ALDOUS HUXLEY

never encountered Besant even once. But he was born (in 1894) into a family that took a dim view of Theosophy.

Aldous’s paternal grandfather, Thomas H. Huxley, was a scientist famous for his aggressive defense of Charles Darwin’s then-controversial theory of evolution. Among Grandpa Huxley’s sparring partners was Helena Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, who insisted that humans evolve not just physically but also spiritually, guided by metaphysical masters who dwell in hidden valleys in Tibet.

In her book “The Secret Doctrine,” Blavatsky sneeringly referred to Grandpa Huxley as “the great man of Science,” who supported “with all the weight of his scientific authority the most ‘absurd’ of all theories – the descent of man from an ape!”

Some years after Blavatsky’s death, her protégé Besant took over the Theosophical Society. Aldous Huxley, raised in his grandfather’s rationalist tradition, regarded Blavatsky as an outright fraud, and he poked fun at Besant for the “errors in science and history, which thickly encrust her books.” He also rejected Theosophy’s particular embrace of the Eastern religions Buddhism and Hinduism.

Yet Huxley did not reject Theosophy entirely. “Except for the bunkum about astral bodies, spiritual hierarchies, reincarnations and so forth,” he wrote, “Theosophy seems to be a good enough religion — its main principles being that all religions contain some truth and that we ought to be tolerant.”

If Huxley noticed all the newspaper headlines in 1929 about Besant’s plans to create a utopian Theosophist colony in Ojai, he likely rolled his eyes at her idea of educating a new race to seek truth based on intuition rather than reason. Even so, when he published his dystopian masterpiece “Brave New World” in 1932, Besant’s Ojai project was not his target. Instead, his satire took aim at the utopian fantasies of the novelist H.G. Wells, who put his faith in reason and scientific progress.

In “Brave New World,” set 600 years in the future, science and psychiatry have fine-tuned a totalitarian World State where babies are created in test tubes, children are brainwashed in the crib to be content with their lot, adults are kept sedated with a happiness drug called Soma, and people willingly give up the possibility of individual freedom in exchange for stability and security. A mindless, soulless, but very comfortable existence, with every pleasure provided. Nine decades after it first appeared, “Brave New World” remains a staple of school curriculums, frequently invoked as an all-too-accurate prophecy of dire times ahead. But within just a few years, Huxley had come to regret the darkness of his vision.

By the mid-1930s he had become a committed pacificist, who very much wanted to believe that the bleak outcomes prophesied in “Brave New World” could somehow be avoided. He also was beginning to embrace the “Light of the East” wisdom he once had derided. His pacifism would lead him from Europe to America, and the light of the East would lead him to Ojai.

in the early to mid ‘30s, Franklin Lacey remained an active Theosophist. At 16, Ray Harden’s precocious squire served as the editor of Modern Knighthood, the official organ of the Order of the Round Table. At the Order’s conventions he rubbed elbows with such influential Theosophists as Robert Logan and Rukmini Devi Arundale, with whom he would remain close.

How did a mere youth acquire so much responsibility? Well, Franklin had always been unusually mature for his age, and a self-confident extrovert who was preternaturally articulate. Plus, the lanky teen already was taller than many of his older co-workers. He eventually attained the height of 6 feet 4 inches, but his weight topped out at 145 pounds. Being so tall and so thin gave him the elongated aspect of a stork, so much so that a friend once said he resembled a statue by Giacometti.

The ‘30s were hard times for the Theosophical Society and its offshoots. Membership had plummeted in the wake of Krishnamurti’s defection, and it spiraled further downward with the advent of the Great Depression, followed by Besant’s death in 1933. Fortunately, Franklin by that point had discovered an alternative career path.

While attending junior high school in Santa Cruz, Calif., he fell in with the drama crowd, and dazzled his teachers with his skills as an actor and playwright. Encouraged by this early success, 14-year-old Franklin wrote himself a note stating an ambitious but distant goal: He must write a successful play by the time he was 38. He sealed the note in an envelope with instructions to himself not to open it until he was 21. At that point, he would have 17 years to write that play and get it produced. Plenty of time. Shakespeare had churned out two or three plays a year, hadn’t he? Piece of cake.

