Ups, Downs and a Happy Ending

The squished hearts, misshapen crosses, imperfect pearls and talisman-like charms that adorn the jewelry created by L.A. designer Erica Courtney can be seen as metaphors for phases of her complicated life.

Her heart was broken at a tender young age by an abusive husband, her faith in marriage shaken. Faced with the prospect of losing her son, she ran away, assumed a new identity and lived as a fugitive, eluding the FBI through sheer luck.

But now, with 18 years of legal troubles finally behind her, Courtney’s life has taken a fairy-tale turn reflected in the sugary sweet love notes she inscribes in many of her sterling silver pieces. The designer seems at last to have found true love in Vince Flores, 32, a musician 10 years her junior. They married in June in a downtown penthouse.

There is a sense that Courtney, 42, is reclaiming her life.

“There is a change. Used to be, if you’d get close to her, if you made any sudden movements, she’d be jumpy,” Flores says. “She’d watch the door all the time, weird stuff like that. Now that everything is over, little by little she’s getting to feel more comfortable. She’s becoming a legitimate, relaxed person.”

Her year-old Beverly Boulevard store has become a hotbed of stylists and editors sifting through necklaces priced over $100,000. She also creates less expensive silver pieces, starting at $46.

But success hasn’t come easily for the youthful-looking designer, who pads around the store barefoot, dressed in a stylish wraparound skirt. A mermaid tattoo peeks out from under her cropped shirt.

“My mother raised me to get married.” And she did--for the first time at age 19.

“You don’t realize how a decision can affect your whole life,” she says. “We came from totally different worlds, which was reason enough not to get married.”

As a child, Courtney lived a life of privilege with mother Helyn Ingram and stepfather W.C. Lamb near the oil fields of Lafayette, La.

Beleagured by Family Strife

But first husband Ronnie Cappo came from the other side of the tracks, she says.

The couple settled down in Baton Rouge. Courtney says Cappo became physically abusive, hitting her if the breakfast dishes were not washed when he came home early for lunch from his dry cleaning delivery job.

Raised as a Catholic, Courtney was determined to stay with her husband. She found an escape in creative pursuits.

“I’d sew clothes for his little nieces, or crochet blankets. I’d hand-make christening dresses. I loved to do things that made people smile.”

In 1980, three years after their son, Josh, was born, the couple separated, then divorced. A nasty custody battle ensued. Courtney wed second husband Michael Fonseca in 1983, hoping it would help her win custody. But she was still losing the fight. Courtney decided her only choice was to leave Louisiana. She packed two teddy bears and some clothes in a backpack for her son, told Fonseca she was going to the market and disappeared. He divorced her after she had been gone several years.

She changed her identity from Tasha Ingram to Erica Courtney-- the name came from a character on the soap opera “All My Children.” A single mother, she avoided the FBI for eight years, getting financial help from her mother, who set her up in a house in Mexico Beach, Fla.

Mother and son eventually relocated to Dallas. They lived on little money and did art projects for fun. They started fooling around with rhinestones, taking apart old jewelry and gluing it on sunglasses.

“My mom said, ‘Why don’t you do that for a living?’ ” Courtney recalls. “But I wasn’t a designer.”

Eventually, she mustered the courage to go to the Dallas Jewelry Mart. She sought out a showroom appropriate for her funky pieces, ready for a fight. But surprisingly, she easily landed a spot, and later even became the manager of the showroom. Working there was a training ground for her own business. She learned about customers and stores.

An Artist Finds Her Voice

She hit the big time when she decorated the oversized face of a Fossil watch with rhinestones.

“People would chase me down to see this watch. I couldn’t believe it!”

Courtney called Fossil and begged for credit on 50 watches. Again, she was flabbergasted when the credit came through. “I didn’t have a dollar in my checkbook!”

The only way she was going to be able to pay for the watches was to sell all 50 to stores as samples. “That was the smartest thing I ever did.” Some stores were reordering before they even got the first shipment. After selling more than 500 of the big-faced watches at $95 each, she had made a name for herself in the jewelry business.

