Lisa Marie Presley in Happy Valley

Lisa Marie Presley's Happy Years at Happy Valley School

Being the daughter of a legend as seismic as Elvis Presley could hardly be construed as a cakewalk.

By Mimi Walker

A teenage Lisa Marie Presley, left, embraces friend Jane Burn in the mid-’80s on a Happy Valley School camping trip across the Sierras.

Photo submitted

Lisa Marie Presley handled all the hurdles that come with great fame under that legacy in her own way, reflective of the many wildly eclectic experiences in her life before her untimely passing on Jan. 12 at age 54. For a brief interlude, she lived one of the closest experiences to normalcy in her life right here in the Ojai Valley. From 1983 to 1985, she spent her sophomore and junior years at Happy Valley School (now the Besant Hill School), at last having a chance to do that which usually eluded her: blend in with her peers.

“I think she was so overwhelmed by the notoriety that she didn’t invite, that she just wanted to quietly slip into the school … she just wanted to take a deep breath,” said Dennis Rice, former Happy Valley School headmaster.

Her classmates welcomed her as she was, and were often very protective of her if anyone dared attempt to pry, as one of her closest friends from HVS, Jake Rupp, shared.

Rupp recalled a situation with a former boyfriend of Lisa Marie at that time. It was discovered that this particular boyfriend from Los Angeles was tipping o paparazzi to Lisa Marie’s whereabouts.

As soon as Lisa Marie broke it o with him, “We were all gathered together ready to get the pitchforks out” if he ever returned to the valley, Rupp joked. But, he added, that’s just the kind of community the HVS student body was: “I have a lot of friends from Happy Valley that I could go for years without talking (to), but I know that if anything ever happened, I could call them and they would be there for me. … I think we were able to help her through it; I do think that she trusted the people on campus.”

Rupp became very close to Lisa Marie. He said she would introduce him as her “best friend from high school” at different parties in adulthood — and saw firsthand how she was moving past the “confining” aspects of her young life. “In some respects at the school, she was a blank slate and willing to try all different things. So many things were new to her that you wouldn’t expect to be new. …I liked that she was playful. We could just sort of be silly and have fun. She was pretty adventurous.”

Rupp’s memories of Lisa Marie are heartily punctuated with laughter as he detailed the hours of riding scooters around Montecito on days o from school, and, post-high school, dancing to Cameo’s “Word Up!” with pillows stu ed in their shirts in her Westwood apartment. He reflected on “one of the best times” of his life at Happy Valley School — a weeklong school excursion to Santa Cruz Island. “We had the whole island to ourselves. A group of us, including Lisa, would just take o in the mornings.” They found a bottomless pit to throw rocks in, unearthed archeological ruins, and partook in light rock climbing along the coastline. “We just kept discovering things, and discovering stuff for the first time together … we were just so free, with no pressures of anything related to society.”

Although Lisa Marie’s time at Happy Valley School ended after junior year — and she ultimately did not finish high school — Rupp remained in her life, although they only saw each other intermittently and did not fully reconnect until around 2008. Rupp talked of how she always felt “comfortable” in Ojai, and even had an epic birthday weekend in the valley, which replicated a happy weekend spent with Rupp and their other close friend, the late Caitriona Meek Nelson, circa the late-2000s.

“There was one weekend where she came to town … she was doing her music and seemed to be in a good place. We just hung out in Ojai; we went to Antonio’s (Mexican) Restaurant and had a really fun dinner.” After an outing at the spa, they had another fun night and had “this crazy time at the Deer Lodge. We just had a really mellow, fun, casual Ojai weekend.”

Above: Soma Kaplan, left, and Lisa Marie relax on the grass during an HVS day trip. “It was a special time in our lives. We all felt very protective of her...it was a lovely, nice time for all of us,” Kaplan recalled.

Photo submitted

For the following birthday after this outing, Rupp said she invited some Tinseltown pals and other friends from Los Angeles down to the valley and arranged to rent out the Ojai trolleys, which carted her posse from the Ojai Valley Inn to the wholly rented out Antonio’s Mexican Restaurant. “Of all places, just to be at Antonio’s with this group of people … that was very cool.” She rented out the Deer Lodge and had friends ride a bucking mechanical bull and play Deer Lodge games. “It was … so Ojai.”

As the years went on, Rupp said he and Lisa Marie emailed and visited once or twice a year. Although Lisa Marie remained “guarded” throughout her life, Rupp said that she often intuitively reached out to him in his own life’s harder moments. “Sometimes, she would just really come through and be the right person to o er support to me that was meaningful.”

Lisa Marie Presley Feb. 1, 1968 — Jan. 12, 2023

Photo by David French/Wikimedia CC

Rice, too, reflected on Lisa Marie’s path to support others: “We had discussions at the school — we knew that she was going to be very, very rich one day, and I encouraged her to do something significant with that opportunity.” With that in mind, he cited Lisa Marie’s charity work in Memphis as one of the largest parts of her legacy. Presley Place, a 12-unit housing complex she funded with the Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association to help homeless women and children get back on their feet, is still up and running more than 20 years later. “She did some really wonderful things there. It was really important to her,” Rice said. “Her time at Happy Valley … was a private time,” Rice continued. “It just allowed her to be a teenager; she stepped out of the limelight and was just another kid in the school. ... She had a lot of friends and a lot of people who loved her through that. I think she really appreciated that time that she spent with us.”

Elvis Presley and Priscilla with Lisa Marie, February 1968. Photo courtesy Wikimedia CC

Rupp concurred: “I think she developed friendships that she could count on later in life. Even though it was a short period in Ojai, I believe that she developed lifelong connections.”

Lisa Marie Presley (right) and her mother, Priscilla, on move-in day at the Happy Valley School dorms in fall 1983. Jake Rupp said: “I didn’t know who they were when I took this pic; I was taking pics of everyone on move-in day at Upper Dorm. I was horrified when I found out because they probably thought I was being a gawker.”

Photo by Jake Rupp

Mimi Walker

Ojai Magazine, Spring 2023