My dad made the biggest jewelled egg in the world. The obsession would destroy his marriage, family and fortune | Autobiography and memoir

BBC Television Centre, 2 May 1990. “Who would spend £7m on an egg?” The question echoes around the TV studio. At home, six million people watch as chatshow host Terry Wogan smiles knowingly, his brown eyes twinkling. “Seven million pounds,” he repeats in his Irish brogue.

“And you can’t even eat it.”

The audience laugh. A heckler shouts that he’d offer a fiver for it. The band strike up. At the back of the studio, two burly bodyguards stand silhouetted. The egg’s diamond-studded shell sparkles under the bright lights.

“It was no silly goose that laid this, the world’s biggest golden egg.” Wogan gestures towards the giant jewelled object, his voice infused with pantomime-style levels of excitement. “And let’s welcome the man who made it,” he says smoothly. “Paul Kutchinsky.”

My father saunters out, beaming from ear to ear. His shiny new loafers glide across the studio floor and he stretches his arm out towards Terry Wogan to steady himself. With his unruly mane, slender build and gold-rimmed glasses, he looks a bit like a mad professor.

The camera zooms in on the egg atop its golden pedestal. At 2ft tall, it’s the size of a small child. Its surface shimmers with thousands of pink diamonds, casting shadows across the studio floor. Its heavy gold shell is open to reveal the first of its surprises: a glittering miniature library topped by a tiny diamond clock.

For Paul, the past few days have been a whirlwind and the enormity of what’s happening is only just sinking in. His lifelong ambition is being realised – but somehow, alongside the elation, he feels piercing darts of dread.

The egg is everywhere. On display in a museum. Splashed across the pages of national newspapers. Starring on breakfast TV. The press are comparing Paul to the legendary Carl Fabergé, whose ornate jewelled eggs won him the patronage of Russia’s last tsars in the late 19th century. Just that morning, a letter had arrived from Guinness World Records confirming Kutchinsky’s was the world’s largest jewelled egg.

The cameras are rolling and Wogan is standing over the egg, fiddling with its controls. “How do I turn this thing on?” My father leaps up, flicks a switch and smiles proudly as the egg spins seductively, its jewelled library replaced by a portrait gallery filled with exquisite blue enamel frames, ringed with ribbons of diamonds.

“Look at that,” Wogan marvels – the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice – “going round in all its sparkling glory.”

When I was growing up, my mother used to refer to the egg as “your father’s ego”, while to the rest of the world it was known as the Argyle Library Egg by Kutchinsky. I felt a mix of pride and bafflement towards my father’s creation. I was thrilled to take its Guinness World Records certificate to school to show my friends, but I didn’t understand why anyone would want an egg that big which wasn’t made out of chocolate.

But after the egg, life was never the same. It came to bear responsibility for the loss of our century-old business, the implosion of my parents’ marriage and Dad’s untimely death. After the family firm was sold, the egg was seized by creditors and locked away. It vanished but its shadow lingered. Mum raged against it as if it were human. A Maleficent-like villain that stole her livelihood and husband, and robbed her children of a father. I was meant to hate it, too. But I couldn’t. Just like I couldn’t hate Dad when he left. Instead, the idea that this shrine to his eccentric, audacious ambition was out there somewhere gnawed away at me.

In the hunt for the egg, I would spend money I didn’t have on private detectives, consult countless experts and fire off emotional emails to jewellers and diamond firms around the world. I would go through periods of presuming it lost for ever and grieving that my dad’s story would never be told. But something inside me wouldn’t give up.

I needed to find this mysterious, destructive object, one of the most valuable artworks made in Britain in the 20th century, and to understand what it was that drove my father to risk everything – his livelihood, marriage and family – to make it.

Paul enjoyed creating things. He was a dreamer who had the hustle of a top salesman but lacked the killer instinct. As he grew up and went into the family jewellery business, Carl Fabergé was never far from his thoughts. He felt a magnetic pull towards the Russian master and, like someone in the throes of a romantic obsession, he wanted to inhabit the object of his desire. His vision for the House of Kutchinsky was based on a grand plan to make jewelled artworks in the Fabergé mould for the oil-rich Middle East market.

But moving away from traditional jewellery was a risk. One-off pieces had the potential to bring in vast sums but took months and large amounts of expensive materials to create. “There was big money to be made but you could lose your shirt on it,” a craftsman told me. While Paul craved the creative challenge of transforming everyday objects into works of art, his father, Jo, was reluctant to give his blessing. Tempers frayed, and once a physical fight broke out on the shop floor. As Paul and Jo laid into each other, suit-clad limbs flailing, the staff looked on in horror. Eventually the doorman separated them, but more than egos were bruised that day.

