How Barbara hutton ended up with a Romanov duchess s jewel

She owned Marie-Antoinette's pearls, the emeralds of a Russian Grand Duchess, a great Egyptian diamond, and the finest imperial jade necklace ever sold. By the time she died in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, almost all of it was gone — and to this day, no one knows where most of it went.

Barbara Woolworth Hutton was called the Poor Little Rich Girl for nearly fifty years. But the truest version of her story isn't told through the seven marriages or the public breakdowns. It's told through four jewels — characters in their own right — and what became of each of them.
Three of them disappeared: the pearls now behind an unnamed private vault door, the Romanov emeralds dismantled and scattered into anonymous rings and brooches still circulating today, and the Pasha of Egypt diamond simply vanished from every record. One of them came home, in a twenty-minute bidding war that ended at more than $27 million.

This is the story of where it all went — and why somewhere out there, someone may own a piece of Barbara Hutton's collection and not even know it.