Creative and a Little Bit Crazy : Altadena’s Legendary Jirayr Zorthian Sculpts Life, Land to His Own Design

In an instant, Jirayr Zorthian scampered up a narrow iron ladder on a retaining wall at his Altadena ranch.

“Shortcut,” he explained as he toured his rambling, dust-covered spread in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

From this vantage point, the painter-sculptor-craftsman-eccentric scanned a landscape heaped with junk: a full-sized telephone booth, heavy-equipment tires, river rocks, rusty metal slats and broken concrete--all grist for the Zorthian artistic mill.

To him, everything is a work in progress. “I have 40 more years of work,” Zorthian said. “I’m 79 now. So 40 years from now. . . .” He paused for emphasis. “I’ll be 119.” Then, true to his feisty spirit, he said: “I don’t have time to die.”

A visit to the Zorthian art ranch makes clear that he has no intention of relinquishing any of his roles--as rattlesnake handler, horse breeder, architect, painter, winemaker, hog butcher, lover of life and raconteur extraordinaire.

“A lot of people my age have given up being curious or vital,” he said the other day. “Can you imagine me in a retirement home playing shuffleboard?”

The 5-foot-3 Zorthian’s muscles are rock hard, although his sun-weathered, tawny skin sags.

Shirtless and in shorts, he walked the ups and downs and sideways of his ranch, 45 acres of chaparral perched 2,000 feet above sea level, with the rest of Altadena and Pasadena covered in smog below.

This place--rich in textures, shapes and smells--has been his home since he left the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps after World War II.

Although by no means a famous artist, the Yale-educated painter has exhibited around the country and the world. As a teacher and mentor, he has inspired many. And in Pasadena art circles, his reputation for eccentricity has grown to mythic proportions.

“You go to these boring, liberal parties and there he is having a great time, wearing a hand-tooled leather top hat and colorful vests,” said Pasadena arts activist Dorothy Garcia. “He’s like a half-man, half-horse, a centaur with Pan influences, dancing on tables. He’s sort of a mountain Toulouse-Lautrec.”

Last month, during the sweltering heat of a party staged by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zorthian complained that no one got up to dance with him and his wife, Dabney, 56, a tall woman with elegant bearing and a head of luxuriously long, graying hair.

“What’s the matter with these young people?” Zorthian said, cane in hand. “I’ve got a broken leg--I fell off my horse--and all these beautiful young people with strong legs aren’t dancing.”

Zorthian the dancer gained fame in the best-selling book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”

The author, the late Richard P. Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Caltech, recounted how Zorthian, taken by Feynman’s bongo-drum playing at a party, ran into the bathroom and sprayed designs in shaving cream on his hairy chest. When he returned, Zorthian had cherries hanging from his ears.

“Naturally this crazy nut and I became good friends right away,” Feynman wrote.

The physicist, who died in 1988, detailed how he and Zorthian exchanged lessons in physics and art, and also sketched the same Playboy models.

Decades after the bongo-inspired dance, Zorthian is still exploring his own laws of physics and art.

He is known for hosting exotic banquets with a robust blend of intellectuals, scientists, movie stars and artists in attendance. Pilgrims such as actor Burgess Meredith, futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, Bob Hope’s wife, Dolores, and comedian Cheech Marin have journeyed up the dusty switchbacks to see the ranch’s wonders.

One of those who relishes Zorthian’s feasts is Albert R. Hibbs, now retired after years of prominence as a Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist. He said: “(Zorthian) is often a little bit crazy, but in such a pleasant way.”

He is a lavish yarn spinner. His tales can be ribald or shockingly painful, as in the case of stories from his Turkish Armenian boyhood, when he witnessed wholesale killings.

Zorthian, twice married, is reluctant to speak of certain family tragedies. Two of his seven children died.

But he thrives on explaining his bodily wounds. Every scar tells a story.

One on his elbow involved 80 stitches and looks as if it came from a broken bottle in a barroom brawl.

Said Zorthian: “I developed a sport called boar riding. You get on a 400- to 500-pound pig. You hold onto it behind the ears. If you stay on 75 feet, you’re lucky.”

Seventeen years ago, he teetered near death from a rattlesnake bite. He had tried to catch the snake--barehanded. Two years ago, he broke his leg training a horse. Recently he underwent a hip-replacement operation related to the fall.

The operation was successful, giving him new vitality. Now, he said, he can complete many languishing projects.

