by Cherie Burns
* * *
Several days before the Magnificent Jewels auction I interviewed Rahul Kadakia. He was out of the office when I was ushered in by an assistant but the starfish were in a purple tray on his desk. I studied them until he arrived. When Rahul came in he held the starfish up and turned it over. Its rays hung limply, reminding me of a bullfrog when he lifted it. It was fully articulated. A phone call interrupted and he excused himself for a moment from the office. “Please,” he said, handing the starfish over to me to hold. I was no longer hesitant. I picked up the ruby and amethyst one and took it over to the window to examine it in the light. Its second and fourth rays were upturned at their end. One small amethyst came loose and tumbled to his desk. I wondered if that was the effect I had on these starfish since a similar thing had happened at Nancy Marks’s. I placed it in the purple tray. I turned the starfish over but could not make out the tiny maker’s marks on its back that might prove its provenance. They were too small to see with a naked eye. When Rahul returned he called an assistant to bring a small plastic bag for the loose amethyst.
He picked the starfish up with far less reverence than I had. With the help of his jeweler’s loupe, he studied the marks on its underside. He believed he could make out a palm tree on a stem, the symbol of a fabricator that neither he nor I could identify. Charles Profillet was the fabricator of the original starfish and he usually signed his work. His name was not there. The emerald and aquamarine version had an eagle eye and “Boivin” in block letters, he said. I could not even see them with a magnifying glass. He shrugged. I would need to check out the marks to see what fabricators they signified. He could not, I knew, discuss who had consigned these starfish with Christie’s. “These rubies are too purple to be pigeon blood,” he said, referring to the fine rubies that were often used by Boivin in the thirties and forties. It sounded as if he was giving me a clue that these starfish were not originals. The catalogue for the collection did not specify that these starfish were made in the 1960s. I could not distinguish the later from the newer starfish by the glossy photos of them in the catalogue, but it was easy to do when you were in their presence or had one in your hand. I’d been told that in one case Françoise Cailles had known the same problem and had authenticated a Boivin piece that she had to recant later after she saw it in person. The originals seemed denser and somehow tighter. It was difficult to explain the difference, and perhaps that intangible je ne sais quoi that dealers spoke of, the scent and spirit of former owners that they believed clung to pieces of estate jewelry, made a difference. Who was I to quibble? A trained expert might have attributed the subtle differences to the workmanship expressed in the goldsmithing, the fitting of the joints, and the setting of the stones. Whatever accounted for the difference, these starfish did not capture one’s imagination or make you feel that you held something extraordinary in your hand. I could feel it, but I couldn’t quite explain it, just as Janet Zapata had told me I would.
Rahul plopped the starfish into the box.
We began by discussing buyers for the starfish and the brooches’ special appeal. “Some [people] prefer diamonds to colored stones but this is an iconic piece,” he said, nodding to the starfish on his desk. “It is special. People gravitate to it. It is a very sophisticated piece for some customers who can play with jewelry.” He had an idea that the starfish buyer was someone “who has a Harry Winston big diamond. Cartier sapphire earrings. A JAR. Pearls by Mikimoto. Everything that you could possibly want. The Boivin starfish brooch is for a princess or actress. It is fun jewelry, like that gold chain from that summer in the seventies.” He called them “big stars” rather than starfish and said that in his whole career so far he had not seen ten of them, counting the starfish in different gemstone combinations and sizes. He told me a story centered on Cartier’s tutti-frutti bracelet. It was made of stones in many different colors. “Why?” he asked rhetorically. “All the stones from Burma and elsewhere had to go to India for cutting. India would offload its poor-quality gemstones first. ‘You must buy this before we connect you with the maharajah you want to buy from,’ was what they said. So the stones were all polished in Jaipur. They were carved in Paris.” The “tutti-frutti” design by Cartier from the early 1900s that entailed mixing brightly colored gemstones, typically sapphires, rubies, and emeralds, and putting them in platinum and diamond settings, became a classic hit. In 2014 a tutti-frutti bracelet sold for $2.1 million at Sotheby’s. The heiress Daisy Fellowes bought a necklace in 1936, about the same time that Claudette Colbert bought her Boivin starfish. “Tutti-frutti was a great example of creativity triumphing over gems alone,” said Rahul, admiring how something of great value could be made from inferior-quality stones. The same could be said of Boivin’s starfish and other oversized sea creatures whose value rested on imaginative design rather than the worth of the stones. The stones that now cost $1,500 to $2,000 a carat were worth $50 to $100 in the 1930s when Juliette Moutard made the starfish, guessed Rahul.
