by Cherie Burns
Tennenbaum knew all about the starfish, but she said that she had never owned one. She had seen a few at auction that she suspected were the later ones that Asprey made when they revived the designs in the eighties and nineties. Those sounded like the ones that Murray Mondschein sold at Fred Leighton. “There are probably only a couple of them that are actually old and one of them sold in Paris probably five years ago … I know a dealer bought that one,” she told me. She remembered that thirty years ago there had been two older starfish, both a ruby and amethyst one and an emerald and aquamarine version, in a store on Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris that sounded like Michel Perinet’s. I jumped to the conclusion that the first one she mentioned might have been the third original that was kept by Boivin. The emerald and aquamarine starfish that was in his store had been used on the cover of the first book, Le Prix des Bijoux, by Françoise Cailles, an illustrated review of international jewelry auctions written in 1986. At last I was able to recognize and identify some of the signposts on the starfish’s trails. Tennenbaum also recalled seeing a ruby and amethyst starfish in the early 1990s at an auction in Saint Moritz. “Probably someone like Fred Leighton bought it and it is one of the five circulating around now,” she commented. It interested me that she was speaking of five starfish. And I always perked up when Murray was mentioned. Tennenbaum suspected that the one she saw was one of the later ones. “They are completely unwearable,” in her opinion.
Her interest in jewelry, she explained, was mostly personal but she worked as a dealer on the side. She also voiced the same lament that I was hearing from vintage jewelry fanciers and dealers everywhere. “Prices are out of control in my opinion. Everything is overpriced.” She knew that Nathalie Hocq, who had bought the Boivin brand, had made a few “cheaper ones” with Frédéric Chambre, an auctioneer and jewelry personality who worked with the Pierre Bergé auction house in Paris. Starfish, as a species, seemed to abound. But the magnificent three, four, or five first produced by Boivin were scattered and elusive.
“The newer ones have diluted the market a bit,” Tennenbaum added. This seems to be what Ralph Esmerian feared when he first saw an—ahem—reproduction. Tennenbaum spoke knowledgeably about record books of the type that Hocq and others hold on to so tightly. She mistrusted them. “There are no drawings in those books. People can put in what they want.”
The Boivin archives were a hole in my story. When Madame Boivin’s daughter and heir to the business, Germaine, turned sixty-six in 1964 she began to think of a future without the Boivin business and she took on a new assistant, Jacques Bernard. According to Françoise Cailles in her book about Boivin, Bernard was an accomplished jeweler, though I would be told by another jeweler that he was more of a businessman than a creative designer. There was a hazy tale of financial and marital intrigue in that account, as well, but I could not verify it.
I was also hearing that the Boivin brand percolates on the back burner of another wealthy, attractive, interesting woman. A Swiss-French beauty—and by repute a formidable personality—Nathalie Hocq owns the Boivin brand and the sketches, books, personal recollections, and archives that go along with it. These are the papers that Françoise Cailles consults to authenticate pieces of Boivin jewelry when she is hired to do so and they are mostly what made up the basis for her book René Boivin: Jeweller. Yet she never shows her copies of the archives to anyone.
Nathalie Hocq (her married last name is Choay) is yet another colorful if vexing player in the Boivin story. She is part of the royalty of the European jewelry world. Her father, former president of Cartier, insisted that she get a degree in economics, study marketing, and understand finance. In 1972 when she was twenty-one, he appointed her marketing director of Cartier. She rose quickly and was known for being elusive even then. An exotically pretty, stylish, and fragile-looking woman in her photographs, she smoked big man-sized cigars from a sandalwood humidor on her desk. At twenty-five she had risen to become the jewelry director of Cartier’s multimillion-dollar operation in ninety countries. I wanted to meet her and hoped that there was information about the starfish in the archives. But she never responded to my e-mail messages, letters, or phone calls.
