by Cherie Burns
In contrast to New York jewelry stores and salons, Lucas Rarities in London feels cozy. I climbed the narrow gray-carpeted stairs with a well-polished wooden banister to reach the second floor. It was both modern and homey, a bit like an art studio with its tin ceilings and beige carpeting. A pillow upholstered brightly with a Union Jack had been tossed on the couch for a splash of color.
On his own turf Sam sported jeans and seemed more harried than he had been when we met over breakfast at the Sherry-Netherland in New York several months earlier, partly, I assumed, because of the recent birth of a third child in his family and the upcoming Masterpieces London jewelry show he was preparing for in London. He was a busy guy, and he seemed a little impatient with a second round of questions about the starfish. Rather than give details about how he came by it he spoke in generalities. “It is a very expensive, very important piece,” he said. He had wanted it for a show he had been mounting, Art Antiques London, three years earlier. “No one else in London had one except for me,” he told me proudly. Landing a starfish in the trade was clearly an achievement to put a notch on your belt. It was also clear from my former conversation with him that he, like almost everyone who comes in true contact with the starfish, had fallen in love with it. “The scale is wonderful and the movement makes you feel like it could crawl up your arm. The workmanship is extraordinary. It was my favorite,” he said, repeating a refrain that I heard again and again both from women who wore the piece and men who for only a brief moment in time possessed it.
It was Sam, enterprising and quick on his feet, who offered Millicent’s starfish to Nico Landrigan when he was visiting in New York and learned of the upcoming launch party for my biography of her at Verdura. He knew the Verdura guest and client list would expose the piece to the New York market he sought. “The piece caused a huge sensation,” he claims, though that is hard to quantify. What it did do was eventually help attract one dealer who was not at the party, Lee Siegelson. Sam, like most jewelers who have handled a starfish, spoke somewhat reverently of it even after it had passed out of his hands.
Sam treaded carefully while telling his story of finding the starfish, ever protective of the client and his network of providers, but he said he first saw it when Henry Baker showed it to him. Henry offered the piece and Rogers’s Boivin hippocamp brooch to Sam, presenting them for him to look at on a tabletop. Sam was bewitched with the starfish and started researching it immediately with his researcher, Claudine Seroussi, who would find her way to me some months later. “I knew it was Boivin and I knew it was rare. I had to buy it,” he said with a smile. But before he committed he asked for it to be delivered to him in London where Dominik Biehler could have a look at it. The two of them decided to buy both it and the hippocamp.
As he had explained to me earlier, he kept the piece off the market to position it and build interest, bringing it out first to display at the Art Antiques London show in 2012.
While Sam and Dominik were bewitched by the starfish, its beauty and history, it was in fact the rather awkward hippocamp that was assigned a great surprise value. The little gray pearl that dangles from the bow at the bottom of the merhorse, it turned out, was extremely valuable. A half million dollars was the estimate I heard.
I stuck to the trail the starfish had followed. Although Jonathan Norton at SJ Phillips had said in his messages to me via e-mail that he didn’t know anything about the Boivin starfish, I decided to pay a visit to him and his landmark store on New Bond Street. (It has since moved.) Henry Baker had been adamant that I should go there. SJ Phillips is one of the oldest family-owned antiques and jewelry dealers. He specializes in silver and estate jewelry. It had a far more venerable feeling than the Lucas Rarities aerie and was a place where you could buy a silver snuffbox or a diamond necklace. I was ushered through the long front showroom full of sparkling silver serving sets in glass cases to the back room where Jonathan sat to receive me. Impeccably dressed in a suit and tie, with shaven jowls and a florid complexion, he was the picture of British self-assuredness and jocular civility. He invited me to have a seat at his leather desk, while his brother Nicolas, taller and trimmer in a tawny summer tweed suit with his glasses dangling on a chain around his neck, looked down on us. I could see Jonathan was amused by the premise of my story. In fact, I felt that both he and Nicolas were somewhat entertained by my arrival. Jonathan declared that he had never seen a Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish and if he had, well, “I’d melt it down. It’s not my kind of thing.” For good measure he added that he’d never been a fan of Lalique, the French glass and jewelry designer from the same era, either. We spoke for a moment about the preference of rich Americans for diamonds today. “A bit sad, isn’t it,” tut-tutted Jonathan. He told me that he was well acquainted with Ward Landrigan from the time when Ward worked for Sotheby’s and Jonathan had tried to teach him cricket. He raised his eyebrows with a jolly little laugh as he recalled those days. We were getting nowhere. He made it quite clear that SJ Phillips truly had no experience with the Boivin starfish. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, having a bit of the girl from Indiana in me, to meet a dealer with SJ Phillips at a Christie’s auction in New York eight months later who told me he had sold several Boivin starfish.
* * *
Geoffrey Munn was a name that Janet Zapata in New York had given me. She liked Munn and thought he was good at “puzzling out things” about jewelry. He worked for Wartski, the jewelers who handle the original Fabergé jewelry. Geoffrey Munn is a noted jewelry historian and gifted at articulating his views on jewelry topics with authority and simplicity. He gave me a brief summary of fine jewelry history.
