The Windsor Jewels Sale of 1987 — The Auction That Shocked the World

On the 2nd of April 1987, a red and white marquee went up on the shore of Lake Geneva, the kind of candlestriped tent you'd expect at a summer fair, not at what was about to happen inside it. A thousand bidders had flown in from six continents to sit under that tent. Another six hundred watched from a second room in New York, and three hundred journalists stood by with their notebooks open. Nobody was selling cotton candy. They were selling a divorced American woman's jewelry box, one piece at a time. And by the time that tent came down two days later, it had made more money than any private jewelry collection ever sold before it. Welcome back to Jewelry Pleasure. Thank you for every like and every comment you leave here, it genuinely keeps this channel going. Today we're stepping inside the sale that turned the Duchess of Windsor's jewelry into the most talked about auction of the 20th century. Who bought what, who was sitting in the room, and how a seven and a half million dollar estimate turned into fifty. Subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss the next one. A love story the world already knew. Before any of that tent or any of those numbers could exist, there was the love story that made the jewels possible in the first place, and made them newsworthy again fifty years later. Edward VIII became King of the United Kingdom in January 1936, on his father's death. Eleven months later, he gave the throne up entirely, telling the country in a radio broadcast that he could not carry out his duties without the help and support of the That woman was Wallis Simpson, an American who had already been divorced once, and was still married to her second husband when the relationship first became public. The line made headlines on every continent, and the couple spent the rest of their lives being watched, photographed, and written about because of it. The couple married in France in June 1937, in a ceremony almost no member of the British royal family attended. Wallis was given the title Duchess of Windsor. She was pointedly never granted the style Her Royal Highness, a slight the Duke resented for the rest of his life. What followed was three and a half decades of exile, spent mostly in Paris, and a jewellery collection that grew nearly every year of it. Cartier, Van Cleef and Arpels, Bouteron. The Duke used all of them, and the pieces he commissioned worked almost like a running argument with the family that had frozen the couple out. Proof, in diamonds and rubies, that giving up a crown had been worth it. By the time the Duke died in 1972, that argument had produced one of the most extraordinary private jewellery collections of the century, sitting quietly in the Duchess's houses outside Paris. Why it happened. Wallis Simpson died on the 24th of April, 1986, alone in that house outside Paris. Her husband had been gone for fourteen years by then. What she left behind was everything the two of them had built over five decades together, and her will gave a very specific instruction about what should happen to it next. The jewels were to be sold, and the proceeds handed to the Institut Pasteur, the Paris research institute that had just isolated the virus behind AIDS, and was racing to find a vaccine against it. AIDS had only been identified a few years earlier, and in 1986 there was still no treatment and no vaccine in sight. Donating a jewellery fortune to that specific research made the beneficiary almost as newsworthy as the jewels themselves, and Sotheby's catalogue carried the purpose right in its title. The jewels of the late Duchess of Windsor, sold for the benefit of the Pasteur Institute. There was, however, another instruction floating around, one the Duchess appears to have simply ignored. The Duke had stated in his own will that after her death, the jewels should be taken out of their settings entirely, so that no other woman could ever wear them. Nobody did that. Every piece went to Geneva Hall, Hammer and all. The Marquis by the Lake. Sotheby's built this sale like a production, not a routine auction. Chairman Alfred Taubman had that candlestriped Marquis pitched directly across the Lakeside Avenue from the Hotel Beaux Rivages, where an old guest register still held the signatures Edward and Wallace had written there back in 1939. Dunne, who covered both days for Vanity Fair, said the spectacle rivalled the finest hours of the late P.T. Barnum. Sotheby's had reason to make a show of it, a collection this famous, tied to a scandal the world still half-remembered fifty years on, doesn't come up for sale twice, and Taubman's Marquis was built to make sure nobody underestimated what was inside it. However modest the number on the presale estimate looked on paper, the attendance backs the ambition up. Around a thousand bidders packed the tent itself. Another six hundred watched slides and phoned in bids from Sotheby's own sale room in New York. Roughly three hundred journalists were there taking notes. Running the room was Nicholas Rayner, chairman of Sotheby's Geneva, a man Dunne compared to Cary Grant at forty. Rayner had spent months courting Maitre Suzanne Bloom, the Duchess's formidable lawyer, just to win the consignment