by Cherie Burns
As for learning the names of the owners of the starfish, at least the third one whose original buyer was unknown to me, she explained, “You can only be told the name of the person in France when it was published.” I take this to mean that after someone else has published it first, or perhaps when the owner dies. “Boivin and its society were private,” she said flatly, and as our lunch was served she continued with something of a lecture on the culture of this privacy. “Bijoux are always something very personal, very expensive. It is high society,” she said, believing that she had made her point. I wondered, watching her carefully, if she really thought that I had come five thousand miles to hear this.
When I inquired if she had known someone who had a starfish whom I could speak to, her expression was of controlled horror. Her eyes darted at our fellow diners. It was as if I had asked something extremely personal and unsavory, coarse even. This whole business of asking direct questions, I could see, was not getting me very far. I watched her absorb and reckon with the idea of a book such as this about jewelry and people. It was a foreign concept to her. “This could never happen in France,” she told me, unblinking, as though that was enough said. I tried another tack and asked if it is less sensitive to speak of the prices or the pieces of jewelry instead of owners. Weren’t ledgers kept? Oui. “Ah yes, they were,” she said, “but of course, they were in code.” Code? Just about everything I had found out so far had begun to feel like code to me.
* * *
Cailles claimed she didn’t know the price that Boivin’s pieces sold for because the record books were coded and she doesn’t know the code. This is hard for me to grasp or to accept, but our conversation moved on. She continued her whispered incantations on the meaning of jewelry in France. Jewels are the pride of the family … They stay in the family until death.
Cailles continued to talk generalities. She invited me to come to Paris again for longer. She was amazed that I declined the glass of champagne that the waiter offered, yet she did the same. When I said no to dessert she insisted I have a macaron. I began to feel that I was being treated like an ingénue tourist, someone that would be swayed from her mission by a little bubbly and a French pastry, just happy to be there. I asked whom she would advise me to talk with in New York about the starfish. She knew that I had already seen Ward Landrigan at Verdura and Lee Siegelson since they had referred me to her. “Murray Mondschein, I think, knows about them,” she said. Always Murray.
She went on to say that during my next visit I must come to her house, a hôtel particulier or mansion, that I had already heard much about. Perinet, her husband, had been one of the leading antique furniture and jewelry dealers in Paris, and their home, dark and richly furnished, had made an impression on anyone who had seen it. I had also been told that it was Perinet who suggested to his wife to write the book about Boivin when he learned that the last owner of Boivin, Jacques Bernard, who presided over it after he sold to Asprey, wanted a book written. Thus she had become the expert on Boivin. I began to think grudgingly that this encounter would be the first of several, just the icebreaker to introduce us. She asked if I would agree to practice English with her on my next, longer trip. This sounded good and felt unlikely. She had not been especially forthcoming, and I could see that the whole concept of a book about the owners and movement of jewelry through people’s lives was an alien notion to her. She had already told me that she could not imagine it. “Never in France,” she said adamantly, bringing a forkful of salad to her mouth. We parted on the street outside the restaurant, her arms filled with books like a schoolgirl. She was going to Tajan, one of the best French auction houses, where she works in the vintage jewelry department. It had been a lovely lunch, on the level of lunches. But I had hoped she would help me enter the world where the mysteries of the starfish are kept. On that level, the score was clearly Françoise 1, Cherie 0. The charming troll was victorious, the bridge still uncrossed.
Chapter Seventeen
After lunch with Cailles, I too traveled over to the Right Bank, to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs to meet Evelyne Possémé, the chief curator and head of the Art Deco and jewelry department. I had been told that she is one of the world’s leading experts in twentieth-century jewelry, and I was anxious to speak with an academic after reaching the limits of information to be garnered in the world of New York jewelry dealers. I had also heard that she can be gruff and does not tolerate fools, so I was a bit anxious. Even Cailles, when I took leave and told her where I was heading, echoed this sentiment. “She can be difficult,” she said, smiling and striding away.
