Rita Rivest

Rita Rivest, a great, iconic soul who rescued herself and many others, passed away from complications of pancreatic cancer.

She was beloved by legions - friends and clients in Santa Barbara, New York, Chicago and wherever she alighted. She will be remembered forever.

Contributions in her memory can be made to:

March 6, 1948, British Columbia -

September 7, 2023, Santa Barbara

Rita Rivest’s life was about rescuing people…beginning with herself. Before the term was ever coined, Rita was a coach. Actually, she was something closer to a life-support whisperer, a deep listener with a big laugh. Whatever she did, she was all-in.

Having fallen hard for Santa Barbara twenty-plus years ago, she set up housekeeping in the hills about Montecito. Even after her Toro Canyon home - and all she owned burned to the ground - she didn’t leave. She moved next door.

If she approached you - after a cautious appraisal - she was on a mission. Usually, there were a few pointed questions, Rita listening with every fiber of her 110 pounds. “I know you,” she would say. “I get who you are!”

And she did.

Rita was particularly skilled at helping women – many of whom had scaled the summits of their professions but who were crumbling within. “I will always think of her leading an army of strong, smart successful women,” said her friend Luis Mora, who first met Rita in Milwaukee in the early 1980s when she ran a popular exercise studio called Stretch.

Not long after, Rita headed to Manhattan where she built up a successful private practice while working in publicity. “When I met her, she more or less ran Susan Blond’s PR business,” recalled her friend, music manager and producer Fred Heller, who noted it was a place where one would meet the A-List of the music business.

She segued into working with private clients as a personal trainer – mostly women; then started a downtown center on Grand Street devoted to issues of women and aging.

In the late ‘90s, Rita established the Ojai retreat Sage Hill – a Magic Mountain mecca of sorts for physical and spiritual health. “You don't waste time with Rita,” wrote the playwright/journalist Jonathon Reynolds, “and she will demand much of you.” She had done it all herself.

Sometimes that meant trips to Manhattan to run up the 86 flights (1576 steps) of the Empire State Building.

In her off hours, Rita huddled exhaustively with scores of addicts and alcoholics whom she met in recovery rooms throughout the U.S.

Friends, clients, addicts confided all to Rita, knowing her to be a tomb of discretion. Many got to know parts of Rita – but few, if any, knew the whole Rita. She was forthcoming, even fearless, speaking about her phoenix-like survival from a searing, abusive childhood, her recovery - but not the specifics of her life. The full arc of her life story was a mystery to most all.

“She was secretive in a way,” said her close friend of many years, publisher Joni Evans. “She silo-ed parts of her life to different people.”

That said, a little Rita went a long way.

A passport tells us that Rita Camille Rivest was born in the logging town of Mission in British Columbia. Her family was French-Canadian with indigenous ancestry.

Alcoholism and abuse raged through generations of her family. In her adolescence, her mother dispatched her to a foster home where she dreamed and schemed of escape. At 15, she took off with a boyfriend. She never looked back.

She beelined to the big cities- Toronto and a long stint in Montreal before settling in the States. A striking looking, athletically-fit woman, she was a quick learner of unusual discipline and grit. Having shut the door on her family of origin, she set about creating a new family.

There was plenty of travel, partying, and her own boozy trips to Mexico. By 1980, she hit her own bottom and found her way to an iconic recovery clubhouse in Chicago where she met the woman she called her “adopted mother.” She never drank again and declined pain medication even during a painful struggle with cancer in her last year.

Sober and sane, Rita threw herself into wellness with the same zeal that fueled her teenage escape. “Rita saved lives, “ said her friend Claudia Albetta. “She was a wounded empath who became a spiritual warrior.” Suffused within her resurrected self was a raw vulnerability that beckoned to other grieving souls.

She found a career mentor in Deborah Szekely, aka “the Godmother of Wellness,” who had founded the Baja retreat, Rancho La Puerta in the ‘50s and later the posh Golden Door. Rita was hired to create Szekely’s exercise programs, launching her as the go-to gal/trainer/life style coach for celebrities and go-getters.

Several of Rita’s friends recall a long early relationship to an older Israeli businessman. She raised his sons and he helped fund her early ventures. In the late 80s she was briefly married to musician/composer Elliott Murphy.

In 1991, she formally converted to Judaism, said Heller, likely stemming from her many friends and beaus who were Jewish. She attended services at New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue where she had studied for conversion. “We went together on the High Holidays and she always came to Seders at our place in Westchester,” said Heller.

Later in life, she would slip into Buddhism and loved visiting the Vedanta Temple down the road from her last home, an immaculately-appointed redoubt in the hills of Montecito.

Her appetites were robust – for hiking, the natural world, friendship and romance. She was a guy-magnet with no shortage of suitors. “She loved men!” said a close friend.

“In a sense, she was always that girl who got out of B.C,” said Mora. “Ultimately she did it all herself.” She was entirely self-created.

