by Cherie Burns
I wanted to know what conventions or rules governed the making of copies of the starfish. It was a topic that would occupy more of my thought and reporting on the starfish than I knew at the time. Chervin guessed that the drawing of the first starfish was never shown to Colbert, but that Moutard and Jeanne Boivin simply decided to make one. Then after it turned out to be spectacular and was bought by Colbert, they hoped to make another. “Ah, but there is always the question of privacy. It is like spending a lot of money for a dress. You don’t want to see another!” he said. Jeanne Boivin well understood the need for women to feel that the piece of jewelry they purchased from her was unique. Later the Parisian jeweler Emmanuelle Chassard showed me a Boivin ram at a jewelry show in Miami that looked straight ahead in the version she had for sale, but in a photo of the piece in Boivin’s catalogue its head of curled horns was turned to the side. Small variations could make enough difference to make a design noticeably unique, but allowed a favorite to be fabricated several times. I wondered if Susan Rotenstreich’s smaller version was an example of this practice.
* * *
According to French law, Chervin explained, a jeweler was licensed to make three models of an original design at once. Overproducing would have diluted the value of the piece in an era before mass production was common, and the French carefully regulated their arts. Chervin guessed that the first starfish had been already made when it was sold to Colbert and that she did not order it from a drawing. He thinks that Moutard and Boivin were most likely smitten enough by the design to make it without having a buyer in the wings. After it turned out to be a stunning piece and was sold to an American movie star, they would have hoped to create another. When Rogers, already a regular client, came in to see what was new at the Boivin salon in the Palais-Royal, voilà! They had something special to show her.
There could have been a starfish sitting in the long sweeping jewelry case when Millicent swooped in with her usual charm and hauteur to shop. Or, as André Chervin explained, it is more likely that Madame Boivin, or perhaps even the legendary salesman and director of the showroom, Monsieur Girard, skillfully stoked her interest. “There is something you might like that we have made, but I will have to ask if I may show it to you,” Chervin explained such careful salesmanship. This was the protocol if Colbert had commissioned hers, or maybe even as a courtesy if she had simply bought the first one already made. “Saying ‘we made something but we cannot propose it to you without asking’ would have gotten her attention,” he explained, wise to the ways of creating interest in a piece of jewelry. I asked if Claudette Colbert would have cared. Chervin laughed one of those infectious French male laughs that makes you feel for a brief moment that you have said something original and clever when you know you have been neither. “I could care less is what she probably said,” he rejoined. But in his opinion the jeweler would have played the role of being punctiliously discreet and would have also tickled Millicent’s interest by creating an element of suspense and something to wait for. Of course, I thought as I left him, Millicent would have ordered one to her specifications. It is not surprising that her starfish differed slightly from the others.
Rogers and Colbert did not know each other, but I had heard from O’Hagan that Colbert admired Rogers’s style and the influence she cast over fashion in their day—the thirties and forties. It is a somewhat ironic aside that their taste dovetailed in jewelry and men. After Rogers divorced Ronnie Balcom, he appeared in a photograph taken on the ski slopes in Sun Valley with Colbert at his side.
The other two original starfish that were created by Boivin in the 1930s were fully articulated, but Rogers’s was not. Its rays have movable joints but they do not bend as fully as the others. This is hard to know if you don’t handle the piece and have the benefit of comparing it to the others whose golden joints go slack if you dangle them in the air. But Millicent’s starfish also had another key difference. Hers was the only starfish that had baguette amethysts circling the big round ruby at its center. The baguettes, or little rectangles, are the distinguishing feature I am most grateful for because they are the only way to know from a photo whether a starfish was Millicent’s. They have been the best evidence that after my date with it that night at my book party at Verdura, I have not seen the Rogers starfish again.