Dad first told me of his plan to build the world’s largest jewelled egg while perched in the cab of a small digger. I was nine, and a chunk of our garden was being ripped up to make space for a tennis court. The yellow excavator had been left abandoned on the lawn and I’d persuaded Dad to lift me into its cab. Scrambling up beside me, he imagined the news headlines if we took it on an accidental rampage around the neighbourhood. “Kutchinsky and Daughter Cause Chaos in Richmond Park,” he joked, then lowered his voice conspiratorially and asked if I wanted to know a secret. “I’m going to make a giant golden egg,” he said, his eyes wide. “The biggest in the world. Bigger than Fabergé’s.”

Captivated, I fired off a volley of questions. How big would it be? How many diamonds would be in it? “It will be nearly as tall and beautiful as you, with thousands of pink diamonds,” he said. I pulled a face. I didn’t like pink; I prided myself on being a tomboy. He stuck his tongue out at me. “Grumpy Cece,” he said. “These are prettier than any you’ve ever seen, I promise.”

I must have looked sceptical because he carried on in that fake upbeat voice adults use when trying to convince you everything is fine. “Your mother thinks I’m crazy, too, but I’ve told her this will make our fortune. After the egg sells, you can have anything you want.”

“Anything? Even a puppy?”

“Even a puppy,” he promised. Just then we heard Mum calling out. Sunday lunch was ready. “Remember to keep the egg a secret,” he said. “Just for now.”

The first sketch of Kutchinsky’s egg was drawn in the run-up to Easter 1989, almost by accident. Paul had hired a young designer, Cheryl Prewitt, as part of his drive to bring more women into the business. Increasingly, she was tasked with designing everything from traditional jewellery to a set of gold figurines, studded with precious stones, depicting the characters in The Simpsons, commissioned as a gift for the Sultan of Brunei’s children.

In a rare free moment, she had just started sketching an egg with a jewelled library inside, modelled on a bookcase in her parents’ home, when Paul materialised behind her. At first, all she heard was a long-drawn-out “hhhmmmm”. Then he swiped the drawing from her sketchbook and shuffled off in his Gucci loafers, back to his office. “We’ll make that, Cheryl,” he called over his shoulder, a glint in his eye.

I picture him scrutinising her sketch in his office, riffling through his books for inspiration, making endless calculations about costs and measurements. The design went back and forth between them, growing ever more complex until it became, in Cheryl’s words, “a monster”. As Paul’s obsession with the egg deepened, so did my mother Brenda’s disquiet. Every time he drank too much wine at dinner, he would start spouting off about being the next Carl Fabergé. When he’d finished, she would roll her eyes before reminding him, in her dulcet Scottish tones, that he had a business to run and a family to provide for, before he started laying giant gold eggs.

Paul proudly kept his copy of the contract with the Argyle Diamond Mine in Western Australia. It reads: “The parties have agreed to manufacture and design a Library Egg approximately 63cm tall, comprising 17,650 grams of 18 carat gold and 700 carats (140 grams) of diamonds.”

Argyle agreed to pay Kutchinsky A$870,000 (about £444,000 in 1989) to cover half the materials and manufacturing costs, as well as supplying more than A$2m worth of predominantly pink diamonds. The sale price was set at “no less than $5 million” and the profits were to be split 60/40 in Argyle’s favour if a buyer could be found. That was the easy part, Paul assured them. He had the Midas touch where sales were concerned, especially in the Middle East. And if the Sultan of Brunei wasn’t interested, there was always Donald Trump, the American multimillionaire famed for his love of golden trinkets. For now, his focus was entirely on “making the bloody thing”.

At the start, Paul felt a kinship with the goldsmith he enlisted to help create his egg. Leo de Vroomen was talented, ambitious and felt the same urge to defy convention. For a time they were aligned. But their bond began to fracture when the egg’s supposedly state-of-the-art electronics kept failing. As costs spiralled, Paul’s irritation hardened into fury.

The rupture came when De Vroomen submitted an invoice for more than twice his original estimate and then refused to release the egg so it could be repaired. As the future of Project Egg hung by a thread, Paul took action. With the help of a friend who happened to be a policeman, he staged an audacious heist. At dawn, he slipped into De Vroomen’s workshop, concealed the egg inside a Harrods carrier bag and sped away through London’s empty streets in a Peugeot 505 police car.

