Diving for Starfish

by Cherie Burns

  I passed Russell Zelenetz, wearing a quilted vest with his shirttail hanging out, along the way. We chatted for a second. He told me that Murray Mondschein now moved around in a motorized wheelchair. For a moment I pondered whether that would make him easier or more difficult to corner.

  * * *

  I had better luck with Simon Teakle, the Connecticut jeweler who had formerly worked for Christie’s. We had only spoken previously by phone. When I introduced myself to him at his booth he reacted to my mention that I had heard from a former starfish owner, Ann Ziff, that she had first seen one being worn by a woman “who was on the board of the Met.” I had taken that to mean the Metropolitan Opera. But a light went off for Simon when I said it. “No, it was the Metropolitan Museum. It had to be Jayne Wrightsman,” he crowed. In fact, he had been the auctioneer at Christie’s in 1995 when they sold the Wrightsman collection, one of the top ten most expensive private jewelry collections in the world. He remembered the collection and the starfish. I was heartened. The name Wrightsman also rang a bell with me. The Wrightsman wing of American colonial furnishings at the Metropolitan Museum had been a donation from the wealthy oil executive and philanthropists Charles and Jayne Wrightsman. It made perfect sense that such a woman would have had a starfish.

  Then I moved along to see Sam Loxton, the only man in sight who was wearing a suit and tie. I told him I had been unable to contact Nathalie Hocq after he had given me her email address two years earlier. I hoped she was at the Miami show. He shook his head. He’d heard that she was in India—Jaipur, the jewel center of India, to be exact. I told him that I was starting to doubt that there were any Boivin archives. “The archive exists,” he assured me. The same frustration over Nathalie Hocq and the archives opened up in me again.

  Sharing Sam’s counter space was a man I had long wanted to meet, Dominik Biehler. Biehler is owner of the Munich-based jewelry and gem merchant Ernst Färber, which claims to have been in business since 1692. We had exchanged a half-dozen e-mails. Biehler, I knew, underwrote Sam Loxton’s purchase of the Millicent Rogers starfish and the hippocamp. I had been told that his family connections go way back with Michel Perinet, Françoise Cailles’s husband, in Paris, and that in fact, he had been in their wedding party. This reminded me again of what a tight-knit guild jewelers comprised. So it did not come as much of a surprise when he told me that he had first seen a ruby and amethyst Boivin starfish brooch at Michel’s store in Paris in 1995. I wondered if it had been the missing third starfish that had stayed in Paris, possibly with the Boivin family or even São Schlumberger. Or even with Françoise Cailles. She had not replied when I asked her outright if she had ever owned a starfish. And of course it was always possible that the starfish in Perinet’s was Claudette Colbert’s, risen from the depths.

  * * *

  Emmanuelle Chassard, the Paris jeweler who had told me via e-mail that she sold an original starfish in 2012 from her store La Galerie Parisienne, was also there. Her father, Alain, that most wonderful kind of slightly tousled older Frenchman, was manning their booth alongside her. Yes, they once had a starfish, he said. “An exceptional piece from an exceptional French family.” I had heard rumors that Emmanuelle was most likely to become the authenticator of Boivin if and when Cailles retired. I had somehow expected a colder, polished Frenchwoman, but Emmanuelle was surprisingly down-to-earth. Wearing little makeup and with her gray-streaked hair hanging loose, she told me that yes, a starfish had sold from her store. She said that she did not know where the starfish had come from. This kind of assertion always amazed me but suggested she had bought it at auction. “I like it to be a mystery. I usually don’t want to know because the mystery of the piece adds to their mystique. And sometimes the story is very sad,” she said. Ah, I thought, the French, always romantic, always ready to embrace secrecy and discretion. Or, as her countryman André Chervin had explained it to me more pragmatically, “The French are more secretive for a reason. They don’t want to attract the attention of the tax man.”

  Before calling it a day, I stopped to see Adam Zebrak, the jeweler for SJ Norton. I said hello and asked him where he had first seen a starfish brooch. Adam was all smiles and winning ways. “Twenty-five years ago with Murray,” he said.

