Jackie Kennedy’s FAKE PEARLS Sold for $211,500

Sotheby's estimated the necklace at $500 to $700, three strands of pearls, except they weren't pearls, they were glass. In April 1996, in a sale room in New York, the bidding went past $100,000 and kept climbing. It sold for $211,500. The woman who'd worn it was Jacqueline Kennedy. Lot 453, lot 454. Picture the page. On one side, the necklace. Three strands, 139 glass beads, each about the size of a garden pea, closed with a small silver clasp. On the other side, a black and white photograph from 1962, a young mother laughing and a little boy in her arms with his fist wrapped around the pearls at her throat. The little boy is John F. Kennedy Jr. The catalogue didn't pretend. It described the necklace as simulated, and anyone who read that word knew exactly what they'd be bidding on. Coated glass. The sort of thing a well-dressed woman in the 1950s could buy at a department store counter. Now turn back one page. Lot 453 was a diamond ring, and it was enormous. 40.42 carats. A long, pointed, marquise shape, one of 18 stones that Harry Winston cut from a rough diamond of more than 600 carats found in Lesotho in southern Africa in 1967. The rough had been spotted in May 1967 by a miner's wife, Ernestine Ramaboa, sifting through gravel at Letzing Latarai. She hid it at home and waited for her husband to come back. A year later, Winston had that stone cleaved in front of live television cameras. Aristotle Onassis gave Jackie the third largest piece in 1968, when she agreed to marry him, and they were married that October on his private island, Scorpions. For the 1996 sale, Sotheby's put the ring at $500,000 to $600,000. So the two lots sat side by side in the catalogue, the ring on one page and the beads on the next. Their top estimates were almost $600,000 apart. The diamond sold for $2,587,500, more than four times its top estimate, the highest price of the wholesale. The buyer turned out to be Tony O'Reilly, the Irish chairman of the Heinz Food Company, and the ring was for his wife, Chris. And the glass pearls? $700 was the top of Sotheby's range. The final price was more than 300 times that. They went to the Franklin Mint, a company near Philadelphia best known for collector plates, porcelain dolls and commemorative coins sold by mail order. The press had a wonderful time with it. And yet, years later, the woman who'd pushed for that bid wrote that the pearls had turned out to be a phenomenal bargain. She meant it literally. She had the figures to back it up, and we'll get to them. Strictly speaking, $211,500 is what the buyer paid in total, including Sotheby's own commission, the buyer's premium. Work backwards through the auction house's rates in 1996 and the hammer itself fell at around 190,000. Even the estimate is remembered differently depending on who you ask. Sotheby's own records say 500 to 700. News reports that week said about 600. The buyer remembered seeing 200 to 300 printed in her catalogue. Pick whichever figure you like. None of them comes anywhere near what was paid Thank you so much for watching And for all your likes and comments on these stories They really do mean a lot If you love the history behind famous jewels The auctions and the price tags nobody saw coming Subscribe and tap the notification bell so you don't miss the next one Nine sessions in April Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died at her apartment on 5th Avenue in May 1994 She was 64 Her will was practical about her belongings. Her two children, Caroline and John, and the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, were to take whatever they wanted. Everything else was to be sold, and the money would go to her estate. So the family chose, and in April 1996, two years after her death, what was left went up for sale at Sotheby's in New York. It ran for four days, from the 23rd to the 26th of April, across nine sessions and roughly 1,200 lots. Some lots held several objects, so the count of individual items passed 5,000. Books from her shelves. Furniture from her apartment and from the White House years. Riding saddles. Paintings. Her jewellery, real and fake. The first warning came from the catalogue. It cost $90 in hardback and $45 in paperback. On the first day it went on sale, the phones took 27,000 orders. Sotheby's ended up printing more than 100,000 copies, over twice what it had printed for its famous Andy Warhol sale. People in some 40 countries bought one. Around 40,000 people queued to walk through the preview, given one-hour slots to wander among the Kennedy's things. Seats in the actual sale room were handed out by lottery, and among the bidders that week were Joan Rivers and Arnold Schwarzenegger. On paper, Sotheby's most optimistic forecast for the wholesale was about $4.5 million. Then the bidding started. A set of John F. Kennedy's golf woods, estimated at $700 to $900, sold for $772,500. The buyer was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who happened to be married to Kennedy's niece, Maria Shriver. A set of his