Eugene Joseff — Joe, the Bead-Stringer (1943) 🇺🇸
You don’t know Hollywood unless you’ve heard the story of one of its most colorful personalities — jeweler Joseff
Thee attainments of Joseff [Eugene Joseff], jeweler to both off-screen and on-screen Hollywood, are proof positive that in this country a man may follow the profession of his choice regardless of handicaps if he has enough persistence and ability.
Born in Chicago, Joseff (known with local affection as Joe, the bead-stringer) says he got kicked out of every parochial school he ever attended, so his education sketched itself through a few years of high school before he became a commercial artist. He felt, however, that he was oil in the ink of art; his head was full of Cellini ideas.
When he should have been drawing pictures of a pretty girl drinking a popular beverage or smoking certain cigarette, he was sketching ideas for unique jewelry.
After his eight hours in the art foundry, Joseff took his designs down to various wholesale jewelers and asked why this or that couldn’t be manufactured. They told him that his notions were challenging, interesting, saleable — but totally unworkable. They just couldn’t be worked out in metal and stones.
Undaunted, Joseff bought books on antique jewelling and studied until dawn, night after night. He made intricate tools. He experimented with unusual materials. When he saw a piece of costume jewelry that puzzled him, he bought it, took it apart and put it together again. All this on his own time after his art chores were done for the day.
Then the depression hit, Joseff came to Hollywood and nearly starved to death before he got his first studio break — turning out a collection of Tahitian necklaces for Twentieth Century-Fox.
For a while he got only the studio work that was refused by the regular wholesale jewelers either because of the time element, or because of the difficulties of the work. Joseff always delivered, although there were times when he had to call in all his Hollywood friends and put them to work stringing beads all night.
He is 36, well over six feet tall, and a bachelor. He still works such fantastic hours that he swears he has never had time to look for a wife.
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Joseff with two movie masterpieces: The headdress worn by Virginia Bruce in The Great Ziegfeld and the tiara worn by Vivien Leigh as Lady Hamilton
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, February 1943