In Other Words

Diving for Starfish: The Jeweler, the Actress, the Heiress and One of the World’s Most Alluring Pieces of Jewelry by Cherie Burns

Diving for Starfish: The Jeweler, the Actress, the Heiress and One of the World’s Most Alluring Pieces of Jewelry by Cherie Burns, St. Martin’s Press, 230 pages The pursuit began after a party in New York. Cherie Burns — author of a biography about Standard Oil heiress and Taoseña Millicent Rogers, Searching for

Beauty (2011) — was in the city for a book event hosted by the jeweler Verdura, from whom her subject had purchased pieces. The owner offered to show Burns a particular piece that had belonged to Rogers. “There, prominently displayed on a gray velvet pillowed pedestal, was a golden starfish the size of my palm, with rubies and amethysts cascading down its ridged rays. Its articulated arms were fully extended and under the showroom lighting it seemed not just to sparkle, but also to effervesce. … The starfish looked real enough to climb out of the case and march up my arm.” Burns declined the opportunity to hold the piece, but when she returned to the salon the following day hoping for a second chance, it was gone. No one at Verdura could say for certain where.

That brief encounter with the starfish brooch sent Burns — a Taos resident herself and a seasoned journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, People, Glamour, and other publications — on a quest to learn more about it. Over the next several years, she dove into the murky waters of high-end jewelry designers and dealers, traveling from New York, Paris, and London to Hollywood and Miami, bringing to the surface “the drama, intrigue, and deception that would sometimes surround” these jewels, particularly pieces designed by the house of Boivin.

René Boivin — brother-inlaw of the famed Paris couturier Paul Poiret — founded his jewelry house in Paris in the 1890s. Over the next few decades, the firm became renowned for imaginative, meticulously crafted pieces, distinguished by their avantgarde sculptural designs and colored stones (Rogers’ starfish featured 71 rubies and 241 small amethysts as well as “miraculously hinged joints that allowed it to conform to the profile of the wearer.”). Boivin designer Juliette Moutard made three original starfish in the 1930s — and perhaps two more sometime later — and no two are exactly the same. British jewelry expert Vivienne Becker lists the starfish among the 100 most valuable pieces in the world, and they have been widely copied. One jeweler assures Burns that “everybody who was anybody between 1935 and 1945 bought from Boivin.”

In Diving for Starfish, Burns attempts to track the journey of the three original brooches as they passed from one owner to the next — a task more difficult that you’d imagine, given that Boivin designers never signed their pieces — their quality alone would be enough to identify them (what some authenticators would call “certified by design, not mark”). Celebrities and socialites have possessed starfish, from Rogers and Claudette Colbert to, more recently, actress and professional poker player Jennifer Tilly. Burns’ hunt plays out like a detective story for fashionistas (and, to some extent, for fans of celebrity gossip), with twists and turns along the way.

Jewelry display cases are transparent by design, but the world behind the scenes, Burns discovers, is quite the opposite. She arranges for a meeting with a New York appraiser, but when she arrives at the agreed-upon time, he retreats to a back room to eat his lunch and gruffly shouts, “Why should I talk to you?” He finally suggests that she come back to speak with him again only after she has obtained a degree in gemology.

She learns that “the French go to great lengths to keep their jewelry secret.” When, over lunch at Ladurée, she asks jewelry expert Françoise Cailles if she knows an owner of a starfish who would be willing to speak with her, Cailles’ “expression was of controlled horror. … It was as if I had asked something extremely personal and unsavory, coarse even.” Ledgers of jewelry sales were kept, but “most jewelers would not write the true name of a client in their books or the price of an item for sale. They created a code … that only a few principals in their own business knew.”

But Burns is determined and intelligent, though not without self-deprecation and, ultimately, a sense of when to call it quits — in the book’s closing pages, she admits that “I could get no closer without abandoning reason altogether.” Her prose is vivid, clear, and smart; and her sense of humor shines through from time to time, like beams of sunlight penetrating the ocean’s surface. Still, this is hardly nonfiction of pressing global geopolitical importance — one assumes Burns’s tongue was lodged firmly in her cheek when she declared the decision to refer to an anonymous source as Deep Throat — but it does offer a refreshing respite from the 24-hour news cycle.

— Laurel Gladden

Cherie Burns discusses Diving for Starfish at Collected Works Bookstore (202 Galisteo St., 505-988-4226) at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 20. She also appears at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos (238 Ledoux St., 575-758-9826) at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 21; $8.