irons made $387,500. A single putter, estimated at around $250, went for $65,750. An oak rocking chair the president had used upstairs in the family quarters of the White House carried an estimate of $3,000 to $5,000. An anonymous telephone bidder paid $453,500. A second Kennedy rocker made $442,500. A leather hunting saddle expected to make $300 to $500 sold for $90,500. A sterling silver tape measure from Tiffany carried exactly the same estimate as the Pearls, $500 to $700. It sold for $48,875. The desk on which Kennedy signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 went for around $1.4 million. The real jewellery soared as well. A kunzite and diamond ring went for around $415,000. But the costume pieces told the story best. The costume jewellery alone, the fake stones and the glass and the gilt, had been estimated at $39,000 in total. It made about $2.5 million. Sotheby's president, Diana Brooks, said it set a record for beating a pre-sale estimate, 61 times over. The very last lot, on the Friday evening, was Jackie's 1992 BMW sedan. Valued at around $20,000, it sold for $79,500. Diana Brooks was in tears when she spoke to reporters afterwards. She said people had bid because Jackie and President Kennedy had touched their lives. Not a single lot went unsold. The four days brought in $34.5 million, about seven and a half times what Sotheby's had hoped for at best. One of the big news magazines ran its coverage under a three-word question. What price, Camelot? Before the sale, one of the executors of Jackie's will had put the value of her whole estate at $45 to $50 million. In four days, the bidders had added something like two-thirds to it. Most of that money wasn't going to stay with the family either. Commentators pointed out at the time that between estate tax and the auction house's commissions, a very large share of it was headed for the government and for Sotheby's. She left the good stuff at the bank. Jackie wore a lot of glass for a woman who would later own a 40-carat diamond. The habit started long before Onassis. She had serious jewels. Her engagement ring from John Kennedy was a Van Cleef and Arpels ring with a diamond and an emerald set side by side. In the autumn of 1963, he bought her a ring with a large kunzite set in a circle of diamonds, meant as a Christmas present. The way it's usually told, he was killed before he could give it to her. Five years later, Aristotle Onassis' wedding present included Van Cleef rubies, a pair of ruby and diamond ear pendants and a ruby ring. But most of what the public saw on her day-to-day was costume jewellery, and she seems to have liked it that way. The costume jeweller, Kenneth J. Lane, who made pieces for her, put it bluntly in 1996, the year of the sale. She wasn't that interested in valuable jewellery, he said. She left the good stuff at the bank. He meant that almost literally. Jackie is known to have had copies made of real pieces she owned, so she could wear a convincing version in public while the original stayed locked away. Part of it was insurance and security. A real 40-carat diamond draws a crowd and a photographer's flash wherever it goes. It's often said she brought the Lesotho diamond out only a handful of times. There was also a matter of taste. With a daytime suit, she would often tuck her pearls down inside the neckline so that only a bit of the top strand showed above the collar, and a triple strand of costume pearls wasn't a strange choice for a woman in her position. Her predecessor in the White House, Mamie Eisenhower, wore a three-strand necklace of costume pearls with her gown to the inaugural ball in 1957, and the White House said so openly in its press release. Nobody thought less of her for it. In that era, a good strand of fake pearls was simply part of a well-dressed American woman's wardrobe. It went with everything. Leave one behind in a hotel room and all you'd lost was the price of a department store necklace. Jackie was 31 when she became First Lady in January 1961. For the next three years, the cameras followed her everywhere. And the pearls went along too. A fist around the pearls. John F. Kennedy Jr. was born on the 25th of November 1960, just over two weeks after his father won the presidency. By the summer of 1962, he was a toddler. And like most toddlers, he grabbed whatever was shiny and within reach. What was within reach, more often than not, was his mother's necklace. The story is usually told as if there were one photograph of this. In fact, both Kennedy children got their hands on their mother's pearls, and more than one photographer was there to catch it. Sotheby's printed a 1962 picture beside Lot 454 in its catalogue. It was taken by Cecil Stoughton, the official White House photographer, the man whose job was to follow the president and record everything. The following year, it was Stoughton who took the photograph of Lyndon Johnson being sworn in aboard Air Force One, with Jackie standing beside him. In the 1962 picture, a small boy is tugging at three strands of pearls and his