King Of Raconteurs

2007: I am a Harry Winston fan. I collect articles written on Harry Winston because they are truly priceless. He has a remarkable way of telling real stories + he is one of a kind jeweler who had the fortune and good luck to meet interesting people from around the world. He is the king of diamonds. It's educational and entertaining.

(via International Diamond Annual, Vol.1, 1971) A N Wilson writes:

Prince Of Diamonds
Some anecdotes of Harry Winston

Harry Winston is not merely the prince of diamond merchants. He is a king amongst raconteurs. His repertoire of anecdotes about diamonds is imperial. Prince and potentate, with diamonds in their crowns, have been his clients and his confidantes. Both the crowned and uncrowned heads of Europe and of Asia wear the jewels that Harry Winston found and sold to them. And a great sparkle of joy, as brilliant as the gleam from his latest tiara, shines in Harry’s eyes as he turns to tell you his next story of how he sold a whopping big diamond t o the King of Siam. The great thing about Harry Winston is that he enjoys himself. When he recalls an anecdote, he lives again every moment of it and he enjoys the fun of it all over again.

I sat entranced in his secluded office in New York’s Fifth Avenue as Harry Winston responded to my request for some of his best stories.

“You know,” he said. “I sometimes feel I’m a bit of a fool. When I get up in the morning and shave and look in the mirror, I often say to myself ‘What sort of a crass idiot are you? Here is a crass idiot if ever there were one! Why do you do this? Why do you go on doing this? Why do you fret yourself employing three hundred people in that building of yours and another whole floor of them across the way and something like 3000 cutters in several different countries—why do you do it? Harry, there’s a sickness in you.’

“And, of course, it is so, it is a sickness. But it does not need any medicine. It is in the blood.”

You can sense that sly humor and the fun in this man as he talks like that. But you can also recognize the enjoyment he gets out of diamonds and out of what he has done and still does with them.

“There it is—it’s in the blood. I rejoice in this. I love diamonds. They are my life. And this is how I live still—a little bit of madman, no doubt, as some people will say: but I’m quite content to be like this, so long as I am enjoying my life as much as I do.”

Whisper has it that Harry has turned seventy. Nobody really knows and he would not let me into the secret. But whatever his age, he’s still a dynamic man. He still does a great deal of selling himself, dealing personally with clients of long standing. He likes to go on exercising the long-range judgment, the experience and the intuition which, together, have made him the greatest diamond merchant in the world.

“You’ve got to have ‘guts’ and you’ve got have ‘wits’ in this damned business,” he says. And he always returns to the point in the conversations I have had with him, that it is no use dealing in this diamond business unless you have a love of diamonds and of gems as a whole. Farouk of Egypt was one of Harry Winston’s clients. Farouk was always a great purchaser of diamonds, occasionally for cash, more often on credit.

“Farouk was an interesting man himself. We had many amusing and exciting conversations together,” recalls Harry. “As a king and a client I thought he must be reliable, for the he had the wealth of Egypt at his command.”

On one occasion—in 1951—Winston made a deal with Farouk, who bought a 700000 dollar emerald. It was for Farouk’s new bride, Queen Narriman. Soon afterwards Harry and his wife, Edna, went with their children to the south of France for their usual holiday. Farouk and Queen Narriman were at Cannes and they invited the Winstons to dinner. The beautiful Narriman wore the emerald. It was a very pleasant and happy occasion. Then the Winstons reciprocated by inviting the royal couple to dinner at their lovely home on a promontory looking out over the Mediterranean. Farouk sent his bodyguards to surround the residence and his coffeemaker to superintend the production of the meal.

“It was all great success and, as things do on such occasions, proceedings continued well into the wee small hours. Sometime about four in the morning, the early dawn was coming and Farouk and I walked out on to the terrace. The morning star was there in the east—in glowing brilliance. At that time I happened to have a magnificent diamond, which I had called ‘The Star of the East’. It was a great gem—a pear-shape of great beauty, of the finest color and finest quality. Eighty-three carats! I loved it dearly. I told Farouk about it. And one thing led to another—the stars in Narriman’s eyes—and Farouk said he would like to buy the diamond. We settled on $1,125,000.”

As Harry Winston described the romantic scene, you could just see and hear it all happening.

“I had no reason to doubt the man,” continued Harry Winston. “After all, he was a king—and I had done business with him before. So I agreed to sell and Farouk was delighted. The diamond was delivered to him. I’d said to Farouk ‘I understand your circumstances at the moment—you can pay me at your convenience.’

“A year went by—and the king’s convenience had not turned up. One day in July 1052, I was at my country home outside New York. A call came through. It was from Alexandria. Farouk was on the line. He said he had a 55-carat emerald which had belonged to Catherine the Great. In view of his debt to me of nearly two million dollars, he wondered whether I would have arbitration about the value of this emerald and accept it in part payment of his debt to me. And then the line went dead.”

Later on Winston heard the story of what had happened. The American Ambassador to Egypt, Mr Jefferson Cafferey, had gone to Alexandria to say farewell to Farouk on his abdication and departure from Egypt in the royal yacht. As Mr Cafferey took his leave, Farouk pressed into the Ambassador’s hand the Catherine the Great emerald. It came to America in the diplomatic pouch, with the message from Farouk that “rest will follow”. But “The Star of the East” did not follow—nor did its equivalent in cash.