in the first place, and he was also the one who'd set the presale estimate at a cautious $7.5 million. By the time the two days ended, Sotheby's had moved 306 catalogue lots, somewhere around 311 individual pieces, since a single lot could hold a full pair of cufflinks or an entire match suite. The bids themselves added up to $45.7 million, add the 10% buyer's premium and assorted fees, and the final total reached $50.3 million, nearly seven times what Rayner had predicted, and a record that would stand for the next 31 years. The seats weren't filled with ordinary collectors, either. A Princess of Naples sat there, so did Princes of Yugoslavia, Princess Ferial of Jordan, the Infanta Beatrice of Spain, and representatives sent by the Sultan of Brunei and Prince Bernard of the Netherlands. One friend of the Duke's watched the numbers climb and said, more or less, that the Duke would have hated every minute of it. He was surprised, he joked, that they weren't auctioning off his fly buttons, too. When the final total was read out at the end of the second day, the whole tent stood and gave Rayner an ovation done compared to the kind Lawrence Olivier used to get on a stage. A Sotheby's spokeswoman, cornered by reporters afterward, had a simpler way of putting it, unbelievable, staggering. Elizabeth Taylor and the Prince of Wales Feathers. Picture three diamond feathers, gathered as if by an invisible hand under a small paved crown, catching every bit of light under that marquee. That was lot 39, and one bidder wanted it more than anything else on offer. Elizabeth Taylor bid by telephone from beside her swimming pool in Bel-Air. Chasing that single brooch, a Cartier piece the Duke had commissioned around 1935, back when he was still just the Prince of Wales. The hammer price is recorded at $449,625. Once the buyer's premium was added, the total came closer to $623,000. Either way, Taylor got what she wanted. She later claimed she'd beaten out Prince Charles, who reportedly wanted the same brooch for Princess Diana. Taylor wore it for the rest of her life. When her own collection went to Christie's in December 2011, the Prince of Wales Feathers sold again, for $1,314,500, more than double what she'd paid for it, all told, 24 years earlier. Calvin Klein's pearls for Kelly. A few phone lines over, no crowd noise at all, just a bidder 3,000 miles away in New York, Calvin Klein was buying pearls for his wife Kelly. He paid $733,000 for a single-strand natural pearl necklace that Cartier had made using pearls originally given to the Duke by his own mother, Queen Mary. A pearl necklace by Van Cleef & Arpels went for $198,000, a golden diamond eternity ring by Dardenne Fils for $102,600, and a pearl and diamond pendant for $300,600, outbidding the cosmetics magnate Estee Lauder to get it. Asked about the spree afterward, Klein kept it simple, the best presents just happen. Twenty years later, in December 2007, the Kleins sent three of those pieces, the necklace, the pendant, and a pair of black and white pearl ear clips, back to Sotheby's in New York. Their original outlay for all three had been around $1.18 million. The pearl necklace alone came back at $3,625,000. The Cartier Panther Bracelet, the single most technically dazzling object in the wholesale might not have gone to anyone the papers could name. It's a fully articulated panther, its body made of paved diamonds and caliber-cut onyx, with two marquise-cut emeralds for eyes, designed under Cartier's creative director Jean Toussaint, made by Peter Lamarchand, and bought directly from Cartier in December 1952 by the Duchess herself. Toussaint's own colleagues at Cartier called her the Panther, a nickname Louis Cartier had given her years earlier for the fur coats she loved to wear. Here it is, worked out in diamonds on someone else's wrist instead of her own. Reports of its 1987 price don't agree. Some put it around $1.27 million. Others say Mohamed Al-Faid paid over $1.4 million for it. You'll sometimes hear that the Franklin Mint own the original. That's false. The Franklin Mint only ever sold licensed replicas with certificates of authenticity. Al-Faid's connection to the bracelet became clearer in 2010, when he turned out to be the anonymous consigner behind 20 Windsor pieces sent back to Sotheby's London. The Panther bracelet led that sale too, and this time there was no ambiguity about the number. For £1,521,250, roughly $7.3 million, the highest price ever paid for any bracelet at auction, and the most expensive Cartier object ever sold. Nobody has ever said who bought it. The flamingo that flew to Madrid. Cartier had another showpiece in the room, and this one you can still go and see. It's a flamingo, standing on one leg, its body built from 42 calibre-cut rubies, 42 sapphires, 42 emeralds, and 102 diamonds, with a cabochon for a beak. The Duke commissioned it, and the Duchess contributed to it too. She had a necklace and four of her own bracelets taken apart to supply some of the stones. It made its first public appearance in Madrid in June 1940. In the 1987 catalogue it was lot 52, and the reported prices vary. The most reliable figure puts it at £498,000. It came back to Sotheby's London in November 2010 and sold for £1,721,250. This time, Sotheby's press