Owning the Boivin archives gives Hocq the license to reproduce the Boivin designs, including the starfish. She partnered in one reported instance to do so with Pierre Bergé, the eighty-four-year-old multimillionaire French businessman who was a partner of the late couturier Yves Saint Laurent in life and business. The Pierre Bergé auction house (PBA) is one of his properties, and in 2012 a contemporary starfish credited as a Boivin sold at PBA for €42,000. Without a Boivin store in existence, auctions are the standard method for introducing such reproductions to the market. New York jewelry designer and socialite Ann Ziff remembered seeing a Boivin starfish at the Pierre Bergé auction house in Paris. PBA included an image from the Boivin archive to promote the starfish for sale, a drawing bearing the official circular stamp from René Boivin that one jeweler explained to me was proof that the design came from the Boivin archives belonging to Nathalie Hocq. Determined to avoid any exposure, Pierre Bergé’s chargée of communications nevertheless assured me that Pierre knew “nothing about the Boivin starfish.” I chalked this up to a term I’d confected to describe such conversations: “jeweler speak.” She obfuscated further by adding that Frédéric Chambre, who used to work at PBA, was the only one who knew about Boivin. Could she put me in touch with him? I asked. “Unfortunately not,” was her reply. The French were formidable when they closed ranks. The fact that Hocq had permitted and, it seemed, partnered to make a few new starfish and offered them at auction remained.
* * *
Now in her sixties, Hocq is a grande dame of the international jewelry world. The one time that I reached her on her cell phone she explained that she was driving in traffic but would call me back. My call was never returned, and my letters, sent to her home in Geneva, were returned, unopened. She obviously was not going to discuss Boivin. Some colleagues believe that she is undecided about what to do with the archives. Yet that stamped image of the starfish from Bergé is public record of her attempt to re-create the design in at least one instance. Another guess about reasons for her reticence is that the Boivin archives are extensive and in disarray. Sometimes I wondered if they existed at all, but Sam Loxton assured me they did. He knew someone who had worked “on the bench” for Asprey who had crated and moved the archives between London and Geneva, Hocq’s city of residence. Unlike Olivier Baroin’s meticulous digitalization of Belperron’s records and archives that permit him to look up anything with a touch of his computer keyboard, the Boivin archive is not available to be referenced. I wondered if it might not have a record of sale for the third starfish and a few other details. However, as Evelyne Possémé at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs consoled me, “It may well have been in code anyway.”
At the beginning of my search I would have thought it ridiculous that the seventy-five-year-old archives of a defunct jewelry house and the names of long-dead original clients would be guarded like the Hope diamond. But then I didn’t know how dodgy the jewelry business is. Jewelers, I have to admit, have a penchant for drama, and secrecy is par for the course.
* * *
I was about to give up on finding the other starfish when I received an e-mail from a West Coast jewelry dealer.
Hello Cherie,
Suzanne Tennenbaum sent your email to me, my name is Ann Marie Stanton and I’m a jewelry dealer in Beverly Hills. It was my pleasure to sell one of the magnificent Boivin starfish about six years ago to a woman who wears her jewelry and loves it.
I would be happy to help you in any way possible and I’m sure my client would also.
Best,
Ann Marie
Her message seemed almost too good to be true, promising access both to her and the starfish’s owner. I quickly learned that she had acquired what appeared to be the last original Boivin starfish, the one the house of Boivin had evidently held close for decades, for the
television and movie actress Jennifer Tilly. “Jennifer is intrigued with jewelry and she is a very sophisticated collector,” Stanton explained to me. Better yet, Jennifer was willing to talk about it.
Ann Marie Stanton worked for herself buying and selling antique and estate jewelry in Beverly Hills. She told me that she first became aware of the Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish when one came up for sale from Christie’s in Geneva in 2006. That was the one that I believed had passed through Lee Siegelson’s hands, described by Janet Zapata in the written account of her research about it for Lee Siegelson as the third starfish. She stated that it had stayed “in the family of the original purchasers until now.” Lee Siegelson and his assistant Sarah Davis would tell me only that the former owner had been in Europe, not the United States. Ann Marie had only seen images of it in the catalogue when she took note of it.
I jumped to the conclusion that it must have been the later Oscar de la Renta brooch, but in fact the auction notes for the de la Renta one explained, “A similar brooch was sold in Christie’s Geneva, on May 17, 2006, lot 381 for $293,000.” The de la Renta one at Christie’s Geneva was sold, according to the catalogue, in 2010 for CHF 184,000.1,2 Its price was the best indicator that it was not an original.