But when Franklin finally did turn 21, on Sept. 26, 1938, he evidently had forgotten all about the envelope, because he left it unopened. Already a savvy show-business veteran, he seemed well on his way to the big time. He had a brand-new clipping from the Los Angeles Times to prove it.

“An unusual attraction booked into the Wilshire Ebell Theater Oct. 13, 14 and 15 is the Franklin Lacey monologue show,” The Times reported on Sept. 24.

Billing himself as “America’s Master of Monologue,” Lacey impersonated stock characters from rural America, both men and women. He gently lampooned their foibles, taking care not to be too cutting with his satire. “These people are the backbone of true Americanism,” he told a reporter. He wrote his own scripts and songs (both music and lyrics) and designed his own costumes for these one-man shows. He already had toured the country performing his act as the luncheon entertainment for women’s clubs. These shows at the Wilshire Ebell marked his arrival at the next level.

“He certainly has what it takes,” Program magazine noted. “In his male skits he is excellent, in his female skits he is a riot … Good fun, this young feller.”

Performing his one-man show for women’s clubs would remain Lacey’s bread-and-butter move for the next decade, even as he branched out into theater, radio and a new, experimental broadcast medium called television.

TV in the U.S. debuted in April 1939 at the opening of the New York World’s Fair, and Lacey’s own debut came just a few months later. NBC broadcast its programming from Radio City in midtown Manhattan via an antenna on the top of the Empire State Building. Hardly anyone owned a television set at this point, but fairgoers flocked to the RCA Pavilion at the fairgrounds to view NBC’s offerings on the special monitors provided. Those who were there on Sept. 26, 1939 — Franklin’s 22nd birthday — watched him perform as part of the afternoon programming. The New York Times TV listings billed him as “Franklin Lacey, impersonator.”

away, in a rented house in Pacific Palisades, Aldous Huxley was confronting a personal crisis amid a larger one. World War II had just begun on September 1 when Hitler invaded Poland, prompting Britain and France to declare war on Germany. Meanwhile, Aldous had just accepted a well-paying job from M-G-M to adapt Jane Austen’s novel “Pride and Prejudice” for the silver screen.

This was exactly the reason that Aldous and his wife, Maria, had settled in Los Angeles early in 1938. Their idea was that Aldous might make some easy money as a Hollywood screenwriter when he wasn’t working on a novel. But now, with a war on, the M-G-M job offer pricked his conscience.

“I simply can’t accept all that money to work in a … studio while my family and friends are starving and being bombed in England,” he said.

Among the close friends he turned to for advice was Krishnamurti, the former Theosophist messiah turned freelance philosopher. After moving to L.A., the Huxleys had invited themselves to Ojai to meet the resident sage, and they had developed an instant rapport with him and his close associate Rosalind Rajagopal. Krishnamurti evidently counseled Huxley to take the job, for on September 10, 1939, Maria Huxley wrote to Rosalind in Ojai:

“… Aldous has taken up his [M-G-M] job and I am quite sure it was the right thing to do, for the moment anyway. … Tell Krishnaji. He was a great help. Tell him we thank him. He probably knows anyway.”

Krishnamurti was still based in Ojai but had cut his ties to Theosophy. Both he and Huxley were committed pacifists, an awkward thing to be in 1939 as the world confronted the Nazi menace. Arya Vihara, Krishnamurti’s home on McAndrew Road, was a refuge for people who felt as Huxley did.

Feeling the need for some sort of spiritual framework for his newfound pacificism, Huxley was exploring traditional Hinduism at the Vedanta Center in L.A. But, as a dyed-in-the-wool agnostic, he was more strongly drawn to Krishnamurti’s non-sectarian philosophy.

