactile thing and the tendrils underneath are part of it. It appealed to both senses. On one hand it looks like the sea. And looking at how it is made was also fascinating.”

  When her parents divorced the starfish went with her father and eventually to Jackie, his last wife. Lorian remembered seeing Jackie wearing it with a big black hat. The starfish was “big and wonderful. Not a flimsy little thing.” She suspects that it was the strong impression of the starfish on her beautiful stepmother that contributed to her lack of interest in owning it later.

  So when Jackie asked, “Would it crush you if I sold it?” Lorian readily deferred to her stepmother. “It was her piece, not mine, and horses are the true love in her life.” She understood that the proceeds from the starfish would go toward Jackie’s racehorses. Lorian also believed that she could help her to sell the jewelry. She did not want to carry it herself in a pocket up and down Fifth Avenue to jewelry dealers. “I’d be hysterical.” So she went to a friend, someone whose opinion she trusted in a world that she considered to be “a slimy business.” The friend mentioned Henry Baker.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I caught Henry Baker on his cell phone b
etween Palm Beach and Dallas. He proudly told me that his employer, Oscar Heyman jewelers, had been in the jewelry business for 101 years and had made the most important jewelry in America. Heyman designed diamonds for Elizabeth Taylor and his pieces figured largely in the Marjorie Merriweather estate.

  Then Baker told me how he happened to get hold of Millicent Rogers’s Boivin starfish. “It was a fluke.” He ran through it briskly. There had been about twenty-five pieces of jewelry in the Ramos safe, he said. Some of them had belonged to Millicent. “Some were junk,” he recalled, and then he had sorted out the starfish. “These pins are difficult to sell,” he said. And to make matters worse in his calculation, Millicent Rogers is known “but she wasn’t Liz Taylor.” He said that the starfish was hard to find a buyer for in New York after he acquired it. “I dragged it all around New York,” he boasted joylessly. On his first cursory rounds of touting it to jewelers, the offers were “like twenty thousand,” he said. Peanuts. Chump change in the vintage jewelry business. So, he put the starfish in his pocket and took it to Europe. “Boivin and Paul Flato are common things over there, the way that Tiffany and Cartier are here,” he explained.

  * * *

  I could tell already that Henry had a more matter-of-fact approach to jewelry than anyone I had spoken with so far. “It’s a financial affair,” he said flatly. I heard the dismissive shrug in his deep voice with a Texas twang. He sounded quite different from the other jewelers I had spoken to so far. It was the first time that I had heard the brooch called merely “a pin” by a jeweler. The dealers invariably called it a brooch. “Brooch,” while dated, sounds somehow stately and more substantive. He led me quickly through the course that the starfish followed. “I sold it to a dealer in London who wanted the blood of Millicent Rogers as proof it was hers,” he said. I assumed this was Sam Loxton, who in his own words had told me he “put it on ice for six months” while he strategized about how to best advertise and show the piece. He commissioned Claudine Seroussi to research and write about it. He took it to a jewelry show in Miami to show to Lee Siegelson. Then, as best Henry recalls, the starfish changed hands twice in the United States over the next few weeks, which suggests that it went to Stephen Russell before Lee Siegelson bought it. Lee suggested to me there had been a partnership between him and Stephen Russell. He was vague. “We’ve worked on a few together,” Lee had said, waving his hand nonchalantly. All of these were fairly fast handoffs except for the period it was kept by Siegelson as he positioned and featured the brooch as he is apt to do when he hopes to create interest in a valuable piece.

  “Everyone was laughing when Lee bought it. He paid six fortunes for it,” said Henry, who was nonetheless a bit admiring of how Lee’s money enabled him to do such things. It was not urgent that he turn around and sell it immediately to recoup his purchase price. At the time we spoke, Henry did not know the piece had sold again, perhaps for those ten fortunes. And he was not inured to the piece’s beauty. “The starfish looks like a starfish in its depths. I really liked them very much,” he conceded, but dispassionately added, “It wasn’t as finely made as you’d think. Boivin was a great Paris manufacturer, but it was a tiny shop. And after the war it got failing and sloppy. It was what it was.” We did not discuss that Millicent’s starfish was made before World War II. He made his point that even the great French jewelry houses were fallible and diminished with time. And as I was about to learn, they licensed “later” models of some of their best pieces to be reproduced by inferior manufacturing. Reproductions with pedigree.

  Henry, who has worked in jewelry for forty years, came from a different point of origin than most jewelers. His background was finance. “My approach is different. For me it’s only about the money. I don’t want a hippo or a starfish.” It was easy to like his forthright manner. He did not seem the villain that he had become in Jackie Ramos’s book since she realized what her starfish was worth. And it was clear to me that he had not followed in great detail the sales history of the pieces after they left his hands. He was not romantic, and the starfish—perhaps no jewelry would—had not cast a spell over him. “Younger groups want something different. If Boivin had seven hundred pieces, I’d guess twenty percent of them are broken and gone. They get rarer and rarer every year.” I could hear the ca-ching of the cash register in his head. The phenomenon is good for sales interest. “There is all this new wealth in the world, but the style [a brooch] is not attractive. A starfish pin without a diamond in it. No flash,” he concluded. When I pressed him for his personal reaction, he deflected the question. “For me it’s an investment. It’s nothing I’d grab, for certain.” He rattled off some trends in the jewelry business, which interested him more for their financial indicators than specific pieces did. He kept his eye on the bottom line. When we hung up I thought that he was the straightest shooter I had spoken with in the jewelry business so far.

