In Boston there is a gay antique dealer, Gyles Chilton and his lesbian sister Cornelia Chilton, an interior decorator. They have recently joined forces in business and opened a gallery on fashionable Newbury Street, two blocks from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. 

Gyles and Cornelia are a smart, sophisticated pair whose omnivorous social appetite leads them from the world of staid Boston Brahmins, to which they were born, to the frivolous and ironic glitterati of drag balls and demi-gendered night club performers.

At the time of this story, they have inherited a large and cumbersome town house on Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay. Amongst the dusty piles of loot in that repository of material excess comes to light a suite of unusual Egyptianesque jewelry including a cobra tiara of gem-encrusted gold. 

Cornelia wears this ensemble of jewels to complement her Nefertiti costume at the Dynasty Ball, in the opening chapter of Family Jewels. This fête is the serio–comic fund raiser for the AIDS Action Committee and is the absolute climax to the gay social season. Soon after arriving at the ball, Cornelia slips into the powder room with the exotic Tatiana Sarkisian. She ends up passed out on the floor alone and the family jewels have been stolen. Gyles, in the meantime, is being introduced to the star performer of the evening, Lilly Linda LeStrange, who defies simple explanation, but suffice it to say that she is a sizzling chanteuse and, indubitably, a Diva. In Lilly’s troop of chorines is a hoofer named Val whom Gyles meets and subsequently falls in love with. It turns out, however, that Val is a hustler who is being used by the sinister element to manipulate Gyles.

In the midst of the festivities, Cornelia is hauled out of the girls’ room limp and unconscious in the arms of the notorious and dazzling drag queen, Monique La Farge. This Pieta vignette brings all action to a halt while the entire company stares at the uncrowned Queen of the Nile. 

As the story develops, the cobra crown makes several appearances and disappearances becoming the focal point and the key to the diabolical greed of the mortician, Nagib Iskander, and his equally sinister sister, Tatiana Sarkisian. Their schemes are aided and abetted and then thwarted by Wisner Chilton, Gyles’s and Cornelia’s aged gay uncle. Wisner’s dreams of immortality are, however, drained from him in a scene of ghoulish torture. 

Great Boston families incorporate all kinds of characters. The Chilton family tree has roots that bore into the rot and compost of the human forest, as well as branches reaching into the bright heavens above.

The Family Jewels is a see-saw between the absurdly comic and the horrific which pumps the story with the energy of many unanswered problems. This leads to a climax enacted in the bowels of the earth in a crypt that absorbs the lives of all those who dare to violate the sanctuary of gloom. 

The Family Jewels is symmetrically designed, ending with a party scene of frivolous revelry at the glittering “Club Crazy” where the heroes and their lovers tie up the loose ends of the mystery. The resolution is punctuated by the performance of Lilly Linda singing her hit song, “Into Each Life a Little Glamour Must Fall.” 

Such is the stuff that dreams are made of and the spells that glamour casts.