by Cherie Burns
I walked back to my hotel across the Tuileries on a June evening that seemed to last forever; the sun stayed high so long. I was exhausted after a long day but I wanted a moment to revel in the feeling of a Parisian evening and to imagine what it must have been like for the stylish women who came to adorn themselves with what they considered the most stylish and luxurious jewelry in the world. Their era was over, but it was still possible to conjure up a whiff of that spell. Paris was and is such a place. It still does that.
* * *
Nicholas Luchsinger had put me in touch with François Curiel, the man who heads Christie’s international jewelry business, and who he felt certain had overseen auctions of Boivin starfish. I had heard of Curiel, who is known for his good looks, dash, and charm to spare, as well as his willingness to go to great lengths for access to private collections for sale. “Waltzing with dowagers” was the phrase one jeweler jokingly used. It was a euphemism. Curiel is a legendary name in the business, credited mainly with overhauling the auction business from a forum that catered mostly to the trade to a public exchange.
Curiel’s account of the business made it easier to understand how rare pieces like the Boivin starfish move in and out of international auctions in New York, Paris, and Geneva, the three most important auction hubs. The auctions become anonymous revolving doors for sellers and shoppers. Curiel also provided me with the listings for four Boivin starfish that Christie’s sold between 1996 and 2010. He could not remember, or wouldn’t reveal, anything more about them. With the thousands of jewels that had passed through Christie’s under his watch, it was hard to imagine that he had any personal recollection of the sale of the brooches even though they invariably made an impression on whoever saw them. I had come to accept that there were four, and maybe even five, original Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish brooches moving through the universe.
As I packed to leave Paris I realized that while the cast of colorful Parisiens had been informative and entertaining, I was leaving with only one new trail to follow. I was hopeful that the Van Cleef client who was the new owner of Millicent Rogers’s starfish would agree to speak with me. Clues about the whereabouts of the starfish were discouragingly hard to come by. It was something.
Chapter Eighteen
In Paris I had gotten a better understanding of the starfish’s creators and their European dealers, but I hadn’t helped myself much further down the trails the brooches had taken. Back in the States, though, it seemed my luck was changing. After a year of asking questions and starting to find my way around jewelers in New York, I realized that the names of a few private collectors came up repeatedly in conversation. Among them was Pamela Lipkin, a well-known plastic surgeon. I telephoned and left a lengthy message on her office voice mail, explaining who I was and why I was calling. It was a shot in the dark, but she also had a reputation for being a social gadfly, so I thought that she might at least know of someone who had owned a starfish. Several weeks later she called back and when I answered the phone she started talking like we were old friends. It took me a few seconds to understand who was calling. “I had one,” she blurted over the phone.
Lipkin is an intense and confident personality. When I asked her why she bought the starfish she told me it was an instinctive purchase. She had a “huge” collection of jewelry, she said, and she started collecting pieces by Suzanne Belperron in the 1970s. A pair of escargot earrings is one of her favorites. She was an early collector of JAR, the jeweler Joel Arthur Rosenthal, who has taken the world of fine jewelry by storm in recent years. She said that she owned a Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish for eight years, but “I never wore it,” she said. It stayed mostly in her safe-deposit box. “I didn’t have time to wear it. You kind of need a booster pack to wear it. It’s heavy.” She said that she bought it for herself and sold it at auction and believes it may be the same one that had turned up with a friend of hers. She swerved to add that a friend of hers in the midst of a messy divorce on Long Island had one but wouldn’t talk about it. She was vague about which starfish was which. Then she offered to put me in touch with a friend of hers who currently owned a ruby and amethyst starfish. Nancy Marks.
I realized this was the name I had heard from Peter Edwards in London, the woman that his clients had seen wearing a starfish and were smitten with it. Nancy, the chairman of Ralph Rucci fashion designs at the time, was gracious and easy to talk with over the telephone. Some sense of pride over having such a beautiful piece was reflected in her voice.
When I asked her to tell me how she acquired the starfish, she began by explaining how her attitude toward collecting was changed radically by a theft ten years earlier. She and her husband, Howard Marks, chairman of an investment company, whose personal worth, according to Forbes magazine, is over a billion dollars, were burglarized in Los Angeles. “Everything was stolen. It was really traumatic, such an invasion of privacy,” she explained, and the experience left her feeling that she didn’t want any jewelry for a while. “It was just ‘stuff.’” It took several years of neither thinking about jewelry nor wearing it before she rebounded and told her husband, “I don’t want a ton of jewelry. I want ten fantastic pieces.” When the two of them were in Paris in 2008 she saw a picture of a Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish brooch in the Christie’s catalogue. “I knew nothing of its owners or history. I just admired it for its beauty. It was too big and too much, but Howard was going to bid on it anyway.” The pair would be in flight leaving Paris during the actual auction. Midflight Nancy remembered that the auction was ongoing, and Howard told her that he had left a bid for it. Once they landed and checked the results, they were disappointed to learn that they had been outbid. Unbeknownst to his wife, Howard was determined to buy it for her and he set out to track down the starfish. I mentioned to her that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get auction houses to reveal their buyers, but she assured me, “My husband can be very persuasive.” He learned that the starfish had gone to New York to the Stephen Russell salon on Madison Avenue. It had sold for $369,410 at auction. For a hundred thousand more than the auction price, Howard bought the piece and managed to surprise her. “It was so weird. He just came in and said, ‘Let’s go for a walk. I need you to come with me,’” she remembered. When he presented her the leather case with the starfish in it, she was thrilled—if not wholly surprised.
