Elizabeth Taylor's Jewellery: A Collection That Rewrote the Rules

On the evening of 13 December 2011, at Christie's headquarters on Park Avenue in New York, the auctioneer Andrea Fiuczynski stood at a podium for the opening of The Collection of Elizabeth Taylor. Lot 13, a pear-shaped natural pearl with a documented five-hundred-year provenance traceable to the Spanish royal family, had been estimated at two to three million dollars. Bidding opened at one million. Within ninety seconds it had passed three. Within five minutes it had passed eight. The hammer came down at $10.5 million, with the buyer's premium bringing the total to $11.84 million. The room applauded. La Peregrina, the pearl that Philip II of Spain had given to Mary I of England as a betrothal gift in 1554, had sold for nearly four times its estimate, to an anonymous Asian buyer bidding by telephone.

The Taylor sale ran across four sessions over four days. The jewellery sessions, on the evenings of 13 and 14 December, totalled $115.9 million. Every single lot exceeded its estimate. Most exceeded their estimates by several multiples. The 33.19-carat Krupp Diamond, which Richard Burton had bought for Elizabeth at auction in 1968 for $305,000, sold for $8.8 million. A Bulgari emerald and diamond brooch, given to Elizabeth by Burton during the filming of Cleopatra, sold for $6.5 million. By the end of the second jewellery evening, Christie's had set the record for the highest total at any single private collection sale in auction history, a record that has held since.

The proceeds, by Elizabeth Taylor's prior arrangement, went to her AIDS foundation. She had been dead nine months at the time of the sale.

What I find worth noting about Elizabeth Taylor's jewellery, and what I think genuinely separates her collection from any other twentieth-century private collection of comparable size, is that she wore it. She did not vault it. She did not lend it to museums. She wore the Krupp Diamond, a 33-carat Asscher-cut diamond originally mined for the Krupp munitions family, to school runs. She wore La Peregrina, a piece of Spanish royal regalia of incalculable historical importance, on a yacht in Sardinia. She wore the Bulgari emerald suite, which Burton had assembled for her over the course of three years, to dinner parties at her home in Bel Air. She had, as she put it in her 2002 memoir My Love Affair with Jewelry, a working relationship with her stones. They were objects to live with, not investments to admire from a distance.

This is, more or less, the story of every important piece she owned.

The Todd suite

Mike Todd, Elizabeth Taylor's third husband, married her in February 1957 and died in a plane crash in March 1958, fourteen months later. In that fourteen months, he gave her substantially more important jewellery than any of her seven husbands would give her, with the eventual exception of Burton.

The cornerstone was a Cartier suite of Burmese cabochon rubies and diamonds, comprising a necklace, bracelet, earrings, and a ring, all made by Cartier Paris in the 1950s and chosen by Todd at the Cartier showroom in New York. Todd had been a successful film producer (Around the World in 80 Days, 1956) and was, by every account, devoted to Elizabeth in a way she had not previously experienced. The ruby suite was a Christmas gift in 1957. She wore the earrings to greet him at the door at his birthday dinner in 1958, in lieu of any other clothing or jewellery. She was twenty-six. She remained, by her own account, in love with him for the rest of her life.

The Todd suite was the first major jewellery she had been given that she actually wore daily. She kept it through the next forty years and through the Eddie Fisher and Burton marriages and the various retreats from public life. The ruby necklace appeared at the 2011 Christie's sale as Lot 27 and sold for $3.78 million against a $200,000 estimate.

The Burton years

Richard Burton met Elizabeth Taylor in 1962 on the set of Cleopatra in Rome. They were both married to other people. Their affair was conducted in the Italian press for the better part of a year, and they were eventually married in 1964 in Montreal, divorced in 1974 in Switzerland, remarried in 1975 in Botswana, and divorced again in 1976 in Haiti. The marriages, in financial and jewellery terms, were the most consequential of Elizabeth's life.

Burton was a substantial earner and an even more substantial spender. He bought Elizabeth jewellery, on average, every six weeks for the better part of twelve years. The pieces ranged from large to astronomical. The Krupp Diamond was the first major piece. The Taylor-Burton Diamond was the largest. La Peregrina was the most historically significant. The Bulgari emerald suite was the longest collaboration. All four pieces, and substantially more besides, remained in Elizabeth's possession until her death.

Burton's relationship with Bulgari was sufficiently well-established that he reportedly told a friend, "The only word Elizabeth knows in Italian is Bulgari." The comment was both a joke and an accurate description of his expense ratio across the early Italian years.

The Krupp Diamond

In May 1968, at Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York, an Asscher-cut 33.19-carat diamond came up for sale. The diamond had been part of the estate of Vera Krupp, the widow of the German industrialist Alfried Krupp, and had been mined and cut in the 1920s. Burton, then in New York filming, attended the auction. He paid $305,000.

