The Portuguese Diamond

Peggy Hopkins Joyce, was a model, dancer, actress, and Ziegfeld girl. The term “gold digger” was coined in honor of Peggy around 1920. She had made a profitable career of marrying and divorcing millionaires. No doubt she intended to add Charlie Chaplin to her list of rich conquests. She frequently visited Charlie onboard the schooner Invader, sailing numerous times to Catalina Island, for weekends of debauchery. The affair didn’t last, perhaps because she was too wild and randy for even Chaplin, or perhaps he proved too much of a tightwad. In fact, this time around it was Peggy who offered up the valuable currency. He was fascinated by her colorful stories – how she had been the mistress of a rich Parisian publisher, and how a young man had killed himself for love of her. He listened and stored up the stories – and Peggy and her love life were transformed into the character of Marie St Clair, in Chaplin’s film A Woman of Paris.

Born Marguerite Upton in Berkley, Virginia, she was known as “Peggy”, a traditional nickname for Margaret or Marguerite. “Hopkins” and “Joyce” were the surnames of her second and third husbands, respectively, was married six times and claimed to be engaged around fifty times.

Joyce owned a precious gemstone known as the Portuguese Diamond, one of the most expensive in the world, which she sold to Harry Winston. It is displayed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The diamond owes its name to a legend that claimed the diamond was found in Brazil in the mid-18th century and became part of the Portuguese Crown Jewels. There is no documentation, however, that substantiates a Brazilian origin or connection to the Portuguese royalty, nor is it clear where or from whom this story originated.

The actual story of this mysterious gemstone is that in February 1928, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a glamour girl and Ziegfeld Follies starlet, and paramour of the very-married father of four, auto titan Walter Chrysler, received from him the 127-carat Portuguese diamond. The precious gemstone was purchased from Black, Starr & Frost for 373,000 dollars and was mounted on a diamond-studded platinum choker. The jewelry firm indicated that the diamond was found at the Premier Mine, Kimberley, South Africa, in 1910, and that Black, Starr & Frost obtained it shortly after its discovery as a cushion-cut stone weighing almost 150 carats. The diamond was later fashioned into its present shape, known as an Asscher cut, at 127.01 carats. In the late 1940s, the diamond was exhibited throughout the U.S., apparently for sale, and was touted as the “World’s Largest Emerald-Cut Diamond.” It finally sold in 1951, when Harry Winston acquired the Portuguese Diamond from Peggy Hopkins Joyce. For the next several years it traveled around the U.S. as part of Winston’s “Court of Jewels” exhibit. In 1963, the Smithsonian acquired the diamond from Mr. Winston in exchange for 3,800 carats of small diamonds. The magnificent Portuguese Diamond is on display in the Gem Gallery at the National Museum of Natural History.

References

• Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
• Southeby’s – Miss Peggy Hopkins by Raymond Perry Rodgers Neilson (The Jeweler’s Eye: The Personal Collection of Fred Leighton)
• The Untold Story of the Duchess of Windsor, the Woman Who Changed the Monarchy by Andrew Morton.
• Filming A Woman of Paris
• Virginia Living