Loose Diamonds

Loose Diamonds

. . . and Other Things I’ve Lost (and Found) Along the Way

Amy Ephron

Dedication

for Alan

Contents

Prologue

I
always like the windows of antique jewelry stores that say,
etched on the glass in old-fashioned letters:

Estate Jewelry,
Antiques, Loose Diamonds

I’ve never bought loose
diamonds but the idea of them appeals to me, sparkling stones that I imagine
come wrapped in a velvet cloth. I also think “Loose Diamonds” would be a
great name for a racehorse, not that I ever really aspired to own a
racehorse but I imagine it would be fun especially if you had a horse that
won. (Loose Diamonds is a lean ebony horse that runs as fast as the
night.)

Loose Diamonds has also always
seemed to me a funny analogy for L.A.—an actress waiting for a part, a young
woman who has a dream—as if they’re all looking for a “setting,” a permanent
surrounding, in a town that’s all about impermanence. And yet, there is
something unsettling about the notion of all those things running around
loose.

I like jewelry with settings,
jewelry with history, jewelry that’s right for its time. It always upsets me
when I walk into a jewelry store and there are antique settings for rings
from which the stones have been removed. I can’t help but wonder where the
diamonds have gone.

Loose diamonds are never
displayed in the windows of antique jewelry stores, only stones with
settings, perfect pieces from different periods of time—a Victorian necklace
with pale-blue iridescent opals and fresh pearls; a perfect Deco bracelet,
industrial and moderne; diamond Cartier watches from the ’20s (or more
recently the ’60s); beautiful hand-strung pearls, their origin beyond
question—for sale to anyone who wanders by. Unless you asked, you wouldn’t
know that in the back of the shop, quite often, settings have been broken
down, the gold melted and sold for scrap, and the loose diamonds waiting for
someone to come along who wants to give them a new permanent
surrounding.

They say that diamonds cut
glass. I don’t know. I’ve never tried it. If you were to use glass as a
canvas and diamonds as a tool, it’s always seemed like it would be a
dangerous way to make art. (I believe in art for art’s sake but not if
there’s personal risk involved.) Diamonds burn at a very high temperature,
6,442˚ Fahrenheit—for comparison’s sake, as we know, paper burns at 451˚
Fahrenheit—so, I’m not sure what kind of explosion would have to occur for a
diamond to burn. Since diamonds are entirely made of carbon, they leave no
ash, just CO
2
, as
if they’ve vanished into thin air . . .

One

Loose
Diamonds

W
hen I was
eight, my friend Jenny and I invented a game. We’d both read
The Secret Garden.
Next door to my house was a ’20s
Spanish house edged by a stone wall with an ornate iron gate, hidden from the
street. One day, armed with silver spoons that we imagined we would use to dig
up weeds and uncover baby crocuses, we unlatched the gate and sneaked into the
garden next door.

We weren’t prepared for what we found—it was like
something you would find in a villa in Puerto Vallarta (not that either one of
us had ever been to Puerto Vallarta). There were ornate hand-painted Mexican
tiles set in patterns in the walls and a tiled terrazzo floor (not a silly lawn
like we had next door) and a big fountain that was peaceful and magical, which
we instantly deemed a wishing fountain. There were perfectly trimmed olive trees
and cutouts in the walls with religious statues and concrete friezes, and it
exuded the kind of peace and calm you would expect to find in the patio of an
Italian church. And we felt like we’d discovered something.

But there was also that little “rush” we felt when
we opened the door of the garden and snuck in. That afternoon in the Caballeros’
garden is the closest I’ve ever come to breaking into a house (if it isn’t
empty, that is, and there isn’t a “For Sale” sign on the lawn).

Two years ago, my husband and I came home and our
house was in a strange kind of disorder. All the papers on the desk had been
thrown about. There was a black flashlight on one of the white linen couches in
the living room. The fireplace poker was lying on the bed. But the house wasn’t
trashed exactly and it took us a moment to realize (in fact, my son had been
home for two hours and hadn’t noticed) that the computer was absent from the
desktop and the doors to the little Chinese bedside cabinets were open and
. . . empty and all of the jewelry boxes were gone. And inside them,
every single piece of jewelry I had was also gone. Except the few things I’d
worn out that night and a pair of aquamarine earrings and matching necklace from
Tiffany’s that I’d carelessly left on the counter of the master bathroom
sink.

After the police and the police photographer
arrived—it was 3
A.M.
by now—I suddenly focused
on the fact that the computer was gone from my desk. I dropped to my knees and
screamed, as if I were praying, in true Hollywood fashion: “All I want is my
spec screenplay back.” This rolled over the LAPD, who have clearly seen every
hysterical meltdown known to man, and they just stared at me with glazed
eyes.

