Saving Vase : Ceramics Collectors Have Rediscovered Betty Lou

Yep, that was a vintage Betty Lou vase, all right, stuffed under a table at a flea market in Michigan.

The collector braced herself. How much?

She happily paid the $1 asking price and then promptly resold it--for $850.

Talk about getting a head.

Nationwide, antique dealers are snapping up the head-shaped vases that were popularized in the late ‘40s by Fullerton artist Betty Lou Nichols before the craze waned about 20 years later.

Nichols died in August at 72, just as popularity began to resurge in the quaint ceramic vases that she started out making with clay and a rolling pin on her parents’ kitchen table.

“She would have gotten a big kick out of it,” said her husband, John, 74, who still lives in the Fullerton house they bought in 1946.

These days, head vases show up in hip movies like “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.” At the annual Head Hunters Convention in Florida, hundreds of collectors shop for vases shaped like the heads of chickens, Elvises, Virgin Marys and others, some with their 59-cent price tag still attached from the dime store.

Last year, a Marilyn Monroe head vase sold for a record $2,800.

In post-modern retro head hunting, there are two prized finds: celebrity heads and Betty Lous.

Betty Lous are not the heads of famous people.

They tend to be women in Gay ‘90s-style with big hats and big curls, perfect cheekbones and perfect skin. They are painted in soft hues such as periwinkle, plum and mint. The trademark Betty Lou look: to-die-for eyelashes lowered in perpetual coquetry.

She produced thousands of heads, creating the basic shapes from a mold, as other makers did. But she was the only maker who added handmade details such as ruffles, lace and bows made of clay from Kentucky and Tennessee. That’s why, collectors say, every Betty Lou looks different.

Betty Lou collectors know her vases without checking for her signature on the bottom.

“I fell in love with them,” said New York collector Maddy Gordon, editor of the international Head Hunters newsletter and organizer of the annual convention.

“To me, hers are the most outstanding of all. . . . It’s a shame she didn’t get all the recognition she deserved while she was around to appreciate it.”

Nichols, who grew up in Fullerton, always wanted to be an artist, her husband said. She studied art at Fullerton Junior College, where she first got into ceramics.

While her husband was stationed overseas during World War II, she started to experiment with ceramics in the kitchen of her parents’ La Habra home. She came up with the idea of making head vases--her husband isn’t sure just how--in 1947, when he was discharged from the Army.

European head vases date back to late 19th-century France, said Kathleen Cole, the Memphis author of “The Encyclopedia of Head Vases.”

But experts credit Nichols with fueling the head vase craze in the United States. Her work apparently filled a void in the ceramics trade when imports from Germany and Japan dried up because of the war, said Cole, whose friend made the Betty Lou find at the Michigan flea market.

Nichols’ business immediately took off, said her husband, a retired contracts manager. In 1949, she opened a studio in La Habra with 30 workers. But soon she became a victim of her own success.

In the late ‘50s, copycats followed, flooding the market. Eventually, florists stopped ordering the head vases because they were too small to fit big bouquets, and collectors tired of them.

The 40-year-old Nichols quit the head vase business in 1962, and turned to painting and raising her two children.

And for a while, people tucked their head vases away in attics.

Then in 1989, Cole wrote her first book on head vases after a friend got her hooked. Other books followed, and then came the Head Hunters newsletter and convention.

A couple years ago, just as the vases started to get hot again, one Head Hunter conventioneer visited Nichols, who had suffered two strokes.

“Where were you when I needed you?” she reportedly asked him.

Now, antique dealers such as Jan Fontes hit trade shows across the country in search of Betty Lous.

“Find me some,” joked Fontes, co-owner of the Antique Gallery in Fullerton, who gets calls from dealers making the same request.

John Nichols gets hit up too. But don’t bother asking.

“What I have,” he said, “I’m not going to sell.”