office confirmed exactly who bought it, the Cartier collection. Since then, the flamingo has travelled. The Grand Palais in Paris showed it in 2013, and it's been at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London too. Of everything sold in that marquee, it's one of the very few pieces the public can walk up and look at today. The Emerald Engagement Ring. Some pieces in the sale carried their whole story in a single engraved line. The Duchess's Emerald Engagement Ring holds a 19.77 carat stone that Jacques Cartier had sourced in Baghdad, said to be half of a much larger stone, the Grand Mogul Emerald, and engraved around the band with the words WE ARE OURS NOW, 27x36. That's the couple's private code for the day they secretly agreed to marry, 27 October 1936, months before the abdication became public. The Duchess had Cartier remount the stone in yellow gold in 1958, decades after the wedding. On 3 April 1987, the ring sold for close to $1.98 million at the Hammer, around $2.13 million once the premium was added, nearly four times its estimate of about $530,000, and it vanished into a private collection nobody has traced since. Nine Crosses and a Wrong Direction Watch. The ring wasn't the only piece built around a private joke, or a private wound. A gem-set diamond cross bracelet, made by Cartier between 1934 and 1944, carried nine separate crosses, each engraved with something only the couple would fully understand. The Duchess wore it on her wedding day. One cross reads God Save the King for Wallace. Another puns on their initials, W E R 2. Others mark far more ordinary things, one for her appendectomy, another for a set of x-rays. It sold in 1987 for about $381,000. A pave heart brooch, topped with a ruby and gold crown and entwined letters W and E, had been the Duke's gift to her on their 20th wedding anniversary. It made about $300,000. A cigarette case engraved with a map tracing the couple's travels across Europe sold for $266,000. A gold pocket watch, inscribed No excuse for going in wrong direction, Easter 1939, made $467,000. Sotheby's had priced both of those last two like curiosities, somewhere near a few thousand dollars each. The room didn't agree, both sold for close to a hundred times their estimate. The prices that broke the room. Every so often that week, the bidding stopped being about sentiment and turned into pure spectacle. Dunn wrote that each time a lot passed a million dollars, the tension in the tent resembled a cockfight. The sale's single highest price went to a diamond with no connection at all to the Windsor's own love story. A 31.26 carat cushion-cut stone sold to the couple by Harry Winston back in 1950. Its previous owner was the Washington socialite Evelyn Walsh McLean, a name serious jewelry collectors already knew. She was the last private owner of the Hope Diamond, the most famous cursed stone in the world, and had bought and worn extraordinary jewels her entire life. Winston had a habit of selling to the most talked-about women in the world. He was the same dealer who later gave the Hope Diamond itself to the Smithsonian. McLean's ring, estimated at around a million dollars in 1987, went to an unnamed Japanese dealer for $3.15 million. Two Van Cleef and Arpels pieces climbed almost as high. A ruby and diamond necklace, engraved My Wallis from her David and given for her 40th birthday, made about $2.6 million, one of the very top lots of the entire sale. A ruby and diamond hollow-leaf brooch, a Christmas gift from 1936 using Van Cleef's mistressette technique, made $806,000. And in a room already full of surprises, a royal naval sword, nobody's idea of a headline lot, sold for $1.33 million, 133 times what Sotheby's expected for a lot nobody thought to get excited about. The named and the nameless. Not everyone in the room wanted their name in the papers, though a few couldn't resist it. The London jeweler Lawrence Graff, already known as one of the royal family's own jewelers, paid over $2 million for a pair of yellow diamond lapel clips by Harry Winston. Lot 91, a bid done described as sending a charge of pure excitement through the whole tent. The Hollywood divorce lawyer Marvin Mitchelson was even less shy about it. He announced to reporters that he'd bought the amethyst and turquoise bib necklace, a cascade of step-cut amethysts and turquoise cabochons that Cartier had built in 1947 for the Duchess to wear across her décolletage, and which she'd worn to the 1953 Gala El Orangery at Versailles, for $605,000, and dedicated it to his mother's memory. He also picked up a large sapphire brooch for $374,000. For a client he wouldn't name outright, but hinted was Joan Collins. Other bidders stayed properly mysterious. A man known only as Mr. Farbrey chased down pieces tied directly to the Windsor Zone love affair, bidding aggressively and telling almost nobody who he was. More than one reporter noticed a deeply tanned man in the crowd, said to be bidding for the Egyptian businessman who had taken over the Windsor's old house in Paris, a man the world would later know as Mohamed El Fayed. But among the jewels that held the most intimate stories, a special place belonged to the Duchess of Windsor's extraordinary emerald necklace. In 1960, Cartier created this spectacular