Elizabeth wore the ring continuously from that night until her death forty-three years later. She wore it to swim in. She wore it to film in (Cleopatra-era films required it to be covered with surgical tape for continuity, which she resented and frequently forgot to apply). She wore it, most famously, to school runs, by which point her children Liza and Maria were old enough to be embarrassed by it. The Krupp Diamond was the most insistently present piece of jewellery in the daily life of any wealthy woman of her generation.

There is a story, told by Burton himself in a 1975 Vogue interview, that he had once complained to an English journalist that he was "sick of bloody women going on about Elizabeth Taylor's diamond ring." The journalist had asked whether he thought, on reflection, that he had perhaps overspent on a piece of jewellery. Burton's reply, recorded in his diary: "Not in the least. I have been overspending on her for thirteen years. The ring is the one part of it that has appreciated."

The Krupp Diamond, sold at the 2011 Christie's auction, brought $8.81 million. The buyer was Robert Mouawad, the Lebanese jewellery dealer, who has continued to display the stone publicly.

La Peregrina

In January 1969, at Sotheby's in London, a pear-shaped natural saltwater pearl was offered for sale. The pearl had been documented for over four centuries. It had been discovered in the Gulf of Panama in the 1530s, taken to Spain, presented by King Philip II to Mary I of England as part of their 1554 betrothal arrangement, returned to Spain at Mary's death, worn by every Spanish queen for the next two and a half centuries (it appears in three Velázquez court portraits), removed to France during the Napoleonic upheavals, and acquired by the Duke of Abercorn's family in the late nineteenth century. The Sotheby's estimate was $50,000. Burton bid by telephone from California and bought it for $37,000.

Elizabeth's account of the pearl's first month with her, published in My Love Affair with Jewelry, includes one of the most-cited anecdotes in the history of celebrity jewellery. The pearl had been removed from its setting for cleaning and reset in a temporary chain. She was sitting on the bedroom carpet at her home in Bel Air and noticed that one of her Maltese dogs was chewing on something white that she assumed was a piece of carrot. She caught the pearl between the dog's teeth, in her words, "just before he crunched it." The pearl was unharmed. The dog received a stern talking-to. Elizabeth subsequently commissioned Cartier to create a new setting for La Peregrina, weaving the pearl into a Renaissance-revival necklace of rubies, diamonds, and additional natural pearls. The Cartier setting, which Elizabeth designed in consultation with Al Durante at Cartier New York, is the form in which the pearl was sold at the 2011 auction. It sold for $11.84 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a pearl.

I find the La Peregrina story compelling because it captures, in a single object, the particular character of Elizabeth's relationship with her jewellery. She owned, briefly, a 35-carat natural pearl that had touched the hands of Mary Tudor, Philip II, every Spanish queen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Napoleon's first wife, and four British dukes. She nearly fed it to a dog. She got it back, had it reset in a way that no museum or curator would have approved, and wore it to dinner. This was, more or less, how she conducted herself with everything she owned.

The Taylor-Burton Diamond

In October 1969, at Parke-Bernet in New York, a 69.42-carat pear-shaped diamond cut from a 240-carat rough discovered in South Africa came up for auction. The diamond was the largest D-flawless then known. Burton authorised a representative to bid up to a million dollars and lost. The diamond was sold to Cartier for $1.05 million.

Burton, on hearing the result, called the chairman of Cartier directly and made a personal offer of $1.1 million the next morning. Cartier agreed, on the condition that the diamond be displayed for one day at the Cartier flagship on Fifth Avenue before being delivered to Elizabeth. The day in question saw a queue of over six thousand people, most of whom paid the small admission charge that Cartier had instituted to manage the crowd. The proceeds of the admission went to a New York charity.

The diamond, henceforth known as the Taylor-Burton, was set as a pendant, suspended from a diamond necklace. Elizabeth wore it to Princess Grace's fortieth birthday gala in Monaco. She wore it to the Academy Awards. She did not, despite the size, wear it to school runs. Some pieces of jewellery are for daily life. The Taylor-Burton was for events.

After her second divorce from Burton in 1976, Elizabeth sold the Taylor-Burton Diamond in 1979 for $5 million to a Lebanese buyer, Henry Lambert. Part of the proceeds funded the construction of a hospital in Botswana. The diamond has changed hands at least twice since and is currently understood to be in private possession in the Middle East. It did not appear at the 2011 Christie's auction.

The Bulgari period

Throughout the early Italian years, the late 1960s and early 1970s, Burton commissioned or purchased substantial Bulgari pieces for Elizabeth on a regular basis. The collection eventually included an emerald and diamond necklace (the famous Bulgari Sautoir), a matching emerald and diamond brooch, a sapphire and diamond parure, a series of cabochon ruby earrings, and a yellow diamond ring of exceptional clarity. The Bulgari pieces were Elizabeth's preferred jewellery for Italian appearances and for the films set in Italy. She wore them on the Burtons' yacht, the Kalizma, named for their three daughters.

