Diving for Starfish by Cherie Burns

Author:Cherie Burns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Chapter Fourteen

I caught Henry Baker on his cell phone between Palm Beach and Dallas. He proudly told me that his employer, Oscar Heyman jewelers, had been in the jewelry business for 101 years and had made the most important jewelry in America. Heyman designed diamonds for Elizabeth Taylor and his pieces figured largely in the Marjorie Merriweather estate.

Then Baker told me how he happened to get hold of Millicent Rogers’s Boivin starfish. “It was a fluke.” He ran through it briskly. There had been about twenty-five pieces of jewelry in the Ramos safe, he said. Some of them had belonged to Millicent. “Some were junk,” he recalled, and then he had sorted out the starfish. “These pins are difficult to sell,” he said. And to make matters worse in his calculation, Millicent Rogers is known “but she wasn’t Liz Taylor.” He said that the starfish was hard to find a buyer for in New York after he acquired it. “I dragged it all around New York,” he boasted joylessly. On his first cursory rounds of touting it to jewelers, the offers were “like twenty thousand,” he said. Peanuts. Chump change in the vintage jewelry business. So, he put the starfish in his pocket and took it to Europe. “Boivin and Paul Flato are common things over there, the way that Tiffany and Cartier are here,” he explained.

* * *

I could tell already that Henry had a more matter-of-fact approach to jewelry than anyone I had spoken with so far. “It’s a financial affair,” he said flatly. I heard the dismissive shrug in his deep voice with a Texas twang. He sounded quite different from the other jewelers I had spoken to so far. It was the first time that I had heard the brooch called merely “a pin” by a jeweler. The dealers invariably called it a brooch. “Brooch,” while dated, sounds somehow stately and more substantive. He led me quickly through the course that the starfish followed. “I sold it to a dealer in London who wanted the blood of Millicent Rogers as proof it was hers,” he said. I assumed this was Sam Loxton, who in his own words had told me he “put it on ice for six months” while he strategized about how to best advertise and show the piece. He commissioned Claudine Seroussi to research and write about it. He took it to a jewelry show in Miami to show to Lee Siegelson. Then, as best Henry recalls, the starfish changed hands twice in the United States over the next few weeks, which suggests that it went to Stephen Russell before Lee Siegelson bought it. Lee suggested to me there had been a partnership between him and Stephen Russell. He was vague. “We’ve worked on a few together,” Lee had said, waving his hand nonchalantly. All of these were fairly fast handoffs except for the period it was kept by Siegelson as he positioned and featured the brooch as he is apt to do when he hopes to create interest in a valuable piece.

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