Elizabeth Taylor’s world-famous La Peregrina pearl — which sold at auction this past week for a record $11.8 million — was eaten by her dog shortly after she received it as a Valentine’s gift from Richard Burton.
“Twenty minutes after she put it on, she lost it,” recalls Ward Landrigan, the former head of Sotheby’s jewelry division who sold the 55.95-carat pearl to Burton for $37,000 in 1969.
After Burton bought the bauble for Taylor, Landrigan traveled from New York to Las Vegas, where he was picked up in a white Rolls- Royce at the airport to deliver the precious cargo to the glamorous couple at a Caesars Palace suite “the size of three tennis courts.”
“They asked what I wanted to drink,” says Landrigan, who’d sold Burton the 33.19-carat Krupp diamond a year earlier. “I asked what they were having, and they said salty dogs, which is vodka and clam juice.”
Landrigan presented the pearl and was chatting with Burton while Taylor left to try it on. She “came back running, showing her cleavage and saying, ‘Ward! I’ve lost the pearl!’
“The room had pink shag carpeting, and I was crawling past a settee when I saw one of [Taylor’s] two Lhasa apsos, and I heard the crunch. I said, ‘Liz, I know where the pearl is,’ ” Landrigan recalls. The pampered pooch apparently wanted the treasure for a quick snack.
Landrigan, who owns fine-jewelry company Verdura, says Liz grabbed the dog and put her hand into its mouth. “She got the dog to spit it out. I was afraid it cracked because pearls do,” he told us, adding that it suffered only a couple of scratches. Taylor then had Cartier make a diamond-and-ruby necklace for the pearl. The full piece was auctioned this past week at Christie’s and sold to an anonymous buyer.
The close call at Caesars was one of many for La Peregrina over centuries: It was once lost in a sofa at Windsor Castle, and Landrigan sold the pearl for James Hamilton, the fifth Duke of Abercorn, whose wife misplaced it at a family wedding and later found it in the bride’s train.