  The following day I first noticed Russell Zelenetz and Stephen Feuerman standing in the center of the aisle talking to Zebrak, and then I noticed the motorized chair at their feet. In it was Murray, a bit better groomed than I had seen him before, his hair combed back smoothly, freshly shaven. He sported a Paul & Shark brand white yachting windbreaker. I walked up and reintroduced myself to him. Russell and Stephen disappeared instantly. For some reason I was reminded how, in “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” reindeer scattered like “leaves before the wild hurricane fly.”

  I explained to Murray that almost everyone I had talked to about the starfish had mentioned him and his connection to them. I was anxious to speak with him. “I have nothing to say,” he said flatly. But didn’t he want to speak for himself rather than have me write about him from the perspective of others? I asked. I waited a beat until this man, a legend in his trade whom I had pursued now for three years, shook his head and finally spoke. He looked up at me, unsmiling, with eyes as hard as a reptile’s. “What’s it benefit me?” he asked, revved up his chair, and zipped away. I had my answer, and left town. I never saw Murray again. He died two years later.

  * * *

  I did not learn in Miami who had the Millicent Rogers starfish. It could not be the one that Teakle remembered selling to Jayne Wrightsman in 1995. At that time, Rogers’s was still in her daughter-in-law Jackie’s possession. Still, I wrote to Wrightsman.

  Shortly, I heard back from her assistant:

  I am sensitive to your request but please know that Mrs. Wrightsman simply never gives interviews of any nature and to anyone. You are correct in saying she is a very private person.

  It seemed oddly appropriate that the e-mail message was written in Courier New typeface, which made me think of an old typewriter. It was a formal policy from a past era, delivered by the buffering personal assistant. Ah yes, a private person. That was a claim I had often heard in my reporting life from celebrities just before they spilled all their secrets, but I could not prevail upon Mrs. Wrightsman to discuss her former starfish. It would have to be enough to know that she once had one.

  * * *

  After Miami, a new feeling crept over me. I was near the end of the starfish’s trail. When I sat back and considered them, they danced before me like a fast-forward newsreel compressing time. I saw them one by one being swept off the counter of the Boivin salon in Paris and falling into handbags and carrying trunks. I knew that a few had cartwheeled with Adam Zebrak through Monte Carlo. Others had been handed off in paper bags, pigskin boxes, and velvet sleeves. Still others, like Millicent Rogers’s, appropriately enough, had basked in the showroom lighting of Lucas Rarities and traveled with Lee Siegelson to European auctions and shows. It was obvious that at times, they had almost mimicked real starfish in the way they propagated. Those “later” versions had multiplied on occasion, slipping into the mix to make an appearance and confuse matters.

  I assumed the story of the Boivin starfish would continue even when it was over for me. Those brooches that I knew were tucked into safes and jewelry boxes in Manhattan and Hollywood would eventually be handed down, sold, or auctioned by a generation to come. Some of the same dealers would be there ready to ease the process. I thought that the new owners of the starfish would not be as colorful or romantic as Claudette Colbert, Millicent Rogers, São Schlumberger, and others had been, but I couldn’t know that for certain.

  The whereabouts of Millicent Rogers’s brooch nagged me. It was a delicious mystery, the buyer who managed to keep it a secret and the dealers who knew, but shivered in their boots at the prospect of raising the ire of a rich jewelry collector by exposing her. She was probably a lovely person, but in this story she was becoming my wicked queen. Deep Throat had p
romised to confirm her identity if I discovered her on my own, but he/she would not give me her name.

  I wrote Nicholas Luchsinger at Van Cleef in Paris again. He sent his apologies for being unable to help me further, along with the caveat that he knew I understood his position. I did. I touched base with a few of the dealers and sources I hadn’t seen in a while to see if they’d learned anything new. Janet Zapata had not heard again from her mystery caller. I went over and over the only leads I had. The owner lived in New York and was involved in the musical arts. She was a “private person.” I had never given credence to the idea that she was a singer or actress. While that could be what “musical arts” meant, entertainers usually weren’t private people. I ruled out Broadway performers. Rather, I had assumed that it was someone like Ann Ziff, who had served on the board of the Metropolitan Opera. I remembered that Ziff said she had seen a starfish on a Met board member, but it sounded as if it was before the Rogers starfish had left the Rogers family.

