Adora and Harry Winston
From Adora’s Emmanuel T. Pineda, I got a book on Harry Winston, whose exquisite jewelry collection will be on Adora’s floor to view and buy.
The book describes how the graying Harry Winston, whose peculiarly round face was enlivened by eyes that could change from warmth to steely toughness, would quietly enter the room and take his place behind the desk. A titan in his field of jewelry and salesmanship, within less than half an hour, diamonds worth millions would be bought by a client, from rings to necklaces and bracelets.
Harry Winston’s rather modest professional beginnings were in Los Angeles, where his father was a small-time jeweler from New York, wrote Alexis Gregory. In 1908, when Harry was all of 12 years old, he ventured into a pawnshop and spotted a ring with a green stone and a price tag of $25. Two days later, after cleaning what proved to be a two-carat emerald, his astonished father sold the gem for $800.
“When Mr. Winston bought his little green stone, newly rich American monopolists were the world’s greatest consumers of fine jewelry after the First World War. They toppled the major European dynasties and accelerated the decline of Old World aristocracy. Jewels tumbled out of Europe’s palaces allowing the greatest diamonds in the world — including several from the French crown jewels — to end up on the ground floor at Tiffany’s. Tycoons’ wives appeared at social events along Fifth Avenue looking like Christmas trees. When these grande dames passed away — or when their husbands went bust in the Crash of 1929 — their baubles came up for grabs to sell, or for the children never to squabble about.”
In 1920, Harry Winston went off to New York with $2,000 in personal savings and set up a small office at 535 Fifth Avenue. He convinced some bankers to finance him in the purchase of estate jewelry, offered his services to everybody in the Social Register and Who’s Who. Replies were not long in coming from his mailings.
“Harry became financially independent, so that in 1930 he could purchase the largest emerald-cut diamond ever to be sold at public auction. Two years later he would incorporate his small Premiere Diamond Company under his own name making original jewelry and handling most of America’s major estates.”
Harry Winston so loved priceless stones that he often kept them in his pockets to caress the whole day. Diamonds were really his thing, but he also dealt in magnificent emeralds. The most remarkable pearl necklace he ever had according to author Alexis Gregory “came from the Maharani of Baroda, Sita Devi. It consisted of three long strands of pigeon-egg-sized, perfectly matched, cream-colored treasures that, in the 18th century, had claimed the lives of several hundred Indian Ocean divers.”
Furthermore, “Winston was a bigger-than-life adventurer, the last of a generation of opportunists, showmen, consolidators, financiers, and promoters who had emerged from the discovery of the great diamond mines in South Africa.” Diamonds were then mainly alluvial (river-based) and imported primarily from India and Brazil. Heavy rains broke down this mass on the earth’s surface, washing the kimberlite into Africa’s rivers. Only the finest diamonds made it intact all the way to the rivers’ mouths. It was mostly these alluvial stones that went into the great treasures of the Mughal Empire, many of which would be carried off to Persia from Delphi.
Winston became De Beers’s largest client for several reasons. First of all, he had the absolute trust of the world’s major clients — the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Shah of Iran, Arabian sheiks, Stavros Niarchos, Aristotle Onassis, and Dorothy Killam, not to mention the countless globe-trotting millionaires who frequented his salons in New York, Paris, and Geneva.
A marketing genius, instead of waiting for clients to arrive, Alexis Gregory wrote, Winston sent executives all over “the planet” to sell the house’s glittering wares, shuttling from Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Tehran, and Caracas. “Winston also pioneered exhibitions and gala dinners in grand European resort hotels so rich women would be tempted to spend a few million dollars between a schuss and a swim.”
Ronald Winston, Harry Winston’s oldest son, was named chairman and CEO after his father’s demise in 1978. He inherited a sense of style in jewelry from his father, and architecture from his mother. Ronald, known for his knowledge of science, is both an inventor and a designer of metal alloys for jewelry and innovative machinery to cut diamonds automatically. Under his leadership, Winston went global, with exhibitions in the Far East, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Jakarta, and from this grew the concept of salons in Tokyo and Beverly Hills.
Ronald’s personal passion is colored diamonds. Every color of diamond available in the universe is available at Harry Winston because of him, while carrying on his father, Harry Winston’s invention of the “rock,” using a large square-cut or pear-shaped solitaire in a ring rather than as the centerpiece of a clip, necklace or tiara.
