Elizabeth Taylor's Jewellery Box
Mr H was in the shop this week talking to a customer about Elizabeth Taylor and her incredible jewellery box so I thought I would delve in to it a bit more and what a box of treasures it is!
ElizabethTaylor was born in 1932 and was well known for her beauty and playing the parts of volatile and strong willed characters. She is as fascinating for the roles she played in films (Lassie, National Velvet, Cleopatra) as for her personal life. The scandals surrounding her and Richard Burton and their 2 marriages and how she was hounded by the press was an early vision of what we have come to see portrayed on a daily basis nowadays.
However, her jewellery was stunning! She said that 'life without earrings was empty' and one of her favorite pairs were diamond and platinum chandeliers. She was photographed in these earrings more frequently than any other jewel in her collection. There is a wonderful story behind them. She saw them in Paris with her then husband Mike Todd and she fell in love with them. Despite them being made of paste, the story goes that she pleaded with him to buy them for her and he did! She wore them whenever she could. It doesn't end there…. In 1957 she put them on and turned to Mike saying that they felt really different. He had arranged for them to be transformed in to the real thing!
The piece she put on every day for years was the 33.19-carat Krupp diamond ring, a 1968 gift from Richard Burton. It is magnificent. Elizabeth Taylor was entranced by this ring previously owned by Vera Krupp and stolen from her hand in a burglary. It was eventually located sewn in the lining of the thief's coat in a town ironically called Elizabeth! After her death, it sold at auction for $8.8 million.
Even her charm bracelet was something to behold! There are around 20 different charms on it from a variety of different men for various films and events! There was even a Henry VIII gold half-sovereign from 1544. Sweetest of all of the charms is a gold ball with the names of her children engraved on it.
Lastly, you might like to see the Cartier rubies. These were infamously gifted to her by Mike Todd, made with diamond and Burmese rubies. The gifting was filmed and if you go to YouTube, you can watch the video. Mike and Liz (!) were newly married and she was pregnant.
She said that Todd was one of the three loves of her life, the other two being Richard Burton and jewellery! They were only married a year when their private plane crashed killing him, he was the only husband she didn't divorce.She was married six times, twice to Richard Burton. By the time she married her last husband she said “After Richard, the men in my life were just there to hold the coat, to open the door.”
