The public will never know what Ronald Winston looks like. Until he dies, that is.

For security reasons he, like his father before him, has not posed in publicity photographs. The closest the public has come to an image of him is a photo cleverly shot with his face obscured -- almost identical to one once taken of his father.

The dramatic aura associated with Winston, the famed president and CEO of Harry Winston jewelers and the son of legendary jeweler Harry Winston, seems to belong more to a spy-thriller than a story of a jewelry legacy. However, for a jewelry house that is accustomed to handling some of the world's most precious diamonds -- the Hope, the Jonker, the Briolette of India -- a touch of danger and intrigue seems inevitable.

One of the most perilous moments in the history of the house occurred in the south of France at the outbreak of World War II. Harry and his wife, Edna, found themselves with $2 million worth of jewelry and nowhere to safely store it, when Lloyd's of London canceled all insurance policies due to the war, forcing the Winstons to retrieve the gems from stores.

With nowhere safe to stash the stones, the Winstons stuffed diamonds in the heels of their shoes, cleverly pinned them into their clothes and hid others in several wiglets of Edna's hair. For two weeks they slept in their clothes and shoes waiting out air raids until finally setting sail for the U.S. where the jewels could then be put in the ship's vault.

Although security is, of course, a concern in this line of work, Winston, who was in town recently to promote the Harry Winston Millennium Diamond Collection, which includes rings with rare fancy pink and blue diamonds, says he is not particularly worried about it, nor concerned with not being able to appear in publicity photos.

"I'm especially not worried about [security] in Japan," says Winston. "And from a personal point of view, I like the business to speak for itself."

Winston is happy to let the glitzy gems steal the limelight, as they invariably do. While the jewels command center stage, he's the sort who makes a point of blending easily into a crowd: He's elegant but not ostentatious, and warm without trying to be life of the party.

He thinks nothing of grabbing a bottle of glass cleaner and wiping off the countertop under which the jewels are displayed -- hardly a ritzy image for a man accustomed to the company of maharajas, queens and celebrities.

Unlike his father, however, who had a consuming passion for the jewels that made him famous (so much so, that his wife almost didn't marry him because of it), Winston once wanted to have nothing to do with them.

"I wanted to be a scientist," he says. "I mightily resisted the torque twisting me into it at first."

Winston, who studied chemistry (he carries around science magazines with him), spent his early days atthecompany bored and frustrated that his father wouldn't give him any meaningful jobs to do.

Gradually his father relented, and when he died in New York 1978 Winston became president and CEO of the company.

Although Winston gave up a full-time career in science, he still devotes his free time to it and to inventing, and has integrated his passion into the world of Harry Winston. One of his unique inventions is a watch named Galatea, made out of rhodium, a platinum group metal. His own watch is an original, special alloy -- which Winston will not divulge -- used on space- and aircraft.

The Oscar goes to:

Harry had an uncanny ability to sniff out priceless jewels and oftentimes cut them into even more sought-after pieces. At the age of only 12 he spotted a ring with a green stone on display at a pawn shop for $25. Harry took the ring home to his father (a jeweler, no less), who discovered astonishingly that it was a two-carat emerald. They sold it for $800.

"[My father] wrote the book on jewelry, I think," says Winston. "He became one of the rare living authorities. I think I bring more of a world view [to the company]. He didn't travel the way I do. Going anywhere in the world was a big deal then."

After Winston opened the Beverly Hills salon on Rodeo Drive in 1986 he opened the first Tokyo salon in the elegant Hotel Seiyo Ginza, after persuading them to let him rent space, even though he didn't have a Japanese company backing the Tokyo store -- a feat that is still difficult to pull off today.

The most important element that Winston says he brings to the company is a flair for public relations. It was under Winston's direction that the house began actively courting celebrities for the Oscars and became the first to lend out pieces for the event -- a PR move which was to catapult the house into superstardom.

"I saw [Oscars] as a wonderful platform. . . . My father did it with Jennifer Jones in 'The Song of Bernadette.' . . . I began putting jewelry on stars and gradually it became a rage."

Now, every year after the Oscar nominations come out, magazines clamor to get the scoop on which dress and piece of jewelry the nominees will wear.

Says Winston, "I'd say Joan Rivers helped to [popularize it] a lot. Joan in her famous pre-Oscar interviews started asking, 'What's your dress? What's your jewelry?' "

Last year, Gwyneth Paltrow's Harry Winston jewels commanded almost as much attention as her Oscar for Best Actress in the film "Shakespeare in Love." (Her father bought her the $160,000 platinum-and-40-carat-diamond princess necklace after she won.)

Paltrow was also the first Harry Winston client to receive a piece of jewelry with the millennium hallmark, which is inscribed on every piece of Winston jewelry sold from October 1999 to the end of December 2000.

A girl's best friendFame is nothing new for Winston, whose father was routinely making headlines for buying the world's most famous -- and sometimes infamous -- jewels.

"When he bought [the Hope Diamond], it was the first time I realized he was famous," Winston recalls. "I was in Boca Raton, Fla. and heard on the radio that he bought it."

The legend of the diamond, which gained a reputation as a deadly jewel that brought misfortune to those who posessed it, dates back to 1642 and still continues today, even though it is locked safely away in the Harry Winston gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The museum still receives frantic letters from people begging them to rid the museum of the stone.

"My father never really believed it had bad luck," said Winston. But others around him did.

People were so afraid of the diamond that on one occasion a passenger who discovered he was on the same plane as Edna Winston quickly deplaned to avoid any possibility of misfortune by association.

Relieved, the passenger boarded another plane breathlessly confiding his "narrow escape" to the man sitting next to him. After listening to the passenger's story, the man handed the superstitious passenger a telegram he had just received from his wife, whose plane had landed safely. The wife: Edna Winston.

Last October, Winston purchased famous jewels of another kind: two pieces of costume jewelry from Marilyn Monroe's collection, which were auctioned at Christie's Oct. 27.

Winston, who bought the jewel for $67,000 (they were originally worth $20) plans to make the earrings with real diamonds and exhibit the pieces together in an homage to the woman who immortalized Harry Winston when she sang "Talk to me Harry Winston, tell me all about it," in the song "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend."

You may never see Ronald Winston, but his mark on Harry Winston is a solid one guaranteed to last lifetimes. Says Winston, the allure of Harry Winston is simple: "We make monuments."