The Mansions of Limbo (36 page)

O
n April 2, 1987, in Geneva, A. Alfred Taubman, the Michigan mall millionaire who has become the
grand seigneur
of the auction world, put on an auction which, for sheer showmanship, rivaled the finest hours of the late P. T. Barnum, the
grand seigneur
of the circus world, who immodestly called his circus the greatest show on earth. Mr. Taubman, no shrinking violet himself, pitched his tent, or rather his red-and-white-striped marquee, on the banks of Lake Geneva and papered the house with some of the grandest names in the
Almanach de Gotha
—nonbidders, to be sure, but the swellest dress extras in auction history. Sprinkled among the princesses, the countesses, the baronesses, and an infanta were the buyers who meant business: dealers from New York and London, Japanese businessmen, a Hollywood divorce lawyer, representatives of the Sultan of Brunei and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, not to mention a battery of bidders who, because they did not wish to travel or like to be looked at, were connected by phone to Sotheby’s in New York and Geneva. Under the red-and-white-striped marquee, after six months of an unparalleled
publicity blitz, the gavel was finally raised on the opening lot of the sale of the jewels and love tokens of the late Duchess of Windsor, the American woman from Baltimore for whom a king gave up his throne. What followed was a jewel auction against which all jewel auctions to come will be compared.

In the month preceding the sale, the jewels, which I heard an English woman in Geneva describe as “frighteningly chic,” traveled from Paris, where they had been under the protectorship of Maître Suzanne Blum, the Duchess’s lawyer and a key figure in the story, to Palm Beach and New York—all with great fanfare and hype generated by Sotheby’s, the 243-year-old London-based auction house which took over New York’s Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1964, in order to woo the rich Americans who were expected to be the chief buyers in Geneva. In both cities, Alfred Taubman, the owner and chairman of Sotheby’s since 1983, hosted smart parties so that all the right people, like Mrs. Astor and Malcolm Forbes and the other heavy hitters, might have a leisurely view of the treasure trove that a besotted monarch had showered on his twice-divorced ladylove. Mr. Taubman, a hale and hearty sixty-two, whose assets are estimated in the
Forbes
-magazine list of the four hundred richest people in America at $800 million, and his beautiful younger wife, Judy, a former Miss Israel who once worked behind the counter at Christie’s, the rival auction house, handing out catalogs, are high-profile figures on the New York and Palm Beach Social circuits. “Selling art is a lot like selling root beer,” he once said.

Duchess fever swept New York. “The romance of the twentieth century,” we heard over and over. In actual fact, it was not a romance that can bear very close scrutiny: the love story of a masculine woman of middle age, who was
probably never once called beautiful in her life, and a Peter Pan king, who resisted responsibility and composed embarrassing love letters. “A boy loves a girl more and more and is holding her so tight these trying days of waiting,” he wrote to her when he was forty-two. Be that as it may, royal romance was in the air. By day the hoi polloi, willing to wait in line for three or four hours just to pass by the jewel-filled vitrines, turned out in such record numbers that the
New York Times
reported the event on its front page. Public interest was so great that Sotheby’s desisted from running advertisements in the newspapers and cut back plans to show the jewels on local television shows because the security force at the auction house could not handle any more people than were already jamming its halls.

Although the British press reported even more avidly than ours every detail of the presale hype, the traveling jewel show bypassed England. From a public-relations point of view, Sotheby’s felt it best not to open old wounds or to stir up adverse criticism when such big bucks were at stake. Fifty years after Edward VIII gave up his throne for the woman he loved, his duchess, even in death, remains a controversial figure in that country, still disliked and still unforgiven by a generation that blames her for taking away from them a beloved king. A close friend of Princess Margaret, brimming with insider information straight from the palace, informed me, “The royal family hated her. Simply hated her.”

Her American admirers felt very differently, of course. As one of them said to me in Geneva, “The English didn’t get her. The English still don’t get her. They should erect a statue to Wallis Windsor in every town in the realm for taking away their king.”

•        •       •

The Duchess’s sale lasted two days. The Hôtel Beau-Rivage, where Sotheby’s is, was where the action was, but the Hôtel Richemond, directly next door, was unmistakably smarter. That was where the Taubmans stayed. The sale of the Duchess’s jewelry was also the occasion of a Sotheby’s board-of-directors meeting, and the Sotheby’s board of directors, as assembled by Alfred Taubman, is the swellest board of directors in big business today, boasting such illustrious names as Her Royal Highness the Infanta Pilar de Borbón, Duchess of Badajoz, who happens to be the sister of the King of Spain, for starters, as well as the Right Honourable the Earl of Gowrie, the Earl of Westmorland, and Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kaszon, who has the largest private art collection in the world after the Queen of England’s, and such Americans as Henry Ford II, Mrs. Gordon Getty, and Mrs. Milton Petrie.

