GINO Empry, who has been doing entertainment PR in Toronto for as long as most of us care to remember, has befriended some of the biggest names in show biz. Many of them have given him gifts, primarily jewelry, for which he has a penchant. Out of - to name just a few - the heavy gold bracelet from singer Tony Bennett, the Mickey Mouse watch from Broadway star Kay Ballard, the diamond pinky ring from actress Glenda Jackson and a goldfish charm from Lena Horne (he is wearing all but the latter), he selects a pendant made from a gorgeous multi-coloured iridescent stone given to him 12 years ago by jazz great Ella Fitzgerald.

"It's korite from the family of ammolite," he says, making the jewel sound like one of the aliens in Star Trek. Gem-quality korite is found only in Alberta and is exceedingly difficult to come by. "After Ella gave it to me, I just kept it in a drawer. But that was a shame because it's so pretty, so I took it to Secrett's Jewellers and had it made into a pendant."

Now he wears the five-centimetre-long pendant often, suspended from an antique gold chain, a Christmas present from musical comedy star Bernadette Peters. "I love the way the colours (orange, red, blue, turquoise) change with the light."

According to Terry Wilson, a designer with Secrett's who knows the pendant well, the opalescent part of the stone is "the fossilized shell from a creature that was like a giant shellfish." The fine cracks in the stone surface were caused during the fossilization process, a period lasting thousands of years, "when the shell was subjected to incredible pressure.

"I'd be heartbroken if I lost it. I was heartbroken when I broke it," said Empry ruefully. He dropped the fragile stone on a concrete garage floor a few years ago and it broke into four pieces - one large and three small. He managed to retrieve all but one of the little pieces and had Secrett's redesign the pendant to incorporate them. Now the large stone is offset by the two smaller ones, all encased in thick, 18-karat gold.

The pendant is his favourite, not just for its rarity, but because it reminds him of Ella and "what a good person she is. In all the years I've had this, I've never seen another piece of korite. The insurance company won't even insure it because it is irreplaceable."