  I found a list of board members and went down it. Mercedes Bass, I knew, was a wealthy fashionable woman who might have such jewelry, but when I wrote to her assistant in Texas, where she lives, the message came back promptly that she did not have a Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish and did not know of anyone who did. I was acquainted with Daisy Soros, who had been on the board, but I had never seen her wear jewelry of quite the magnitude of the starfish. Still, I asked if she had ever seen a starfish. She had not. The eleven-person board plus twenty-some managing directors of the Metropoliton Opera seemed a whole cast and chorus. Many names there I didn’t know. I paused when I came to the new president, Judith-Ann Corrente. Hers was a name I didn’t recognize. I Googled her. Whenever a photo of her came up she was wearing a big gem-studded brooch. Corrente is a very attractive, trim brunette who serves a number of philanthropic interests. I Googled her again, this time with Van Cleef & Arpels in the subject line. There she was, seated and resplendent, wearing ruby earrings and a large circular brooch (presumably from Van Cleef) on a purple suit at the Women’s Committee Fall Lunch for the Central Park Conservancy in 2011, sponsored by Van Cleef. She was seated next to Nicholas Luchsinger.

  Corrente wore beautiful jewelry in all the photos that flashed up on my computer. Deep Throat had told me that the owner of the Millicent Rogers starfish had jewelry by all the master jewelers, which I took to mean Cartier, Schlumberger, Van Cleef & Arpels, Belperron, and Boucheron. She was a bonafide collector. Olive skinned and long necked, Corrente wore dangling ruby earrings to advantage. In one photo with her husband, Willem Kooyker, head of Blenheim Capital Management, an emerald and diamond aigrette (an elongated ornament that historically served as a plume on tiaras) dangled at her waist. But what convinced me that she was the likely owner of Millicent Rogers’s ruby and amethyst starfish brooch was something else. She fit the profile of their owners.

  Judith-Ann Corrente was obviously a serious person. She had been one of nine women in the inaugural coed class at Princeton University. She was a dedicated philanthropist and president of the Monteforte Foundation she created with her husband. She was a thinker, exactly the kind of woman that I had learned gravitated to the Boivin starfish. Perhaps it was arguable that São Schlumberger had not been as focused as the other starfish owners, but what she lacked in wits she made up for with style-setting dynamism. None of the starfish owners had been ordinary rich women. They weren’t Marie Antoinette, heaping on excess for its own sake.

  I fired off a message to Deep Throat but got no reply, which made me think I might be on the right track. I asked another collector if she knew anything about Corrente. She didn’t know much except that Corrente had been at a Van Cleef event at the Cooper Hewitt museum in New York in 2011. I wrote a letter to Corrente and sent it to her in care of the Metropolitan Opera. I received no reply. The business office gave me an e-mail address for her. I attached a copy of my original letter. I heard nothing back.

  I remembered something that Françoise Cailles had told me in Paris. “The more beautiful the jewelry, the less you see it. Unless you are the kind of person who wants to be seen, like the nouveau riche. When it’s beautiful and expensive you don’t show it.” I could see some of this dynamic at work. Corrente was determined to stay private. A few people who knew her told me that she was reserved, even a bit aloof. One woman described her as severe and added that her husband, Kooyker, is the warmer, more outgoing personality in their partnership. Nobody ever said that conviviality was a requisite for owning a starfish.

  Several weeks later I got an e-mail from Deep Throat. “Well done,” it read.

  Knowing that Corrente had Millicent’s starfish gave me a lift I hadn’t expected. Of course, I was relieved to have located it, but more than that, Corrente seemed the perfect custodian of the piece. Beautiful, sophisticated, and, I assumed, self-assured, she had had many occasions where she could discreetly have worn a Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish brooch. The Internet was flooded with photos of her on opening nights at the Metropolitan Opera. She had not worn the starfish in the photos I saw, but she seemed a woman who moved in many ways and along the same vein as Millicent Rogers had—Corrente wore a stunning black-and-white Schiaparelli dress to the opening of Otello in 2015. Corrente was statuesque. All this made me strangely happy.

  * * *

  I did not expect to ever see a Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish again. They had danced through my head and pulled me into their worlds as inexorably as sea sirens had called to sailors in the Odyssey. I had followed them into their worlds and was satisfied that I could get no closer without abandoning reason altogether. I would slip away from the jewelry world now.

  I had known when I began my starfish quest that there were likely to be mysteries I could not solve. I had expected the final owner of Millicent Rogers’s starfish, so carefully guarded by the jewelry world, to be the unsolved puzzle in the story. But in fact, it was Claudette Colbert’s first starfish that I could not identify. Lost? Stolen? Misplaced? It had clearly been to the underside and back, but I suspected that it had re-emerged from the dark as one of the four I had seen.

