Found Treasures.(jewelry design)

Byline: editor: Tonne Goodman

Verdura launches a line of pieces once designed for the inimitable Babe Paley. Jean Nathan gets a preview.

Even 30 years after her death, the name Babe Paley still conjures a paragon of best-dressed womanhood whose chic stemmed from an unwavering desireand abilityto make what she wore her own, whether a couture gown, an off-the-rack dress, or an emerald parure. Less known is that Barbara Cushing Mortimer Paley was also a paragon of grace and thoughtfulness with a great gift for friendship. Still, it meant quite a lot to be admitted to her inner circle.

That is where the master jeweler Fulco di Verdura found himself for the almost four decades following their first meeting, in the late 1930s. Not only were they friends and confidants but she became his muse. This month, his namesake company brings out a line of a dozen designs inspired by and made expressly for Paley, pieces never before put into wider production. Classic and easy to wearand suited to leaner timesthey include "Pebble" bracelets in a variety of stones; a rope-link watch, bracelet, and necklace; and pearl torsade bracelets and earrings.

Verdura himself was a magnet to a long line of glamorous women, from Coco Chanel to Greta Garbo to Marella Agnelli. But none had as special a place in his heart as the one he called "the beautiful darling," borrowing the pet name Paley's father had given her. When they met, she was a VOGUE fashion editor soon to be married to Stanley Grafton Mortimer, Jr., a blue-blooded heir to the Standard Oil fortune; he was an expatriate Sicilian aristocrat turned jeweler with "a heart of gold and tongue of quicksilver," according to Cecil Beaton.

When she married her second husband, CBS founder Bill Paley, Verdura became a fixture at their various homes and on their travels. In New York, the Paleys were often part of the glittering international assemblage at dinners at Verdura's Manhattan apartment, where the menu was invariably a big bowl of spaghetti with clam sauce, whipped up by the host himself.

Verdura was hardly to the stove top born. But by the time he reached his 20s, the family fortunes were on a sharp downturn. In 1923, he inherited his father's ducal title and a sum so insignificant ...