Ann Marie was a refreshing change from the French and New York dealers who got jittery discussing their clients. Her client, Jennifer Tilly, was the dream owner of a Boivin brooch from my point of view. Tilly, who has appeared in over sixty films during her acting career and was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Bullets over Broadway, may be best known to audiences today as a gambler on the World Series of Poker. She talked openly about her passion for jewelry and her pride in her collection. “She wears it,” Stanton told me flatly. Jennifer’s pieces aren’t sitting around, hidden in a vault.
Tilly’s profile as a movie actress and professional gambler is more public to begin with than those of the society figures who own starfish, and it is one reason she is more comfortable talking about her jewelry. “I always really loved jewelry. I used to watch Joan Rivers ask the stars on the red carpet whose pieces they were wearing. When someone said, ‘It’s mine,’ that was the person I wanted to be,” Tilly said in her distinctively high, raspy voice. She chronicled her evolution as a collector. “In the past I loved the kitschy stuff that looked like a great-aunt in Palm Beach had left it to you. Those coral and turquoise animals.” She laughed. “Then I got more serious.”
Serious meant recognizing the brands and paying higher prices. JAR. Boivin. Belperron. “You can buy a diamond, a big emerald. Those are easy, but it’s the art pieces that interest me,” explained Tilly, remembering how Joan Crawford wore her charm bracelet with Oscars and love-note charms dangling from it. “I loved it,” enthused Jennifer, who looks down a little on the trend of actresses wearing borrowed dresses and borrowed jewelry rather than reflecting their taste by wearing their own. She bought herself a fabled Bulgari brooch in the 2011 estate sale of Liz Taylor. “It was the brooch that Eddie Fisher gave her when she was in Rome making Cleopatra. She ran off with Burton, so he sent her the bill and she paid for it!” Tilly told me, thrilled. “There is a lot of beauty in jewels and the stories behind them,” she said, and added with pride, “I buy my own jewelry. I buy my taste and what appeals to me. That’s it. I have friends who get pieces from their husbands and they say, ‘Oh, I wish he’d asked my opinion.’ Then you get something you don’t love but you have to wear it so he’ll buy you a present again.” That was not her problem. This reminded me of what Ward Landrigan had said about the changed nature of the jewelry business in recent years. “Women buy jewelry for themselves now. In the past, women used to wait for a guy to buy something. And very often, if he bought something he would buy the wrong thing!”
* * *
The right jewelry, in her opinion, matters. “It is how you project yourself. I love the golden age when Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich owned their own jewelry or it was passed down from one generation to the next. Today it is a more disposable culture.” Jennifer Tilly joins the ranks of other professional or wealthy women like Colbert, Rogers, or Dr. Pamela Lipkin, who have bought their own starfish. Nancy Marks, Claudia Cohen, and Susan Rotenstreich were aided by prosperous husbands, but they, too, have professional identities. Tilly proudly wears three JAR brooches at a time. She also has a gold Boivin cow skull that was exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum. “You’ll never see that again. Belperron is dead. Boivin is dead. They can’t be churning out new pieces.” That’s one reason jewelry by distinctive quality designers is steadily increasing in value.
Just as Ann Marie Stanton had told me, Tilly wears her starfish, like her other large brooches, on black dresses. “They are a great frame for the brooches. A 1930s silk gown would be okay. Or a simple black dress, tea length. No jeans!” Tilly laughed.
Scale, color, and design are what attracted her to the starfish. “I loved this starfish from the beginning,” she said. She had seen the photo of Millicent Rogers with her starfish on her shoulder, even though the starfish being touted for sale was not Rogers’s. The iconic Richard Rutledge photo of Rogers wearing it is part of the legend of the piece and what the auctioneer at Christie’s used to promote it. “It was so big and bold and I really wanted it. I thought it was incredibly chic and the colors were muted,” she concluded after seeing the catalogue in color. It inspired her to leave a bid on it, but as she has become a more experienced collector she prefers being on the phone or having someone else do her bidding.