  * * *

  The last thing Henry Baker told me was how quickly jewelry like the Boivin starfish could change hands once it hit the market. Typically, he explained, when he went to London he would appear with a piece of jewelry in the Burlington Arcade, where a half-dozen top jewelry stores are located. He might sell a piece in the morning and learn that by the time he awakened the following day it had changed hands more than half a dozen times again and at a substantial price jump each time. That was how fast some pieces of jewelry could move. This was news to me. I didn’t know it worked that way. He told me I should go to London, where he had taken Millicent’s starfish, and he rattled off the names of a handful of jewelers whom I should speak with. And then he offered me something few other jewelers had proffered. “Use my name,” he said. I would.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Until I spoke with Henry Baker, London had not figured into my notion of places where the Boivin starfish had traveled, but when he told me about setting out early in the morning with a “twenty- or forty-thousand-dollar ring” to sell, and learning the day after he’d sold it that it had exchanged hands another three times, each with a hefty price bump, my interest went way up. I was discovering that jewelry at this level is truly an international commodity, traveling casually across oceans as easily as walking down a block on Fifth Avenue. There was no reason to believe that the starfish I sought were there, but plenty of evidence that they had been seen by the jewelers who worked there. My quest was turning into a gradual accumulation of hints and reports of sightings, like the logs of birdwatchers who glimpsed a rare species flying into a thicket. Baker also mentioned several London jewelers who had taken an interest in Boivin and the starfish in particular. Baker rattled off a number of jewelry-store names like Hancocks, and SJ Phillips, “the biggest jeweler in the world,” he explained. They weren’t familiar to me. London sounded like a bustling jewelry market, and when I went there I was not disappointed.

  Martin Travis, a jeweler with a background in auctions, was at the top of my list. He ran Symbolic & Chase on Bond Street. Symbolic & Chase knows a good deal about Boivin. Martin told me that he had seen two ruby and amethyst Boivin starfish, but that he had never owned one. He saw his first one for sale at Christie’s in Paris and then a second, which he believed was a “later” one, inflexible (which I took to mean unarticulated) in Palm Beach at the IAAF exposition in 2006, the same show I had attended years later when Lee Siegelson showed me a pair of Boivin starfish earrings and was announcing he would soon be selling Millicent Rogers’s starfish brooch. That was the same year that a starfish formerly owned by Oscar de la Renta, a “later one,” came up for sale at Christie’s. At the time I contacted Travis, Symbolic & Chase had a diamond starfish for sale on its Web site. The diamond version lacked zing. Cupped in a yellow gold setting that held it like a slipper or cell phone cover, it no longer looked alive. I was reminded of what Lee Siegelson had told me when I had asked him if the wealthy new Asian market showed an interest in vintage jewelry. His answer was no. He explained that he couldn’t sell an Asian woman a Millicent Rogers starfish. The Asian mark
et had no cultural reference for it, the way there would be for a Chanel suit or other well-known brands. “Jewelry establishes the sense of style … the added sense of taste,” Lee explained. Diamonds and big stones were more highly esteemed in Asia.

  * * *

  Henry Baker had made the rounds with the Rogers starfish, shopping it to the Burlington Arcade jewelry merchants and others before he struck gold with Sam Loxton at Lucas Rarities. London, as I was about to learn, was flush with new money, and luxury goods, jewelry among them, were selling briskly in 2014.

  * * *

  Vivienne Becker, the noted British jewelry historian, had spoken to me about the enduring appeal of the Boivin starfish, and she had written in one of her columns for the Financial Times about the emergence of a new generation of dealers who were moving antique and period jewelry, like the Boivin starfish, beyond dusty specialty shops and into a more modern arena. Her articles and comments had given me a preview of the London jewelry scene that I was about to see for myself.

  Sam Loxton at Lucas Rarities personified this new generation of young jewelers. I had first met the forty-three-year-old manager of Lucas Rarities in New York City, when he was there on one of his frequent business trips. His relative youth, smooth cheeks, hip goatee, and tapered trousers spoke not only of his Englishness, but also of this emerging cohort. His specialty is Art Deco jewelry from its beginning in the 1920s to the 1970s. Lucas Rarities, nestled into an upstairs salon over Brown’s restaurant in Mayfair just off Bond Street, specializes in rare period jewelry and objets d’art. His generation of London dealers has moved “upstairs,” as almost all the small quality shops have. Trained as an auctioneer for Christie’s, Sam now runs the London base for the Munich jewelry and gem merchant Ernst Färber. As a London jewelry insider explained to me, “Sam would not have had the money to buy the starfish, but with Dominik Biehler at Färber behind him, he could do it.” What he did then boosted the value of the starfish, reflecting the trend in selling vintage jewelry today. He bought the starfish and while he strategized over the campaign he planned to mount to advertise and romanticize it, he put it “on ice.” During the interim he researched the provenance of the piece, the history of the era it was created in, and self-published a handsome booklet full of glossy photos and abbreviated but well-researched text about the starfish and the splendors of other Boivin pieces. This was the dealer that Henry Baker was referring to when he mentioned someone who “wanted the blood of Millicent Rogers” as verification of the provenance of the piece. His goal was to create interest and excitement about the piece. In this starfish’s case, attaching the mystique of its former owner, the glamorous Millicent Rogers, to it lent both credence and class and—the purpose of it all—added value.