I had already heard about the ripples it made when she wore it out to lunch in London. She and Howard are hardly celebrities, but they are a power couple when they step out in New York or London. She remembers wearing the starfish to a luncheon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, also attended by the clothing designer Diane von Furstenberg. “Diane flipped out,” Nancy said, laughing good-naturedly; she had enjoyed the admiration.
The starfish always attracted attention. It was somehow satisfying to know that the starfish was worn and not just kept under wraps, but Nancy echoed other owners when she told me that it is difficult to wear. It is best suited to be worn on a sturdy jacket or other stiff fabric. Its virtue lies in the way that its articulated limbs mold to the contour where it is pinned.
She invited me to her home to see it. It was one of those freezing New York winter days when the wind ripped along Central Park South where the Markses live in a penthouse atop the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The elevator opened into the foyer of their apartment, an aerie furnished in cool neutral colors. Pieces of stone statuary accented the room. Nancy, a petite and pretty brunette with her hair pulled back simply in a bun and wearing scarce makeup, met me in a simple maroon sweater dress and wedge heels. She wore big gold hoop earrings but no other decorative jewelry. She guided me to the kitchen, where she made us tea and I looked down into the leafless trees in Central Park whose tops from this height looked like gray and brown lace. While the tea steeped Nancy disappeared momentarily and returned with a startling splash of color against the cool color palettes inside and out: her ruby and amethyst starfish brooch. She set it casually on the breakfast table between us.
I must have exhaled. This was the real deal. Her starfish with its long rays detailed by six cabochon rubies running down their spines looked just as I remembered the one I saw fleetingly at the Verdura party. It commanded the space between us. She offered it to me to handle. Its articulated gold fretwork and everything about it felt elegantly seamless. No point caught when I stroked it with my finger. I had heard enough jewelers talk about what made a Boivin starfish special that I knew what to look for. Tips of two rays were flipped at their ends to show their golden undersides, and it, like the one Millicent Rogers had owned, looked real enough to be a live creature. As we handled it, I noticed that a small amethyst was missing from its tiny setting hole. We talked for a moment of a jeweler who might be appropriate to make repairs and she showed me a fabulous gold cuff bracelet that she had asked him to make for her a few years back. It was obvious that she loved jewelry and chose her pieces discriminatingly. She was totally relaxed, rather than all atwitter, with their value and fineness. When she pinned it to the neckline of her burgundy dress, even light as flat as the winter light that morning caught in the perfectly rounded ruby at the center and radiated depth and warmth. I was always a little surprised at how, when a starfish is presented, after the surprise and a moment of admiration, there is really little else to say. There it was. It spoke for itself. Nancy turned her head so I could snap a photo of the starfish pinned to her dress. The focus quickly went to the piece, not the wearer. She smiled slightly, but all of our energy went toward the starfish, not each other.
We made small talk while we finished our tea and she told me a story about collecting fine jewelry. She had photographed the pieces that were stolen from her in Los Angeles ten years earlier. One was a diamond brooch created by JAR. It was reported to an organization called the Art Loss Register. When a friend saw the missing piece seven years later for sale in Hong Kong, the FBI was alerted and it was recovered shortly after being offered for sale by a New York jeweler. I was impressed to hear how this kind of recovery worked, and that it was possible to track down stolen jewelry. Later when I contacted the Art Loss Register the agent I spoke with told me a story that reminded me of Claudette Colbert’s story of putting down her Pan Am bag with her starfish in it and finding it gone when she remembered to take it with her. In 2006 the young Duchess of Argyll set down her hand luggage at the Glasgow Airport. A three-string pearl necklace, a Cartier brooch, a large emerald ring, and a pair of pearl earrings were packed inside. The duchess realized the bag was missing before she even began the car trip back to Inveraray Castle. She reported the theft to the airport police at the Art Loss Register. Six years later she spotted her Cartier brooch being offered for sale at the Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull, and enlisted the Art Loss Register’s help. Further investigations revealed a Glasgow dealer had purchased all four pieces at the “Unclaimed Property” department from the British Airports Association. One may wonder if the duchess had bothered to follow up on her claim, but maybe duchesses don’t do that. Of course, she was overjoyed to have some of her jewelry back, especially the brooch of diamonds and sapphires that Cartier had made for her grandmother. Her square-cut diamond ring and a pair of pearl earrings surrounded by tourmalines and diamonds were still missing. Besides being a good tale, the story was a reminder of what a commodity jewelry is. The agent whom I spoke with at the Art Loss Register told me that he had never had a starfish reported missing.
Nancy Marks clearly was attracted to the starfish purely for its beauty, but to many people it was primarily an economic good whose value fluctuated with the market. I wanted to think that her starfish was Claudette Colbert’s, resurfaced after all these years, but there was no certainty. It was definitely not Millicent Rogers’s with its baguette amethysts circling the central ruby.