The £7m was a line Dad threw out to get the media excited, Mum says. He expected to get less but was trying his luck. It’s possible Dad decided this was the best way to ensure a sale. Or maybe it was a sign of his growing desperation, as the financial pressure on the business deepened. Like a poker player down to his last chips, he had steeled himself and gone all in.

By the spring of 1990, Kutchinsky’s egg was finished. There was one last moment of panic, when Dad realised the photo frames in the portrait gallery were still empty. The plan had been to engage an art firm that specialised in hand-painted miniatures. But the expense of the motors in the bottom half of the egg’s shell – supplied by a Ministry of Defence provider on condition that Gerald Earl, Kutchinsky’s workshop manager, sign the Official Secrets Act – forced him to abandon this final grand gesture. Instead, he and David O’Connor, head of sales, cut out pictures of wig-wearing historical figures from my school textbooks and other images from glossy magazines such as Tatler to fill the gaps.

Neither of my parents were home much during the egg’s creation. If they weren’t out at charity functions, they were having dinner with clients or Dad was playing tennis, often his alibi for seeing Anna, a sales assistant for a Hatton Garden associate, with whom he was having an affair. I’d started acting up in class, to the point that my parents were called in to speak with my headteacher after I’d caused a disruption with a few friends.

“Has anything changed at home recently?” the headteacher asked in the meeting. I stared at the floor. Mum gazed angrily at Dad. Nobody mentioned the egg.

On the drive home, I sat in the back of the car and tried to block out their bickering, but fragments filtered through. Dad was repeating his promises to buy Mum a new car, take us all on a big family holiday, add a swimming pool to the house. Our lives could finally start again. After the egg.

The exhibition launch at the V&A was the first time I saw Kutchinsky’s egg. We arrived as it was being transferred into a display case in the centre of the grand room, with its red-tiled floor and walls lined with gilt-framed pictures. Gerald was there, polishing the shell and testing the electronics. The doors of the case weren’t yet locked, and with my parents engrossed in conversation with a museum official, I seized my moment. Creeping up behind Gerald, I stood on tiptoe and reached out to caress the egg’s cool, hard surface.

My sister, Katrina, crossed the room and was about to copy me when one of the security guards stepped in. I grabbed her hand and rushed out of the room, pushing through the crowd that was gathering in the foyer. I could hear Dad cursing in the distance. I knew I was in trouble, but I didn’t care. Finally, I had touched the egg.

After the exhibition, like a pop star enjoying a meteoric rise, the egg embarked on a world tour. The first stop was Tokyo, where the pink diamond market was booming. The city’s most prestigious department store, Mitsukoshi, where Kutchinsky had a small boutique, would showcase the egg, putting it on the radar of Japan’s newly minted billionaire class.

Tokyo went the same way as the egg’s previous outings, at the Basel Fair in Switzerland and a private chateau outside Hamburg: rapturous headlines, a stream of superlatives from onlookers, but no hint of a sale. The next stop was New York City, where the egg would make its US debut at Christie’s prestigious auction house. This time Brenda joined Paul. He had been distant lately, but she put it down to stress and a lack of family time together. “He was obviously having his affair then,” Mum now recalls. “I could feel he was disengaged but I just tried to brush it off.”

They flew on Concorde, sharing the supersonic flight with the former Prince Andrew and his then wife, Sarah Ferguson. As the jet steadied itself after takeoff, they toasted Paul’s success. Lurking behind them, strapped in alongside its bodyguards, the egg served as a constant reminder this wasn’t a holiday. (As it was far too precious to go in the hold, Dad’s creation had its own seat, booked under the name of Mr Egg.)

For four jam-packed days, they trailed the egg around the city, doing interviews with everyone from the New Yorker to Brides magazine and The Today Show on NBC. The climax of the trip was the “Ultimate Event” – a glittering cocktail reception at Christie’s, affording the great and good a glimpse of the “Ultimate Masterpiece”. “We did everything we could to find a buyer,” Mum said. “Short of hawking it in the street and walking up and down Broadway with a sign saying ‘Egg for sale’.”

By the final day, it was clear that, despite his love of gold bling, Manhattan local Donald Trump wasn’t going to buy the egg. Malcolm Forbes, the famous Fabergé collector, had also been on Dad’s hitlist until his sudden death earlier that year. The mood on the three-and-a-half-­hour Concorde flight back was subdued.

