Claudine Pearson Luppi
92, Sherman Oaks
If you look closely, you can glimpse Claudine Pearson Luppi riding a camel through an Egyptian desert in the 1954 motion picture “Valley of the Kings.” Luppi was an extra in that largely forgotten film, her only reward a lunch with its leading man, Robert Taylor.
It’s unfortunate that Hollywood didn’t keep in touch after that, because Luppi went on to lead a life so adventurous it seemed made for the big screen.
As the young wife of a U. S. diplomat, she watched history being made in Egypt, Pakistan and India, and helped organize a reception in New Delhi for Jacqueline Kennedy during the first lady’s 1962 goodwill trip to India. Kennedy’s trip came amid intense geopolitical tension, yet won over a nation and turned her into a global icon.
Luppi’s memories of that night, “A Dinner for the First Lady,” are on file at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
During the Indo- Pakistani war nine years later, Luppi had a different role, helping evacuate U. S. citizens from Karachi to Tehran.
She and her diplomat husband divorced when she was 49. She then went back to the Middle East to teach elementary school in Saudi Arabia.
“Claudine lived quite a life,” said
Glory Ellen Pearson Peel. Asked to describe her cousin in just one word, Peel choose “gutsy.”
“Either that,” she added, “or you could call her a self- made woman.”
Luppi, who spent the final years of her life in a nursing home in Sherman Oaks, died Aug. 4 from complications of COVID- 19. She was 92.
The eldest of eight children born into poverty in Lewiston, Idaho, Claudine Pearson was caring for her siblings by the time she was 5.
“She came from being a barefoot little kid in rural Idaho to really self- styling her own kind of glamorous world- traveler role,” daughter Mary Basich said.
Luppi worked as a journalist in Idaho and Las Vegas, was a mother to four, attended Brigham Young University and American University, taught school on two continents, co- wrote a cookbook and lived in more than half a dozen states and four countries.
“We called her the Energizer Bunny,” her daughter said. “Because she just kept going.”
Luppi got a job as a reporter at the tiny Lewiston Morning Tribune after graduating high school in 1946. A year later, she left for BYU, where she met Hobart Luppi. The two shared a desire to travel and see the world, and after marrying in 1950, Hobart became a diplomat with the U. S. Foreign Service.
Later, as the wife of a consul general, Claudine Luppi was a visible face of the U. S. government during their postings.
“She was extremely involved in the local American community,” said Basich, who was born during her parents’ time in India. “She was really kind of a striking leader.”