In the 1900s when there was no entertainment or cinemas, he explained, there were hunts, and horseracing and the theater for fun among people with money. They dressed to the highest for dances and balls and “jewelry is the highest form of dress. It is always the essence of what else is going on. A distillation,” he added. “It is a covert language full of secrets,” he said. No kidding.
I walked through the Burlington Arcade, an elegant covered shopping area behind Bond Street that was created for luxury goods in the mid-nineteenth century and stretches from Piccadilly to Burlington Gardens. For fun, at every jewelry shop I stopped to ask if they had a Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish. I thought of Henry Baker coming here with a hot item to peddle in his pocket and making the rounds.
Just down the road on Piccadilly is Bentley & Skinner, another fine British jeweler with an august history. Founded in 1881 to supply jewels to the royal family, it has since been appointed as jeweler to the queen and the Prince of Wales. I am not certain what this truly means except that the crests of her majesty and the prince adorn the catalogue and publicity materials. I was met by the store’s handsome and forthcoming deputy manager, Alessandro Borruso, a Sicilian. “The market is completely changed by the Internet. It is now specialty markets,” he explained to me, mentioning that Bentley & Skinner’s business was once based on warrants from the queen and the Prince of Wales. They also handled Lalique and Fabergé, and now, he boasted, they supplied the gems for the modern artist Damien Hirst’s diamond-studded skull and a silver mirror. Just eight years ago, he told me, he was a geologist in Italy. After seeing a jewelry show he made the transition to gemology and a new career that brought him to England.
The history of Bentley & Skinner did not include Boivin, so I prepared to make my exit when Alessandro excitedly waved to his sales staff to bring the black leather box open to the diamond tiara that Lady Mary wore for her wedding in the Downton Abbey television series to his desk. He is rightly proud of the delicate sprays of diamonds that make it so extraordinary. Try it on, he suggested. The assistant with the white gloves who handles the piece was already coming my way. I relented. I let him snap my photo on my cell phone. It didn’t make me look like Lady Mary, but it was a beautiful tiara. He pressed a small catalogue with a gold spine into my hands as I left, and I was totally amazed when I opened it back at my hote
l to find that it opens not with a classic introduction about the venerable business with royal patronage but an entirely unrelated five-page story by Somerset Maugham entitled “Mr. Know-All” that tells the story of a pearl merchant who uncovers the infidelity of the wife of a fellow passenger on a transatlantic ocean liner. The jewelry business, as if I didn’t already know, is not like other businesses.
* * *
The memory of the Rogers starfish was not completely cold among other jewelers in London. There was the hint of a trail; something unmentioned, but the cause of a little throat-clearing, had eased its way from inside Henry Baker’s pocket and flitted across the desks and viewing stations of half a dozen London jewelry salons before it stopped with Sam Loxton. Stephen Burton, the principal at Hancocks, told me later when I met with him in New York that he had seen the starfish when it came through.
Martin Travis at Symbolic & Chase suggested I visit with a jeweler I had never heard of, Peter Edwards. Edwards was known for carrying Boivin pieces, and I was learning that people in the jewelry business seldom made an idle suggestion.
Visiting the Peter Edwards shop was more like paying a visit to a private home than a store. The ground-floor entrance on Conduit Street is below a discreet black-and-white sign and required ringing the doorbell. Rather than a liveried security guard waiting to let me in, Peter Edwards himself came to the door. It was covered with wrought-iron grillwork that at the hour I arrived made an interesting dappled shadow on the plush pearly gray carpet inside. Edwards looked the part of the aesthete he is, a lovely mannequin of a man, angular, smooth gray-blond hair just so, soft loafers, dark slacks, and a white silk shirt tailored and pressed to fall perfectly from the collar. Low lighting contributed to the muted mood. Small showcase boxes hung sparingly at eye level on the walls under large black-and-white glamour photos of models and famous faces wearing jewelry by the seven designers whose works were Edwards’s specialty. Edwards offered me a chair across from his desk and then took his seat behind it, crossing his ankles.
He had seen a Boivin starfish, he recalled, about fifteen years ago that he thought he had heard sold for about sixty thousand British pounds. A later one sold for well over a hundred thousand in the 1990s. He thought he had seen it at the Paris Biennale.
He said that he had had a few clients come in over the years looking for a Boivin starfish, and then three years ago some women shoppers came in somewhat atwitter over one that they had seen on a woman at a luncheon in the West End. He fought for a moment to remember whose it was. “That American multibillionaire who bought a big house on Eaton Square.” Then it came to him. Howard Marks. Howard Marks had entered his shop looking for a Flato piece that had articulated wings and flapped. It was his wife, Nancy, who was seen wearing the starfish out to lunch.