  Had it been the one on São Schlumberger’s mink coat on the way to Malcom Forbes’s party? Did it live in Nancy Marks’s Central Park South penthouse or Susan Rotenstreich’s Park Avenue apartment? Was it locked in a safe in Paris, bound to reappear at some later auction? I could not know. But I felt sure that, like all fine jewelry with a world of hunters keeping an eye out for it, it would surface again. While my story had ended, the starfish’s would continue, and they would continue to move through the secret sands of wealth, commerce, and beauty until a time when such things were no longer sought or mattered. Meanwhile, even though I tried to leave the starfish’s story behind, it sometimes surfaced in my mind, as if in a dream.

  In that dream I stand before Boivin’s last address at 4 Avenue de l’Opéra. The graceful stone arch over two-story wooden doors still stands proud and grand, but the street below the former upstairs salon is now lined with the shiny façades of modern commerce. I walk right through those twenty-first-century stone walls as if they were illusions and climb the stairs to the cobwebbed workshop with sturdy benches and drawing boards lighted by high windows. It is intensely nostalgic, although I have never been there. Yet it is lifeless. The magic of the bygone era that incubated the starfish is missing. The Buddha sculpture at the salon’s entrance is gone. There are no pencils or paint sets on the tabletops, no molds to which the supple starfish arms were shaped, no metal shavings gleaned from the gold settings or sparkling flakes chipped from jewels. The play of wondrous imaginations and imperious demands for perfection that brought the starfish to life are dissipated. All that is left, as I stare around the dusty salon, is a faint but unmistakable whiff of salt, the tang of the beaches of Brittany.

  Acknowledgments

  It takes many generous people to amass the details of a time gone by. In the case of three pieces of famous French jewelry lost in a world of total discretion, it took an
army. I am especially appreciative of those experts in the jewelry world who tutored me in its workings and pointed me on my way: Claudine Seroussi, Audrey Friedman, Ralph Esmerian, Ward Landrigan, Caroline Stetson, Lee Siegelson, Sarah Davis, Janet Zapata, Susan Abelas, Françoise Cailles, Russell Zelenetz, Stephen Feuerman, Pat Saling, Mark Emanuel, Marie-Caroline de Brosses, Sam Loxton, Dominik Biehler, Henry Baker, Nicholas Luchsinger, André Chervin, Sylvain Chervin, James Givenchy, Simon Teakle, François Curiel, Christopher Walling, Barbara Harris, Ann Marie Stanton, Daphne Lingon, Natalie Bos, Peter Edwards, Francesca Amfitheatrof, Rahul Kadakia, Ulysses Grant Dietz, Geoffrey Munn, Evelynne Possémé, Emmanuelle Chassard, and Martin Travis.

  I greatly appreciated those who racked their brains to remember anything about the starfish or their owners: Bob and Helen Bernstein, Helen O’Hagan, Elizabeth Bray Irvine, the late Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, and Vivienne Becker. A special thanks to Colleen Caslin, for loaning me a jewelry book that I held on to for five years. I am grateful to the jewelry fanciers and collectors who told me their stories: Susan Rotenstreich, Nancy Marks, Susan Tennenbaum, Lorian Buckley, the late Jackie Peralta-Ramos, Jennifer Tilly, Ann Ziff, and Pamela Lipkin. Thank you to Jan Reeder and Stephane André, who were quick to make introductions for me, and to Landt Dennis, Sophie Lenoir, and Alain Pinto, who helped me correspond in French without humiliation (that I am aware of). I am grateful to Betty Kojic, who prods to make things happen.

  I must especially thank Olivier Baroin and Jean-Pierre Brun, who responded graciously, generously, and promptly to my endless follow-up questions about Boivin in the 1930s. Phil Poirier in Taos and Caroline Tappou in Paris answered tedious queries about the way jewelry was crafted more than eighty years ago.

  I owe much to my agent, Cynthia Cannell, for her support of a different concept, to St. Martin’s Press for letting me go “fishing,” and to my editor, Michael Flamini, for his deft touch and vision. Vicki Lame and Gwen Hawkes kept us on track and schedule. Ragnhild Hagen saved me from woe.