During the elevator ride down to the ground floor I thought back to the Markses’ apartment and Nancy’s stewardship of the starfish. It was a place where a Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish belonged, the kind of rarefied and quietly elegant rooms away from the bustle of life below where I had imagined they would wash up.
And then I had a stroke of unexpected good luck. I found a source who knew who owned one of the original Boivin starfish, probably the Millicent Rogers one, but wouldn’t tell me. I had developed this source in the process of running down the woman Lee Siegelson had seen wearing it, and after Nicholas Luchsinger’s remark that it belonged to an American in New York. I decided to name her/him Deep Throat in honor of the secret source who coached the reporters Woodward and Bernstein in their investigation of the Watergate scandal. Their Deep Throat gave them hints. My Deep Throat told me that the owner had an important position in the music world, and had jewelry from “all the masters,” which could include Cartier, Tiffany, Van Cleef & Arpels, Boucheron, and Belperron. The owner was a Van Cleef client, Deep Throat said, which I already surmised.
So now I was closing in on my little school of starfish. I knew where two were. Susan Rotenstreich had hers on Park Avenue in New York and Nancy Marks’s was on Central Park South. If Deep Throat knew what he/she was talking about, it sounded like a third was also a stone’s throw away from the two owners I knew of in New York. I remained hopeful that I could find the third. I had always known there would be some unsolved mysteries in the starfish story and that I would probably not be able to draw a neat line to all the people who had owned each starfish since their creation. I had even thought when I left Paris that I just might have to accept that I could not discover who owned Millicent Rogers’s starfish today. But as my hunt continued, and now that I had located two, the mystery of the Millicent Rogers starfish ate at me. After all, I was her biographer and hers was the starfish that I had followed down the rabbit hole into this whole dazzling and sometimes daunting world after the Verdura party. I promised myself I would find it.
Chapter Nineteen
My husband and I used to do a little scuba diving. I remember how easy it was to become disoriented underwater. At this point in my search, I had a similar feeling hunting for the starfish. It was hard to know which way to turn. There were definitely more than the three I originally believed existed, but there were also obviously different classes, different grades. Not all were on the level of the first few masterpieces turned out by Boivin. I had learned that the jewelry world abhorred the idea of identifying later versions as reproductions. The interests of the jewelers were best served by the idea that they were all more or less the same, with the later versions basking in the price effect created by the early wonderful versions. Confusion reigns, and it isn’t all accidental. I had to keep Susan Abeles’s admonition about wolves in mind. More like sharks, I was thinking, swimming among the starfish. How many more have been made beyond the three to five Boivin originals? I guessed there were a half-dozen reproductions out there, maybe more. I had seen one at Christie’s. Maybe Pamela Lipkin’s Long Island friend had one. Another had sold from Christie’s, and I had to assume there could be a few more that had evaded notice if they had not crossed the well-worn paths of New York, London, and Paris jewelers. It definitely seemed there were more than the three ruby and amethyst Boivin starfish that had been mentioned in Christie’s auction catalogue notes. The standards for authenticity in fine jewelry were a bit different than they might be for, say, modern paintings, and they diluted the market created by the original works of art.
For instance: Christie’s auction records showed five starfish sales since 1996. One that had sold in 2010 in Switzerland for $184,278 was dated as being from the 1960s and was said to measure 12.2 centimeters in diameter, a centimeter larger than the originals. It appeared to be the same piece that had been offered at Christie’s in New York in 2006 with the information that it had been the property of Oscar de la Renta. Its lot description at that time followed the notes that accompanied the originals and said that it was dated circa 1935. Yet a salesroom notice on the same page advised, “Please note that the starfish is a recent example and was most likely manufactured
in the 1980s.” For whatever reasons, that starfish didn’t sell.
One of the starfish that had passed through Christie’s auctions in the last twenty years was unaccounted for. It had sold in 2006 and it wasn’t the one that Susan Rotenstreich or Nancy Marks had. It wasn’t the Oscar de la Renta one and it wasn’t Millicent Rogers’s. I was determined to find it, but I was out of ideas about where to look. A jeweler in London had told me about a woman who frequented auctions in Paris and Geneva who often took her dog, a standard poodle, with her to the sales. The mystery woman wore a flamingo brooch that was made by Cartier. It was the brooch, copied from an original that had belonged to the Duchess of Windsor, that had stuck in my acquaintance’s mind rather than her name. The only clue she could give me was that the woman, a known collector who sat in the same row at auctions as the leading French dealers, “who huddle together and behave like naughty schoolchildren at the back of the class,” was on good terms with the Landrigans at Verdura. It seemed so little to go on, but by now I had great respect for how small the jewelry world was. I asked Ward Landrigan if he knew of a woman who fit this description. A message promptly came back from his assistant, Betty Kojik, that it was Suzanne Tennenbaum, a collector who lived in Los Angeles. Betty had contacted her on my behalf and Tennenbaum agreed to speak with me. Her e-mail address was included. The hint sent me in a new direction, for which I was hugely grateful.
