Diving for Starfish

by Cherie Burns

  Barbara had happened upon a ruby and amethyst Boivin starfish in the Marché aux Puces in northern Paris, where permanent stalls house the flea market that is something of a French institution. As Rebecca Scherm wrote in her novel Unbecoming, which describes the Marché, “it was perhaps the only flea market in the world where a six-thousand-euro Louis XIV love seat sat outside on the sidewalk.” Barbara prowled the market when she was studying in Paris. She took immediate note of the starfish the day she saw it. “It made me gasp, it was so beautiful,” she said. She asked its price of the old woman who was selling it, and remembered, “It was a lot. Probably fifty thousand francs, even then.” The old woman in the tiny enclosure eyed her thoughtfully. “Who is buying this?” Barbara asked her. “Americans,” was the answer. The woman explained that the starfish had been made by a small French maker for the haute bourgeoise Frenchwoman. “She said it was a little intellectual, and it was collected by Americans. I was so intrigued,” Barbara said. I was intrigued, too, wondering if Claudette Colbert’s lost starfish could have washed up in a flea market stall some forty years after it went missing.

  I asked Barbara a variant of the same question that she had asked the old woman in the market: why do women buy starfish? Her answer was thoughtful, as though she had arrived at it over many years as a jeweler. “Buying them is the most perfect escapism. It is just you and a whimsy. There is not enough whimsy in lives today. It’s a sea creature! The moment you buy it is a pure moment of definite whimsy for those who can afford it. You can’t put a price on the experience.”

  I found myself thinking about this every time I came close to an owner of the starfish, and I began to understand why some owners wouldn’t talk about their starfish. The thrill was in the secrecy, the private moment of owning the piece and putting it on at will. It was a little like a love affair. To go too wide with it, too public, was to diminish the thrill. It was difficult for the owners to explain, some magic alchemy of glee and greed that, I suppose, is not something most of us want to own up to. Mine. That was what Ann Marie Stanton remembered about watching Oprah Winfrey at the Oscars one year when a reporter inquired about a piece of jewelry on her dress. “Whose is that?” the reporter asked, expecting Winfrey to name the jeweler who had loaned it. “Mine,” said Oprah, taking everyone aback.

  * * *

  It was a Christie’s attendant who was showing me a starfish, in a preview to its sale, who distilled the matter down to its essence. She was girlish, lightly slipping the starfish back into its case. “Don’t you wish these pieces could talk?” she asked. Yes. Yes, I did.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Murray Mondschein, whose name looms over the jewelry world, continued to be a presence lurking in the shadows at every turn of my path pursuing the starfishs’ story. Ward Landrigan had made the association first. Françoise Cailles in Paris mentioned Murray as someone who knew about the starfish. Susan Abeles of Bonhams recalled walking past Murray’s store and seeing one in the window years earlier. Ralph Esmerian, whose relationship with Murray was no doubt complicated, kept urging me to explore Murray’s role. Murray had sold Fred Leighton jewelry to Ralph a year after the business pleaded guilty to tax fraud for failing to collect tax on millions of dollars of jewelry. Murray remained a legend in the trade for reasons other than simply being the face of Fred Leighton over more than thirty years. A Bronx cabdriver’s son, he began selling vintage jewelry to accessorize the Mexican wedding dresses and crafts that he sold in Greenwich Village in the late seventies. Obviously a man with a Midas touch, he began to operate under the name Fred Leighton and became the go-to jeweler for one-of-a-kind estate jewelry pieces in his awninged corner store on Madison Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street until he sold it to Esmerian in 2006. Fred Leighton jewelers carried all the great designers from Van Cleef and Tiffany to Belperron and Boivin. In the 1990s, according to Pat Saling, Murray made some starfish for Asprey, the British jeweler who bought the Boivin brand in 1991. Through Pat as his spokesperson he told me repeatedly that he is no longer in the business, but like a true devotee, he attends almost all the major jewelry shows and auctions in the United States and Europe. He is both an elusive and peripatetic character. King of the hill, he needs no publicity.

