Dame Elizabeth Taylor’s Royal Cartier Ruby Moment in London

Visitors to the landmark Cartier exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London have the opportunity to marvel at a gorgeous midcentury necklace owned by Dame Elizabeth Taylor. Almost seventy years ago, the necklace made another notable appearance in London, during a victory lap for the man who purchased it for Taylor as a present.

On July 2, 1957, film producer Mike Todd arrived for the London premiere of his blockbuster film, Around the World in 80 Days, at the Astoria Cinema in Charing Cross Road. The West End was crowded with celebrities attending the screening, the proceeds of which benefited the Newspaper Press Fund Appeal. The Duchess of Kent was there, having swiftly changed after a Wimbledon appearance into a black evening gown and her diamond girandoles and Romanov bow brooch, accompanied by her daughter, Princess Alexandra, who wore white satin with diamonds and pearls.

The most highly-anticipated guests, though, were Mike Todd and his wife, the iconic film star Elizabeth Taylor. The two had married in Mexico that February, shortly after her divorce from the actor Michael Wilding. The couple’s romance was front-page news across the world in 1957. They announced at the end of March, shortly after Todd’s movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture, that they were expecting a baby, due later in the year. For the premiere, Elizabeth wore an accommodating gown, made for her by Dior from yards of ruby red chiffon.

With the crimson dress, Taylor wore a special suite of diamond and ruby jewelry from her personal collection. The set included a festoon-style necklace made of platinum and gold and set with Burmese rubies and the popular 1950s combination of diamond baguettes and round brilliants. The necklace also featured another ruby tucked away on its clasp.

The jewel, made by Cartier, was part of a demi-parure that also featured a pair of earrings and a bracelet, all nestled into one of Cartier’s signature red leather cases. Made in 1951 and revised two years later, the necklace apparently remained with Cartier until it was purchased for a famous client in 1957.

That year, the rubies were acquired from Cartier by Mike Todd as a present for his new wife. The couple were spending the early weeks of summer 1957 with friends, including Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, at the Villa Fiorentina on the French Riviera. Taylor was swimming in the villa’s pool, wearing her diamond tiara, when Todd walked outside carrying a gift.

In her jewelry memoir, Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair with Jewelry, Taylor recalled what happened next: “He was holding a red leather box, and inside was a ruby necklace, which glittered in the warm light. It was like the sun, lit up and made of red fire. First, Mike put it around my neck and smiled. Then he bent down and put matching earrings on me. Next came the bracelet. Since there was no mirror around, I had to look into the water. The jewelry was so glorious, rippling red on blue like a painting. I just shrieked with joy, put my arms around Mike’s neck, and pulled him into the pool after me.” The scene was captured on a home movie camera by Eve Johnson, who was then married to Taylor’s The Last Time I Saw Paris co-star, Van Johnson.

Still tan and refreshed from her Riviera vacation, Taylor made her public debut in the Cartier ruby set at the London premiere of Todd’s epic. The Associated Press breathlessly reported, “Yards of crimson chiffon trailed from her sun-bronzed shoulders to the floor. Her ruby and diamond earrings and necklace glittered.”

The diamonds and rubies continued to sparkle after the film screening had ended. Todd had planned a lavish celebration at the Festival Gardens in Battersea Park. The all-night party featured thousands of invited guests, a menu with dishes from around the globe, and a dozen bands. The Telegraph called it a “colourful, jumbled kaleidoscope of a ball, banquet and barbecue.”

A fleet of London’s signature double-decker buses pulled up outside the cinema to ferry passengers to the party, but there was one problem: rain. Thousands of rain ponchos had been provided, and guests huddled into the covered bars and marquees that dotted the space. Regardless of the weather, hundreds of guests crowded the gardens. As dawn broke, as many as 500 revelers were still going strong, including Prince Aly Khan and Taylor’s once and future husbands, Michael Wilding and Eddie Fisher (who was mistaken by one guest for a waiter). AP reporter Eddie Gilmore noted that John Whitney Hay, the American ambassador, stepped in a deep mud puddle. “The people who mattered were either very wet from the rain, or very wet from the champagne,” quipped the Daily Herald‘s Emery Pearce.

A famous photograph taken of Todd and Taylor at the end of the extravaganza shows the producer kissing his sleepy wife on the cheek as she sits in a car. In the photo, all of her rubies are on display—necklace, earrings, and bracelet—as well as the 29.4-carat diamond engagement ring that Todd had given her, which she impishly called “my skating rink.” Sadly, Todd and Taylor’s love affair couldn’t last. After the birth of their daughter, Liza, in August 1957, Todd tragically died in a plane crash in March 1958.

Elizabeth Taylor went on to marry four more husbands after Todd’s death, but she always noted that he was one of the two loves of her life. She continued to wear the jewelry he gave her for decades. After her death in 2011, the rubies were among the many pieces of her jewelry auctioned at Christie’s to raise money for AIDS research. The necklace, earrings, and bracelet were sold in separate lots, with the earrings bringing $782,500, and the bracelet fetching $842,500.

The necklace, always the star of the show, sold for $3,778,500. The jewel is now part of the Cartier Collection, through whom it has been included in the current Cartier exhibition in London, where it is displayed next to an iconic ruby piece owned by one of Taylor’s contemporaries: Grace Kelly’s Bains de Mer Tiara.