The summer of 1990 stands out in my memory as the point at which the threads binding our family started to unravel. We spent the start of the school holidays in Marbella, southern Spain, while Dad stayed in London. I could sense Mum felt aggrieved, left alone to look after three young children. “Bloody egg,” she would mutter under her breath when she thought we weren’t listening. At night, we feasted on pizza and ice-cream, and tried to gloss over Dad’s absence.

That was the year Saddam Hussein ruined my birthday. After I pleaded with Dad to fly out and celebrate me turning 11, he eventually succumbed. He arrived the day before, but seemed distracted and irritable. News was breaking that Iraq’s president had sent his forces to invade neighbouring Kuwait. The UN immediately condemned the invasion, and an allied coalition was formed to drive Saddam out of Kuwait.

Dad spent most of my birthday glowering on the sofa, muttering profanities. The implications for the House of Kutchinsky were clear: if war broke out, the Middle East’s heads of state would be too busy protecting their oilfields to splurge on supersized jewelled objects.

Dad took me to play tennis the next evening. Afterwards, we sat on the terrace of a nearby cafe and shared some chips. He always treated me more like an adult than a child and didn’t hold back from telling me when things were going “tits up”. “I’m worried it might be my Mona Lisa, Cece,” he said, looking pensive.

I stared at him blankly. “Whaddya mean, Dad?” I asked, slurping my Diet Coke.

The Mona Lisa, he explained, had a price tag of about $1bn – so high that no one person could ever own it. The work was now so fragile, and the cost of insuring it so high, that it was unable to leave the Louvre and could only be seen through a glass case. Lapsing into silence, he took a swig of his beer. “I’d like the egg to be in a museum one day,” he said, sounding more philosophical. “But right now, I just need someone to buy it.”

The next morning when I awoke, he was gone.

As the year drew to a close, the House of Kutchinsky teetered on the brink. A buyer for the egg still hadn’t materialised, a global recession was starting to bite and the bank was threatening not to extend its credit. Personally, Dad was still in limbo; torn between the agony of hurting Brenda and not seeing us girls, and the ecstasy of being with Anna.

The final stop on the egg’s tour was Australia. Argyle had made it the star attraction of the 1990 Melbourne Cup, of which it was a sponsor. This “$16 million thoroughbred” (as one newspaper advert described it) would be revealed to almost 300,000 racegoers. A press conference was planned to show it off to selected media and launch it in the southern hemisphere.

Paul agreed to the plan, but he was worried the egg’s notoriety was becoming problematic. The longer it went unsold, the more speculation mounted as to what the reasons for that might be, leaving him to face the stark reality that nobody loved it as much as he did. He’d had some troubling feedback recently from a US-based diamond dealer who pitched it to a wealthy Wall Street banker, only for the banker to respond, “That old egg from Oz? Don’t waste my time on that lemon.”

Falling into a jet-lagged slumber, Paul was woken one morning by the room phone’s shrill ring. Argyle’s Ron Currie was calling in a panic: the egg’s doors wouldn’t open. Trying to sound surprised, Paul dressed and rushed up to the suite where the showcase was due to take place. When he arrived, Ron had his suit jacket off and was wrestling with this giant golden egg while other Argyle executives looked on, grim-faced.

Ignoring the fact that it was almost midnight in England, Paul called Gerald. Once the workshop manager had stopped cursing about his sleep being ruined, Paul explained the problem. If the slightest misalignment occurred when the egg was slotted into its marble display cabinet, the mechanism that powered the doors would fail. For it to work, it required exact precision and for various wires to be taped together to hold it in place. “If you get desperate, tip it upside down and rattle it around,” Gerald wheezed, as he hung up. Their only hope was to say the egg had been damaged in transit from London and pray the journalists believed it.

Always a good talker, Paul survived the press conference, moving through his repertoire of egg puns and joking about suing British Airways £7m for repairs. “That wasn’t too bad,” he whispered to Ron as the press pack started filing out. His friend winced. No amount of witty banter could hide that this was a total humiliation.

He flew back to London without the egg. Argyle had it on display at a local museum. Although he was happy to have a break from handling its logistics, it was the first time he had been separated from his golden ego.

Back in London, he was confronted with a crushing financial reality. By early 1991, the House of Kutchinsky owed the bank more than £1m. Without an injection of capital, there would be no way of paying salaries, let alone dealing with their ever-growing pile of creditors. Their bank manager made it clear he wasn’t prepared to wait any longer for Paul to sell the egg.

