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STORY BY MARK LEWIS

Way back in that long-lost world we call the 1950s, an Ojai high-school drama teacher named Franklin Lacey co-wrote “The Music Man,” an enormously popular Broadway musical comedy about the redemptive power of love. Impressed, the British novelist Aldous Huxley recruited Lacey to reinvent Huxley’s dystopian novel “Brave New World” as a musical.

Unsurprisingly, this effort failed. What’s surprising is that Huxley and Lacey attempted it in the first place. What led them to launch such a quixotic project? The answer is woven into the history of Ojai’s Happy Valley, an equally quixotic project that nevertheless succeeded — with considerable help from Huxley and Lacey.

into its run, the recent revival of “The Music Man” remained the hottest ticket on Broadway. It filled the cavernous Winter Garden Theatre night after night with people paying hundreds of dollars per ticket to see handsome Hugh Jackman as Professor Harold Hill singing “Seventy-Six Trombones,” and winsome Sutton Foster as Marian the Librarian singing “Till There Was You.” Hit revivals of beloved musicals often run for years with multiple cast changes, but when Jackman and Foster departed the show, the producers opted to quit while they were ahead, and closed the show on January 15.

Their decision was met with regret in Ojai’s Happy Valley, where “The Music Man” looms large. The show’s book was co-authored by Franklin Lacey, a former Happy Valley School drama teacher and head of school, and a longtime board member at the Happy Valley Foundation. Lacey’s widow bequeathed his share of the show’s rights to the foundation, which oversees the school (now called the Besant Hill School of Happy Valley), the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts and the Happy Valley Cultural Center.

Even with the Broadway revival ending its run, the Laceys’ bequest remains a gift that keeps on giving. “The Music Man” is so frequently performed by high schools and community theaters that it contributes significant financial support for Happy Valley year after year.

“The Music Man” was not Lacey’s only claim to fame. At the age of 9, he toured the country as a Theosophist lecture-hall prodigy. As an adult he toured the country again with a successful oneman comedy show. He also hosted history’s first TV talk show, and he briefly took over as impresario of the Ojai Music Festival.

Huxley’s claims to fame are many, as a novelist, an essayist, and as a famous public intellectual who laid much of the groundwork for the human potential movement. His novel “Brave New World” remains in print and widely read, and its predictions about a dystopian future seem ever more prescient.

Huxley and Lacey crossed paths in Ojai, where the Theosophist leader Annie Besant had tried to plant a utopia in the wilderness. She called it Happy Valley. After she died, it lay dormant for decades. Then it began to come to life — not quite as Besant had envisioned it, but close enough to claim the mantle of her legacy. Both Huxley and Lacey played key roles in its regeneration.

What does any of this have to do with “Brave New World” or “The Music Man”? Read on.

was born in Vancouver, B.C. on Sept. 26, 1917. His father, John Mason Lacey, was a mining engineer who specialized in prospecting for oil. John and his wife, the former Maude Knight, had eight children, of whom Franklin was sixth in line.

John and Maude were avid members of the Theosophical Society, which sought to synthesize the religions of East and West. Franklin grew up in a household that venerated the group’s leader, Annie Besant, and her protégé Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom she was grooming for the role of Theosophist messiah. To prepare the way for his coming, she had created the Order of the Star in the East and put Krishnamurti at the head of it. By late 1925, the O.S.E had more than 40,000 members worldwide, and John Lacey was one of them.

At the time, ambitious Theosophists were jockeying for position in expectation that Krishnamurti would soon begin his messianic mission. Southern California, teeming with Theosophist lodges, was a hotbed of O.S.E. activity. Krishnamurti himself had a home in Ojai, where his neighbors included the Krotona Institute of Theosophy. Southern California also teemed with oil fields — and John Lacey, after all, was an oilman. The stars seemed aligned for a change of scene. In late December 1925, John moved his large family from Vancouver to L.A., where he immediately became a prominent lecturer for the Order of the Star in the East, doing his bit to lay the groundwork for the coming of the World Teacher.

John and his family, including young Franklin, likely were among the hundreds of Theosophists who turned out to meet Besant’s train when she and Krishnamurti arrived in L.A. in September 1926. She passed most of the next seven months as Krishnamurti’s houseguest in Ojai, where she had an epiphany. She decided to plant a Theosophist colony here in this beautiful, isolated valley, and make it the cradle of a future golden race.

