The Pearl Legacy

JC, who has sent her family’s objects and memories, now sends me her mom’s pair of pearl collars, faux pearls on silk that used to grace a common cardigan or blouse in the 1940s. These were produced by Glentex in Japan and, in Brooklyn, by an industry with the curious name of Baar & Beards, Inc.

I remember my grandmother had a few of these; when I was a kid, I used to pretend I was Queen Elizabeth, wearing a collar of pearls. These were the middle-class version of fine pearls. My Oma (German name for “gram”) called these her “dickey” collars, about 14 inches long and one to two inches wide.

Why these were fashionable has to do with the history of saltwater and freshwater pearls. By the late 1880s, pearls were so over farmed that few women could afford a pearl strand or a “real” pearl collar. Once the pearls from the great natural beds in the Arabian Gulf, young men used to dive from Dubai or Abu Dhabi, were overfished, saltwater pearls were sourced from Australia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. So hungry were Americans for pearls, a gift to a bride or a graduation gift, that the bivalve mussels producing freshwater or river pearls from the Mississippi River, once so plentiful, were no longer available. Farming those freshwater pearls in the late 19th and early 20th centuries decimated the Mississippi mussel.

Alas, the history of wearing pearls has always had its ebbs and flows, due to the depletion of vast pearl beds throughout the past 1,000 years. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the natural pearl beds of Central and South America were farmed for the European nobility. Laws were passed to keep the common folk from wearing pearls; only royalty in the 15th and 16th centuries could drape themselves, as did Queen Elizabeth, with pearls. Royalty always loved their pearl prerogative: Julius Caesar loved pearls and banned unworthy people from wearing them in Rome.

Not just European royalty wore pearls. They were dear to Hindu culture as the “daughters of the Moon,” as written in the Vedas. Pearls have always been connected with the oceans, and of course, with Venus.

In the 1940s, cultured pearls were still a relative rarity, and although very few people could afford natural saltwater pearls, cultured pearls began to be more affordable. Still, a faux pearl collar was much cheaper. So JC’s mom did the next best thing with a shopgirl’s budget. She bought a faux pearl collar, which in 1943 could be purchased for $1.

The landscape around pearls and their affordability changed with the invention of cultured pearls by the entrepreneur Kokichi Mikimoto in 1893. He realized that if he placed an irritant inside a specific kind of oyster, farmed from another oyster, he could “grow” a pearl in special hanging beds off the coast of Japan. By 1920, cultured pearls were affordable and almost perfectly round and white, in contrast to natural saltwater pearls hunted by those intrepid deep-ocean divers.

Mikimoto found the almost perfect specimen of cultured pearl: the Akoya, limited to certain oysters, as very few can “grow” a pearl.

I just returned from an appraisal of a collection belonging to a wealthy client of mine who has a home in Puerto Vallarta, and this has started me on a kick of rewatching Elizabeth Taylor movies. Taylor lived with Richard Burton at the time of the filming of John Huston’s Night of the Iguana. My client’s housekeeper, who is not young, remembers Elizabeth Taylor’s house in Puerto Vallarta, received as a gift from Richard Burton in 1964. Now the luxurious hotel Casa Kimberly in the city’s historic downtown area, the property was once a love nest for Taylor and Burton, connecting their huge “casitas” by the famous Bridge of Love. It was their private getaway during the filming; that bridge was built by Burton to avoid paparazzi.

The connection with pearls is part of this story: Burton bought the world’s most famous pearl, La Peregrina, at a Sotheby’s auction for $37,000 in 1969 for Taylor, as a Valentine’s Day and 37th birthday gift. One of the most memorable of all the world’s pearls, La Peregrina is the largest pear-shaped pearl at 55.95 carats (4 ounces), about the weight of a deck of cards. Taylor’s estate owned it until it sold in 2011 for $11 million.

As a contrast, the value of JC’s mom’s faux pearl collar today is $10.