Chapter Thirteen
Millicent Rogers was attracted to the Boivin starfish for the same reasons it had captivated Claudette Colbert. She always had an eye for stylish jewelry, and liked to make a splash. Her father scolded her in a letter for overspending when she was in her twenties. By the time she was in her thirties and living in Europe, it was a full-blown avocation. Major jewelers like Boivin often saw her coming. They knew she had money to spend and seldom asked the price of something that she wanted, but there was a flip side to her shopping habits. She was a difficult client, full of the sense of entitlement that great wealth bestows. The Belperron archives made note of her attempts to return pieces sometimes years after she had bought them in hopes of exchanging them for newer designs. Rogers was determined to live on the stylish cusp of change, and most shoppers didn’t act like her. With less money to spend, they didn’t have her clout with merchants, who always forgave her excesses.
Millicent was an extravagant collector of jewelry and she learned to make pieces of her own design, both reasons that led her to Boivin in Paris in the 1930s. Boivin’s imaginative and innovative styles had already captivated several Hollywood personalities in the United States. Couturiers like Millicent’s friend Elsa Schiaparelli were acquainted with Boivin because they knew Jeanne’s brother, Paul Poiret, the leading fashion designer in Paris before the war. Poiret was inspired by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to introduce flowing styles that were a precursor to flapper fashions in the United States. The dancer Isadora Duncan and the actress legend Sarah Bernhardt were also clients, and popularized Boivin’s bold jewelry styles. Rogers was attracted to Boivin jewelry not only for the wonderful naturalistic designs that were becoming the rage, but she also found the ambience of a house run by women that also relied on women designers especially appealing as she tried to learn jewelry making for herself. She had sent one of her own early efforts at design to Boivin for fabrication. She was acquainted with Jeanne’s brother, Paul Poiret. They traveled in the same well-connected fashion circles. It was a genial relationship that would lead Rogers, with her appetite for high-quality novelty in clothes and accessories, to come eventually across the Boivin starfish.
* * *
Remember, she was a Standard Oil heiress, and her appetite for collecting was insatiable. Jewelry occupied a central part of her life. Rogers had suffered from rheumatic fever as a child and she suffered throughout her life from a weak heart. A series of small strokes caused some paralysis and tremors in her left arm. Jewelry making, the wielding of small jewelers’ tools and the shaping of wax models, was good for maintaining her manual dexterity. She also liked presenting personalized gifts, like the gold cuff links she made for Clark Gable.
As she did with dress couturiers, Rogers influenced designs with leading jewelers that she patronized. She was instrumental in Fulco di Verdura’s creation of a diamond-thronged scallop-shell brooch and she contributed design motifs to the leading American jeweler Paul Flato. Her design, the Flato heart brooch, was the same one Lee Seigelson gave me to try on when I first met him and Sarah Davis in the Siegelson salon.
In 1938 Rogers married her third husband, the handsome bon vivant Ronnie Balcom, nine years her junior. They occupied a house that she and her second husband, an Argentine aristocrat, had built in Austria, and during the years they spent there before World War II, Millicent exemplified, as Diana Vreeland put it, soignée international fashion style. She shopped in Paris and wore designs by the leading couturiers of the day, including Valentina, Schiaparelli, and Mainbocher. In addition to modeling her style in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, she often accessorized the clothes she wore for fashion shoots with her own pieces of jewelry. She sh
owed up with the Flato heart brooch coming through customs with Ronnie Balcom and on a Schiaparelli suit that she modeled for Vogue. In the photo she sits at the desk of her New York apartment in a Schiaparelli black pantsuit with the starfish pinned to her right shoulder in 1945. Like Claudette Colbert, Millicent bought her starfish for herself in 1938.
That year she had given Ronnie, a car fancier, a Delage Aerosport coupe that he admired at the Paris Expo. The deal was contingent on the manufacturer’s adopting a new shape she had specified for the fender and rear fin. Rogers never needed an excuse for parity in spending, but that gift is the closest I can come to a motivation for her buying a ruby and amethyst starfish brooch for herself, if she needed a justification. She rarely did. It is more probable that she was simply captivated by the starfish, prized it for its beauty, and bought it for herself. Because she had more money than the men she kept in her life, they did not buy jewelry for her. She bought her own.
