Open-and-Shut Cases : Why Does June Berliner Collect Powder Compacts? Well, It All Started With the King of Nepal

June Berliner of Los Angeles has a collection of more than 1,000 powder compacts. The earliest is a brass one of 1910 by the Cleopatra Vanity Box Co., embossed with a woman’s head in art nouveau style. The latest was designed by Salvador Dali in the form of a dove in 1950. In between are hundreds of enameled Art Deco examples: compacts in the form of military hats, hands, hot-air balloons; compacts with musical boxes; compacts that do everything short of powdering your nose for you. The compacts are displayed in illuminated cabinets. The plastic shelves revolve at the push of a button, and the compacts glide past like decorative candies on a conveyor belt.

I asked Berliner why she started collecting compacts. Her answer began: “I used to mountain-climb in the Himalayas--the Mt. Everest area--and I became enamored of the Sherpas.” I wondered what that could possibly have to do with those refined little boxes for cosmetics, and I remained mystified for some while as Berliner unfolded her exotic story.

In 1978, she and some friends took medical supplies, a doctor and warm clothing to the Sherpas at Thami in Nepal, about eight miles from the Tibetan border. They also built the Sherpas a volleyball court. King Birendra of Nepal was delighted with her initiative and gave her a Lhasa apso dog. She left it in Katmandu, Nepal, for a time while she visited Darjeeling, India. There a lama, hearing her story, gave her a Tibetan terrier.

When she and the terrier returned to Katmandu, they were met at the airport by a young Nepalese called Deepak Chhettri. He said: “Oh! You and small dog have big fleas.”

Having de-fleaed herself and the terrier, Berliner went to the palace to call for the royal dog, the Lhasa apso. “They wouldn’t let the terrier in because he was a common dog. He had to wait out in the car. I went into a beautiful marble hall to receive the Lhasa apso, who had his own amah (nurse).” The king sent Deepak Chhettri to accompany Berliner home with the dogs. When she arrived in Los Angeles with them, her husband was not wildly enthusiastic. Throughout the next year, he made Berliner practice saying “No, thank you.” He would say to her: “Please accept a royal dog.” And she would have to repeat, “No, thank you.” And when she again went to Nepal the next year, that’s exactly what happened. The king offered her another royal dog. Berliner said, “No, thank you.” So, instead, the king made her a present of two old, silver, Nepalese powder compacts. And that, best-beloved, is how June Berliner’s collection began.

“The Nepalese boxes were just so fascinating,” she says. “And I had the contents of one analyzed. I asked my doctor to let me go to a lab and have it analyzed because I thought, ‘This smell is like nothing I’ve ever smelled before.’ I found that it had a great deal of mercury in it; it could have killed more people than it beautified. So the whole history of cosmetics started to interest me, and I began reading about why people would put mercury on their faces.”

On her travels, Berliner bought more compacts. Her husband said: “Oh, compacts, that’s what I used to give girls in my high school days. That’s what you gave as a gift; they were inexpensive, they weren’t too personal and you could have them engraved if you wanted.”

June Berliner’s mother died two years ago. When June went back to her mother’s house in New York and began cleaning out the drawers, she found all her own old compacts.

“They were engraved from different boys in high school,” she says. “I remembered then--I had forgotten--when I was getting married, my mother said, ‘You can’t take things with other men’s names on them, now that you’re a married woman.’

“I said, ‘Well, you take them all’--and she kept them all those years.”

“Lucky you weren’t tattooed,” I suggested.

Berliner decided to amass as comprehensive a collection of compacts as she could. At first she made a lot of mistakes. She bought very ordinary compacts of the 1940s, with cracked mirrors or ill-fitting lids. When she removed the shops’ labels, she often found that the stickers had caused irreparable damage to the surface. She bought at antique stores, Art Deco stores and flea markets. Then she started putting advertisements in such magazines as The Antique Trader Weekly. She found that prices for the same compact could vary from $15 to $150. She also noticed that “the first time I dealt with people, they were fairly reasonable; the second time, the price went up; the third time, greed entered the picture, and by the fourth time, I decided that I wasn’t ever going to buy from that person again.”

