Picture this. The most precious gemstones in British history. Rubies worn into battle. Sapphires from medieval saints. Diamonds the size of eggs wrapped in cotton wool, sealed in a glass jar, and buried 60 ft beneath Windsor Castle in an ordinary biscuit tin. For 6 years, they lay in the chalk earth while bombs…
She was a breath of fresh air, the Queen’s beloved daughter-in-law, who was even trusted with the Heirlooms of the Crown. Today, she is losing her home and her last sanctuary in the royal world. How did this catastrophe happen? The story of her jewels—from a fiery ruby to stolen diamonds—will tell us everything about…
She was a great collector: Queen Mary’s taste and her ability to work with jewels and master craftsmen shaped the face of the British jewel box for a century. Many of her pieces are still alive today—we recognize them in portraits and at modern state events. But what about those that were sold, dismantled, or…
In 2014, the death of the ninety-nine-year-old Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe, led her heir to a London vault and a discovery that felt frozen in time. There, tucked away in massive oak chests, he found a treasure trove of jewelry, all curiously wrapped in newspapers from a single, turbulent year: 1953. Why had these…
On the 5th of December 2023, inside Sabbee’s New York sales room on York Avenue, a small diamond and pearl cross was suspended beneath a focused beam of white light. Set in silver topped gold, each diamond caught that beam and fractured it, not with the theatrical blaze of a crown jewel, but with…
Los Angeles, 1973. Television specials in the early 1970s occupied a particular space in the entertainment landscape that no longer exists in quite the same way. an occasion, a genuine event, something that people arranged their evenings around because the medium was still young enough that certain combinations of performers on a single stage felt…
July 14th, 1960. Elvis Presley walked into a small neighborhood barber shop in downtown Memphis, wearing sunglasses and a hat, hoping for an hour of anonymity. What he heard in that chair from a barber who had no idea who he was cutting would stay with him for the rest of his life. And what…
Vincent Duca had been a paparazzi for 3 years and he was good at it. He knew how to blend into crowds, knew which celebrities frequented which restaurants, knew that scandal sold better than straight news. He’d made decent money photographing aldermen with mistresses, judges at strip clubs, society wives shopping in stores they couldn’t…
That’s very sweet, honey. But real performers spend years, decades, even perfecting their craft in professional environments. You don’t just wake up one day and become Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley sat at the Warn for Micah counter of Rosy’s Diner, sipping black coffee, listening to a young journalist from Nashville explain why he’d probably never…
Memphis, Tennessee, May 1957. Ellis Auditorium on South Main Street had been hosting events since 1924, which meant it had hosted enough of them to have developed its own particular atmosphere. The specific quality of a building that has absorbed decades of human occasion, celebration and mourning and music and argument, all of it accumulated…
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