Huxley was fascinated by the commune of like-minded folk that coalesced around Krishnamurti at Arya Vihara. Huxley felt at home among them. Some were old friends from his youth, such as the English actress-playwright Iris Tree. Others were new friends, like the prominent Theosophists Robert Logan and Louis Zalk. Together these people comprised a community of highly cultured, intellectually inclined pacifists, living in peaceful seclusion among the orange groves. Aldous and Maria frequently joined them at Arya Vihara.

was not a pacifist – or, if he was, he was carried away by the patriotic wave touched off by Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. When America entered the war in December 1941, he tried to enlist various branches of the military, but they all classified him 4-F due to his se- vere hay fever. Stymied, he resumed his the- ater career in L.A. as a member of Elsa Lanchester’s popular sketch-comedy troupe at the Turnabout Theatre. (Lanchester, a native of England, is best remembered for playing the title role in “The Bride of Frankenstein.”) The Turnabout gig evidently was not a fulltime job, for at the same time Lacey resumed his TV career as a performer for Paramount Television in Hollywood.

At Paramount in 1942, Lacey made history by hosting “The Franklin Lacey Show,” the first-ever talk show, broadcast live and unscripted from the Paramount Pictures lot via the experimental station W6XYZ (the future KTLA).

“During the war, the best of W6XYZ’s programming consisted of live, unrehearsed interviews conducted by Franklin Lacey, who became television’s first talk-show host, on his own show,” Michael Ritchie wrote in his book “Please Stand By: A Prehistory of Television.” over to their house for dinner afterwards. And Franklin and his guests frequently accepted. Lacey’s talk show was a true block party, lasting several years.”

TV’s first programmers adopted most of their formats from radio, and radio didn’t have shows featuring a host interviewing celebrity guests. There was no precedent for that until Franklin Lacey invented the format. “The Tonight Show” is often credited with being TV’s first talk show, but Lacey preceded “Tonight” by a decade.

Lacey was a natural for the host role. People who knew him invariably used words like “amiable,” “affable,” “likeable, “outgoing” and “charming” to describe him. Some of his TV guests, including the English comic actress Beatrice Lillie, remained his friends for life.

Another person he charmed during his Paramount Television days was Gladys Turner, an Australia native who worked at Paramount TV as a secretary. Her friends called her Glady. She and Franklin were married on March 23, 1943, and were still together when he died 45 years later.

Glady presumably accompanied Franklin on his extended visits to Ojai during the war. We know about these visits because on at least two occasions he performed at the Ojai Art Center.

“Mr. Lacey came to Ojai to visit friends and was persuaded to give a performance while he was here,” The Ojai newspaper reported in August 1943. “… Mr. Lacey has worked with and written material for numerous stage and screen luminaries.”

Did Lacey encounter Aldous Huxley in Ojai during the war years? Probably. We don’t know where Lacey stayed during his visits here, but we do know that he was friendly with Krishnamurti and Rosalind Rajagopal, both of whom were also close to Huxley. And Robert Logan, whom Franklin knew from his Order of the Round Table work, was (like Huxley) a frequent wartime guest at Arya Vihara.

Franklin also was friends in Hollywood with the Lansbury show-business family, emigrees from Britain whose eldest daughter, Angela, was an up-and-coming M-G-M ingenue. She was friendly with the actor Hurd Hatfield, and she visited Ojai at least once to party with his friends here. These friends comprised Iris Tree’s crowd, the former Chekhov Players, including Woody and Erika Chambliss and Ford Rainey, a circle that overlapped with Krishnamurti’s crowd. (They all lived near one another in the East End.) Angela Lansbury in a memoir noted that she met Aldous Huxley while attending one of Krishnamurti’s public talks.

“The uniqueness of Lacey’s show was that even though there was a tiny number of set owners watching, week after week Franklin could convince stars like Beatrice Lillie, of Broadway and London musical fame, to join him for an hour of civilized conversation,” Ritchie wrote. “No prizes. No audience participation. Just talk. And the show was so popular that the 40 home viewers would call W6XYZ and invite Franklin and his guests

As for the Huxleys, they too had many Hollywood friends, especially among the British-emigree contingent — people like Charlie Chaplin, and Charles Laughton and Laughton’s wife, Elsa Lanchester, who regularly motored up to Ojai to hear the sage speak. Lanchester, of course, was Lacey’s colleague from the Turnabout Theatre.