In due course, Farouk set up his court in exile in the Isle of Capri. He left Harry Winston know that ‘The Star of the East’ had been left behind in the palace safe in Cairo. Winston took legal action, which led to a search of the safe deposits in the palace. But the diamond was missing. Then legal action was taken against the Egyptian government and Winston won his case. But Colonel Nasser ignored the court’s injunction and not a sou was paid. Some time later Harry was at a party in the south of France where he met a cousin of Farouk’s, who had been Minister of Finance during Farouk’s regime. The cousin said that Farouk, in exile, had nevertheless been getting a lot of gold out of Egypt, shipping out his assets quite freely. This alerted Winston to the possibility of recouping some of the debt Farouk owed.

“I have since employed a very smart investigator,” remarked Harry Winston, ‘and the story is not ended.”

One immediately understands from the way Harry says this that some quite remarkable development can be expected to happen in the quite near future.

But what a setting all this is for one of the greatest best sellers of all time! There are all the ingredients—a king, a beautiful queen, a great world famous merchant, a royal honeymoon at Cannes, a mansion on a promontory overlooking the Mediterranean, the royal coffeemaker, the royal yacht at Alexandria, the American ambassador, the diplomatic pouch, the Isle of Capri, beautiful and historic emeralds, special agents—and, at the center of them all, this lovely 83 carat pear-shaped gem, ‘The Star of the East’. I had always thought these things were the figments of an imagination as lively as the late Ian Fleming’s—but no, here they are in a real life drama. Stories like this bubble out of Harry Winston, if you can get him in the mood and with the time to tell them. I egged him on.

“Yes,” he said, “there was also a certain king of Saudi Arabia—a man of very, very great wealth—from oil, you know. He had a very large court—four wives and something like eighty concubines. He was a considerable exponent of the art of love. They were all young girls. A connoisseur he was. The king became a client of mine—he needed many jewels.

“I told the king at one of our meetings that I had a diamond of perfect quality—a 62-carat pear-shape—but it was not for sale. I loved it so much I’d done something I’d never done before—I’d called it ‘the Harry Winston Diamond’. The king became excited. He said:

“Harry, I must have it’ and he went on insisting. And, anxious lest I should change my mind, after I had been persuaded to sell, he asked that the diamond be wrapped up there and then and handed over to him.”

Eighteen months later the king visited Boston from Saudi Arabia for treatment to the retina of an eye.

“I was summoned to Boston to see the king. He needed more diamonds and I sold him two million dollars worth of jewelry. And when we had concluded our deals, the king passed over the table a small parcel. It was in the familiar wrapping of our house. It had not been opened. I recognized it.

“Harry,” said the king. “I hope you will credit me with this against the jewels I’ve just bought from you.” I was astonished. “But you can’t give this back,” I said in my amazement, “It’s the most beautiful diamond.” The king looked at me quizzically.

“Harry,” he said, “I’m fond of living, just as you are. I want to go on living. If I gave this stone to one of my four wives, well, my life would not be worth a moment’s purchase.”

“As I was taking my leave, the king asked: “By the way, Harry, if you have three other gems just like that, let me know.”

Harry Winston knows a good story when he has one, and he would certainly not paint the lily.

“But Shakespeare also says, ‘tis very silly
To gild refined gold, or paint the lily.”

But there is a sequel to the story of the king of Saudi Arabia that I think justifies its being added here.

“I always believe in fate,” said Harry Winston. “There’s a great deal of luck in this world of ours. But it’s not all luck. Foresight and a lot of other things go into it too.”

“Anyhow, about three weeks later, in the normal course of business, I was asked to value some estate jewelry. It had belonged to the late Mary Byron Foy, a daughter of Jack Chrysler, the motor car tycoon. I opened the parcel and, to my amazement, I found what appeared to be an exact replica of ‘the Harry Winston Diamond’, the 62-carat pear-shape the King of Saudi Arabia had handed back to me. I rubbed my eyes. But it was a diamond all right—not a replica. It was a perfect match. I called for my diamond to compare the two. They were perfectly matched. But mine was 62 carats and this was 60 carats. The difference was so infinitesimal—it was negligible. They had to be a pair of earrings—they were made for each other. I bought the Foy diamond and made a pair of earrings. “In due course some old clients of mine got to hear that I had something special. They were Mr and Mrs Killam, of Canada. When Mrs Killam came to see them, she burst out: ‘These are mine’. And so they were—immediately.

“If you believe in fate, here’s a perfect example of how it can work to your advantage most unexpectedly.”

And then Harry began philosophizing a bit. “It’s not just fate or luck. You have to work hard—and work hard following your fate, pursuing your luck and taking advantage of what comes your way. You need imagination, perception, intelligence, perseverance—and luck. And you must know what you are doing.

“There’s something about jewels—they grow on you. You get to love diamonds, you get to love jewels—emeralds, rubies too. You love them for themselves. You life wraps itself round them. And, although it sometimes breaks my heart to do so, I enjoy selling diamonds. I find it a very absorbing and entertaining pastime.”

When I remarked that Harry Winston shared with the late Sir Ernest Oppenheimer a love of diamonds for themselves, Harry Winston’s personal assistant, Jill Ciraldo, chimed in: “You know, Mr Winston plays with diamonds as if they were toys.” And Harry nodded—delighted.