Society girls in the employ of Sotheby’s, wearing black dresses and single strands of pearls, bristled with self-importance as they manned the telephones, dispensed press badges, sold catalogs, and gave terse replies to queries. The bars in both hotels were never not full, and the gossip was terrific, although not always reliable. “Absolutely not!” one indignant upper-class voice, overbrandied, rang out. “I don’t care what you’ve heard! The Duchess of Windsor was not a man!”

Always, following the death of a prominent person, individuals come forward claiming to have had a closer acquaintance with the deceased than the facts would bear out. One favorite preoccupation among the insiders was minimizing the degree of familiarity certain people claimed to have had with the late Duke and Duchess. “So-and-so,” they said, talking about a highly profiled man in
New York, “was not nearly so close to the Duchess as he says he was. The Duke would never have had him around.” Or, “I visited the Duchess for years and I never once heard her mention So-and-so,” naming an international lady.

A thousand smartly dressed people piled into the tent to find their ticketed seats, all carrying the glossiest and most gossipy auction catalog ever printed. At fifty dollars a copy, it promptly sold out, and is now a collector’s item. Friends met. Men greeted men with kisses on both cheeks, and women did the same. On closed-circuit television sets around the tent a film was shown, but no one watched, because they were all looking at one another. “The world was fascinated by them,” intoned a voice on the sound track, “and they were obsessed with each other.… The Prince of Wales’s father, George V, had Mrs. Simpson’s past investigated and decided she was not a suitable companion for his son.… Queen Mary called her an adventuress.” Year after year of newsreels of their glittering and empty life flashed by: weekends at Fort Belvedere when the Duke was still king, their somber wedding at the Château de Candé, the two of them arriving here, arriving there, fashion plates both, stepping out of limousines, waving from the decks of ocean liners, sweeping into parties, relentlessly up to the moment, in all the very jewels that were about to be sold, the Duchess leading, the Duke following, she gleaming, he scowling, or smiling sadly. Behind it all, a voice sang, “The party’s over. It’s all over, my friend.” But no one was listening either, because they were all talking to each other. The Princess of Naples, married to Victor Emmanuel, who would have been the king of Italy if history had gone another way, chatted up Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia, who works for Sotheby’s jewelry department, while his brother, Prince Serge of Yugoslavia, chatted up the Baroness Tita Thyssen-Bornemisza, ablaze
in sapphires, who chatted up the Countess of Romanoes, who was wearing the diamond bracelet she had inherited from the Duchess of Windsor and who in turn chatted up the Infanta Beatriz of Spain, who chatted up Grace, Countess of Dudley, who chatted up Princess Firyal of Jordan, who chatted up Judy Taubman, while her husband, Alfred Taubman, the
grand seigneur
, radiating power and importance, carried a huge unlit cigar and smiled and waved and greeted.

Then the auction began.

From the first of the 306 lots, a gold-ruby-and-sapphire clip made by Carrier in Paris in 1946, the air in the tent was charged with excitement. A few moments later, lot 13, a diamond clip lorgnette by Van Cleef & Arpels, circa 1935, which was estimated to bring in $5,000, went to a private bidder for $117,000. The excitement began to build. Two lots later, when a pair of pavé diamond cuff links and three buttons and a stud, estimated to go for $10,000, went for $440,000 to a mysterious, deeply tanned man who was said to be bidding for the Egyptian who has taken over the Windsors’ house outside Paris, the first applause broke out in the tent. People realized they were present at an event, engaged in the heady adventure of watching rich people acting rich, participating in a rite available only to them, the spending of big money, without a moment’s hesitation or consideration. The sable-swathed Ann Getty, who wanted it known that she was there because of the board-of-directors meeting and not to bid, changed her seat from the fifth row to the first in order to be closer to the arena. By lot 91, a pair of yellow-diamond clips by Harry Winston, 1948, that went to the London jeweler Laurence Graff, one of the royal family’s jewelers, for over $2 million, financial abandon filled the air with an almost erotic intensity, and it never lessened during the
remaining hours of the sale. Powdered bosoms heaved in fiscal excitement at big bucks being spent. Each time the bidding got into the million-dollar range, for one of the ten or so world-class stones in the collection, the tension resembled the frenzy at a cockfight. Sotheby’s employees manning the telephones waved their hands frantically to attract the auctioneer. People rose in their seats to get a better look at the mysterious Mr. Fabri, who bid and bid—money no object—on all the pieces directly linked to the love affair between Edward and Wallis. “The Duke would have hated all this,” said a friend of the Duke’s, shaking his head. “I’m surprised they’re not auctioning off his fly buttons.”