mother is laughing. Caroline had got there first. In the summer of 1958, Jacques Lowe began photographing the family at their house at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod. He'd go on to be the Kennedys' personal photographer through the campaign and into the White House years. Among his pictures of the family is one of a very young Caroline chewing on her mother's pearl necklace. A print from those 1958 sessions at Hyannis Port, titled simply Pearls, now belongs to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Lowe's story ended sadly. He kept around 40,000 of his Kennedy negatives in a bank vault at the World Trade Center. He died in May 2001. Four months later, the vault was destroyed on the 11th of September, and almost all of the negatives with it. His daughter, Tomasina, pushed for months to have the vault recovered from the rubble. When the safe was finally found, it was intact, and what had been inside it was ash. What survives of that archive comes largely from prints and around 1,500 contact sheets that had been kept elsewhere in New York. Nobody can prove, bead by bead, that the necklace in every one of those photographs is the exact strand that was sold as lot 454. Jackie owned more than one triple strand of faux pearls, and at least one other from her estate has since come back onto the market. The link between this necklace and those pictures rests on tradition, and on Sotheby's choosing to print them side by side. But it's the link that mattered in 1996. The buyer later described spreading photographs across her husband's desk to make her case Jackie and the pearls here, Jackie and the pearls there The little boy on her lap pulling at them She called the necklace the icon of the icon People who'd never looked twice at a piece of jewellery in their lives knew that necklace They'd seen it on a young mother and a baby in the brief, bright years before November 1963 Who made them? Ask the Smithsonian who made this necklace and you'll get a clear answer. Its catalogue record lists the maker as Kenneth J. Lane and says the necklace was designed by him. Lane's own company says the same. Most of the reproductions you can buy today carry his name. Now look at the other paperwork. The 1996 Sotheby's catalogue named No Maker at All. It called Lot 454 a simulated triple-strand pearl necklace and left it there. When Sotheby's looked back on the sale decades later, it's still named No Maker. And then there's the buyer's own account. She wrote that Jackie bought the pearls at Bergdorf Goodman, the department store on Fifth Avenue, sometime in the 1950s, for about $35. When the necklace arrived after the sale, she said, it was still in its original silk-lined Bergdorf box. The Smithsonian's own notes put the original price at under $300. Treat both figures as approximate. The trouble is that Kenneth J. Lane wasn't making jewellery in the 1950s. He was born in Detroit in 1932, the son of a man who supplied car parts. He studied at the University of Michigan and at the Rhode Island School of Design, worked in the art department at Vogue, and then designed shoes, including under Roger Vivier at Christian Dior. His own jewellery business only started in the early 1960s. The Smithsonian's own description notes that he moved into jewellery in the early 60s, which sits awkwardly beside a department store purchase from the 50s. Both stories can't be literally true for the same strand. Neither Sotheby's nor the Smithsonian has publicly settled it. The necklace has long been associated with Kenneth J. Lane. Where it really came from is still uncertain. It's easy to see why his name stuck. Lane made faux pearls respectable. He dressed the Duchess of Windsor, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn. He cheerfully called his work fake and junk. And in the 60s, he was a fixture of New York society, a guest at Truman Capote's famous Black and White Ball in 1966. The fashion editor, Diana Vreeland, was a fan. So were women who could easily have afforded the real thing, and who mixed his pieces in with their diamonds. And he had a later first lady as a devoted customer. Barbara Bush wore his three-strand fake pearls so constantly that she joked her head would fall off if she ever took them off. In 1996, the same year as the sale, he published a memoir. He called it Faking It. Kenneth J. Lane died in his sleep at his apartment in Manhattan in July 2017. He was 85. The question of the Bergdorf box was still open. The Bidder in Beverly Hills Linda Resnick grew up in Philadelphia. By the 1990s, she and her husband, Stuart, were living in Beverly Hills and running a string of businesses. They'd turned around a flower delivery company, Teleflora, and then bought the Franklin Mint from Warner at a moment when Warner's video game business, Atari, was losing money and its board wanted to sell. As she tells it, Stuart promised her they'd fix the Mint and be home in California in six months. They ended up living in a hotel in Philadelphia. Under Linda, the mint had stopped being mostly about