piece for Wallis Simpson, combining five pear-shaped emeralds set within diamond surrounds. The largest central emerald weighed 14.61 carats, while the four others ranged from nearly six to almost eight carats. But the real showstopper was the enormous pear-shaped emerald hanging from the necklace, an astonishing 48.95 carats. Its history was just as fascinating as its size. The emerald had been acquired from Harry Winston, and it was believed to have once belonged to the Spanish Royal Collection. Wallis wore it repeatedly at glamorous social events, and in 1964, she even appeared wearing it in Vogue. And then there was another jewel that carried an even more personal message, the Duchess of Windsor's Cartier ruby bangle. The Duke acquired this spectacular piece by June 1938, just one year after their wedding. Set with cushion-shaped rubies and baguettes and circular-cut diamonds in platinum, it was far more than a glamorous bracelet. Inside was engraved a deeply personal message, for our first anniversary of June 3rd. The inscription referred to the couple's first wedding anniversary, which they celebrated at the Villa La Croix on the French Riviera. Wallis wore the bangle throughout the late 1930s, most famously in a series of iconic portraits photographed by Cecil Beaton in Paris in 1939. She continued wearing it for decades, pairing it with ruby necklaces, diamond jewels, and elaborate tassel pieces. Among the Duchess of Windsor's most unusual jewels was a remarkable chalcedony set, delicate in colour, yet unmistakable in style. The set was created by Suzanne Belperron, one of the most distinctive jewellery designers of the 20th century. Her soft blue chalcedony was combined with diamonds, creating a look that was elegant and modern. Wallis wore these jewels as part of her extraordinary collection, carefully choosing them to complement her glamorous outfits. The chalcedony pieces were sold separately rather than as one complete set, and each necklace, bracelet, and pair of earrings became its own chapter in auction history, and the prices were astonishing. The necklace alone sold for $183,000, while the pair of bracelets brought $146,000. Records that didn't last. The marquee came down, but these jewels kept making news for decades. In 1998, Mohamed Ol Fayed, by then owner of the Windsor's Old Paris House, sold roughly 40,000 objects from that house at Sotheby's New York. Furniture, photographs, the Duke's own writing desk, spread across some 3,200 lots. That sale had originally been scheduled for September 1997, but was postponed after the deaths of Dodi Fayed and Princess Diana that August. It finally went ahead in February 1998, raising $23,355,838 for the Dodi Fayed International Charitable Foundation, named for his son. The jewels resurfaced again in November 2010, when Ol Fayed turned out to be the anonymous seller behind those 20 pieces sent back to Sotheby's London, the panther bracelet and the flamingo brooch among them, together raising just under £8,000,000. Twenty pieces, in other words, had brought in roughly a quarter of what the entire 306-lot sale made back in 1987, a rough measure of how much the Windsor name alone had appreciated in 23 years. David Bennett, who worked both the 1987 and 2010 sales for Sotheby's, called the Windsor collection the most important assembled in the entire 20th century. Not just for the jewels, he said, but for the provenance and the love story behind them. For over 30 years, the Windsor sale's $50.3 million stood as the record for any single-owner royal jewellery auction. It finally fell on 14 November 2018, when Sotheby's sold the Bourbon Palmer family's jewels in Geneva for the equivalent of $53.1 million, carried almost entirely by a single Marie Antoinette pearl pendant that alone brought in $36.2 million, against an estimate of $1-2 million. $50 million from a collection Sotheby's had modestly priced at seven and a half. It was never really an auction so much as a production. Reporters at the time reached for circus language to describe it, and 30 years on, nobody's really argued with them. Every explanation offered that week came back to the same word, nostalgia. Sotheby's own president called it exactly that, a unique outpouring of nostalgia for two people who had given up a throne for each other. Whether that explains the panther bracelet, or the pocket watch, or the cigarette case with the map of their travels engraved on it, you can judge for yourself. What's certain is that 30 years on, people are still bidding these pieces higher, and a candlestriped tent by Lake Geneva is still the yardstick every royal jewellery sale gets measured against. Before we finish, I just want to say thank you for being here. If you enjoyed this story, please consider liking the video and subscribing to Jewellery Pleasure. It may seem like a small gesture, but it truly means a lot to me and helps the channel grow. And please leave a comment, I read every single one. Your thoughts, questions, and opinions are what make these stories even more special. Which lot would you have chased that week, the panther, the pearls, or the ring with the secret date on it? Tell me in the comments, and if you want more stories like this one, stay close. Thank you for watching Jewellery Pleasure.