The auctioneer, like the judge at a trial, has the power to enthrall his audience. At the podium in Geneva was the tall and debonair Nicholas Rayner. It was he who first approached Maître Suzanne Blum, the keeper of the Windsor flame, about the disposition of the Duchess’s jewels. A notoriously difficult woman, the octogenarian Maître Blum is said to have been charmed by Rayner, and because of him she entrusted the jewels to Sotheby’s. The charm that captivated Maître Blum captivated all the women in the tent as well. “Divine,” said one woman about Rayner. “And separated,” said another, as if that fact added to his glamour. Although he was criticized by a few purists for several times allowing the bidding to continue after he had dropped the gavel—he said that since the money was going to charity the ordinary rules did not apply—he won over far more people than he alienated. He had a sense of theater, realized that he was in a leading role, and understood exactly how to keep this audience in the palm of his hand. Graceful, witty, he was Cary Grant at forty, giving the kind of performance that turns a good actor into a major star. At the end of the second day, when the total sales had
reached $50 million, the audience rose and gave Rayner a standing ovation which rivaled any that Lord Olivier ever received.

It was a sad disappointment to auction voyeurs that they could not turn around and stare at Miss Elizabeth Taylor raising her already jeweled hand to bid $623,000 for a diamond clip known as the Prince of Wales feathers brooch, which Richard Burton had once admired on the Duchess, for the simple reason that Miss Taylor had chosen to make her bid by telephone while suntanning next to her swimming pool in Bel-Air, California. They could not watch the multimillionaire dress designer Calvin Klein either, as he bid by telephone from New York $733,000 for a single-row pearl necklace by Cartier, or $198,000 for another single-row pearl necklace by Van Cleef & Arpels, or a mere $102,600 for a pearl-and-diamond eternity ring by Darde & Fils of Paris, or $300,600 for a pearl-and-diamond pendant by Cartier, for which he outbid the Duchess’s friend and frequent New York hostess Estée Lauder, the cosmetics tycoon, and all for his beauteous new wife, Kelly. Expensive, yes, but Van Cleef & Arpels had told Calvin Klein it would take ten years to match pearls for the necklace he had in mind and cost several million dollars. He told the press that he was not going to wait for a special day to give them to Kelly. “The best presents just happen,” he said.

Under the marquee, only Marvin Mitchelson, the Hollywood divorce lawyer, who built his fortune on the failed marriages of the famous, broke the rules of anonymity and had himself announced as the purchaser of the Duchess’s amethyst-and-turquoise necklace for $605,000. He further wanted it announced that he dedicated the purchase to the memory of his mother, who had worked to put him through law school. Mitchelson also purchased a huge sapphire
brooch for $374,000 for someone else, a client whom he would not name, although he tantalized the press by hinting that it was Joan Collins, whom he was representing in her latest divorce.

In seats every bit as good as the seats occupied by the Princess of Naples and Princess Firyal of Jordan sat two dark-haired beauties in Chanel suits—real Chanel suits, not knockoffs—who were there to bid, not gape. They scrutinized their catalogs, and they had mink coats folded over their knees. Their stockings had seams, a subtle signal to the cognoscenti of such things that they were wearing garter belts, not panty hose. Ms. X and Ms. Y, two international ladies of the evening, told me they were staying at the Richemond, where they felt as at home as they do at the Plaza Athénée or the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ms. X had her heart set on lot 26, a pavé diamond heart with a gold-and-ruby crown and the initials W. and E., for Wallis and Edward, intertwined in emeralds. It had been the twentieth-wedding-anniversary present of the Duke to the Duchess. Ms. Y had
her
heart set on lot 31, a single-row diamond bracelet with nine gem-set Latin crosses hanging from it. The Duchess had worn it on her wedding day in 1937 and had once remarked that the crosses represented the crosses she had to bear. Ms. X said about Ms. Y, jokingly, that she wanted the bracelet with the crosses to wear on her whipping hand. Used to the best, Ms. Y has a custom-made bag by Hermès to carry her whips in. She didn’t get the bracelet with the crosses, which went for $381,000. Ms. X didn’t get the pavé diamond heart either. It went for $300,000. “The prices just got out of hand. We were a couple of zeros too short,” Ms. X told me during a break. “That heart probably belongs to Candy Spelling by now. Come and have tea tomorrow. We’re free until ten.”