Paste is a girl's best friend

COLLECTING It was costume jewellery, not the real thing, that adorned the glamorous Hollywood stars - and Mme Joan Joseff supplied it. Madeleine Marsh meets a movie legend

THE'YRE larger than life, they're glamorous, they're expensive, and they're fake. When not appearing in movies, many of them can be found in Los Angeles. What we're talking about here is not Hollywood movie stars, but the artificial gold and paste gems at the LA offices of Joseff of Hollywood, Tinseltown's most celebrated costume jewellers. Here, where appearance is everything and substance an optional extra, fake equals glamour; Joseff's gems are as alluring today as they were in the golden age of the movies.

In the 1930s and 1940s the company (owned by Joan Castle Joseff and founded by her late husband, Eugene) supplied the jewellery that decorated more than 3,000 Hollywood films, from Scarlett O'Hara's wedding ring in Gone with the Wind, to the diamonds Marilyn Monroe sang about in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Today Joseff still rents out its collection to the movie industry and makes costume jewellery for the occasional big period production such as The Age of Innocence. But fashions and films have changed. "They don't wear many clothes in movies nowadays," says Madame Joseff, "so they don't need much costume jewellery."

Today she presides over a remarkable collection of around three million pieces - a jewelled history of the American cinema. Entering her windowless storeroom in an unprepossessing part of Los Angeles, one is almost blinded by the light of these Hollywood crown jewels. A headpiece of trembling diamond stars worn by Norma Shearer as Marie Antoinette lies next to the coronation crown from The Prisoner of Zenda, so regal-looking that over the years people from nine diferent countries have identified it as the authentic crown of their homeland.

Talking to Mme Joseff, it becomes clear that the real gems are those that punctuate her conversation. In Hollywood's heyday she met all the stars and is a source of colourful anecdotes about them. "That Marilyn Monroe was a curious lady," she muses, raising her eyebrows. "I remember a big party at the Beverly Hills hotel - she was with her gentleman friend, a columnist, who sat there and combed her hair all the way through dinner. I couldn't believe it! She never opened her mouth other than to say yes or no. People have said she was a Russian spy, and brilliant. She must have been a very good actress because that wasn't the Marilyn I knew."

Marlene Dietrich was another Joseff customer, and once insisted on viewing their gems for two hours wearing nothing but a military cap. Errol Flynn also visited. "Now he really did love the gals - especially in between takes," giggles Mme Joseff. "In Adventures of Don Juan, he wore a single pearl drop in his ear. We ended up making him 22 earrings because he lost 21 with the ladies in his dressing room."

In addition to these discarded earrings, there are hundreds of necklaces. A nine-strand bib of pearls and rubies created for Bette Davis in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex hangs alongside a chain of 125 jingling golden bells designed for her rival, Joan Crawford: "Joan was so excited when she came in to try it on that she left her mink coat behind," Mme Joseff remembers.

Every jewel has a story behind it. The Crawford necklace was inspired by a pair of earrings designed for the character of Belle Watling, the good-hearted prostitute in Gone with the Wind. "Hold this," says Mme Joseff, carefully passing me a weighty golden box. "That was the actual cigar case that Clark Gable as Rhett Butler tossed into the basket in the ballroom scene when the girls were collecting for the Confederate cause. Even now women still want to touch it, and most of them swear they will never wash their hands again."

It was the costume designer for Gone with the Wind, Walter Plunkett, who introduced Eugene Joseff to the movies. In 1934 he took the Chicago- born advertising man to see The Affairs of Cellini, and Joseff, who had been apprenticed as a jeweller and was fascinated by the history of jewellery, was horrified. He noticed that, while Constance Bennet and Lucille Ball were dressed in carefully recreated 16th-century Italian costumes, their jewellery was pure 20th-century American - the equivalent, he noted, of having them drive an automobile. Joseff complained vociferously. "If you're so smart," Plunkett retorted, "let's see what you can do."

Eugene Joseff grasped the jewelled gauntlet with both hands. By the end of the decade he was the leading costume jeweller in Hollywood, renowned for his craftsmanship, the intricacy of his work (a single necklace for Greta Garbo in Camille took 1,200 hours to make) and the shrewdness of his business acumen. Unusually, Joseff jewellery was only rented and not sold to the studios, which meant that pieces could be re-used in various films. This resulted in the collection that Mme Joseff still hires out to the film and TV industry today.

Joseff's success was no doubt helped by his great personal charm. "All the movie gals were after him - all of them. He was extremely handsome and the most dynamic man I have ever met," Mme Joseff recalls. She joined the company straight from business school in l938, and in true Hollywood fashion they fell in love at first sight and were married in 1942. Joseff designed her wedding ring: a raised golden birdcage with a 312-carat real diamond that bounced around loose inside it. "It was stolen," says Mme Joseff, philosophically, "so he made me another one with a faux jewel."

The couple worked extremely hard. They averaged an 18-hour day, crafting jewellery for most of the great films of the period from All About Eve to Ziegfeld Follies. They had to be extremely inventive. In order to escape the wrath of the censors in the 1948 version of The Three Musketeers, Joseff devised so-called "clevagels", jewelled clasps to cover up the provocative cleavage of Lana Turner. Fifteen years and a social revolution later, Joan Joseff was supplying the jewellery for Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, and affixing piano wire to the star's bosom to give it the required seductive prominence.

Many of the stars were so reluctant to part with their designer baubles that Joseff began making jewellery for their personal wardrobes, too - which escalated into a successful retail line. "In the Thirties and Forties, Hollywood had such an influence on fashion that it changed people's idea of costume jewellery," says Mme Joseff. "People used to think it was sort of trashy but all of a sudden, once they'd seen it on the screen, even the wealthy gals decided they should wear costume jewellery - not the small reproduction stuff, paste pretending to be real stones, but pieces that were larger than life and made a fashion statement - the jewellery worn by the stars."

She and Joseff travelled around the United States, promoting their retail lines in the major department stores with exhibitions of the studio jewels. "Even in those days - the Forties - when no one was collecting anything much, people would keep coming up to me and saying: 'I collect Joseff jewellery'. They still collect it today, half a century later."

In 1948, tragedy struck. The Joseff's were due to fly to Arizona with Eugene - an amateur pilot - at the controls. At the last minute Joan decided she couldn't go, and stayed at home with their 11-month-old baby. Joseff set off with three male friends, the plane crashed and everyone on board was killed instantly.

Mme Joseff never remarried. "I could never find anyone else like Joseff," she says. Now in her eighties, wearing perfect make-up and a smart red suit festooned with Joseff brooches, she misses the grand old days of Hollywood: "The movie gals wouldn't dream of being seen anywhere unless they were perfectly coiffed and gowned - except Hedy Lamarr. Hedy was colour-blind and wore bobby sox of a different colour. Now, the young movie stars hide under baseball caps and want to blend into the background; you have to force them to dress up."

The costume jewellery she and her husband created has become part of Hollywood history. Exhibitions of their studio gems have been held around the world, and Joseph recently talked to Debbie Reynolds, another great Hollywood survivor, about possibly setting up a museum.

After 55 years in the jewellery business, Mme Joseff has lost none of her enthusiasm for her glamorous creations. "Before you go you've got to try this on," she says, handing me a vast, exquisite and impractical bracelet that once graced the wrist of Joan Crawford. "Just imagine what it would have looked like over a long evening glove. Doesn't it make you feel glamorous? You don't need to wear real diamonds to look like a princess." !