Harper Valley is the fictitious community named in the 1968 hit song "Harper Valley PTA" as well as the movie and television series of the same name. The community, supposedly located in Ohio near Cincinnati, was founded by the Harper family and in the movie and television series, was personified by Otis Harper, Jr. (played in the movie by Pat Paulsen and in the television series, in a friendlier form, by George Gobel).
The other powerful family in the community was the Reilly family, headed by pompous and snobbish Flora Simpson Reilly (played in the television series by Anne Francine and the movie by Audrey Christie). In the movie, she was married to a man named Henry Reilly; but in the television series, she was considered a widow with the presumption that Henry had died. She had a daughter in the television series named Wanda Reilly Taylor (Bridget Hanley).
In both movie and TV show, she had grandchildren. In the movie, her granddaughters were twins, Edwina and Bettina, (played by twins Laura and Jan Teige). In the television series, her granddaughter was named Scarlett (played by Suzi Dean). In the movie, due to their being reared by their snobbish grandmother, Bettina (and Edwina, to a lesser extent) were enemies of Stella Johnson's daughter, Dee (played by Susan Swift in the movie; Jenn Thompson played her in the television series); whilst in the TV show, Scarlett (Wanda was her mother) was Dee's adversary.
To the untrained eye, Harper Valley looked like any other small town on the surface, prim and proper and friendly. In reality, it was full of people who had very little if any real moral character. In fact, most of the town characters were miscreants, adulterers, alcoholics, and other kinds of people of that stripe.
A resident of the community, Stella Johnson (played in both the movie and TV show by Barbara Eden), a widowed door-to-door cosmetics salesperson with a thirteen-year old daughter (the aforementioned Dee) was sent a denounciatory letter calling her on her flaunting of the society mores of the time, (mainly that the PTA thought she was a disgusting role model for Harper Valley's impressionable young people, and a very real temptation for their husbands, due to her wearing miniskirts, drinking and flirting with men, etc.) and if she did not mend her ways more to the PTA's liking, Dee would be expelled from school. In short, Dee was being punished for the perceived transgressions of her mother.
Furious with their snobbery and their self-righteousness and hypocrisy, Stella stalked to the school, and in a never-to-be-forgotten confrontation with the PTA, exposed them all to be the frauds that she knew them to be. Her prime enemies were Flora and the other women who were allied with her either professionally or socially.
Stella's friends in town were Alice Finley, the owner of La Moderne, the local beauty shop. In the movie, Alice is played by Nanette Fabray) and Cassie Bowman (on the television show, played by Fannie Flagg). Cassie also subsequently worked and was said to have owned the La Moderne (performing the same functions Alice did in the Movie as Stella's friend and co-conspirator). She later found a job at Harper Valley's newspaper, The Sentinel as a reporter.
In the television show, her relationship with Willamae Jones (played in the series by Edie McClurg) was more friendly and not nearly as acrimonious as it was in the movie (Willamae was played in the movie by Fay DeWitt), and she was also semi-friendly with fellow PTA member Vivian Washburn (played by actress Mari Gorman). She got on well with other members of the PTA, to some degree, excepting for the Reillys.
Harper Valley's bank was the Bank of Harper Valley, owned by the Reilly family. Bobby Taylor (played in the movie by John Fiedler and in the television show by Rod McCary), who was married into the Reilly family in the TV show, was the town's leading attorney.
