A 75-Carat Jubilee for an L.A. Museum

The Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History is poised to celebrate, naturally, its own 75-year history next weekend.

Timed to coincide with the Folk Art Festival in Exposition Park, the one-day, free, alfresco birthday party will feature all the fare of such fun--marionette shows, a little too much food, large treasure hunts, miniature train rides and demonstrations of the bijouterie (jewelry), scrimshaw (ivory carving), pinata and origami (paper flowers or animals) crafts.

More appropriately for a diamond jubilee, a diamond cutter will demonstrate the million-dollar facets, as it were, of his prized and frightfully expensive trade.

Actually, Jeff Davis, a cutter with Interdiam Corp. of Los Angeles, doesn’t really cut diamonds. Like the crystal workers of Edinburgh and Waterford, he spends most of his time grinding and polishing a person’s best friend.

“Diamond cutting is really just a term to describe the general trade,” said Davis, 38, born in South Africa close to where the most famous and largest diamond ever, the Cullinan (3,106 carats of it), was mined. “Actually, we work on sawing or bruting (turning) the diamond to make it round before starting the polishing process.”

Does that mean hammers and chisels and deep prayers before whacking the priceless exist only in our ignorance?

“Not quite,” Davis corrected. “It’s called cleaving where we slice a groove into a larger diamond, put a steel cutting blade into the groove and then tap it with a mallet.

“That will split the diamond along its grain, just like a piece of wood. But we seldom do it here.”

“Here” is the cutting room of Interdiam on the penthouse level of the International Jewelry Center on South Hill Street. The corridors are hushed and carpeted. Some interoffice doors are guarded by combinations. The public does not shop here. Agents for Arabian royalty do.

Jacques Mouw is president of Interdiam and his dad heads the Amsterdam office, while a brother manages company affairs in Johannesburg--and theirs is a fifth-generation business. Mouw will say their diamonds are shipped to the Far East and Europe. He won’t say to whom.

Cutter Davis--like the master carpenters of Rolls-Royce or the tailors of Savile Row--is quite removed from the opulence of what he does. He cannot afford to own the best of his own work. He certainly doesn’t know any of the people who buy the diamonds he cuts.

“But once in a while I see pictures in magazines and recognize the jewelry,” he said.

Davis’ appearance at the museum’s birthday party will be all in his day’s work. He will be polishing on a portable turntable with industrial diamond dust (held by any greasy medium from castor oil to Vick’s Vaporub) as the abrasive. The diamonds will be whatever are on his current work sheet.

“Maybe even this one,” he said. He bounced a twinkling chunk on his palm. It was yellow and 9 carats and the size of a pajama button. “This is a round brilliant, and we are going to rub (polish) it into a 7-carat radiant (square) cut.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with the original. It simply has to be cut down to match others in a yellow diamond necklace under construction. When one is paying $1 million for a necklace, it seems, one is allowed to get picky.

Davis--survivor of a five-year apprenticeship that paid $15 a week--has cut everything from a 40-carat rough diamond on down, and polished everything from a five-point pinhead on up.

In 16 years, he has yet to cleave across the grain and smash one diamond.

Interdiam hasn’t been quite so lucky.

“The biggest one we smashed was worth about $50,000,” Mouw confessed. “And you can’t insure diamonds during the cutting process.”

Then what can you do?

“You can go home and pour yourself a double Scotch,” Mouw said.

“Or have a heart attack,” Davis added.

Or take it out of the cutter’s paycheck.

Folk Art Festival and 75th birthday of Natural History Museum, 900 Exposition Blvd., Exposition Park. June 12, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Information: (213) 744-3466.