Chet Gordon
"Helen Boehm, a self-made businesswoman known as the Princess of Porcelain for her company’s elaborate sculptures, which have graced the coffee tables of royalty and heads of state for six decades, died on Monday at her home in West Palm Beach, Fla. She was 89.
Mrs. Boehm had been ill with cancer and Parkinson’s disease for some time, said Sharon Lee Parker, the current president and chief executive of Boehm Porcelain, the Trenton-based company Mrs. Boehm helped found and indefatigably promoted.
With her husband, Edward, Mrs. Boehm (pronounced beam) founded the company, known early on as E. M. Boehm Studios, in 1950. At the time, neither knew a thing about porcelain. He was a veterinary assistant trained in animal husbandry; she was an optician.
But Mr. Boehm was a gifted sculptor and Mrs. Boehm a natural pitchwoman. After all, she had once persuaded a customer named Clark Gable to buy a pair of sunglasses, and who in his line of work would not already own one?
Considered highly collectible, Boehm porcelains often depict flora and fauna and are known for their handpainted colors and lifelike detail. The current line ranges in price from $125 for a tiny lamb to $20,000 for a three-foot-high eagle. Rare vintage pieces have fetched in the neighborhood of $100,000, Ms. Parker said.
Boehm sculptures can be found in museum collections, including at the Metropolitan Museum and the Vatican. They have been owned by luminaries like Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, Pope John Paul II and Sophia Loren.
In a marketing coup scored by Mrs. Boehm decades ago at the cost of 3 cents, Boehm pieces have been presented to every United States president from Eisenhower to Obama. For years they have been the de facto state gift from the White House to foreign dignitaries, as in 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon presented Mao Zedong with a pair of life-size porcelain swans.
After Mr. Boehm’s death in 1969, Mrs. Boehm continued to run the company with characteristic savvy. No sooner was someone in the headlines, it seemed, then a commemorative piece was made and bestowed on the recipient with all attendant fanfare.
For Diana, Princess of Wales, Mrs. Boehm created a porcelain copy of her wedding bouquet. After Diana’s death in 1997, she issued a limited-edition white rose, sending one each to Princes William and Harry and offering the rest for sale at $350 apiece. (A pink rose honoring Diana can be purchased on the company’s Web site for $395.)
Under Mrs. Boehm’s stewardship, Boehm grew into a multimillion-dollar business with studios in Trenton and Malvern, England. Boehm porcelain was sold in high-end stores like Bonwit Teller, and the company had its own showrooms in New York and other cities.
In consequence, Mrs. Boehm kept (simultaneously) a Rolls-Royce, a Mercedes and a Duesenberg; maintained a constellation of homes in the United States and abroad; owned a prizewinning polo team; and cheerfully dripped Harry Winston.
All this Mrs. Boehm, the daughter of working-class Italian immigrants, built from a business begun in a cellar with a $1,000 loan.
Elena Francesca Stephanie Franzolin was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 26, 1920, and grew up in the Bensonhurst neighborhood there. Her father, a cabinetmaker, died when she was 13, and Helen, as she was known, worked as a dressmaker to help support the family. As a young woman, she became an optician.
In 1944, she married Edward Marshall Boehm. An experienced livestock breeder, he made realistic clay sculptures of animals as a pastime. Mrs. Boehm encouraged him to pursue his art professionally, and eventually, with a loan from one of her eyeglass clients, they started a porcelain studio in a Trenton basement.
She often said that Mr. Boehm cared nothing for business. So she took matters into her own hands and was soon on the telephone to the Met, which purchased a Hereford bull and a Percheron stallion. In the mid-1950s she wrote to the first lady, Mamie Eisenhower.
Before long, a reply came from the White House inviting her to lunch. (The letter had 3 cents postage due, which Mrs. Boehm promptly paid.) She arrived in Washington with bull in hand, the first in a long line of presidential Boehms. And thus, president by president and prince by prince, Boehm bloomed.
Mrs. Boehm sold the company in 2003. When, several owners later, Ms. Parker took over last year, it was in brittle shape, its staff of more than 400 reduced to four. Today, Boehm pieces can be purchased on the company’s Web site and through several dozen authorized retailers.
Mrs. Boehm leaves no immediate survivors. She was the author of a memoir, “With a Little Luck: An American Odyssey” (Rawson, 1985, with Nancy Dunnan), with a foreword by Letitia Baldrige.
Not all of Mrs. Boehm’s marketing schemes worked out happily, at least not at first. There was the time, in 1958, that she brought a flock of exotic birds — real ones — to Tiffany’s in New York to promote her company’s bird figurines. The birds slipped out of their cage and were pursued through the store, gingerly, by employees brandishing small blue boxes. Some fled into Gotham’s wild blue yonder and were never seen again.
The story made the papers, and Mrs. Boehm appeared on television for days afterward."
Helen Franzolin (Beahm) was born in New York on December 26, 1920 to Peter and Frances Franzolin. She died November 15, 2010 in West Pam Beach, Florida. She is buried at St. Mary's Cemetery in Trenton, New Jersey.
