Making jewelry has been a part of Katherine Wallach's creative life since, at the age of 6, she put a blanket down in front of the Ladies Village Improvement Society building in East Hampton and offered her beaded wares for sale.
At about the same age she visited a bead company in Manhattan owned by a relative. "There were shelves and shelves of these brown paper packages" in his basement, she recalled. "I was ripping them open and beads were pouring out." They gave her a bucket, which she filled.
Growing up in Manhattan, Ms. Wallach knew she would one day do something creative. "I wanted to be a tap dancer. I wanted to be a Rockette. At one point I wanted to be an equestrienne." During summers in East Hampton, she would hang around Stony Hill Stables, "pulling ticks off dogs for free lessons."
After two and a half years at Sarah Lawrence College, she had one year's worth of credits, "because of all the flea-marketing, food-shopping, flower-picking, and tap-dancing -- not studying."
In 1978, Ms. Wallach left college to appear on Broadway in "The Diary of Anne Frank." The production was a family affair, starring her father, Eli Wallach, as Otto Frank; her mother, Anne Jackson, as Mrs. Frank, her sister, Roberta, as Anne, and she herself as Margot Frank, Anne's older sister. The Wallach family has appeared on stage together many times since, though without her brother, Peter, who is an artist and filmmaker.
Since "Diary," Ms. Wallach has moved back and forth between acting and jewelry designing. In Los Angeles in the 1980s, she was stringing Indian beads and making necklaces when "someone insulted my jewelry and said, 'You only put things together, you assemble, you don't really make anything.' "
Wounded, she decamped for Venice to learn bead-making from scratch, and, while she was at it, glass-blowing. Not long after, on a trip to Australia, she studied goldsmithing.
In May, Ms. Wallach opened Shoplift, a showcase for her jewelry on Main Street in Amagansett. Ninety percent of her pieces are one-of-a-kind. Ms. Wallach designs everything herself, but now trusts her artisans to make the various components. "For example, all my cameos are made in a little town outside of Naples. They go back for generations carving these cameos," usually from agate, onyx, or shell.
Her obsession with cameos began at Pompeii, when a vendor with a stall near the ruins asked if she wanted to see a special one. It turned out to be a donkey in a state of arousal. "I was so regretful that I didn't buy it, that the first cameo I ever made" (which is in a case at Shoplift) "is a cherub riding a big phallus."
The "naughty/sexy" aspect of some of her pieces reflects a determination to "take the piss out of taboo and superstition." (Born on July 13, Ms. Wallach wears jewelry covered in that number -- "reverse bad luck," she said.) Cameo is "such an old art form, with almost boring subject matter," she explained. "I want to make it into something more contemporary."
Her line of "interview" necklaces began in the 1980s in L.A. After asking clients a series of personal questions, "I search over a couple of months for charms and talismans that represent what I found out." She incorporates some object of the client's in these creations. "I've had people give me things like their child's dried umbilical cord, or a horse's tooth." If the client agrees, she gets back to them after a year or two, asks if anything's changed since they last talked, and sends new charms that reflect the changes.
Another series arose from her discovery at New York flea markets of vintage rosaries, "which I then tricked out, some thematically, with unusual charms, repurposed single earrings, and hardware store finds."
She was in Barney's one day, wearing a vintage rosary she'd discovered in a New York flea market and embellished with unusual charms, single earrings, and hardware store finds, when the store's main buyer asked where she'd got it.
"I said, 'I made it.'
'No, you didn't.'
'Yes, I did.' "
The buyer asked to see her line, and after visiting "every flea market in the city," she produced a galaxy of necklaces. That was the first order she had from Barney's.
In the 1990s, Ms. Wallach met the British designer Paul Smith, and they began a long-term friendship. Her jewelry can be found in his stores in New York and Los Angeles, as well as at JW Cooper (Bal Harbour, Fla.), Spruce Design Decor (Rhinebeck, N.Y.), Lazy Point Variety (Amagansett), Bomba (Rome), Oro incenso Mirra (Milan), and The Stronghold (Venice, Calif.). She has an online presence as well.
Some years ago, Ms. Wallach bought 15 acres in Maremma, on the Tyrrhenian side of Tuscany. With 400 grape vines and 190 olive trees, the property makes wine and olive oil, but not commercially. "The grape vines are 90 years old." she said, "I didn't want to kill them." She is trying to get a European passport, to allow her to pursue acting on the continent and eventually to sell her jewelry.
Along with numerous film and television credits, she acted in three films directed by Martin Scorsese: "The King of Comedy," "Gangs of New York," and "Goodfellas." She is on the board of the Actors Studio in New York, where she still studies -- "I'm finally old enough to play Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?', so I'm working on that at the studio" -- and has plans to run a sensory acting workshop with a friend at La MaMa in Umbria in the fall. And, she's written a screenplay for a film set in Italy that she hopes to shoot next year.
"At a certain point in your career, you're not getting enough roles, so I figured I'd write the best role ever for myself."
Ms. Wallach now divides her time between Italy, New York, and rural Pennsylvania, where her husband of four years, Craig Deutermann, owns a dental laboratory. "He has a case in the shop of jewelry made out of teeth. He's another one who has to express himself!" Big surprise: They met at a flea market.
Her new Amagansett shop is furnished with an unpredictable variety of vintage display cases, furniture, artwork, flower arrangements, and various eccentric objects (a huge toothbrush, an outsized colander, a blue guitar.) One room is filled with racks of vintage clothing and other flea market discoveries. She will put out fall merchandise in August, she said, "and Christmas, I go out of my mind." Shoplift will be open year-round.
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