Yet he confessed that he was not especially interested in who owned jewelry. “I always want to know the age and condition of a piece. It is more important than who owned it.” He had the smooth facial features of a boy, but he talked like a sage. And a businessman.
* * *
The day before the Magnificent Jewels auction that would include the two starfish, one ruby and amethyst and the other emerald and aquamarine, I went to Christie’s to preview them. They were laid out with all the other pieces to be auctioned in a viewing gallery on the ground floor. I browsed around until I saw the starfish. When I walked up to the counter and was about to ask the attendant to hand me the starfish a tall man in dark-framed glasses with a curly ponytail beat me to it. He turned it over briskly and handed it back. I asked him if he knew about the starfish. In a British accent he said he’d handled three or four of them before. I immediately perked up and told him why I was interested. We chatted for a moment. He was Adam Zebrak, a dealer from Monte Carlo for SJ Phillips, the firm where I had interviewed the principals in London. I remembered Jonathan Norton and his brother telling me that they had never seen a starfish and knew nothing about them. Zebrak was moving fast, previewing many of the pieces in the room, and I could tell that this starfish was not of any special interest to him.
The auction the following day was curiously routine. There were 350 lots to sell and the two starfish were lots 191 and 192, titled “Property from a distinguished collection” in the catalogue. There was no mention of Françoise Cailles or her authentication, yet the pieces were signed René Boivin, according to the catalogue. I thought of François Curiel’s modernization of the auction world and penchant for marketing when I opened the glossy four-color catalogue to a photo of the two starfish, the ruby and amethyst one in front, the emerald and aquamarine one in back. They were posed standing on tips like two dancers with their arms spread in a pas de deux or cartwheel for a full page. Images of the pieces for sale flashed up on a big projection screen above the auctioneer during the bidding. Things had come a long way from the time when jewelry was laid out in gray cardboard boxes and looked all the same.
The starfish did not come up for several hours into the bidding. Then they came and went in a blink without much competition. The catalogue estimate had been $80,000 to $120,000 but the ruby and amethyst starfish actually sold for $137,000, the emerald and aquamarine one for $125,000. While these numbers topped the estimates, it was clear that the audience knew, as did I, that these starfish were not Boivin originals. A JAR diamond flower cuff bracelet in the next lot was listed for $600,000 to $800,000.
There was no way to know who the buyer of the starfish was and whether he or she was seated in the room or on the other end of the telephone line. As I left the room, Adam Zebrak stood nearby. I had seen him seated next to Murray Mondschein, who was wearing black-and-white suspenders patterned with skulls and crossbones, a few rows in front of me. “Murray said that it wasn’t one he’d made,” he told me. I was surprised that he shared th
is confidence with me. It was significant that he spoke at all of starfish that Murray had made. If not Murray, who then? I wondered. Maybe Nathalie Hocq and Pierre Bergé or their former colleague in the auction world, Frédéric Chambre? I remembered that Ann Ziff had said that she had seen a starfish at auction on the second floor of the PBA house in Paris.
* * *
After the auction I located Adam Zebrak through SJ Phillips in London and asked him to tell me about the starfish that he had handled. He wrote back, “I have owned a couple over the years and have sold them to Fred Leighton. I do not discuss my clients, customers, or past glories. Privacy is my policy…!!” Obviously, I was learning, Fred Leighton, aka Murray Mondschein, was a strand upon which many starfish had washed ashore, and some were even spawned there.