“We desire to form on this land a Centre which shall gradually grow into a miniature model of the New Civilization,” she announced in The Theosophist in January 1927.

To get the ball rolling, Besant bought 465 acres in Upper Ojai, dubbed the property Happy Valley, and created the Happy Valley

“The Foundation will include a School — later I hope a college — which will endeavor to train boys and girls to be good citizens in the New Civilization,” she wrote.

Years later, Franklin told an interviewer that his parents often brought their kids to Ojai in the ‘20s to hear Krishnamurti speak. Franklin must have been referring to the Star Camps that took place in 1928 and 1929, when thousands of Theosophists from around the world came here to sit at the World Teacher’s feet.

(These camps featured the actress Beatrice Wood performing in “The Light of Asia,” a play about the life of Buddha. This might have been young Franklin’s first significant exposure to the theater, to which he would devote his professional career.)

At some point during this period, Franklin crossed paths with Ray W. Harden, a Theosophist from San Jose who was charged with publicizing the World Teacher project in the U.S. Harden also oversaw the Theosophical Society’s campaign to recruit teenagers and younger children to the International Order of the Round Table, which sought to invest Theosophy with the aura of King Arthur and his knights. (Harden’s title was Chief Knight for America.)

Harden saw something in 9-year-old Franklin, and he persuaded the Laceys to let him take the boy under his wing. Franklin was named the Chief Knight’s squire and joined him on the national lecture circuit. Their topics, as emphasized by the publicity materials, included “the magic of the Ojai Happy Valley.” Harden’s squire was billed as “Franklin Lacey, boy clairvoyant, who played with fairies all his life.”

Fairies were a big deal to Theosophists, who tried to photograph them using special cameras. Adult lecturers who discoursed on this subject tended to be sneered at in the mainstream press. But newspaper writers were more indulgent with Franklin, who was only a boy, albeit an unusually charming and articulate one. His fairy lectures made local headlines all across the country.

“Peter Pan would have found Franklin Lacey refreshing,” gushed The Des Moines Tribune. “Franklin not only believes in fairies, he sees ‘em!”

He talked with ‘em, too.

“Almost every human being has a guardian fairy who looks after him and talks to him,” Franklin assured his audiences. “My particular fairy I call ‘the Doctor.’ He has been with me, off and on, since I was 2 years old. Counsels me and looks after me.”

His lecture tour with Harden was such a success that Franklin was invited to meet with the famous inventor Thomas Edison, a Theosophy enthusiast who shared with Franklin his own experiences with the occult. Franklin even did a command performance at the White House, during which his impersonation of the vaudeville star Will Rogers elicited a chuckle from the usually taciturn president, Calvin Coolidge.

Ray Harden provided Franklin with some unusual experiences. A friend of Franklin’s would recall that the boy “grew up under the tutelage of a guardian who one day took him to the top of the Woolworth Building in New York City, then the tallest structure in the world, and hung him from his ankles from the top!” Most youngsters would have been utterly terrified to be dangled from the pinnacle of a building that was nearly 800 feet tall. But Franklin, according to his friend, “could only remember the exhilaration he experienced at the time.”

The highlight of Franklin’s career as a Theosophist prodigy came in August 1929, when he and Harden arrived in Chicago to attend the Theosophical Society’s World Congress. Besant had traveled all the way from her home base in India to preside over the gathering. In her speech welcoming the delegates, she focused on her Ojai project.

“Two years ago, I bought a large tract in California,” she said. “I call it Happy Valley because that is a beautiful name, and life ought to be beautiful and happy, and would be if people lived as they ought to live. I want to use it as a colony to attract families with children of the new type. By later intermarriage between them, the growth of the superior race will be hastened.”

Franklin’s ears must have been burning as he listened. He was, after all, a California kid, and Besant had singled out California kids as heralds of the coming golden race.

Several days later, in the Theosophical Society’s American headquarters in nearby Wheaton, Ill., Besant was introduced to 12-year-old Franklin, “in whom she had recognized a very special spark,” Radha Rajagopal Sloss wrote in “The Story of Happy Valley.”

It is interesting to note that Besant only a month earlier had lost her messiah-in-training when Krishnamurti publicly rejected the role and dissolved the Order of the Star. Krishnamurti had only been 14 when Besant first proclaimed him the future World Teacher; perhaps now she was auditioning possible replacements from among the supposedly golden youth of California. In any event, nothing came of her brief encounter with Franklin, who never saw her again.