  I learned of Murray’s significance in the jewelry world and in the starfishs’ story mostly through other jewelers. Mark Emanuel, co-owner of David Webb, explained that Murray had trailblazed the “secondary market,” estate jewelry. “He monetized estate jewelry. That’s the essence of Fred Leighton.… Every great piece of jewelry passed through Murray’s hands. He figured it out. He was a true merchant. Murray saw everything and he owned everything.” He also owned starfish, both early and “later versions,” a euphemistic way of saying real and imitation ones.

  * * *

  The starfish Murray made were licensed from Asprey, the British company that bought the Boivin company in 1991, and bore the Boivin brand, but they were considered different from the originals. Slightly bigger and bolder, they did not bear the look of seamless old-world craftsmanship apparent in the originals, jewelers who had seen them told me. I would soon have the opportunity to see for myself. Yet even without comparing the two, it was easy to see why the newer starfish made it difficult to know and to track the exact number of starfish in existence. The originals and the “later ones” tended to be grouped together.

  The semantics for these other starfish had become troubling. When I first called them reproductions, Pat Saling bit my head off. Mark Emanuel at David Webb, whom Saling called a reproduction company, reprimanded me further. “The word is negative. Cut it out of your vocabulary. It’s a meaningless term. A dirty word,” Emanuel had told me and marched me upstairs to the fourth floor of the company’s Madison Avenue headquarters to see the workshop where twenty-five master jewelers fabricated David Webb designs. Signed and numbered, they weren’t, in his lexicon, reproductions. Yet the ethics of making new versions from old designs still confused me, especially if they bore the name of the original maker, as Murray’s did. Among some jewelers there seemed to be an intent to create confusion, if not outright fakery. Of course, the new starfish I had heard of had been made by the Boivin company, albeit without any of the Boivin principals and owned at the time by Prince Jefri Bolkiah, brother of the Sultan of Brunei. They were the “later” or “newer” ones. Ironically, I felt certain that they were signed or stamped R. BOIVIN. The same ethical questions arose about those produced by the Pierre Bergé auction house in Paris with the designs owned by Nathalie Hocq, current owner of the Boivin brand. The drawing I had seen was for a sapphire and emerald starfish, not ruby and amethyst, but it was clearly being marketed as a Boivin item. I suppose technically it was Boivin, on one hand, but I also stubbornly felt that if it wasn’t one of the original ruby and amethyst starfish brooches drawn on Moutard’s sketchpad and overseen by Madame Boivin, it wasn’t one of the ones, be they three or five, that I was seeking. It was a reproduction.

  * * *

  In 2006 a ruby and amethyst starfish owned by Oscar de la Renta’s wife Annette came up for auction at Christie’s in New York. The lot description said that it was “circa 1935” and bore the “maker’s mark for René Boivin.” It was priced well below the earlier Boivin ones. The record shows it was “unsold.” I have been told by jewelers that it had first been touted by Christie’s as an original but then it was taken off the market before the sale. However, four years later it was auctioned in the Geneva sale. This time it was described as a 1960s version “in pink leather René Boivin case signed and with maker’s mark for René Boivin.” When I shared this little tidbit with my husband he commented it was a bit like the automakers’ practice of selling new cars by touting the cupholders.

  I would later learn of a woman who worked as a model maker in the Boivin atelier in the 1980s and 1990s. Caroline Tappou, in Paris. “At that time we made the models in elastomer,” a rubbery polymer product, both viscous and elastic, put over a metal mold, she explained, confirming
that there had been starfish credited as Boivin that were not the old originals. This different technique sounded likely to account for the slightly coarser appearance and feel of the “later” versions I had seen. It would rule out the exacting handcrafting and thus save time and money. But something, some je ne sais quoi, was surely lost in the process.