Both the first two starfish were bought by wealthy, stylish women for themselves, which suggested a pattern that would continue. It also bore out the theory of some jewelers that the starfish attracted a unique kind of woman. The first shared attribute was being rich, but it went beyond money.
Like Colbert, Rogers had confidence and flair enough to sport a piece as bold as the starfish. This was a woman who had gone to a New York debutante’s ball in a black dress and Chinese headdress for no better reason than to create a sensation. She almost always tweaked the design of things she bought, changing the buttons on coats, mixing rustic and refined elements in clothes, putting her personal stamp on everything she touched. So it is reasonable to assume that she did the same thing with the starfish that she had done in the Delage showroom where she had taken a lipstick out of her purse and drawn the tail fin design she wanted on the car she ordered for her husband. At Boivin, she likely asked Juliette Moutard and Jeanne Boivin to make her starfish a bit different from the one Claudette Colbert had. She wanted hers to be slightly more rigid and to lie flatter than the more articulated variety that Claudette had bought. Records show that she ordered the starfish and a hippocamp piece by Boivin at the same time. She was accustomed to asking for a slightly different, personalized twist to most things she had custom made. She was also known for her great tact with designers, making them feel that she was only suggesting the smallest modification to their own already brilliant creations. Juliette Moutard and Jeanne Boivin either demurred or concurred. It is worth noting that the next starfish Boivin would produce after Rogers’s reverted to Juliette’s original design, fully articulated again and without baguette amethysts around the central cabochon ruby. Perhaps Millicent’s was even the third that was made, though it was the second that sold, if Jeanne Boivin had taken advantage of the French law to make two more of the first design. The evidence suggests that Jeanne and Juliette preferred their original design. As for the phantom third, I was still looking for even one report that someone had seen it outside of the shop.
* * *
The Rogers family, I hoped, would have the story of how Millicent’s starfish had come up for sale in 2011. I took a deep breath. Millicent’s last living son, Arturo Peralta Ramos, had not been the easiest source to deal with while I was writing his mother’s biography. But I was hearing from diverse parties in the jewelry business who had anything to do with the selling of Millicent’s starfish that Arturo had owned the piece, and to make the story even juicier, that he and his wife had at last opened up a safe where he kept it in his New York apartment, formerly his mother’s, along with other treasured and valuable pieces of jewelry. I had perked up when Claudine Seroussi, as part of our early conversation about the Rogers piece, told me the story of a young couple she had met who announced themselves to be Rogers family of some sort and spoke of a storied safe.
Rogers had grandchildren, but none came to mind that fit this description, and the idea of a vault where Millicent’s remaining gems were hidden sounded to me like something right out of Arturo’s storybook. He loved intrigue and secrets. But I listened. I also heard that Arturo and his wife Jackie, who previously spent summers in Turtlewalk, the old hacienda in Taos that Millicent had bought and refurbished in the 1940s, were now living in Taos full-time. Arturo was eighty-seven and in spite of smoking several packs of cigarettes a day he managed to carry on, driving around an old woody station wagon with the tanks of oxygen he needed to keep breathing at an altitude of seven thousand feet in the seat next to him.
I had heard that Jackie, also in her eighties, had been the actual owner of the starfish until it was sold. I made an appointment to speak with her but she insisted that I talk to Arturo first since he had known about the starfish longer than she had.
* * *
A pack of barking dogs announced my arrival at the house. Arturo met me at the top of the outdoor stairs to his study and ushered me inside, ready to talk about his mother’s starfish brooch.