There was work going on in the museum when I arrived and I was guided up narrow spiral stairs that were veiled to protect the floor and pieces below from construction dust and debris. The museum space felt otherworldly, shrouded in misty hues and filtered light. Possémé, to my surprise, seemed more Germanic than French with her short-cut hair and clipped English. Her earnest and direct approach was comforting after Cailles’s gentle dodges and hedges. Possémé furrowed her brow at my questions and reached for volumes from the library of books and texts that were scattered on the tables and shelves in an upstairs office that felt like a garret, with windows that opened more to the sky than onto the beautiful grounds of the Tuileries that I knew lay below. She told me that she first saw a starfish in 1995, at a Schlumberger fashion and jewelry event. We talked a bit about the attraction of fish, dolphins, and maritime life for Renaissance painters and for jewelers in the period of Boivin.
She then went on to explain the jewelers’ marks that identified the workshops where the pieces of jewelry had actually been made. Like so many other practices I was encountering, I found that deception, often intended, was built into the identifying elements of jewelry design. The workshops that actually fabricated the pieces of jewelry from the designs that came to them from designers in jewelry houses like Boivin each had marks that would identify which shop had done the work. Much like a coat of arms, a symbol usually identified the designer and the workshop. Boivin’s symbol was a snake, but Possémé told me that she had never seen it on a piece of jewelry. We both knew the story that Jeanne Boivin, like Suzanne Belperron, did not like signing or marking pieces from Boivin because she wanted their design alone to be enough to identify them. Yet workshops still lay claim with their poinçons, hallmarks, stamped to their work. A fine piece of jewelry could have several such brands on it, both the fabricator’s stamp or signature and the designer’s, always almost microscopically small. Charles Profillet made and signed Boivin’s early starfish. Deception would come into the picture when pieces that lacked a mark were sent to France to be given ones that would boost their value in the United States. Alternately, buyers in France who wanted to avoid paying taxes on the pieces had the maker’s marks removed, adding to the confusion. I had heard several times about how these practices made it difficult to identify original pieces from later copies by their marks alone. And I had also been told by a New York jeweler that she had once traveled to Paris to get a mark put onto a piece that lacked one. In her case, she swore, she was getting the stamp to prove the origin of a Boivin piece (you, gentle reader, and I know now that Boivin didn’t use its mark, but not everyone understands that), but her story illustrated how simple it could be to acquire a mark on a reproduction. Like so many practices in the jewelry world, a convention that was meant to be helpful in learning the provenance and identification of a piece had been tampered with and was confusing
I wanted to know about the codes in sales books and ledgers that Madame Cailles had mentioned to me over lunch. The subject hit a nerve with Possémé and she seemed as interested in it as I was. She explained that most jewelers would not write the true name of a client in their books or the price of an item for sale. They created a code of nine characters that only a few principals in their own business knew. The example she used to explain this to me was of jewelers from the town of Ratisbone, Germany. She wrote the name on a yellow Post-it note for me and beneath the lette
rs put the numbers 1 to 9. Using letters for numbers—r for 1, a for 2, t for 3, and so on—the jewelry house could record prices with letters and names by using numbers that were unintelligible to anyone except themselves. If a disgruntled employee left, somewhat as Suzanne Belperron had defected from Boivin to start her own business, the client lists and sales histories remained secret with the original holder. Both buyers and sellers could evade taxes, sales and perhaps inheritance, without records. “They didn’t want anybody to know the price or that it changed for different clients,” Possémé explained. This was all further evidence of how deeply ingrained secrecy is in the jewelry trade. I was beginning to understand how this culture of secrecy still coursed through the veins of the modern-day jewelry business, from Paris to, gosh, maybe even—Indiana? I hadn’t tried to buy a vintage diamond ring there lately.
With details of a brooch made by another workshop that measured 6.2 by 1.45 centimeters, Possémé estimated the markup for a piece like the Boivin starfish. She guessed that the starfish sold for twice what it had cost to make.