  * * *

  Certain starfish of undetermined vintage have surfaced in other places where it is hard to follow. The late television gossip columnist Claudia Cohen reportedly had a starfish. A society woman who frequented media social events in the 1980s and 1990s tells me she saw Cohen wear it at a party for the legendary Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown in the Rainbow Room restaurant atop Rockefeller Center. Cohen was then married to billionaire Ron Perelman, known for his jewelry taste and collection. His wife after Cohen, the actress Ellen Barkin, amassed a serious collection of fine jewelry that she spoke publicly about selling after their divorce. Pat Saling said that the Cohen starfish came from her and Murray Mondschein. Everything about Cohen, who died of ovarian cancer in 2007, is difficult to track since her estate has been held up in a rancorous family dispute among her daughter Samantha, ex-husband Perelman, and his former in-laws. With $68 million in court costs, nobody has time to discuss a mere piece of jewelry.

  * * *

  Jewelry shows function as watering holes for that rarefied breed of men and women whom I was learning to identify: jewelry dealers. In fact, their lives, when you try to make an appointment with them, seem to be an endless merry-go-round of shows in New York, London, Maastricht, Tucson, Miami, Las Vegas, and on and on. They show their wares to the buying public, but perhaps more important, they advertise what they’ve got, like plumage, to other jewelers. They buy from each other for their clients and they gossip.

  * * *

  The Haughton International Fine Art & Antique Dealers Show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York has been a leading jewelry marketplace since it began in 1989. I went specifically to meet Stephen Burton, the managing director of Hancocks in London who had been too busy with preparations for the Masterpiece London show to see me the previous spring. Burton had first been mentioned to me by Henry Baker as one of the jewelers likely to see a starfish or any other piece of fine vintage jewelry that arrived in London. When I got there a man in a black raincoat with a stringy ponytail comb-over covering his bald spots was getting all the attention from the attendants behind the counter. Once the man in the raincoat moved on, Burton was free to talk.

  He and I sat down at a little table off to the side of his counter. He had given some thought to my queries about the starfish and spoke of Millicent Rogers’s, which he had seen when it moved through London with Henry Baker as “the one that got away. I didn’t quite buy that,” he told me in his lilting British accent. Like other jewelers he is acutely aware of Françoise Cailles’s position as sole authenticator of Boivin. “I think she has a full copy of the archives and designs of Boivin,” he said. The monopoly, he explained, allows her to charge to authenticate Boivin pieces, and also knocks any middlemen out of the process.

  As I put my notes away I told him that I was hoping to find Murray Mondschein at the jewelry show if he was there, but I didn’t know what he looked like. “He was just here,” he said excitedly, “the man in the black raincoat.” I needed to get moving to run him down.

  * * *

  When I passed the booth belonging to A La Vieille Russie, I stopped to talk to Peter Schaffer. Peter, a director of his family’s multigenerational business founded in Kiev in the 1850s, is a specialist in the jewelry of the czars. He and his family had always had a special relationship with Millicent Rogers. It was a slow moment on the floor of the fair and Peter sat almost clownishly on a stool, gazing across the aisle and looking to me a bit like Humpty Dumpty about to fall. I asked if he’d seen Murray Mondschein. “He’s here,” he said. “With his daughter. That way,” and he pointed rather matter-of-factly toward the dining area.

  I spotted Murray and his daughter having lunch at the back of the dining space. For a while I stood to the side and observed him. He was nothing at all like the dapper image that the name Fred Leighton had conjured up in my imagination. He wore black-and-white suspenders and had a big belly. A stream of younger merchants came up and spoke to him. He was jovial and seemed to enjoy their homage.

  Murray and his daughter finished their lunch and took seats in a booth belonging to a beautiful Belgian jewelry designer, Véronique Bamps. Bamps, I had been told by an employee of Bonhams, might know something about the starfish. Murray seemed to be telling her stories. I’d heard he was a talented raconteur. He had been in the business for a long time, and had a lot of yarns to tell. I kept an eye on Murray and his daughter until they rose to leave. I followed him into the aisle and stopped him to introduce myself. Since he had broken two previous appointments with me, I watched to see if he recognized my name. He showed no sign. I explained that I was still anxious to speak with him. “Call Pat. She does my scheduling,” he said, moving on. When I called Pat a few hours later, she grew exasperated. “I’m not his secretary,” she snapped. I already understood that Murray Mondschein had no intention of talking to me about the starfish.