Arturo guessed that his mother found her way to Boivin with “Schiap,” her designer and friend Elsa Schiaparelli. “Schiap introduced her to jewelers. My mother had tons and tons of jewelery,” he said, and added that she carried it with her during their trips to Paris, where she often stayed at the Plaza Athénée. These memories swam around for Arturo. He recalled a ring from the 1920s that had belonged to the Russian mystic Rasputin in his mother’s collection. Its connection to a villainous and powerful figure captured his boyish imagination. “She would pay any price if she wanted it,” he said of his mother’s shopping method. Millicent seemed to have few true favorite pieces of jewelry, he recalled, but “she wore the starfish on gowns. I remember that.” He spoke knowingly of Millicent’s visits to Boivin though he could not remember there being a specific time or day that she came home to Shulla House in Austria with a jewelry purchase from Paris, where she often traveled to visit her mother when the family lived in Europe before World War II. He did remember the starfish being in their house and seeing his mother wear it. He told me that Millicent followed a quote from “Johnny” (Jean) Schlumberger, who designed for Tiffany & Co.: “If you can’t wear it, why have it?” She wore her jewelry.
The most provocative new thing Arturo told me about the starfish was his teenage memory of Millicent having two of them. He said that he remembered the starfish because when he saw two of them, he asked her, “Why do you want a second one?” She answered that she was “comparing” them. Stylish women and men to whom I have posed the same question have said that two would have made a fabulous belt buckle. Arturo always remembered having the impression that the second starfish had arrived for Millicent to take a look at and somehow to evaluate or appraise. Whatever the reason, she only kept one for her collection. On occasion she loaned it to friends to wear—or to study. Arturo remembered it being loaned to his grandmother Mary and to the Hollywood actress Janet Gaynor. He thought it may have also been loaned to the Brazilian sculptress Maria Martens, who encouraged Millicent to have confidence in her own jewelry-making talent and designs.
After Millicent died in 1952 her will left certain pieces like her pearl ring and earrings to family members, but Arturo seems to have kept what jewelry was not itemized in her will. He says that after he married his second wife, Jackie, he started giving her a “pin” from his mother’s collection every year at Christmas. The first one he gave to her was the starfish.
Discussing the starfish gave Arturo reason to tell me a touching story that I had heard before but not in such detail. His mother had met his second-wife-to-be when she was just a teenager in the San Fernando Valley. Millicent was in her forties and had moved to Los Angeles to be closer to her new lover, Clark Gable. She was looking at property to buy, inspecting the movie director John Ford’s farm, not far from his existing home in Encino, California, where the thirteen-year-old Jackie rode her horse. Jackie was upset at seeing the surveyor’s sticks on the land where she loved to ride and considered wild, so on three occasions she jumped down from her horse on her daily ride and pulled them up, thin
king she could impede any sale of the property. Finally, the third time, Gable and Millicent caught her doing it. According to Arturo, Gable scolded her roughly, threatening to spank her for what she had done “to this lady.“Millicent took a gentler line with Jackie, who explained that she had meant no harm. She simply wanted to be able to ride her horse on the property. “Come and ride here anytime,” Millicent assured her. And Jackie rode home chastened but sure that “the lady,” Millicent, loved horses because of a large pin she was wearing on her shirt. In fact, the pin was Boivin’s famous hippocamp brooch, startling for its image of a half horse, half merhorse: a “hippocamp” dangling a dark gray drop-shaped pearl. The hippocamp would reenter her life again later.
* * *
I went to visit Jackie a few days after I had spoken with Arturo. Jackie was a former couture model easing into her eighties. She was still remarkably attractive. I knew that she had been plagued in recent years by health issues and I expected someone more frail, ravaged even, than the immaculately dressed, creamy-skinned, slender woman who greeted me. The housekeeper ushered me down a hallway lined with blue oxygen tubes to her bedroom. She suffered from emphysema but she was breathing without oxygen when I arrived. There was an element of animated fun about her that is hard to describe, as though she just might jump out of bed and dance the twist or share a secret with you. And she was elegant in chartreuse and black lounging pajamas, her silky blond-white hair pulled back with a headband à la fifties Hollywood. Her nails were neatly manicured and polished to a neutral sheen. Her bedroom at Turtlewalk looked north across the fields of Taos. Majestic Taos Mountain appeared through the large picture window framed with tasseled drapes. Between the foot of her bed and the window a large flat-screen television was on, tuned to horseracing, one of her passions. I asked if we could lower the volume while I sat at the foot of the bed as she talked about her starfish.