After all the years of bad decisions, murky dealings and mud-slinging, the end, when it came, was sudden and brutal. The company was sold to a rival jeweller and Paul was forced out. Almost a hundred years of history – wiped out. I’ve always wondered why the business couldn’t be saved. Were the debts really so catastrophic and the family rifts so deep that nobody could work together to find a solution? Or did Dad secretly see the bonfire of the business’s fortunes as his release from the pressures of a life he was already untethering from?

in 2002, Kutchinsky’s unsellable egg was sold. The Japanese buyer paid ¥800m, about £4.3m at the time, most of which went to Argyle, who took possession of it after the business collapsed. My dad wasn’t here to see it happen. The accident, in 2000, had made the papers. “Jeweller killed in Spanish road crash,” said the Jewish Chronicle’s report, which made no mention of Kutchinsky’s egg. Instead, it described Dad as a manufacturing jeweller from Hatton Garden, “the third generation of the family which successfully built up the prestigious shop in Knightsbridge”. Even in death, his father’s achievements still overshadowed his.

Decades passed. Life moved on. I hid the picture of Dad cradling his egg in a drawer and tried to forget. But my unfulfilled quest still haunted me. It returned at night, unbidden. A missing part of him. Of me.

Then one morning I woke with a simple clarity: I needed to find it. And so, more than three decades after its debut at the V&A, I found myself standing in front of the egg once again – this time in a museum in Tokyo.

Lit up inside its glass display cabinet, it resembled a golden spaceship about to launch. Standing in front of it, I saw my reflection warped by the egg’s golden curve. It had become as much part of my identity as it was Dad’s. Lost in thought, I almost didn’t notice Takashi Mabuchi and his wife, Reiko, arriving. They had donated the egg to the museum after the death of Takashi’s father, Kenichi, an eccentric character and fearsome businessman with a magpie-like fascination for sparkly objects. Radiating grace and generosity, the Mabuchis swept into the room, shook my hand and put me at ease.

Ritsuro Miyawaki, the museum’s head gemologist, darted ahead and started polishing the egg with his handkerchief, like a proud parent. As he stepped back, he pressed the switch to power on the motor. I felt my heart racing. What if the mechanism failed?

As if by magic, the doors slid open and the interior rotated like a giant music box. It was faultless. I marvelled at its celestial gleam, the perfect Barbie pink of its precious stones and the magnificence of the jewelled petals that carpeted its dome. Beneath this sparkling sprawl was our name, carved on its shell for posterity.

For years, Kutchinsky’s egg had been locked away in a bonded warehouse, almost as if it had never existed. On the surface, its vanishing act had brought peace, but beneath it my family’s wounds had festered. When I started looking for it, there were bitter rows and screaming matches. I understood it was painful for them, but I was determined that confronting the past would restore the egg as a source of pride, rubbing away the tarnish that had stained our memories.

Now, as I watched the egg working just as Dad always dreamed, I felt a rush of vindication. “It’s fixed,” I sputtered. Takashi Mabuchi grinned widely and thrust a small, barrel-shaped motor into my hand. Talking rapidly, he explained that shortly after his father bought the egg, the doors again refused to open. So Takashi, an expert engineer, took a big risk. “My family had paid ¥800m for it. If I destroyed it, it was my responsibility,” he said. “That’s why I had the guts to do it. I wouldn’t have dared if it had belonged to someone else.”

Piece by piece, he had taken it apart. Replacing the motor had been easy. He’d bought a new one from a local electronics store for just ¥9,500 (about £50 in 2002). But as he placed it inside, he noticed a bigger problem. The doors were designed to rise up and slide back, meaning the top of the egg had to lift to make space, placing extra strain on the motor. Grabbing a blowtorch, Takashi had soldered the egg’s golden hinges and restructured it so the doors opened in a single motion. “The way it was designed, with the top and the bottom moving together, was extremely advanced,” he explained, politely glossing over the fact that it never worked.

Smiling back at this beaming billionaire, I felt my anxieties slip away. The egg belonged here. That those who bought it were among the few people in the world with the expertise to fix it was a perfect coincidence.

Growing up, I’d often wished Dad had never made the egg and our lives could go back to how they were before. But I see now that would have been impossible. With or without it, the House of Kutchinsky’s foundations were already shaky and my parents were pulling in different directions. In some ways the egg became a shimmering scapegoat for my family’s misfortunes.

As the sky darkened, the Mabuchis bid me a polite farewell. Grateful for their time and generosity, I hugged them, evoking amused horror on Takashi’s face. Hugging is not common in Japan, especially among older generations, my translator explained. Luckily, they took it in good spirits. As their chauffeur-driven car sped away, I could hear the echo of their laughter.