In 1932, a jeweler named Sol Laykin opened for business in Los Angeles. He could not have known that the city he was setting up in was about to become the most glamorous place on earth — or that his jewels would be part of the reason why.
Sol Laykin was not a man who wasted words. He was, in the truest sense of the term, a merchant — someone who understood that the relationship between a jeweler and a client was built on trust, knowledge, and the quiet confidence of knowing exactly what you were doing. He had established his first California presence through a series of hotel salons: the La Quinta Hotel in the desert, the Santa Barbara Biltmore on the coast, the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. Wherever California's most discerning visitors gathered, Sol Laykin was there.
The company was called the Laykin Diamond Company. A perfectly respectable name — functional, clear, to the point. It was, however, not destined to last.
"Darling Sol, this name of yours — Laykin Diamond Company — has no ring to it."
— Gloria Swanson, La Quinta Hotel, circa 1932
The greatest star of the silent era had a way of making herself heard. Gloria Swanson — who had worn every crown Hollywood had to offer and invented several more besides — was a client at the La Quinta salon when she turned to Sol with the particular authority of a woman who had never once doubted her own taste.
Sol, who had not built a jewelry business across multiple California salons by arguing with his best clients, considered this for a moment. Then he said, with the equanimity of a born merchant:
"Gloria, you can name it anything you like — if you're buying."
She was buying. And so, with the confidence of a woman who had just returned from Paris and understood that the French do everything better, she announced: Laykin et Cie. Sol agreed immediately. It was only later that evening, at dinner, that he thought to ask what et Cie actually meant.
"Of course, my darling — et compagnie. And company, in French. All the best houses in Paris are calling themselves this now."
The name stuck. As names chosen by Gloria Swanson tend to do.
The La Quinta Hotel, California · circa 1938 — where Gloria Swanson gave Laykin et Cie its name. The automobile is a Plymouth, circa 1938–39.
In 1935, Laykin et Cie opened its Hollywood salon at 8657 Sunset Boulevard — and the relationship between the house and the golden era of American cinema was sealed. The street outside gleamed with Duesenbergs and Packards. Inside, the jewels gleamed with something more lasting.
The stars came. Lana Turner became a loyal client — she would later wear Laykin et Cie diamond drop earrings and a diamond brooch on screen in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), opposite Kirk Douglas, in a film that would win five Academy Awards. That same year, Sol's atelier created a two-row diamond bangle bracelet for her — a piece that would later become known as the Doris Day bracelet, after Day wore not one but two of them stacked on her wrist in Pillow Talk (1959) with Rock Hudson.
Two of Hollywood's greatest stars. One bracelet, worn twice as well. That is the kind of provenance that cannot be manufactured.
The jewels that graced the golden era of American cinema did not come from a catalog. They came from a conversation — with a jeweler on Sunset Boulevard who knew exactly what he was doing.
The clients who followed were no less remarkable. When Soong Mei-ling — Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the leader of Nationalist China and one of the celebrated Soong sisters — visited the United States in February 1943 to address a joint session of Congress, she became the second woman in history to do so. Her tour of America did not end in Washington. She came west.
In Los Angeles, Madame Chiang's visit became an event of the first magnitude. She addressed a special gathering at the Hollywood Bowl — an occasion with which Laykin et Cie was associated, as the house had long been a committed supporter of the musical arts in Los Angeles. She stayed at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard for nearly two weeks, receiving a continuous stream of visitors, dignitaries, and gifts befitting her extraordinary stature. Parades were held in her honor. The city came to attention.
Just down the street from the Ambassador, at 3240 Wilshire Boulevard, stood the Laykin et Cie salon in the I. Magnin building — a gorgeous, opulent structure clad in marble, completed in February 1939 and considered one of the finest retail buildings in the United States. It was almost certainly here, in this setting of California grandeur, that Sol Laykin and Madame Chiang Kai-shek first met. The ring he designed for her — built upon the form of the traditional Chinese wedding ring, surrounded by twenty point diamonds and set with imperial jade — remains in production at the Laykin et Cie atelier to this day.
Sol Laykin believed that Los Angeles deserved the finest things — and he was willing to help make that happen.
That belief extended well beyond the jewelry salon. Laykin et Cie had long been a committed supporter of the musical arts in Los Angeles, including the Hollywood Bowl. And when Dorothy Buffum Chandler launched her landmark campaign in April 1955 with the celebrated El Dorado Party — the fundraising event that would eventually ignite nearly $20 million in private donations toward a permanent home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic — Laykin et Cie was among the original sponsors. Sol Laykin worked closely with Mrs. Chandler in those early years, and the house remained a steadfast supporter of the effort through the years that followed, culminating in the opening of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in December 1964.
It was, for Laykin et Cie, entirely consistent with who they had always been. A jeweler to the stars, yes — but also a citizen of Los Angeles, invested in the city's culture, its institutions, and its ambitions.
Laykin et Cie remains, as it has always been, a Los Angeles institution. Its relationship to California — to the people, the culture, and the life of this state — has deepened with every decade.
Some things, it turns out, are simply meant to last.