The French, and perhaps jewelers worldwide, played endless games to obfuscate any details about their wares and markets. The French government has tried to regulate some aspects of the jewelry trade. For instance, when a design is “retired,” the drawing of it is stamped (like a notary seal) with a registered number. I had seen such a stamp online on the page of a design of a Boivin starfish when the Parisian jewelry house of Pierre Bergé stopped re-creating Boivin’s starfish in 2011. It was the strongest evidence so far of some attempt to regulate and control a business in which it is easy to pirate creative property. And it was a record that something had occurred even when the people involved denied it. I had contacted the Pierre Bergé auction house after I was told that Mr. Bergé and Nathalie Hocq Choay in Switzerland, who now owns the Boivin archives, had made a few new starfish during the past decade. I received word from the PB’s representative that Pierre Bergé knew nothing about the Boivin starfish even though she allowed that “Boivin jewels have been sold through his auction house.” But the stamp on the page of the design, a retiring of the license to produce it, clearly suggested otherwise. C’est la vie.
* * *
The corporate offices of Van Cleef & Arpels are in the Bourse in Paris, where it is an adventure finding and then gaining entry to buildings. No outer sign advertises the businesses within. The sleek, modern, low-key reception lobby, and turnstiles through the next doorway, come as a surprise. It is like stepping into another, more modern movie. Nicholas Luchsinger, international retail director and “heritage collection” specialist for Van Cleef & Arpels, met me with a ready smile. A bounce in his quick stride and a few unruly strands that stuck out from his otherwise smooth dark hair like a cowlick lent him a boyish open charm as he settled at his desk in a clean, minimally furnished white office. After the dark entry hall on the ground floor and a haze on the Paris streets that morning, the Van Cleef offices felt like a cloud of suffused light.
Luchsinger had worked with Van Cleef for nine years and was prepared to give me an overview of the jewelry-collecting habits in France. He explained that high inheritance taxes force many families to hold on to their jewelry and add to the importance of secret-keeping. He thought he remembered seeing a Boivin starfish roughly ten years before. He mentioned that estate jewelry and jewelry auctions were a relatively new phenomenon in the world of fine jewelry, and he attributed the fashionability of estate jewelry in the 1980s to the New York jewelry store Fred Leighton. There it was again, the mention of Murray Mondschein, aka Fred Leighton. I had heard from several jewelers in New York and Paris about the role of Fred Leighton in the evolution of the jewelry business and the fame of the Boivin starfish in particular. Nicholas Luchsinger, who knows his history, thought it likely the Boivin starfish had been made sequentially, with the first one to show to prospective customers. That’s probably the one Claudette Colbert bought. And the second was created to replace it. Maybe that’s the one Boivin held on to until 1968. The others, including Rogers’s version, were likely to have been special orders. That was his opinion.
Luchsinger went on about the enduring appeal of certain old pieces from the thirties and forties, including the Boivin starfish and Van Cleef’s ballerinas, brooches fashioned like delicate little dolls in classic ballet poses with rose-cut diamond faces and stones reputedly salvaged from Spanish crown jewels that were auctioned off in Mexico. Those little diamond dancers did not appeal to me, but I had to admit that everything about jewelry was typically made more interesting by the story that went along with it.
I was hoping that Luchsinger could help me with another piece in the riddle of the starfish. Lee Siegelson had told me a beguiling story about encountering the Millicent Rogers starfish after he had sold it. He said he did not know who the final owner was. Like most jewelers I had spoken to, he winced a little when talking about the piece moving on and out of his possession, even when the sale had been profitable for him. The Rogers starfish sold for somewhere between $800,000 and $1 million, I knew. I asked Lee if he had ever seen it again and he told me about going to Paris some months later for the Van Cleef exhibition. He said that during the champagne reception he caught a glimpse of the starfish on a woman’s lapel across the room. I asked him a dozen questions about who the woman was, what she was wearing, was she blond or brunette, young or old, and so on. He seemed quite honestly not to know the answers. He thought the suit it was pinned to was black. All he remembered, like a former suitor catching a glimpse of an old love, was the starfish. “It was wonderful to see it again,” he said sincerely. Then the crowd shifted and closed behind the woman who wore it, and she and her starfish vanished from sight.