A year and a half later Christie’s advertised the Oscar de la Renta starfish, but when Tilly learned that it wasn’t one of the original ones, she didn’t bid. “You just have to wait,” she concluded. It took discipline. Ann Marie Stanton became her partner in shopping for a starfish. In a prime example of the jewelry world network, it was Susan Abeles, whom I had met at the Bonhams auction house in New York and who used to work for Lee Siegelson, who spoke to someone at Doyle, where she also used to work (with Berj Zavian), who knew Ann Marie’s West Coast partner, Nan. Nan told Ann Marie a starfish was available. When Stanton heard about it she asked the owner to send her photos of it. Jennifer knew she wanted the starfish, but Stanton wanted to negotiate the price if she could. Lee Siegelson in New York sent the piece through Brink’s insured shipping service for Stanton and Tilly to look at. Tilly remembers the day it arrived in Stanton’s Beverly Hills office. “When they pulled it out of the box, it was beautiful!” She was smitten by it. “I knew I would put it on a payment plan. I wanted it.” Tilly said that this kind of fine vintage jewelry “costs a lot.” It’s not like buying a designer dress or handbag, so she considered it to be an investment worth putting on a payment plan if she couldn’t afford it outright. She regarded it as a commodity. “I’m not going to sell, but I could during hard times if I needed to.” Stanton negotiated a price with Lee Siegelson, but the sticking point was the payment plan Tilly needed to purchase it. Lee finally acquiesced to payments spread out over several months. The starfish would stay with Stanton until it was paid for. It was an old-fashioned “layaway plan” financed with a loan. The purchase price was around four hundred thousand dollars, which all parties, except one who slipped, told me they couldn’t exactly remember seven years later.
Meanwhile, Tilly enjoys her jewelry and is unapologetic about wearing big expensive pieces. She has worn her starfish nine or ten times. She does not hide it away in a safe or bank vault. “If I had pieces in the vault I would never end up wearing them. Jewelry is to wear,” she asserted, and said that she often thought of the photo of Millicent Rogers wearing her starfish. “She wore her jewelry every day to express herself. When I wear mine it makes me happy and other people, too. It just makes the day a little brighter. The starfish is a great conversation piece. People want to know about jewelry like this,” she said.
Tilly added that she did not wear her starfish to play poker because “it is too elegant. I have to look like a lady gambler on television.” She is kno
wn for her voluptuous figure and the deep cleavage she has revealed at the poker table, but perhaps the starfish would be a further distraction to her opponents. With her physical stature and profile she can pull off wearing the large brooch. It amuses her that she is the second Hollywood actress (that we know of) to own one.
I surmised that Tilly’s starfish was bought by Stephen Russell at auction in Geneva. I was beginning to get the idea that, despite their laid-back personas, Stephen Feuerman and Russell Zelentz were the bloodhounds of the starfish market, always on alert for the appearance of one. The price of a ruby and amethyst Boivin starfish had tripled since Susan Rotenstreich’s husband bought hers in 1996. Despite its estimate of $54,000 to $66,000, Russell paid $287,055 in Geneva. Lee Siegelson was his partner, and Stanton tells me she negotiated a price with Lee. More intriguing to me was Christie’s catalogue note for the piece that claimed it was bought directly from Boivin and was the third model of the starfish. I take this to mean that it is the one that followed Colbert’s and Rogers’s off the drawing board in Paris. The bit worth pondering was “bought directly from Boivin.” By 2006, Boivin’s doors had been closed for more than twenty years. I recalled an image from the book Modern Jewelry: An International Survey 1890–1963 by Graham Hughes that accompanied the 1963 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It included a photo of this starfish. Boivin was listed in the owner’s column. Was it possible that the Boivin family had kept the starfish until 2006? Or that Françoise Cailles, as authenticator, had owned it? Of course, any number of owners could have bought directly from Boivin in the 1930s and kept their starfish in the family for seventy-eight years. Janet Zapata’s notes on the starfish asserted that it had “remained in the family of the original purchasers until now.” It was probably as close as I was going to get to the truth unless Cailles would break her silence.