Ralph Esmerian, the dapper fourth-generation jeweler who bought the Fred Leighton jewelry company from the retiring Murray Mondschein in 2006, remembered, “Murray Mondschein (better known by his name change to Fred Leighton) proudly showed me a couple of starfish in the 1980s that he had commissioned the Boivin firm to make for him.” I wondered, was it the 1980s or the 1990s that Pat Saling mentioned, but I had learned by talking to jewelers that there was some fluid margin for accuracy, even if it rattled my journalistic nerves. Ralph continued, “I voiced my objections to such copies, expressing (and knowing him) that within a few years such reproductions would be represented as originals from the 30s and 40s.” Ralph corresponded with me by letter while he served his time in the Canaan federal prison in Waymart, Pennsylvania. He had become one of my best sources about the starfish and the people who might know something about them. He added, “When Murray bought some of Diana Vreeland’s jewelry, I thought he showed me an original Boivin starfish—but I’m not certain.” I could find no record of a starfish in Vreeland’s estate, yet the starfish would have fit right in with her penchant for things red and big. Her sons directed me to fashion jewelry king Kenneth Jay Lane, who helped Vreeland with her jewelry collection and unabashedly copied Chanel cuffs and other master jewelers’ pieces for her, the Duchess of Windsor, Jackie Kennedy, and other stylish women. But he could not recall seeing a Boivin starfish in her costume or fine jewelry collections.
* * *
Those “reproductions” that Ralph mentioned had been made during the time that Jacques Bernard owned Boivin and ran its business for Asprey. There was no question any longer in my mind that Murray had made and offered “later” starfish for sale, and there was evidence that an original may have passed through Fred Leighton jewelry at some time, but I wasn’t going to learn about it firsthand. I couldn’t help wondering if the later ones had been presented for sale as originals. There was at least room for confusion. Of that I was certain.
It was obvious to me that there was money to be made by anyone who produced copies of the original starfish and inserted them into the market. They could count on the guardians of integrity of these works of art to be tolerant of the imitation process.
The question of counterfeits dogged and intrigued me. I grappled with the term since most later starfish were made more or less under Boivin’s extended auspices, but I wondered how this differed from a hypothetical example I made up. What if the Ford Motor Company made a copy today of the original Mustang pony model of 1964? It would be very easy to distinguish from the “later” ones made in 2015. Both are called Mustangs, but no fancier of the sixties classic would be satisfied by the modern version, I bet. More to the point, no one would be fooled into believing that the later version was an original. Jewelry is different.
When I heard back from Ann Ziff’s office about the sale dates and location of her starfish, I realized her starfish was the one I had handled and seen auctioned at Christie’s. “Property from a distinguished collection” was the only hint of its provenance in the catalogue and there was no claim that it, or its emerald and aquamarine partner, had been authenticated by Françoise Cailles or that they had been made in the 1930s. And they had been priced accordingly. By this time I found it only mildly surprising that no one had bothered to point out to me, when I was on hand asking questions, that this ruby and amethyst starfish was not one of those I was looking for, unless I counted Rahul Kadakia’s telling comment that the rubies were not of pigeon-blood hue. He had played along while we studied the ruby and amethyst piece, looking for puncheons and signatures. Though signed with the Boivin stamp, which could have been real or added later, it was not one of the original three. It was a later model.
Ziff’s starfish were the best example I had encountered so far of how starfish reproductions, no matter what you called them, could crawl into the market and obscure the trail of the originals. Yet, Ziff’s appreciation and enjoyment of the pieces did not depend on their authenticity. The starfish’s beauty and articulation were satisfying enough for her. They were well made, and indeed, they were technically the Boivin brand. There is always confusion surrounding the signed pieces, since Madame Boivin had maintained that Boivin creations needed no signature to identify them. The assay marks by the fabricators, like Charles Profillet, were one indication of original provenance, but a piece that was out-and-out signed by Boivin was more likely to have been made later by Asprey. It didn’t make a lot of sense and felt like a good round of the childhood game of opposites, in which you said everything you didn’t mean, or the way that tornadoes and toilets reverse their spins in the southern hemisphere.
