Word: porcelain
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Sometimes a collection can be awfully handy. Winston and CeeZee Guest discovered that last fall when they were temporarily strapped for cash (not that I understand how that happened to them). Anyway, they got $812,275 for their Chinese porcelains and French antiques at Parke-Bernet, instead of the mere $500,000 they had counted on. Jewels are more durable than porcelain, but they're easily heisted; Sonny and Marylou Whitney got robbed of $780,000 worth at Saratoga a year ago, and their insurance premiums must be ferocious. Coins can be better guarded, but someone recently stole Willis...
Angela Lansbury executes the thankless role of Delilah's spear-wielding sister, looking like a porcelain Valkyrie and apparently regarding with doubt her future as a blonde bombshell. Victor Mature, who plays Samson, is quite fat and quite bad, but he pulls down a wicked temple...
...Victorian parlor was complete without its whatnot crammed with porcelain curios and bric-a-brac. Potters of that day found an endless market for glossy, sentimental figures of puppies, kittens, grazing sheep and cows (sometimes used as milk pitchers). Today the ceramic gimcrack is coming back, this time destined as much for museums as for the coffee table, and in a radically different form. The current crop of gewgaws is more likely to be an eight-foot alligator, a toothbrush, or a bathroom scale with a few human toes still left in place...
...seat of Viet Nam's government and a center of its learning during the 19th century. There stood the palace complex, with its graceful red and gold buildings and pagoda roofing, its grounds of tall shade trees and frangipani, and its collections of bleu d'Hué porcelain. It was the most beautiful section of Hué still standing. It was also an eerie place to die, and its Communist defenders evidently decided to get out while they could. They left behind an unexploded shell near the fragile imperial throne, a cache of rifles and ammunition...
Last week it was finally time to pay the piper. Up for auction at Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries went 151 items of Guest's choicest Chinese and Meissen porcelain and signed French 18th century furniture. In three hours of furious bidding, collectors, in what was a resounding tribute to Guest's connoisseur taste, bid a handsome $815,275. It was enough to see the Guests safely out of the woods for the moment. But in the tradition of the rich, they could not have appeared to care less. Even before the sale began, Winston had taken...