I told Luchsinger this story in hopes that he would recall a Van Cleef client who might own the starfish. With his elbows on his desk he seemed to ponder. We looked through the pages of some of the Van Cleef catalogues on his conference table and then it came to him. He thought he knew who had bought the Rogers starfish. Of course, I had to understand, he said, that he couldn’t tell me without her permission. I asked if she was an American. Yes, he said. In New York? Yes. Then I watched him tighten. That was all he could tell me. When I pressed, he agreed to ask if she would be willing to speak with me. Just the prospect of locating the owner of the Rogers starfish elated me.
* * *
Besides Jean Pierre Brun, there was another man in Paris, Olivier Baroin, who I hoped could shed light on the provenance of the starfish design, and the fuzzy area of influence and credit for it shared between Suzanne Belperron and Juliette Moutard. Olivier Baroin had told me that he didn’t know enough about Boivin to be of interest to me when I contacted him before my trip to Paris, but he agreed to meet with me when I insisted. He was then the owner of a somewhat disputed archive of Belperron, a story I had heard rumblings about in New York, and I didn’t want to get involved in it.
He met me at the Saut du Loup outdoor café nestled behind the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. “Loup,” I knew, is French for wolf, which made me again recall Susan Abeles’s caution that jewelers are wolves. Olivier was almost an hour late, which, instead of frustrating me as it usually would, gave me the chance to catch my breath and recover from the fatigue of straddling two languages. A handsome forty-five-year-old, he arrived in purple jeans and a white shirt wearing a cabochon ruby ring with a stone the size of a dime. He plopped two cell phones and a computer on the table between us. When I commented on his ring he explained that it was Indian, of uncertain value, and that he wore it for no better reason than that he liked it. He insisted that I try it on. I had learned by then to acquiesce. I wore it like a talisman for the rest of our interview. It was a smashing ring.
I was not surprised to learn that he had seen Madame Cailles that afternoon, following our interview. New York, London, Paris—the jewelry world is small in these cities. Everyone knows everyone, it seems. I could not resist asking him if Cailles mentioned our lunch. “Ah yes,” he said, and wi
th a grin added, “She found you very American. You ask a lot of questions,” he said. I tried to share a little laugh with him. “What am I supposed to do? I came here to ask questions,” I explained. He did a quick little humorous spoof of what might be acceptable. “Would you mind if perhaps I might ask you about something…” We shared a sigh of camaraderie and moved on.
Olivier had distinguished himself by putting all of the Belperron archives that he has onto his computer. He professed that he believed in transparency, though he explained that it is not the French or jewelry world’s way. He knew the young assistant who had worked for Belperron to help her burn seventy percent of her drawings and files in the fireplace of her Paris apartment before her death. Belperron was determined not to reveal her clients, and like Boivin, she was convinced her designs were adequate to identify her work, so she didn’t sign her pieces.
Baroin, who began working in jewelry workshops at the age of fourteen, is another example of someone totally enamored with jewelry and his work in the business. “I love it. It is always fascinating,” he said, scrolling through his files to try to find a record of a Millicent Rogers sale, another of Daisy Fellowes. “The secrecy business,” he scoffed. “Françoise would never show you anything. I try to be transparent.” He wanted to set himself apart. The problem was that his expertise is Belperron. He told me he loved all designs by Belperron and that he suspected that Belperron originated the starfish motif for Jeanne Boivin, but he did not claim that the one I was following, the particular Boivin starfish, was not Juliette Moutard’s. Whoever began toying with the starfish motif, this Boivin starfish seemed unquestionably to have been Moutard’s. That was a relief. Baroin was also more forthcoming when talking about cost and value. Based on other pieces that sold in his archive records, he estimated that the starfish cost about 70,000 French francs, 48,000 for the stones and 15,000 for the workshop and labor cost. It is likely they sold for between FF 70,000 and FF 100,000 at the time. In “old” francs. In the 1930s the French franc was at its lowest against the dollar, one franc fluctuating in value between five and ten cents. If Olivier’s estimate was correct, the starfish sold for $3,500 to $5,000, the equivalent of $60,000 to $86,000 today. He knew that Millicent Rogers paid FF 67,290 for a pansy flower brooch from Belperron, and he also knew from the record books that she was regarded as a difficult client. “Not everyone behaved like that,” wanting to return things later for designs more current, and so on. I was not surprised. That was Millicent. There was not much more he could tell me about the starfish.