It was time to take stock. I had now discovered and held two of the original Boivin starfish in my hands and I knew that Millicent Rogers’s was floating around New York City, on the bosom of a Van Cleef & Arpels client who was an aficionada of the arts. Jennifer Tilly had a fine original one in Los Angeles.
Chapter Twenty-two
I heard about the Original Miami Beach Antiques and Estate Jewelry Fair from Natalie Bos, who writes the JewelsDuJour jewelry blog. Bos had featured Boivin starfish on her blog in the past and I was anxious to speak with her. We met for coffee.
Bos had never seen a full-sized Boivin ruby and amethyst starfish, though she had devoted a blog entry to a report that Stephen Russell and Lee Siegelson were showing Rogers’s around the dealers’ market. When I asked her which of the various jewelry auctions I should attend in order to familiarize myself with the scene, she hardly paused before suggesting Miami. I was surprised. I had expected her to say Maastricht in the Netherlands, or the Masterpieces, or even Baselworld in Basel, Switzerland, which claims it is the most important and trendsetting show for the watch and jewelry industry. One hundred fifty thousand people attended that weeklong event in 2015. But the Original Miami Beach Antique Show in January was her suggestion. “They’ll all be there,” she explained, meaning the dealers I had been hunting and talking to for several years now.
She was right. The Original Miami Beach Antique Show claims to be the world’s largest indoor antiques show. Its wares range from Renaissance to Art Deco. A thousand dealers from twenty-eight countries attract twenty thousand attendees to South Florida.
It had begun pouring rain the night before the show and continued into the next day when I arrived through puddles outside the bland, one-story box building of the Miami Beach convention hall. Inside it became obvious that the majority of the shoppers were dealers buying from other dealers. I felt I had landed in territory that was a cross between a fishbowl and a Fellini movie. The windowless space gave no hint of the weather outside, day or night. Inside the air was full of purpose as people consulted their catalogues and moved through the square grid of aisles. This jewelry fair was not a place for carefree shoppers to ooh and ahh over the pretty pieces. It was more like a trade show: serious business for those who attended. The dozen or so dealers I had pursued in New York and Europe were listed in the directory, along with over a hundred wholesalers from Tel Aviv and hundreds from other places. French, Spanish, and Italian were heard as much on the floor as English. I wandered around aimlessly at first, just to get my bearings, and when I looked up, lo and behold, ther
e was Pat Saling in a turquoise blazer behind the counter of her booth. The customer shopping ahead of me was the Belgian dealer Véronique Bamps, wearing moccasins and jeans, and looking, she said, for a certain Cartier bracelet. When Bamps moved on I approached Saling with a couple of follow-up questions about when she had sold jewelry to Imelda Marcos. Her face hardened when she recognized me. I asked if she had heard anything more about the Boivin starfish since I had interviewed her the prior year. She said she hadn’t. “I wouldn’t tell you if I did know,” she added. I asked if Murray was at the convention. “He’s here,” she said, turning her charm toward another customer.
I milled through aisles of telescopes, Hermès scarves, silverware, vintage crystal, and paintings mixed in the rows, maybe even miles, of jewelry. There was just enough kitsch to offer some relief. I stopped to touch the ears of a full-sized Yoda statue in a booth with jukeboxes and bar toys. They didn’t wiggle as I’d hoped.
After almost three years of chasing the starfish and the dealers who handled them, I found this show was a bit like a family reunion, complete with irritable old aunts and uncles, their names displayed behind their booths. I recognized the players in my story and knew better what to ask of them at this stage of the game than when I had first met them. Typically crisp and dressed for business when I’d met them in cities, everyone was a bit rumpled and casual in the Florida humidity. I hoped that would mean more accessible.
* * *
I went looking for Martin Travis from Symbolic & Chase, whom I had missed seeing in London. I knew that Martin had sold a diamond starfish brooch a few years earlier in London and he was familiar with Boivin. Sandy-haired and wearing jeans, he was younger than I had imagined.