The police photographer called me the next morning,
“I didn’t want you to think we were all insensitive,” he said. “I’m a Buddhist.
But I can’t say that around the guys. And I’m praying for you.”

His prayers (and mine) were heard apparently. Four
days later, when a new computer had been installed, I checked my email and there
was a message, the gist of which was:

I think I may have bought a
stolen computer; if you are, in fact, Amy Ephron, please let me know if
there’s anything you want on it before I wipe the disc clean.

After a somewhat complicated negotiation that
involved begging, tears, and some version of a mild threat, or at least the
implication that something really terrible would happen (to me, if to nobody
else) if I didn’t get my work back, a disc with a copy of my hard drive
miraculously “appeared” in our mailbox.

But there was still the pesky part of the loss of
all that jewelry; not the monetary loss, even though I’d never be able to
replace it due to the price of gold, the scarcity of antique jewelry now, the
precision of each of the pieces. But even if I could replace them, I could never
replace the tangible memories that each piece held.

The gold stud earrings my mother had given me when
I’d first had my ears pierced, against her wishes. A conciliatory gesture in a
way. As she said, “If I
was
going to do it, I was
going to wear gold.”

The ’20s marcasite-and-crystal bracelet, a
deconstructionist masterpiece, that I wore religiously like a piece of armor in
my early 20s, given to me by a comedy writer in New York who’d just been given a
year-long contract, because writing could be a legitimate way to earn your
keep.

The pearls I never wore (I’m not really a pearl
kind of girl), given to me by that guy in New York I was almost engaged to
(until he, too, figured out, prompted by his mother, that I wasn’t really a
pearl kind of girl).

The thin, 18-carat Cartier bands from my first
marriage. Of course, I didn’t wear them anymore, but I liked to know that they
were there in a box where they belonged.

The antique emerald and diamond ring my first
husband gave me on the occasion of my second daughter Anna’s birth—not showy but
(39 hours of labor later) hard-earned and which I’d promised Anna I would give
her one day. Apparently not soon enough.

Victorian opal earrings found like a piece of
treasure on a Sunday morning at the Toronto jewelry mart on the pier. I never
wore them in daytime. They were nighttime earrings. All of it gone.

We weren’t alone. There’d been an epidemic of
burglaries in L.A. Everywhere we went, someone said, “Oh, that happened to me.”
Sherry Lansing and Billy Friedkin were suing ADT home security. Even retired
judge Diane Wayne and her husband, Ira Reiner, who was the former district
attorney of L.A., had been hit . . . Diane says the only thing
she misses is one pair of Michael Dawkins earrings that were so comfortable she
wore them every day. She says they weren’t particularly valuable. But she can’t
replace them because they were silver and gold and he doesn’t make those
anymore. I wonder if she misses them
only
because
they were comfortable or if she misses them because she wore them every day, to
dinner, to events for her children? She wore them when she was sitting on the
bench, and they made her feel as if she was balanced and part of a functioning
and protective society.

I, however, was attached to each piece. (And even
if I could replace them, I’m not the sort of person who goes out and gets a new
cat.) The Elsa Peretti triple diamond bracelet on the delicate gold chain. The
Elsa Peretti single diamond bracelet. And when you wore them together, it looked
like you were wearing something. The beautiful gold necklace, 20-carat gold,
multistrand, so that it looked almost like a delicate rope around my neck,
falling just below the collarbone. The emerald-cut diamond and sapphire
earrings . . .

I never had big flashy diamond studs that sparkled
from a mile away or a rock the size of the Ritz or an emerald cocktail ring,
garish but impressive, but who would want them, even if you could? I mean, who
came up with the theory that an engagement ring should equal 15% of your
fiancé’s annual salary? (I tried to sell that one to my present husband, but it
didn’t fly.)

I never aspired to the Taylor-Burton
diamond . . . I was always more the school of Mrs. Harriet
Annenberg Ames, the original owner of the Taylor-Burton diamond, who wore it as
a ring and put it up for auction at Parke-Bernet in New York in 1969 with this
statement: “I found myself positively cringing and keeping my gloves on for fear
it would have been seen, I have always been a gregarious person and I did not
enjoy that feeling . . . as things are in New York, one could not
possibly wear it publicly.” One could remark that the Taylor-Burton diamond was
too big to wear on your hand and Elizabeth Taylor was right to have it made into
a necklace, but I would probably add, “As things are in the world now, even if I
could afford it, I would never feel politically correct with something of that
value on my hand . . .”

No, I never could compete on a carat-to-carat
basis, but what I did have was an extraordinary collection of exquisite pieces.
The silver-and-black beaded choker, the Piaget watch . . . And
the loss of all of it was tangible and unsettling. I found myself panicking if I
put my cell phone down and couldn’t remember where it was, or scribbled a number
on a piece of paper that I then misplaced, or took my wedding band off in the
kitchen and couldn’t find it in the morning on the bedside table.