This was big news. Finally. The Marks starfish, because of the date, could not have been the Millicent Rogers version. This had to be one made either earlier or later.
* * *
Steeped in the history of Boivin and Belperron, Edwards reminded me, “Everybody who was anybody between 1935 and 1945 bought from Boivin.” He mentioned Lady Diana Cooper and Diana Vreeland and added that the cachet of Boivin’s pieces was enduring. He had sold a pair of Boivin earrings several hours before my arrival. What frustrated him, and others, is that these pieces are “certified by design, not mark.” So someone could find it and copy it. Being able to recognize and differentiate the real starfish from later reproductions is what has put Françoise Cailles on center stage. Jewelers need her—somebody—to document workmanship and design that was considered by Jeanne Boivin to be all that was necessary to identify the jeweler’s work. How else could they prove that the pieces of jewelry were genuine without giving prospective buyers a whole history lesson on Jeanne Boivin and the French jewelry business in the 1930s? I sympathized. Catalogue notes proudly mentioned if a piece was signed with the maker’s mark or name, and in the case of the starfish included mention that Françoise Cailles had authenticated it. Like so much of the jewelry business, the logic refracted like light bouncing around in a complex cut diamond. Cold truth was hard to arrive at. What it did make clear was how Françoise Cailles had achieved eminence in her role as the sole authenticator of Boivin. Jewelers needed her because without her authentication, there was always a question. I began to think that there was room for a small degree of uncertainty even with her authentication, but she was what we had. She admitted that there were very few stock books. “Most of Boivin’s jewels were commissioned pieces, to be delivered unsigned as soon as they were completed,” Cailles explained.
Edwards made a gentle swerve in our conversation. The upcoming Masterpiece London show was evidently on his mind. Like many jewelers I encountered, he spoke admiringly and enviously of Lee Siegelson. “Lee buys it for one hundred or two hundred and sells it for a million,” he said hyperbolically, giving me a tight smile. He understood that was roughly what he had done with the Rogers starfish.
* * *
I finally had the opportunity in London to meet Claudine Seroussi, the most knowledgeable researcher for Sam Loxton who had contacted me about Millicent’s starfish when Sam was mounting his campaign with a well-researched booklet on Boivin that included the starfish. Claudine had been a bright light among the people I had encountered in the jewelry world, a personality on e-mail willing to make suggestions and direct my inquiries. Her knowledge of jewelry history was nearly encyclopedic and by the time we met in London she was studying for her degree in gemology. I was anxious to meet her. We had spoken once before on Skype and to my chagrin our whole interview had been on camera. Sitting at home in New Mexico, juggling a nine-hour time difference between us, I was wearing pajamas. Even on a Skype camera I could see the thumb-sized emerald ring she wore.
Claudine, like all jewelers, was cautious. But very helpful. She spoke of the genesis of naturalism in jewelry design as it affected Jean Schlumberger of Tiffany & Co., and Boivin. And she explained to me that a piece of jewelry could not get an assay mark in France without being made in a workshop of French jewelers. The mark was a very controlling sort of documentation, even though after a piece was purchased the owner might go to some lengths to have it removed to avoid taxes. She knew where the human element intersected the business.
Claudine’s expert eye had also found a small clue that might explain the elusiveness of the third starfish’s trail. It was in a book about exhibition jewels published for the Victoria and Albert Museum by its curator Graham Hughes in 1962. An image of a Boivin starfish and a famous Boivin chameleon are photographed side by side. On the line with the letter o to indicate the owner’s name is the name Boivin, suggesting that in 1968, when the final edition of the book was published, one ruby and amethyst starfish was—news again—still owned by Boivin! This third early starfish was becoming a tantalizing mystery, making an appearance and then disappearing. It was not Millicent Rogers’s. No one, in my inquiries, so far, had claimed any knowledge of it. But it was out there. Where was it now?
In my rounds I had become inured to the chorus of praises that dealers sang to the starfish, but the London jewelers reminded me of their significance. Everyone knew of these famous pieces. Most had seen them whether they had owned them or not. Sam Loxton had studiously explained their historical importance. “They heralded the advent of the three-dimensional yellow-gold jewelry of baroque proportions that became fashionable during the 1940s and 1950s.” But no one would attribute a starfish’s attraction solely to good looks. There was a mystique.
Beauty, breeding, craftsmanship, value, and a string of celebrated owners contributed to it equally. I got it. I understood the appeal and aggregate value of the Boivin starfish. What I needed to find out now was where they had traveled on their peregrinations from Paris, on whose shoulders and in whose luggage and pockets. I felt as if I had so far been following a trail of crumbs, checking in on Henry Baker’s clients who had seen the starfish, leading me onward. They led to the places where Millic
ent Rogers’s starfish had touched bottom, if only briefly, but it was the hint of two new leads that cheered me. I needed to find Howard and Nancy Marks. I wondered if their starfish might be the one that Claudette Colbert had owned. Equally intriguing was the suggestion that Boivin had held on to a starfish at least until 1968.