Although her mother loaned her the money to buy the initial 50 watches, her business has never had any other outside financial backing.

She went on to design bustiers and earrings with colorful Austrian crystals. Her son came up with the idea to make watches with beaded straps. “Now Chanel has a watch like that,” Courtney says with a chuckle.

But Courtney was restless in Dallas. She and Josh stuck out like sore thumbs in Highland Park, where they lived. “I had purple streaks in my hair, tattoos and miniskirts. People who lived there were identical in Ralph Lauren with matching bows in their hair.”

Flores, an L.A. native traveling through Texas with his rock band 151 Swing, came along in 1989 at just the right time.

“When I met him, a bolt of lightning hit my heart.”

It took Courtney and her son just three weeks to pack up their stuff and move to Los Angeles. She rented a showroom downtown.

“I felt the bottom dropping out of costume jewelry, so instead, because I was bored, I started writing love notes in silver hearts and crosses. I had just met Vince and I was madly in love. My assistant said, ‘That’s really great,’ but I said, ‘Who’s going to want that? Forever, forever my baby I love you?’ ”

Turns out everybody wanted it. “When you move to a new place, it inspires you in different ways.”

Instead of using hard wax to create molds for her silver jewelry (as many designers do), Courtney devised molds out of soft wax. “It gives the pieces a liquid-like handmade look,” she says. “All the silver at the time was very sharp-edged. You couldn’t tell one designer from the next. I just wanted to do my own thing.”

Drawing on a Personal Wellspring

She created charms in the shape of squished hearts and crosses, perhaps symbolic of the disappointment of her first marriage and her disillusionment with the Catholic church.

Courtney did not consciously create talismans but says, “I was very psychic when I was younger, and definitely thought of certain things as lucky charms.

“I think people feel my jewelry is lucky and talisman-like because it is so uncalculated. It is like a ruling from the universe.”

She came to be represented by the Parallel Lines showroom at the New Mart. Everything started moving at the speed of light. Courtney moved into gold and South Sea pearls.

“At first South Seas were the rejects. I didn’t understand why the funky-colored pearls were the undesirables. They wanted blacks and whites and goldens [pearls], and that’s it,” she says. “The first fine jewelry show we did, no one even knew what they were.”

Undeterred, Courtney kept working with South Sea pearls until they caught on. Again, art imitated life. Like the pearls, Courtney’s offbeat approach to jewelry design--the rough edges, soft shapes and odd colors--was catching on.

With the ups and downs of her soap opera life, it would be tempting to dismiss Courtney as a free spirit, flaky even. She is not. Her success is the result of tenacity and hard work. Unfortunately, just as things were starting to pay off, her personal life derailed again.

Tested by Separation

Working on a tip Courtney believes came from a disgruntled employee, the FBI arrested her in 1992 on federal kidnapping charges while she and Flores were in New York City to meet with buyers. Although she served no time in jail, Courtney was sentenced to a three-year probation.

Josh, then 13, was sent to live with his father, Cappo, in Louisiana. Courtney was torn apart.

“She barely got out of bed and she cried all the time,” Flores remembers. “She was a wreck.” The jewelry business coasted along.

When the probation period was over, Josh happily returned to live with Courtney and Flores in L.A.

Cappo later filed a civil lawsuit for alienation of affection. The 18-year legal battle did not end until October. She settled out of court for more than $25,000.

Now Courtney is enjoying married life for the first time. But she won’t play the victim.

“I know what I did was right. I will stand behind it until the day I die,” she says. “I found myself. I realized everything that happened to me I let happen to me. It’s easy to sit back and say, ‘He did this to me and that to me, and he was so mean.’ Blah, blah, blah, who cares, cry me a river. But I had a part in that, and when you find out you are in control of your own life . . . it’s so cool.”

E-mail Booth Moore at booth.moore@latimes.com.