What was wrong with me anyway? I felt bereft, like
a spurned lover or an abandoned child. And I resolved that I would never let
myself feel that way again. I was done. No more emo. No more jewelry as armor,
jewelry as protection, jewelry as memory, jewelry as a tangible way to hold on
to someone. From now on, I would simply not care. I would have a layer of
reserve, withhold my attachment. From now on, whatever jewelry I would accrue
would simply be an accessory.

And even though my husband instituted “the jewelry
replacement plan,” which was terribly sweet of him, I generally wear only tiny
gold wires in my ears and my wedding ring, unless we’re going out.

Eighteen months later, a message was left on our
answering machine. “Detective Dan Schultz, LAPD. We have recovered a load of
jewelry. There’s some possibility it might belong to you. Call me
please . . .”

And even though I didn’t think any of it could
belong to me, my heart sort of skipped a beat.

I’d seen the report on the news. Burglar draws a
treasure map and leads detectives to a jewelry cache. Treasury dug up by the 118
Freeway . . .

It was some sort of Talented Mr. Ripley kind of
thing.

He was a strange character from a rich family;
methodical, meticulous, sometimes he even cleaned up the houses he broke into so
it would be days before someone realized they’d been hit. And part of the thing
was the “rush” he felt when he broke into somebody’s house.

As Detective Longacre of the LAPD’s Commercial
Crimes Division explains it, they caught him “by luck and by golly” (his words,
not mine). He’d rented a storage unit. In California, if you are six months
behind in your rent at a storage unit, the owner of the facility has the right
to auction off the contents of your box. They opened the box a crack so bidders
could get a glimpse of what was inside and someone saw some gold coins and
offered three hundred dollars. And they opened the box and found millions of
dollars’ worth of jewelry and firearms, including a sapphire necklace that had
once belonged to Eva Perón and a Degas ballerina painting. The thing is, the
storage facility had auctioned off the wrong box by mistake—they’d meant to open
the box next door . . . Once it was open and they saw the guns,
they had to call the LAPD.

The other thing they found inside the storage unit
(and this is where it gets a little strange) was a computer, and on the computer
was a fairly sophisticated program that’s used to create “a.k.a.’s.” And that’s
how they found him. He’d used his own photograph in multiple identities he’d
created, disguised, made-up, redone, different hair colors, facial hair, etc.
. . . and nobody knows quite why. It was almost as if each burglary
had to have a complicated disguise.

Detective Longacre broke the image down (this is as
close as LAPD gets to
CSI
) on a facial recognition
database and generated a “generic” APB. In other words, they didn’t know his
name but they had some idea of what he looked like and they generated a “Wanted”
poster. A few months later, when he got careless and was apprehended during a
burglary in progress in Encino, a West Valley cop ID’d him from the poster.

They linked him to so many burglaries, he was
facing 15 years, so his lawyer called up and said, “Do you want to know where he
buried the rest of the jewelry?”

The thief drew a detailed map from memory, so
precise that it was chilling—three different aerial views, from above, lower,
and then dead-on, with exact measurements: Highway 118, 0.75 meters from the
fence, 0.7 meters underground, almost eerie in their accuracy and detail. On the
other hand, if I’d buried 14 million dollars’ worth of jewelry, I’d probably
want to remember where I put it, too.

The cops didn’t believe him. But sure enough on the
first shovel, they dug it right up.

We have recovered a load of
jewelry. There’s some possibility it might belong to
you . . .

The viewing wasn’t quite like what we thought it
would be. We imagined vast quantities of jewelry laid out on velvet
cloth . . . Instead there was a three-ring binder with photos
that was passed around. The meeting room at the Van Nuys Police Station looks
like a high school cafeteria circa 1968. The victims sat on benches hunched over
chipped Formica tables. The jewelry was in bunches in little manila envelopes
stored in big brown boxes and if you thought something might belong to you, they
would bring the envelope over for inspection. None of it was mine.

That night we went out to dinner with my friend
Wendy and her husband. The moment we sat down, Wendy pushed a little silver box
across the table. I opened it, and inside were two Hershey’s Kisses and a tiny
antique platinum-and-diamond tennis bracelet. It was really pretty. “It belonged
to my mother,” she explained.

I put it on and suddenly I felt like I was attached
to something. I wear it all the time now, like a piece of armor on my wrist. And
I hold on to a time when jewelry was passed down and small trinkets were
treasured and garden gates were left unlatched and probably, if we’d tried it
(although we never would), the glass door to the patio had been left open,
too.