Early on she had made the discovery that by loving others, she could feel love herself. “What she cared was about helping people,” said her friend Arno Jaffe. “She loved life.”

She loved it all…

In Memoriam

By A.L. Bardach / The Santa Barbara Independent, October 4, 2023

To see this working, head to your live site.

joni evans

Oct 22, 2023

My Rita

in Memories

I met Rita back in the early 90s. She was teaching an exercise class in a private home in Westchester County, NY, and I was invited to be one of the participants. I was, at that time, 50, overweight, overworked, tense, mid-divorce, and running a huge company. I could hardly breathe and there was something about Rita that made me think she might save my life. I signed her up for weekly private lessons at my home.

Of course, within a few months, she was my best friend.

I visited Sage Hill many times and when my mother passed away in 2001, I stayed with Rita for a few weeks just to heal. We hiked together, of course, she much faster and stronger than I, and she reshaped my eating habits, my hormone regimen (I had been taken off pills; she put me back on), and tried (unsuccessfully) to get me to stop drinking wine. Years later, when she moved back to NYC, she spent weekends with me in my home in Westchester, we went to screenings together, visited the Botannical Gardens in the Bronx, went to museums, and she got me through another loss —that of my sister to cancer.

We traveled together to Paris for my 70th birthday...I had lost my favorite stud earrings months before; a new set was her birthday present to me.

She was always secretive about her past (yes, I knew vaguely of an abusive childhood; vaguely of a marriage to a musician) and if I ever probed, Rita would deflect my questions. Rita had firm boundaries...she simply wouldn't discuss things she didn't want to discuss.

I remember quite a few boyfriends in her life... some she introduced me to,..but in the years I knew her, she hadn't found a real love. God knows how many wild encounters she had...she was a big flirt, and men loved her.

We often went to spas together...I remember being in Arizona with her where she sprung up the CamelbackMountain like a billy goat...I had managed to join her at the summit about a half hour later. Upon returning to the bottom, I realized I had left my favorite sweater near the top where I had stopped to rest.. I considered it gone. But no, Rita sprung up and climbed that mountain AGAIN, retrieving my sweater.

I don’t remember Rita being religious, but we shared a belief in spirituality. We visited mediums and shared mystical experiences often. I continue to capture orbs in my camera and Rita was both fascinated and fully open to the afterlife. The first medium she met "saw" her living in two places: NY and California; brought a message from a close friend of hers that was undeniably someone she knew well...from then on we relished and shared our paranormal experiences.

Most stunning was her memory… anything I experienced and told her about she remembered. It was like having a personal biographer..."Remember the time..." she would ask and, of course, I didn't until she chronicled it in detail.

When I fell madly in love in my 60s, Rita was so happy for me. And she loved my Bob. She formed her own special relationship with him and they were like siblings. When it came time to marry, it was Rita who performed our ceremony (applying for credentials and writing a beautiful poem for us)...at the side of a golf course in Montecito, where we wintered to be near her. And the 3 of us traveled together to Costa Rica and beyond. Wherever we went Rita attracted new friends. I used to tease her that when she got off a plane, she had collected at least 10 names and phone numbers. Waiting on line at the movies, she would strike up a conversation with a stranger and the next thing you know, that stranger was coming for dinner.

It was Rita's idea that Bob and I rent a house in Montecito for the winter months. Unfortunately, we were there for the mudslides in January of 2018. That night, before the rains had started, Rita moved into our home as we were in a non-voluntary move area and she wasn't. We woke up to no power but little else seemed askew. We just assumed a bad storm. Soon the tragedy we amazingly missed all around us became clear. People, neighbors had lost their lives. We were told to stay in our homes, probably for a few days at least, as the roads were blocked by mud, uprooted trees, and large boulders. Of course, Rita knew everyone in the town... the police, the sheriff, the fire department. She charged her phone in her car and within 24 hours engineered a way to get us out.

Mostly I remember laughing with Rita. Not just laughter: hysterical, fall-down laughter. She was soooo funny. Somehow we always shared the absurd (comics, comments, tv programs) and loved telling each other about it. She called me her sister as I did her (though, of course, now I realize there were many sisters!).

I loved Rita. We spoke every few days; sent presents (she always sent me beautiful nightgowns disapproving of my unsexy flannel nightwear). When she called me with her shocking cancer diagnosis, I was standing in the exact spot at the Bronx Botanical Gardens where we went together the year before.

In the two years that followed, we spoke almost every day. She refused to let me see her-- claiming fear of infection. Yet she sent me beautiful photos of herself…her hair turned a gorgeous silver and her skin was glistening. She never looked better than after chemo, she laughed. Of course I was not there to see how thin she had become nor the skin sores that she suffered or the many indignities of her disease. “I’m just doing all I can do "is what she said, over and over, still hiking, still laughing and she remained hopeful to the end. I’m sure she was as surprised as we all were to have lost her life. For her life was always on overdrive.

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