The Bulgari emerald and diamond brooch (technically a pendant that could be detached from the Sautoir and worn alone) sold at the 2011 auction for $6.13 million. It had been originally bought by Burton for $73,000 in 1964. The appreciation, across forty-seven years, was over eighty times.

After Burton

After her final divorce from Burton in 1976, Elizabeth's jewellery acquisition slowed but did not stop. She married John Warner in 1976 and Larry Fortensky in 1991. Neither marriage produced major pieces. What did appear in her later collection were pieces she bought for herself: a substantial collection of Van Cleef & Arpels brooches accumulated in the 1980s; several Cartier Tutti Frutti pieces acquired in the 1990s; a notable David Webb necklace, gift to herself, from 1995. Her later acquisitions were, on average, less spectacular than the Burton-era pieces but more considered.

She continued to wear her older jewellery throughout. Photographs from the 2000s show her wearing the Krupp Diamond, the Mike Todd ruby earrings, and a Bulgari sapphire pendant on a single afternoon at her Bel Air home, none of it intended for any particular event. She had always treated her collection as a wardrobe.

The 2011 auction

The decision to sell the collection had been made by Elizabeth before her death in March 2011, in consultation with her executors and her son Michael Wilding Jr. The proceeds were to fund the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, which she had founded in 1991 after the death of her close friend Rock Hudson. The total proceeds across all four sessions of the Christie's sale, including non-jewellery items, came to $156.8 million. The jewellery alone was $115.9 million, against a pre-sale jewellery estimate of $30 million.

What made the auction extraordinary, beyond the prices, was the catalogue itself. Christie's produced a five-volume set of hardback catalogues documenting every piece, with photography, provenance research, and Elizabeth's own annotations from her memoir. The catalogues are now museum-quality reference works and are sold for over $1,000 a set when they appear on the secondary market.

The collection's dispersal, item by item, into private hands has been substantially complete. La Peregrina is in Asia. The Krupp Diamond is in Lebanon. The Bulgari pieces are largely in the United States. The Cartier Tutti Frutti pieces went to a single American collector. The Mike Todd ruby necklace, the piece Elizabeth had owned the longest, sold to an anonymous European buyer and has not been publicly displayed since.

It is unlikely the collection will ever be reunited, even briefly, for exhibition. The pieces are too valuable and the holders too dispersed. What survives is the catalogue and Elizabeth's memoir, both of which contain photographs of every major piece on her, taken across forty years.

She had worn them all.

Frequently asked questions

How much did Elizabeth Taylor's jewellery sell for at auction?

The 2011 Christie's auction of Elizabeth Taylor's collection totalled $156.8 million across four sessions. The jewellery alone totalled $115.9 million across two evening sales on 13 and 14 December 2011, against a pre-sale estimate of approximately $30 million. La Peregrina sold for $11.84 million, the highest price paid for a pearl at auction at the time.

Where is the Krupp Diamond now?

The 33.19-carat Krupp Diamond, which Richard Burton bought for $305,000 in 1968, sold at the 2011 Christie's auction for $8.81 million. The buyer was Robert Mouawad, the Lebanese jewellery dealer, who continues to display the stone publicly under the name "The Elizabeth Taylor Diamond."

Where is La Peregrina pearl now?

La Peregrina was sold at the 2011 Christie's auction to an anonymous Asian buyer, bidding by telephone, for $11.84 million. The pearl remains in private possession and has not been publicly displayed since the sale.

Where is the Taylor-Burton Diamond now?

The 69.42-carat Taylor-Burton Diamond was sold by Elizabeth in 1979 for $5 million to a Lebanese buyer, Henry Lambert, partly to fund a hospital in Botswana. The diamond has changed hands at least twice since and is currently understood to be in private possession in the Middle East. It did not appear at the 2011 Christie's auction.

What happened to the proceeds of Elizabeth Taylor's jewellery auction?

The proceeds of the 2011 Christie's sale went to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, which Elizabeth had founded in 1991 after the death of her close friend Rock Hudson. The foundation continues to operate, funded substantially by the auction proceeds and ongoing licensing revenue from her perfume line.

Did Elizabeth Taylor wear her jewellery regularly?

Famously, yes. She wore the Krupp Diamond daily, including to film sets, to school runs, and to swim in. She wore La Peregrina on yachts. She wore the Bulgari emerald suite to dinner parties at home. Her published memoir, My Love Affair with Jewelry (2002), records that she treated her collection as a working wardrobe rather than an investment portfolio.

What was Elizabeth Taylor's most famous piece of jewellery?

The 33.19-carat Krupp Diamond is the piece most photographed on Elizabeth Taylor across her lifetime and is therefore the most publicly recognised. La Peregrina is the most historically significant, with documented provenance back to the sixteenth century. The Taylor-Burton Diamond is the most spectacular by carat weight at 69.42 carats. All three are extraordinary in different ways.