In sum, Lacey and Huxley traveled in overlapping social circles which maintained interconnected outposts in Ojai during the war years. These were small worlds indeed, so it’s likely that the two men crossed paths here. Did they become good friends during this period? Impossible to say. But if they did not forge a bond during the war years, they would forge one soon enough, with Ojai as their common ground.

ended in 1945 with mushroom clouds rising over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the science-worshipping dystopia Huxley had imagined in “Brave New World” seemed more prescient than ever. His Hollywood friends Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith offered to make a film of the novel, with Meredith playing the lead role and Goddard supplying the financing. She was feeling flush, have recently extracted a huge divorce settlement from Charlie Chaplin.

Back in 1932, Huxley’s then literary agent had sold the novel’s film rights to RKO Pictures for the paltry sum of 750 British pounds. RKO had never filmed it and had no plans to do so, but the studio had no objection to someone else filming it – so long as RKO received a piece of the action. A tentative deal was struck to allow the Goddard-Meredith project to proceed.

But there was a hitch. That same literary agent had sold the novel’s dramatic rights to the playwright Louis Walinsky. His play had premiered in Paris in 1938, and resurfaced there in 1939 for another brief run before closing a week before the war broke out. It had not been produced since. But Walinsky still held the dramatic rights, and he refused to sign a waiver. The producers refused to proceed without that waiver in hand. So that was that.

Huxley still owned the book publishing rights, and his publishers agreed to put out a new edition of “Brave New World,” which went on sale in bookstores on Jan. 1, 1946. But Huxley, in his preface to this edition, confessed to some second thoughts.

The novel ends on a bleak note when the character called John, a.k.a. the Savage, confronts an unsolvable dilemma. Having been raised on an indigenous reservation in New Mexico, he cannot adjust to life inside the supposed scientific utopia; nor can he see returning to the so-called “primitive,” pre-scientific world of the reservation. So, he hangs himself.

“The Savage is offered only two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village, a life more human in some respects, but in others hardly less queer and abnormal,” Huxley wrote in his new preface. “If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity — a possibility already actualized, to some extent, in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the Reservation.”

Huxley contented himself with writing the revisionist preface; he left the book’s original text untouched. But he had planted the seed within himself of a future novel that would bookend the pessimism of “Brave New World” with the possibility of hope. This utopian novel – eventually titled “Island” – would germinate for many years before it finally found its way into print. In the meantime, Huxley would help nudge another person’s utopian project closer to fruition.

That person was none other than the late Annie Besant, about whom Huxley had made so many snide remarks in his younger days. Now he adopted her view that Ojai could become the site of a special community.

Almost 20 years had passed since Besant had laid out her vision for her Happy Valley property in Upper Ojai. Yet the property remained mostly undeveloped. In 1946, Rosalind Rajagopal decided it was time to create a Happy Valley School under the direction of Dr. Guido Ferrando, a retired philosophy professor from Vassar College now living in Ojai.

“Such a school is in keeping with the original intent of Dr. Besant,” the Happy Valley Foundation board declared. “… It was generally agreed that a school, embodying Dr. Besant’s ideas in education, and the people who would inevitably gather around it, would help forward the community and cultural ideals for which the Foundation was originally created.”

Huxley took a keen interest in this project. He and Krishnamurti both participated in the discussions about what approach the new school should take.

“Huxley particularly emphasized that there be no barriers between different disciplines but an integration of subjects as well as cultures into a world view,” Radha Sloss wrote in her booklet “The Story of Happy Valley.”

For various reasons, the new school was not situated in Happy Valley itself but in Meiners Oaks, on the old Starland property that had hosted Krishnamurti’s Star Camps back in the late ‘20s. The idea was to eventually build a brand-new campus in Happy Valley and move the school there. For now, they would hold classes in the old Starland cafeteria, with Arya Vihara in the

East End serving as a temporary dormitory.

The Happy Valley School opened in October 1946 with three teachers and 10 students, among whom were Radha Rajagopal and her future husband, Jimmy Sloss. The school also came equipped with a board of trustees to guide its development, and among those trustees was Aldous Huxley.