coins and medallions. It sold high-end collector dolls. Her first run of a Scarlett O'Hara doll, she said, brought in $35 million. One of the first things she did at the company was ban the word customer. The people who bought from the mint were to be called collectors, and the staff were to treat them that way. Every reproduction was supposed to be researched down to the last detail so that the buyer knew exactly what they were getting. She'd admired Jackie Kennedy all her life. To her, Jackie was the closest thing America had to royalty. When the Sotheby's catalogue came out, she went through every page. Out of more than a thousand lots, she found exactly one thing she wanted. The pearls. Everything that follows comes from her own memoir, written years later. The catalogue estimate she saw was low, a few hundred dollars. She suspected it might go a bit higher. Then, week by week before the sale, she watched the talk around it climb. She told Stuart they might have to go as high as $5,000. He asked her whether the pearls were fake. When she said yes, he told her that was insane. Closer to the day, she told him it might be $25,000. He said that was just nuts. So she built her case. She laid photographs across his desk, one after another. Jackie wearing the pearls in picture after picture, and John John on her lap, pulling at them. She wore them in nearly every picture ever taken, Linda told him. The day before the auction, she warned him the price might reach $100,000. He just stared at her. In the sale room, the bidding opened at $5,000. It didn't stop at $25,000 or at $100,000. When the hammer came down, the Resnicks had won the necklace, and with the premium, the bill came to $211,500. The story ran in newspapers across the country, and people laughed. By Linda's telling, a whiskey company even took out a full-page newspaper advertisement asking whether you'd just paid $211,000 for fake pearls, because if so, you needed a drink. The Mint sent two of its own security guards to New York to collect the necklace. They brought it straight to Linda's office and her staff gathered round to watch her open it. It was still in its silk-lined box from Bergdorf's. As she lifted the lid, she said, she caught a faint trace of Jackie's perfume and her eyes welled up. A hundred and thirty thousand copies. The Franklin Mint had bought the necklace to copy it. Its people studied all 139 glass beads. It made moulds from them and cast exact copies, colour-matched, the creamy tone of the originals. According to Linda Resnick, each original bead had been built up with 17 coats of lacquer, so each copy got 17 coats as well. The copies were strung on hand-knotted silk and closed with a silver clasp in the Art Deco style, set with nine small rhinestones and stamped with the mint's own mark. Every strand went out with its own paperwork, a certificate saying what it was and where it came from. Before the original went on show at home, the Resnick's sent it on a tour across the country so that buyers could see the thing their copies had been made from. Then it went into the Franklin Mint Museum outside Philadelphia where visitors could stand in front of the real thing. The copies sold for $200 a strand. By Linda Resnick's own figures, the Mint sold more than 130,000 of them. Sotheby's itself, looking back, uses the same figure. At $200 each, that comes to a gross of around $26 million on a necklace that had cost them $211,500. A phenomenal bargain, she called it. On those numbers, it's hard to argue. Her reasoning went like this. Any company could sell a strand of fake pearls. Only the mint could sell copies cast from Jackie's own beads, each one with a certificate to prove it. What women were really buying, she believed, was the chance to wear what Jackie wore. The couple went on to much bigger businesses, including POM Wonderful Pomegranate Juice, and Fiji Water. The necklace stayed with the mint until 2005. That year, the Resnicks and the Franklin Mint gave it to the Smithsonian. It's now in the National Museum of American History in Washington, catalogued as a gift of Linda and Stuart Resnick and the Franklin Mint, and it has been shown in the museum's First Ladies exhibition, the same exhibition that holds the gowns America's First Ladies wore to their inaugural balls. The Lesotho diamond, by most accounts, stayed in a vault for most of the years Jackie owned it. The glass pearls, or strands just like them, went to staterooms, to the family house at Hyannis Port, and within reach of a small boy's fist. In April 1996, the diamond made about 12 times what the pearls did. Against their own estimates, though, the ring beat its top figure about four times over. The necklace went for about 300 times its top figure. And somewhere, in a jewellery box you'd never think to look in, one of those Franklin Mint copies is probably still sitting in its case, with the certificate folded underneath. Do you own a piece of costume jewellery that means more to you than anything real? Tell me about it in the comments, I read every one.