By Hans Allhoff
There’s an argument to think twice before venturing off to new and distant places. Instead, why not burrow into your own backyard? Stay home, go deep, practice monogamy of place. You will run less risk of missing places like the Zorthian Ranch.
You can look down on the Ranch from high on Chaney Trail or Mount Lowe Road, which the Star News called a “trash-strewn hilltop” in its obituary for Jirayr Zorthian. Not entirely unfair: Zorthian could be accused of razing healthy orchards and filling gullies with countless junked automobiles, industrial waste, and construction debris. But do think twice before completely condemning a place, and a man so dear to local legend. Both, after all, were very close to Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman’s own heart.
Zorthian was an Armenian who fled the genocide as a boy, and landed on some Altadena acreage in 1946 by way of Yale School of Art, Europe, FDR’s WPA, and the United States Army. As a GI he worked in intelligence and painted his mural masterpiece The Phantasmagoria of Militigary Intelligence Training. The whereabouts of the 4 x 157 foot mural are unknown, but a since-covered wall at the Pentagon isn’t out of the question. A digitized version spans the wall of an AirBnB on the Ranch.
Today, the Ranch comprises 40 acres that’s home to his son Alan (long time AH board member), a number of docents, and various experimental projects. Permaculture and agriculture, art work, animal husbandry, outdoor education, assemblage architecture, and living resourcefully are all under study there.
A modern economy and permit-policing state aren’t kind to places like this. But admirably, if imperfectly, it endures — and the next generation, including Alan’s daughters Caroline and Julia , and others, are all-in on keeping it going.
Alan worked for years after his father’s death in 2004 to clear away junked cars and materials objectionable to County health and other officials.
Visually, the place is still somewhat funky — more reclusive Topanga than the refined side of Altadena. There is a pool with a view, but it won’t make your vision board if you typically source from Dwell and Architecture Digest. The ascent is precarious, if you like your roads graded and your bridges sturdy. But welcome to what Zorthian called “The Center for Research and Development of Industrial Discards with Emphasis on Aesthetics.” Alan jokes his dad always said he needed 40 more years to get the Ranch right.
The Ranch belongs here because it stands for the same thing Altadena does: the primacy of place in our happiness and freedom. (Now that’s some good intersectionality!) Counter-cultural, sure, but, aspirationally egalitarian in its front-door policy.
But back to the man. The wild man.
“Jerry” as he was mostly known since coming to America, was Dionysian and unpretentious in his worldview, but a Yale man, millimeters removed from Skull and Bones. Knowing that Jerry and Richard Feynman were dear friends, trading lessons in physics and art for years, I like to imagine how a meeting between the artist and William F. Buckley, his fellow Yale alumnus, would have gone. Would WFB have threatened to “sock him in the goddamn face,” as he did Gore Vidal? This would have ended poorly: Jerry was 5’3 but a decorated wrestler with a ferocious physicality.
Zorthian was a witness not only to genocide but to the tragic death of his own 18-month old son, whom he accidentally backed over in his van. Yet he came out on the other side with a life oriented to experimentation and play. He often painted nudes and in later years famously hosted a birthday “Primavera” party in which he, calling himself Zor-Bacchus, sat on a throne as nude women danced around him, feeding him grapes.
But ultimately, he was a family man, an artist with unimpeachable chops, though uninterested in the art world or business. He studied Michaelangelo and Da Vinci while in Europe, and wanted to be broadly talented like them. It was always the Ranch, not any piece or portfolio of art, that was Jerry’s lifeline and justification.
Zorthian’s art does hang at the Ranch, of course — a portrait of Miss October 1963, Christine Williams, is in the Ranch’s version of a gift shop (and photos of Zorthian painting it in Playboy’s October 1963 issue). Across the room is a massive painting, The Divorcement, depicting the disintegration of his first marriage. That wife, Betty Williams, served him with papers upon his return from Syria attending to his father’s death. As Alan tells it, she’d been in Pasadena, falling in with Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard, and Alistair Crowley. In the divorce, she got the kids and he the land. His second marriage, to his enduring muse Dabney (Alan’s mother), lasted until his death.
The Feynman friendship left an artistic footprint, too. There is the “Feynman Wall of Passion,” a stone and brick wall inlaid with found objects that frames a small sanctuary. Across the way, a metal sculpture approximately the size of an RV represents the collision and harmony of their respective fields.
But it feels like the art isn’t the main point of the Ranch. It’s the built environment —almost all of it done by hand. Fine craftsmanship does’t define it either, but rather the boundless evidence of toil, ingenuity, whimsy, and a resistance to the tyranny of the perfect. It is telling that Jerry considered the Boy Scouts of his youth as formative to his design philosophy as Yale.
It’s hard to knock any of this considering the Ranch attracted just about everyone: L.A. bohemians, Andy Warhol (whose after-party following his first Pasadena show was at the Ranch), JPL intellectuals, art luminaries, Bob Dylan, John Lautner and, maybe most legendary, jazzman Charlie Parker.
About that: “Charlie Parker at Jirayr Zorthian’s Ranch, July 14, 1952,” is not easy listening. It exists because someone there happened to have a reel-to-reel tape recorder: the liner notes say “the sound quality is inevitably bad.” But that is not an apology, because what you’re listening to is less a concert than a night in time. If the acoustics are just too horrifying, fine. The story of their meeting and the night is told in comic–book form in Chasin’ the Bird: A Charlie Parker Graphic Novel. Read that.
The Ranch is pure Jerry. Emerging from it, rolling back down to Loma Alta, the poet Gary Snyder comes to mind. “Find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there.” Alan told me when his dad came to southern California, he first looked at La Jolla. Let’s celebrate, clothes on or off, that this beautiful, crazy person found Altadena and dug in here instead.