Picking up the Vivian Greene isn't exactly starting over. That would be easier.
pieces in Hawaii
Artist Vivian Greene
By Erika Engle
overcomes more than her
share of adversity to find success
Star-BulletinThe cartoonist, writer and artist is reassembling the mosaic of a life, a career and a business shattered by natural disaster, personal grief and bad luck. A millionaire by age 26 with a successful line of greeting cards in stores across the country, she now counts as a success shelf space in two downtown Honolulu retail stores.
Greene, now 52, first sold her Kisses comic strip to a syndicator in 1971 but the company went bankrupt before the panels hit the papers. She immediately made Kisses a line of greeting cards, took them to a trade show and sold $12,000 in advance orders. That year, at age 21, Greene became the youngest and first female greeting card manufacturer in the United States. The next year she left the trade show with $300,000 in orders.
By her mid-20s, the Miami resident drew local and national attention as a self-made millionaire with her self-named company, Vivian Greene Inc.
"Technically I am a millionaire because I own stock in the company, which owns all the assets," Green said.
"In reality, I'm struggling. I'm really struggling."
She struggled with the death of longtime boyfriend Toby Stone in 1989 -- and from it wrote the self-help book "Good Mourning" about dealing with grief.
The book is still available at a few local bookshops, including Bookends in Kailua. Managing Partner Pat Banning said the store has carried the book for about a year.
"It's popular without being a huge seller," she said.
Banning said the brief affirmations may be helpful to someone in grief.
"Sometimes you don't want to deal with a long heavy paragraph," she said.
Greene hopes to have her next book, "Mourning Glory," in stores July 21, and is in the process of writing another, "Legal Lemonade."
Greene's Kisses cards are re-emerging slowly, with other cards featuring local artists' work and her written sentiments. They are now available at Chit Chat Sundries & Gifts on the ground floor of 1001 Bishop St. and at Bin's Convenience at 700 Bishop St.
The Kisses characters are cherubic children with their eyes covered, because, Greene said, "What is real is seen with the heart."
"Her cards are so cute, the sentiments are precise and not wordy," said Jan Babin, co-owner of Chit Chat. "I think it will catch the consumer's eye quickly."
Babin said Greene's work will most likely appeal to women, and that it fits her mix of greeting cards by artists.
"In our store there are no Hallmark or American Greetings cards," Babin said.
At one time Greene had cards in 6,000 stores across the United States, before crisis management took priority. In 1992 her aging mother fell, breaking her leg and pelvis, and suffered a series of small stroke-like episodes.
"She was never fully lucid after that," Greene said, and after years of costly round-the-clock care, died July 20.
Also that year, the Miami-based portion of her business was virtually wiped out by Hurricane Andrew.
"I lost product, people lost homes -- I had five people (who'd lost housing) living in my house in Miami," Greene said.
Then a moving company she hired to ship her business to Hawaii, O.K. Storage and Transfer Co., claimed to have lost 115 crates of her belongings, including personal effects, at sea.
Greene said in spite of the company's claims, the original works started turning up in the hands of collectors.
She filed suit against the moving company. In the meantime, the 6,000 card racks were not being refilled.
Greene won a $93,500 judgment for the first count of a six-count lawsuit filed against the company and its owner -- to whom she had previously rented her home.
She sued for breach of contract in addition to other counts. Greene said she rented out the home to defray expenses associated with her mother's long-term care.
O.K. Storage and Transfer Co has no current telephone listing. Its president, Alden Wayne Barnett, has an unlisted telephone number and could not be reached.
The inventory sheet attached to Greene's lawsuit totals $700,000 in damages .
"If we were to show what our natural growth is, how much we were doing before this happened, was $6 (million) to $10 million dollars a year," she said. "It sounds like a lot but if you look at what (Peanuts creator Charles) Shultz did, he personally did $50 million."
Greene said she has just learned that the storage company has been sold and that last week a man she has never heard of drove from Tampa to Miami to present to O.K. Storage six crates, supposedly containing her possessions. She does not know how he came upon the boxes, or whether they really contain her belongings. Greene has been told she may claim the articles when she pays the bill for their storage, now more than $2,000.
In the lawsuit, Greene alleges breach of contract for the lost business materials and personal effects, and accuses Barnett of "stripping her house," of all but two items: a piano and a 90-gallon aquarium, which Greene said is now broken.
She says the woman who used to be her housekeeper is now living in the home, which is encumbered by a tax lien. The attorney who filed her suit has now moved to another firm, and the case is mired in uncertainty.
"I can be taxed on inventory when I can't even touch my stuff," Greene said.
"This stuff has an ironic way of working."
Because so many personal effects were among the items that O.K. Storage and Transfer was to ship to Hawaii, she has encountered a modern-day identity crisis.
She has received traffic tickets in Miami -- while she was in Hawaii. In trying to obtain a duplicate Social Security card, she was informed that she had died in 1979.
The artist, still very much alive, is selling matted prints through her Web site, www.viviangreene.com, and has a small start-up operation based downtown with two part-time employees and a commission-based sales team.
She hopes to finance further press-runs of her Kisses, Island Kisses and local art cards through the baby-steps of these sales efforts.
"This isn't like starting over," Greene said. "This is like starting from a real big hole."