EVEN a 14-carat pink diamond ring can start looking tarnished if it is immersed in muck. That rose-gold ring, worth up to $15 million by one estimate, was to be the centerpiece of a Christie’s auction last week, until legal actions in Manhattan scuttled the sale minutes before it was to start — on two successive evenings.
On Wednesday, the second night, lawyers for a Wall Street bank that was trying to sell the ring and more than 100 other pieces of stunning antique jewelry to recoup part of a $187 million debt owed by a prominent collector were awaiting a judge’s ruling on the collector’s effort to stop the auction. Christie’s had spent a small fortune promoting the sale, sending the gems on a world tour to Geneva, Moscow and Dubai for potential buyers to savor.
A few minutes after 6, when the auction had been set to start, the cellphone of François Curiel, the director of Christie’s jewelry department, rang. He listened, said thank you and hung up.
“There is no auction tonight,” he announced to a small group of international jewelry dealers gathered at Christie’s Rockefeller Center rooms.
“Disgusting!” cried a prominent London dealer, who grabbed his coat and stormed out.
More than one of the dealers was angry at Christie’s itself, for trying to sell in such a rushed and uncertain manner what Mr. Curiel had called in the sale’s 154-page glossy hardcover catalog “one of the greatest jewelry collections of all times.” After all, to paraphrase
Oscar Wilde, to abort a highly anticipated jewelry sale once may be regarded a misfortune; to abort it twice looks like carelessness.
The twice-aborted sale upended what is normally the high season for international jewelry auctions in New York, but gave outsiders a rare glimpse into the machinations of the high-end jewelry trade. Originally scheduled for Tuesday, the sale, “Rare Jewels and Gemstones: The Eye of a Connoisseur,” was derailed by bitter courtroom wrangling between the connoisseur in question — Ralph O. Esmerian, 68, a collector of American folk art and precious gems who owns the Fred Leighton jewelry company — and Merrill Lynch Mortgage Capital, a division of Merrill Lynch & Company.
ALSO caught up in the drama is
Peter E. Bacanovic, the former Merrill Lynch broker who was sentenced to five months in prison for his role in the
Martha Stewart stock case. In January, the month Merrill Lynch first filed suit against Mr. Esmerian in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, he hired Mr. Bacanovic as president of Fred Leighton. He assigned him, among other duties, the job of using his strong social connections to help open a Beverly Hills store.
Last week, Mr. Esmerian’s jewels were displayed in a specially created tented pavilion in the center of Christie’s main salesroom, adorned inside with silver-painted tree branches bearing peacock-feather blossoms, echoed by diamanté curlicues etched onto the black fabric walls and ceiling.
Among the treasures was a diamond bow brooch worn by Empress Eugénie, the wife of
Napoleon III, and later owned by Mrs. William B. Astor, the social lioness famous for her ballroom that accommodated 400 of New York’s swells. There was a diamond-encrusted ballerina brooch made in the 1940s by Van Cleef & Arpels and an Art Nouveau glass and enamel bracelet made by René Lalique estimated by Christie’s at $500,000 to $700,000.
Hundreds of discerning jewel lovers had descended on Christie’s to admire the glittering wares of Mr. Esmerian. But he was conspicuously absent.
“I have not been to see it,” Mr. Esmerian said in an interview last week. “It’s not for me to stick my head in there and lend credibility to all of this.”
Mr. Esmerian had used the jewelry as part of his collateral for $177 million in loans (now $187 million, with interest and costs) from Merrill Lynch, most of which went to finance the purchase of Fred Leighton. Mr. Esmerian’s contention — part of his legal maneuvers last week — was that his jewelry collection had been undervalued for the forced sale.
His plan had been to sell the finer pieces in a new Fred Leighton boutique in Beverly Hills, which he said was scheduled to open in September on Rodeo Drive opposite Harry Winston.
Mr. Esmerian was apoplectic about the planned auction being forced by Merrill Lynch. In an emotional interview on Tuesday, he shook his head in dismay as he thumbed through Christie’s lavishly illustrated catalog, pointing to beloved items of jewelry collected by him and by his late father, Raphael Esmerian, a gem dealer who emigrated from Paris in 1940.