Berliner divides her compacts into several categories. First, there are the very fine examples made of gold and decorated with precious stones, by such companies as Cartier and Tiffany. Berliner does not have many of those, but she saves the descriptions and photographs of them that appear in Sotheby’s and Christie’s catalogues. “I do have one Tiffany from the early 1930s,” she says, “and they’re still making the exact compact. The only difference is in the wear.”

Next down the scale come compacts of fine enamel on sterling silver. “You should always have the enamel in perfect condition,” Berliner advises, “because enamel cannot be repaired properly; you can always tell an enamel repair.” Austria and England made fine compacts in this category. “And I have found some wonderful ones in the Orient. Many were made in the 1940s for servicemen to bring home. One of them was sold in Singapore just before the Japanese invasion.”

Compacts that have belonged to the famous are highly desirable. Occasionally, stars’ compacts surface in Art Deco stores. And Berliner was interested to read in Rosalynn Carter’s book, “Lady from Plains” (1984), that Jimmy Carter gave her, for the Christmas before they became engaged, a compact engraved “ILYTG”--an old Carter family endearment, meaning “I love you the goodest.” Berliner would dearly like to lay her hands on that one, but there isn’t much chance. Compacts have great sentimental value.

Nevertheless, brute economics sometimes force people to sell. One woman who read a Berliner advertisement in the press sold her mother’s compact to Berliner. It was a tortoise-shell compact with a silver elephant on the front. The woman told Berliner: “My mother lived in England. In the late 1920s, she was asked to fly to Malaya to give a lecture to the English ladies’ garden club. They gave her the compact as a thank-you present.”

An 87-year-old woman wrote to offer a compact that her husband had given her. She still had the sales slip for it and had never used the compact, “but she used to go to her drawer all the time,” Berliner says, “and look at it with great affection. She said she wanted it to go to a collector who cared; and that if I couldn’t afford to buy it from her, she would give it to me. It’s a lovely compact, and I bought it from her.”

Whenever Berliner buys a compact by mail, she always writes to ask: “Do you know the story of this? Where did you buy it? Please tell me about it.” And each compact has a card in Berliner’s index. Berliner is the kind of collector I approve of. She is not content just to amass pretty things, but she also hunts down the original catalogues in which they appeared. She has done some formidable research, which eventually may result in a book.

Another important category is that of commemorative compacts. Some were bought originally at the Chicago World’s Fair, 1933, or the New York World’s Fair, 1939. Others celebrate the Silver Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary, 1910-35, and the accession of King Edward VIII, who abdicated and became the Duke of Windsor. And many are souvenirs of places--the old Steel Pier in Atlantic City, N.J.; the S. S. Grand View Point Hotel in Pennsylvania, which was in the form of a ship and indeed had a grand view (“See three states and seven counties!”); or McCulloch’s Leap, Wheeling, W. Va., over which the eponymous hero leaped on his horse to escape the Indians--and survived.

Most of the best compacts were made in the high Art Deco period, the ‘20s and ‘30s, and all the familiar Deco motifs appear--sun ray, fountain and ziggurat--and sphinxes and hieroglyphics after the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 made Egyptiana fashionable. June Berliner is fond of a group of compacts known as “tango chains,” which are attached to a ring and chain. “In the ‘20s and ‘30s,” she explains, “women did not have to carry pocketbooks, car keys, checkbooks, credit cards--I mean, pick up a woman’s pocketbook now; it weighs a ton. So think of the days when all a woman had to carry was a compact.”

I wonder what a compact collector should be called. Compactologist? Berliner’s one regret in gathering her collection is that she has never come across another compact collector, though she has heard that Barbra Streisand has a number of beautiful Art Deco examples, and that Streisand is an expert haggler with the dealers. If enough compactologists can be winkled out, Berliner would like to start a compact collectors’ club. If you are a budding or confirmed compactologist and would like to join her, you can write to her: June Suite 1050, 270 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills 90210.