  Time, and goodwill, were obviously running out for my quest. Almost everyone (except for Murray) had been willing to help me the first time around. But now that I knew what the important questions were—the ones whose answers would violate the jewelers’ omertà—it was no longer a good idea to play along with me. At first, they had patronized me and my quixotic project. Now I was “pushy.”

  * * *

  I was at a stalemate with Françoise Cailles. I had e-mailed Françoise several times after our meeting in Paris. In one message I asked if she had ever owned a starfish, as I had been told she had when I made the rounds with London jewelers. It made perfect sense since several jewelers, Lee Siegelson among them, remembered when there had been a starfish in her husband’s antiques store. But Cailles did not reply. Several months later I received an e-mail message from Pierre Callies, spelled differently than Cailles. In an attachment was a letter from Françoise with a dateline from Minneapolis.

  Dear Ms. Burns,

  I do not know if I received all your mails. I left some of your mail unanswered as result of a busy schedule. Yet, I told you everything I knew, or everything I could tell you about the starfishes. Neither my husband nor I can reveal or publish clients’ information that is strictly confidential. This is legal requirement of our professions.

  The mention of a legal prohibition against talking about jewelry in Cailles’s message was pretty questionable. Granted, there is a convention of confidentiality among dealers that serves them well. And without being specific, she had swiftly dodged my question about owning a starfish. Though she invoked the dealers’ claim of confidentiality, the questions I asked her—whether any starfish had been made by Boivin with four instead of six cabochon rubies running down their rays as Susan’s did—seemed appropriate to ask the keeper of the standards and history of the House of Boivin. Yet in her view there was no obligation to share them with the world at large. There was certainly no professional requirement for her to cooperate with me, and she had obviously decided, after a nice Paris lunch, to turn me away. I wondered: to what end did she keep her secrets?

  A letter that I sent to her husband, Michel Perinet, at their home address asking about his history with the starfish in his store went unanswered. It was clear that they were cutting me off. Nathalie Hocq, who now owned the brand and had bothered to register Boivin Fondation with a domain Internet address in 2012, was taking the same position. She wouldn’t speak about it. Boivin and the Boivin starfish were quite literally their business, and they had decided to go into protection mode. Even Lee Seigelson said he didn’t want to talk to me anymore about starfish.

  * * *

  After the Haughton show at the Armory, I stopped into Christie’s to take in the Important Jewels auction being held there that week. I wan
ted to watch Rahul Kadakia, the thirty-nine-year-old international head of Christie’s Jewelry, run it. Kadakia had been considered a rainmaker in the world of international fine jewelry auctions, following in the footsteps of François Curiel. East Indian by birth, he is a small, impeccably dressed man. Wearing red socks with his tassel loafers, he took his place behind the auction lectern. I sat near the back and watched the crowd. The buyers were mostly men and many wore yarmulkes and fedoras. It seemed everyone had a five o’clock shadow. There were a few women in fur coats, high heels, and sunglasses on such a gray day. Rahul was supremely composed, coaxing bidders and on occasion making light banter with them. There was something polished and princely about him. He had smooth, delicate-looking hands but wielded the auction gavel like he meant it. During a pause between lots I looked over to the rectangular glass jewelry case where some items for the upcoming Magnificent Jewelry sale, some months off, were already displayed. Something caught my eye. I went over for a closer look. There in the middle of the case were two large starfish brooches, one ruby and amethyst, the other emerald and aquamarine! I went back to look more closely. They were bigger and brighter than the ones I had seen so far. I hoped it was just the bright overhead lighting that made them seem so ostentatious and bold, even a little bit gross. I was taken aback. I had doubts that these were originals.

  The next morning I was back at Christie’s. The room for the previous night’s auction was cleared and empty, including the jewelry case where the starfish had been. I wondered if I’d dreamed seeing the starfish at all. I asked in several offices where I could find them. They were gone, I was told. As I had found after the Verdura party, starfish had a way of vanishing overnight. I tried again, more insistently, in another office, where buyers claim their merchandise. The clerk on duty telephoned the jewelry department. They would be available for preview in about six weeks, I was told. I could not see them now. Like sea creatures that slip from sight, the starfish went missing again. Just like that.