Brittle-Bone Disease Forces Jewelry Designer To Reorganize Her World

Laurel Burch, high-school dropout and Haight-Ashbury hippie, had a flair for design and turned it into a $20 million retail empire. But her flair for survival played an even more critical role in her storybook success.

Burch of Sausalito, Calif., the girl with the Golden Touch, has osteopetrosis, a rare disease that causes her bones to break at the drop of a hat - or a bump from a friend. "I was born with it," she said last week. "Most babies don't live beyond age 2." Burch remains upbeat despite having had 60 fractures.

On July 1, she took a serious fall and predicts it will be a year before her broken right leg, which is fortified with screws and a heavy metal bar, is healed. Because of her illness and after toughing it out for years, Burch, 50, is changing her life - and her business.

Between radiant smiles and showers of tears, Burch tells what's going on now. In what she calls the hardest decision of her life, she has dissolved Laurel Burch Inc., the wholesale corporation that sold her work to 4,000 stores. She is now selling the jewelry and other items left from more than a decade of the company.

"I spent 90 percent of my time putting out fires," says Burch, who was chief designer, CEO and international front person for the business she began 25 years ago in a San Francisco garage.

She has arranged to sell her work, instead, through a series of licensees, "where I won't have to worry about the day-to-day operations of a company."

Making the switch took most of two years - the process slowed by a year and a half of ill health. Her designs, for the most part, disappeared from the stores.

"People thought I'd died or disappeared," she says. "But I never stopped working."

Her first designs - posters, calendars, journals, note cards and other stationery items - for the Laurel Burch Paper Company emerged last summer. Collections she designed for eight other licensees are now filtering into the market and include scarves, T-shirts, tote bags, rubber stamps, three-dimensional animals, earrings, coffee mugs, cotton throws, masks and dazzling plates for the Franklin Mint series.

All have the Laurel Burch look, a mythical paradise inhabited by birds, animals, flowers.

Whether in a hospital bed or at home in a wheelchair, the radiant Burch says she is finally free to design, design, design.

Just before her leg broke this time, she finished painting a 14-foot mural and created every last niche, wall decoration, carafe and candlestick for the new Mikayla restaurant in Sausalito's Casa Madrona Hotel.

Burch also designed as a donation the new headquarters of the Oakland Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

She is now designing a tea house for the island of Saipan.

She is laying plans for a traveling art-and-performance show - using costumes she has collected from all over the world - and donating all profits to charity. "I want to leave something to each community."

Finding comfort in creating

All her life, whenever the going got rough, Burch found salvation in creating things.

Burch grew up in a broken home in Southern California. "My dad married three times, my mother twice. There were lots of mixed children. Home was very unstable and emotional, and I felt very worthless as a person - very shy, and not particularly talented, although I loved to play guitar, dance and do drawings."

She says she was born with osteopetrosis, a hereditary disease that medical professionals call "marble bones." One doctor said it is caused by an excess of calcium, which so hardens the bones that they shatter on impact.

Burch, who has had eight broken legs, says she left home at 14 - "my mom just couldn't cope with all my illnesses" - and worked for room and board taking care of six children. She attended high school, but didn't get good grades. "It was so painful to live in the body I lived in. I was lost in the chaos of my family."

She retreated into a world of imagination "where there was color and beauty and a positive spirit. I learned that human beings can create their own magic."

After a brief marriage at 18 and the birth of two children (who are now grown and show no signs of osteopetrosis), she drifted to the streets of San Francisco, where she began making earrings as gifts for her friends, hammering metal wire on a frying pan in her garage, decorating it with beads, coins and pieces of bone.

People loved her work. Pretty soon she had five friends working in her garage, and she was hitchhiking to street fairs up and down California, selling her jewelry from tackle boxes.

A shopkeeper at San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square spotted a necklace she was wearing and asked if she would make a batch for his store.

"My life work just sneaked up on me," says Burch. "I never dreamed of a business. It was the passion to make things that was overwhelming." More and more shops bought her designs.

On a trip to China, looking for old beads and metal for jewelry, she saw her first cloissonne. Enchanted, she made a dozen "little paintings," and had them made into earrings. When she saw the box of completed designs, "it was one of the best days of my life."

She shopped the earrings all over California, and orders poured in. "Suddenly I had a business." She began designing other products - tote bags, scarves, paper products. "I designed everything myself. I still do. I want to do it. I love to do it."

She traveled the world to find manufacturers and formed Laurel Burch Inc. in 1979.

Meanwhile she was breaking her legs and raising her children. "I had no male partner, no soulmate. I worked all the time."

On an airplane returning from Asia, she met Jack Holton, a management consultant and travel executive with a master's degree in business administration from Stanford University. After a long courtship they were married two years ago. "We fell in love in a hospital room," she says. "Two days before our first date, I broke my leg." When they married, on a hillside in Carmel, Calif., Burch designed her own wedding gown, a white lace top with a huge cerise skirt to cover yet another broken leg.

Nowadays, the two run separate businesses - he helped her with some contracts in Japan - and run separate households. He shares her spectacular cliffside home in Sausalito; she shares his home in Orinda, Calif., where he stays to be close to his three children. Holton, she say, is "my love, my sweetheart, my life partner."

With all her troubles Burch has found a measure of peace. She and her children, Aarin, 30, and Jay, 25, have made friends again with her first husband: "We're a real '90s family, very Marin." The mother who set her loose at 14 is now one of her best friends.

Burch finds enormous joy being back in the throes of designing, and says she will use some of her new-found freedom to explain that joy to the world. "I want to write a book," she says.

She confesses that sometimes she weeps. "There are days when I just turn my head into the pillow and say, `God, this is really sad.' I'm tired of it happening; my leg really hurts. But then I say, `OK, enough!' " She slaps her hands together. "I can't be sad. Find me somebody to giggle with."

Her huge blue eyes are bright with tears but she smiles. "My illness is really my gift. I realize that from my saddest moments I found this imaginary world that I can share through my designs."

Having grown up with no mentors, "I have learned to rise above the bad things on my own, and reach for the courage to do what I want to do in the hours or years I have left."

------------ JEWELRY SALE ------------

A "collectors' sale" of Laurel Burch jewelry and accessories will take place from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday, at the Bellevue Conference Center, 121 107th Ave. N.E. Cash and personal checks only. Although Burch cannot attend, members of her family and friends "will be there to greet people."