Ward Landrigan, an entrepreneur who revived Verdura, a storied jewelry brand founded by an Italian noble that catered to social lions and society queens, and who once delivered two diamonds as big as the Ritz to Hollywood’s first couple, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, died on Nov. 9 in Manhattan. He was 84.
He death, in a hospital, was from complications of pancreatic cancer, his son, Nico, said.
Mr. Landrigan made his mark in the 1960s with Sotheby’s, as head of its United States jewelry division. But he was best known for returning Verdura to glory.
In its prewar heyday, the company, founded in New York in 1939 by the master Italian jeweler and Sicilian aristocrat Fulco Santostefano della Cerda, the Duke of Verdura, was what The New York Times called “America’s crown jeweler.”
Originally funded by Cole Porter and the businessman and philanthropist Vincent Astor, the company had collaborated with Salvador Dalí on jewelry designs and accessorized Coco Chanel with its signature white-enamel cuff bracelets emblazoned with jewel-encrusted Maltese Crosses. Babe Paley, the style avatar and socialite, wore Verdura, as did the fashion luminary Diana Vreeland.
With his blue-collar background, Mr. Landrigan was no aristocrat, but in 1984 he had the resources to buy Verdura, which had been under new management since the duke’s retirement in 1973. At that point, the company was “serving a lot of ‘the real old-money of New York’ and basically the rest of America,” Mr. Landrigan said in a 2014 interview with Fajo, an online Canadian lifestyle magazine. “But it was a small clientele, and my goal was to open it up.”
Over the next four decades, he did just that. Mr. Landrigan forged his own relationships in the duke’s old circle, which included social doyennes like Betsy Whitney and Brooke Astor, while courting a new generation of style-setters and earning favorable coverage from top fashion magazines. Under him — and eventually his son, Nico, the current president — Verdura’s revenues soared from about $1 million a year to more than $20 million.
Verdura continued to roll out designs from the thousands of watercolor sketches that the duke, a talented artist, had left behind, while continuing to make signature pieces like the Lion’s Paw brooch, a cascade of diamonds and sapphires adorning a radiantly colored scallop shell.
The company’s notable clients have included Brooke Shields, Sofia Coppola and the fashion designer Carolina Herrera.
In 1999, Mr. Landrigan also purchased the venerable but dormant Parisian jewelry house Belperron, with its more than 9,000 designs by the founder, Suzanne Belperron, whose “effect was nearly that of Coco Chanel in fashion,” the Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn wrote.
A natural raconteur, Mr. Landrigan often told the story of his trip to London in 1968 to deliver a particularly enormous rock to Mr. Burton and Ms. Taylor, one of Hollywood’s most famous acting couples.
It was the Krupp diamond — a 33.19-carat Asscher cut diamond affixed to a ring once owned by the actress Vera Krupp, the wife of the German industrial baron Alfried Krupp. Mr. Burton had bought the ring for Ms. Taylor, paying a record $307,000 for it (more than $2.8 million in today’s dollars) at a Sotheby’s auction. Mr. Landrigan had been the auctioneer.
Because of the diamond’s value, Mr. Landrigan flew to London to hand-deliver the ring to the couple at the Dorchester hotel. The so-called Battling Burtons, whose fiery relationship was marked by a mutual appetite for alcohol in large quantities, searing fights and lavish gifts, were still on their first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1974. (They wed once again, in October 1975, but the sequel lasted less than a year.)
Mr. Burton answered the door in a white terry-cloth bathrobe and called out to his wife, who was in a bathrobe as well. Even without makeup, she looked “regal in appearance,” Mr. Landrigan said in a 1969 interview with The Houston Chronicle.
But she was also self-effacing. When she slipped on the ring, he recalled, she held up her hand proudly and said, “Look at my short, fat little fingers now!”
Edward John Landrigan III was born on Aug. 7, 1941, in Newark, the elder of two children of Edward Jr., an oil refinery technician, and Patricia (Fream) Landrigan, a nurse.
Young Ward’s first encounter with the jewelry business came, oddly enough, through the Boy Scouts. Pursuing a merit badge that required him to learn firsthand how a business works, he got a summer job at a local jewelry shop. When he was not sweeping floors, he learned his rubies from his sapphires.
After graduating from Jonathan Dayton High School in Springfield, N.J., in 1959, he enrolled at Drew University and received a bachelor’s degree in art history in 1963. He later added a master’s in the subject from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
Hoping to secure a job at an auction house, Mr. Landrigan went to work as a typist for Parke-Bernet Galleries, a leading American auction house, which Sotheby’s bought in 1964. When the head of the jewelry department died, Mr. Landrigan volunteered his services and joined the department. Deepening his expertise by studying at the Gemological Institute of America, he assumed leadership of the department at 24.
During his tenure there, Mr. Landrigan had another encounter with Mr. Burton and Ms. Taylor, in overseeing the auction of a necklace featuring what would become known as the Taylor-Burton diamond. The sale took a lot of effort by Mr. Burton, who had set a maximum bid of $1 million (more than $8.8 million in today’s dollars), only to be outbid by $50,000 by the jewelry house Cartier.
“I turned into a raving maniac,” Mr. Burton wrote in his diaries, which were published in 2013. Although Ms. Taylor assured him that there was “more in life than baubles,” he added, “I was going to get that diamond if it cost me my life or $2 million, whichever was the greater.”
Mr. Landrigan intervened, persuading Robert Kenmore, whose Kenton Corporation owned Cartier, to sell Mr. Burton the diamond for $200,000 more. Mr. Kenmore did, on the condition that he could display it at Cartier stores in New York and Chicago — a $1 million publicity barrage,” as Mr. Kenmore termed it, that drew thousands of visitors and landed the diamond, originally set in a ring, an appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
In 1970, Ms. Taylor wore the diamond in a necklace when she presented the best picture award to “Midnight Cowboy” at the Academy Awards ceremony.
Mr. Landrigan left Sotheby’s in 1973 to set out on his own as a jewelry dealer. When he heard that the Duke of Verdura was retiring, he began a pursuit of the company that would last a decade.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Judith Landrigan; a daughter, India Bayley; five grandchildren; and his sister, Chrys Landrigan.
The story of the Krupp diamond did not end at the Dorchester. As Mr. Landrigan recalled in a 2022 interview with The Times of London, Ms. Taylor wore the ring to a party in London, where Princess Margaret noticed it and said, “My dear, that ring is positively vulgar.”
A few drinks later, the princess approached her again and asked if she could try it on. “Of course,” Ms. Taylor responded. “Not quite so vulgar now, is it?”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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