DON GONYEA, HOST:
A famous jeweler in London had a wild dream to create the world's largest jeweled egg. Paul Kutchinsky was already rich and successful when he became obsessed with one-upping the legendary Faberge eggs. He showed it off on a BBC talk show in 1990.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TERRY WOGAN: The world's biggest golden egg.
GONYEA: Paul brags that British craftsmanship can now compete on the world stage.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PAUL KUTCHINSKY: There are great craftsmen here. And what we're trying to do here is to show that they're still alive and kicking.
GONYEA: The show host, Terry Wogan, is dazzled by the egg, along with the entire audience.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WOGAN: Don't sell it in all that much of a hurry 'cause it really is a beautiful piece of work.
P KUTCHINSKY: Thank you very much.
WOGAN: Thank you, Paul. Paul Kutchinsky.
(APPLAUSE)
GONYEA: Paul Kutchinsky's daughter, Serena Kutchinsky, witnessed all of this as a child. She has written a memoir about how this fabulous golden egg brought about her family's downfall. She joins us from London.
Serena, thank you for being here.
SERENA KUTCHINSKY: Hi, Don. Great to be here.
GONYEA: OK, so first, Serena, we need some background. The House of Kutchinsky was this very high-end jewelry shop in London. But you start your story among the watch and clockmakers of rural Poland.
S KUTCHINSKY: Yes. So I discovered that my great-great-grandparents had, in 1893, left their hometown of Grabow in Poland and traveled, you know, made a pilgrimage, I suppose, that many Eastern European Jews were making at that time to flee the pogroms.
GONYEA: So the plan was to go to America, but they stopped in London, and that's where they got involved in the jewelry trade.
S KUTCHINSKY: Exactly, yes. My great-great-grandmother Leah had sewn a few heirlooms of jewelry into her skirts, and that allowed them to buy the tools that was needed for Hersh to begin working as a watchmaker and clockmaker.
GONYEA: There's a passage early in the book where you call your ancestors shadowy figures from my family's past, whose ingenuity, creativity and persistence carried them to this country and helped them succeed. Can you pick it up from there?
S KUTCHINSKY: (Reading) Those traits were fossilized down the generations, but by the time it reached my father, the first generation born into wealth, it mutated into a corrosive ambition that consumed him.
GONYEA: That's quite a realization for a daughter to have about her own father.
S KUTCHINSKY: It is indeed, Don.
GONYEA: In the '80s and '90s, the House of Kutchinsky was one of the premier jewelers in London. Can you just describe the kind of things they were making and selling?
S KUTCHINSKY: So I mean, my grandfather Jo had really built the business up in the '60s and '70s and built a really strong name for the House of Kutchinsky, making very kind of almost avant garde, kind of chunky gold, coral, onyx. By the time my father took it over, he wanted to move into a different era. He wanted to outdo his father because by this point, his father, Jo Kutchinsky, was a sort of legend in the jewelry trade. So he decided to go into sort of making more elegant and dainty and feminine jewelry. And then that sort of did all right, but it wasn't ever going to rival the likes of Cartier or Bulgari. So he realized he had to do something on a scale that no one else had ever attempted.
GONYEA: He became obsessed with creating this egg.
S KUTCHINSKY: I mean, he was always obsessed with Faberge. Faberge had turned his family business into the world's first luxury brand, and I think that's what my father saw, as well as an opportunity to elevate the Kutchinsky name, to make it not just renown in Britain, but around the world.
GONYEA: I need you to describe the egg, and I understand you actually saw it once.
S KUTCHINSKY: I did, Don. I got into trouble, actually. I mean, the egg was obviously absolutely stunning. It's breathtaking. Not only is it actually officially the world's largest jeweled egg, it's also the world's largest collection of pink diamonds. So I always sort of, you know, focus on the vital statistics, if you like, which is 15 kilograms of the finest 18-karat gold, about 20,000 of the world's rarest pink diamonds. It took 7,000 hours to assemble by a team of master jewelers.
GONYEA: And in the case of your father's egg, doors would open to reveal an entire world inside the egg.
S KUTCHINSKY: Yes, it was like a miniature doll's house inside. And then that rotated, and it turned into a sort of jeweled portrait library with beautiful blue enamel frames of all different sizes. But yes, so it made its debut in April 1990 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which, you know, I was allowed to stay up for the party, which was incredibly exciting. And I got a new frock and everything.
GONYEA: How old were you at that time?
S KUTCHINSKY: At that point, 10.
GONYEA: OK.
S KUTCHINSKY: And, you know, there were lots of paparazzi outside because there was a minor royal in attendance, and it was just so beautiful. And I sort of felt like I wanted to touch it, and then the security guard obviously saw me just as my sister was about to copy me, and it was all a bit dramatic. But, you know, I didn't really care because, you know, I touched the egg.
GONYEA: He travels the world after that, looking for a buyer.
S KUTCHINSKY: Yes, I mean, it had a very meteoric rise, the egg. It was everywhere, you know, like a pop star kind of thing. And then all over the papers and the magazines, and then it went on tour, so it had to be strapped into a first-class seat with its bodyguards on either side. So really, it took up three seats in first class, and its ticket was booked under the name Mr. Egg. It went to Tokyo, but no buyer was found there. And then it traveled on to New York, actually, where my father sort of had it in mind that maybe Donald Trump might be the one to buy it. But no one was coming forward, and the sort of pressure from the bank was mounting because, obviously, you know, my father had very much overreached himself in the making of it.
GONYEA: What was the price tag?
S KUTCHINSKY: The price tag that was official was 7 million.
GONYEA: British pounds?
S KUTCHINSKY: Seven million pounds, yes.
GONYEA: Amid this search for a buyer, the House of Kutchinsky collapsed.
S KUTCHINSKY: Yes, exactly. A year later, the business was sold. A hundred years of jewelry heritage, gone. And then, obviously, you know, he had his affair with someone who was the sales assistant of the pink diamond dealers, so also someone connected to the egg. So, you know, very much in my mother's eyes, the egg was the source of all ill and evil and suffering and sorrow that our family went through. And then my dad died a decade later in March 2000, two days after his 50th birthday, tragically, in a car crash in Spain.
GONYEA: The egg disappeared. Without spoiling the end of the book, give us a sense of what happened to this object.
S KUTCHINSKY: My father's Australian business partners, the Argyle diamond mine, who had provided all the, you know, incredible amount of pink diamonds - I think Argyle had accepted that maybe it would never be sold. You know, no one really knew what to do with it. It was so overexposed. They basically locked it away in a bonded warehouse on the other side of the world. And then there was a billionaire in Japan who decided that he wanted something that there was only one of in the whole world. So, you know, Mr. Egg was back on a plane again, and it sold. The unsellable egg had sold.
GONYEA: It has an owner. The chapter is closed on the egg.
S KUTCHINSKY: Indeed.
GONYEA: Serena Kutchinsky's memoir, "Kutchinsky's Egg," is out this week. Thank you.
S KUTCHINSKY: Thank you, Don. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
