Buyers eager for Windsor jewels

Press, 4 April 1987, Page 10

Buyers eager for Windsor jewels

NZPA-Reuter Geneva The Duchess of Windsor’s modern jewellery collection brought a staggering $57.7 million yesterday in fierce bidding that drove prices on some pieces to 10 times their estimated value. ? Buyers included the actress, Elizabeth Taylor, who- bld from beside her pool in Los Angeles, but the highest single price was $5.4 million paid by a Japanese . diamond dealer for a 31-carat diamond ring. “I bought it for the romance it represents, for the extraordinary quality of the diamond, and for the good cause which the money will go towards: the fight against

the terrible disease A.1.D.5.,” Mr Tsuneo Takagi told reporters. The 95 lots fetched about $5O million at the auction. With a 17 per cent commission that the buyers must pay Sotheby’s auction house, the total comes to more than $57 million. The most highly-valued diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires went under the hammer yesterday, but many items of historical merit will be sold today. The two-day sale, with a total of 306 lots, had originally been expected to raise about $l3 million. The first day brought in more than four times this sum for the Pasteur

Institute for Medical Research in Paris, to which the Duchess left the collection on her death last year.

The Pasteur Institute has been one of the leading : research centres in the fight against A.I.D.S. ■ The Institute announced at the auction that it would use the money to build and run new laboratories specialising: in A.I.D.S. and cancer research. The collection combines twentieth century masterpieces, with historic love tokens given to the Duchess by the King who gave Up his throne to marry her. King Edward VIII abdicated on December 11,

1936, after a reign of 11 months, : to : marry the Baltimore-born Wallis Simpson. They lived in exile in Paris as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The Duke died 15 years ago. The bidding from the first item was fast and furious, with a series of breath-taking duels as buyers in the circus tent vied against absent bidders using direct telephone lines. Elizabeth Taylor paid $1.07 million for a diamond clip designed as the plumes and crown of the Prince of Wales. The buyers seemed motivated by the exquisite nature of some pieces, and by the history and connection with

the “romance of the century.” Sotheby’s experts were surprised to discover a well-kept secret held by the Duke and Duchess: much of the jewellery was inscribed with intimate love notes. The inscriptions on the gold and silver settings included plays on words, historical jokes and ambiguous, apparently amorous, references. A walnut-sized deepgreen emerald which the King chose for Mrs Simpson’s engagement ring was bought for $3.5 million by a London jeweller, Laurence Graff. Dated October 27, 1936, it is inscribed: “We are ours now.”