In 1973, William Agee, then the director of the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art (later taken over by the Norton Simon Museum), said Zorthian’s “entire ranch is a living work of art. . . . The distinction between architecture and art is difficult to tell.”

Proudly, Zorthian said: “This entire property has sort of been sculpted with a skip-loader.”

The sculpture, part art and part function, takes various forms. The most famous are his walls, which curb erosion on the mountainside and embody his visions.

“This is a controlled artistic situation,” Zorthian said, pointing to his favorite wall, taller than he is and sloping with the earth’s contour.

Encased amid the mortar and stone are a shovel, a piece of a tree that shaded Zorthian’s studio with bright yellow flowers before it died, and a baby doll with a hair-loss problem (Lady Godiva, he explained) on a ceramic horse.

Another totem contains a series of metal strips behind a rusted radiator. On each strip is inscribed Zorthian’s version of the seven deadly sins: “Judgmental. Indulgence. Vanity. Anger. Anxiety. Procrastination. Gluttony.”

The last of these, Zorthian said, he conquered by losing 12 pounds. The others, he said, he is still working on.

“This keeps me from going to the head-shrinker. I solve my own problems,” he said.

From somewhere came the wham-bang! of a dump truck unloading broken concrete--bounty for more projects. A rooster crowed. The heat of the day heightened the barnyard smells.

A longtime friend of the Zorthians, Kilbee Brittain of Los Angeles, said: “He’s the only person I know who could build a wall with a skull of a pig, a telephone and toilet bowls--all in perfect symmetry.”

Zorthian, explaining that friends bring gifts of junk, said: “Everybody knows what I need.”

He rang a hammer on an anvil and told how for $105 he got a slew of blacksmith’s tools. Moving on, he pointed with pride to other treasures: a phone booth affixed with a “Find it fast in the yellow pages” sign, and enough red stop signs to control traffic in a small town.

Soon, Zorthian said, he hopes to finish his decades-in-production, three-story, creosote-colored barn/house made of telephone poles. Scores of bottle-glass electrical insulators stud the outside walls.

He and Dabney live in a stone farmhouse, chockablock with artifacts and art, including the governor of Tennessee’s 1987 declaration that Zorthian is a “Tennessee Colonel” because of the mural he painted in 1938 in the state capitol.

Elsewhere on the property, he leases out what he calls a “$600,000 rich man’s house.” There are many other structures, including an unfinished guest house with an elaborate doorway and a tepee erected by American Indian friends.

There are terraces, kinetic art, horses, beehives and piles of tires.

Automobiles and trucks, many of them faded and in disrepair, dot the landscape. A lime-green 1957 Cadillac with two flat tires has a vanity plate reading ZORTH. A boom truck is next to a milk truck he and Dabney used for 24 years for their Zorthians’ Day Ranch for Children.

There is a black-and-white, snub-nosed Los Angeles County police bus; a Volkswagen van; an MG sports car and an ample supply of small trailers and campers.

One notable attraction is buried behind a wall of rusting items. It’s an elephant Zorthian made for a 1959 exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, constructed from a fire hose, buckets, burlap and rope. Inside the animal’s stomach is a papier-mache missionary’s head.

“I did this in 1959, long before Kienholtz and the others were doing this kind of art and selling it for a fortune,” he said, referring to Edward Kienholtz, whose assemblage piece “Back Seat Dodge ‘38” is part of the Los Angeles County Museum’s permanent collection.

As Zorthian walked through his bunker-like slaughterhouse and its environs, he spoke of what is: “This is where we make our own ham. This is where we make our own sausages.”

Outside the slaughterhouse, under the shade of live oaks, he spoke of what will be: “There’ll be a 150-by-50-foot lake with boats, swans, canoes.”

At another site, he said, “we’ll have cages of wild animals, trained for the movie business. We’ll have a bear, a wolf, a tiger.”

Inside the farmhouse over a lunch of lahmajoon (Armenian pizza topped with lamb paste), black olives, feta cheese and wine, he spoke of his Armenian childhood: “I saw people beheaded right in front of me. I saw people hanging from telephone poles. I saw terrible massacres.”

One day, Zorthian said, his father was led away to be executed. The family heard nothing more. Three years later, his father reappeared to tell of a miraculous escape.

Zorthian ate an olive down to the pit. He threw the pit with a true aim. It sailed into the fireplace, between the screen and the smoke-stained mantel.

He changed the subject.

After lunch, he surveyed his domain of unfinished projects and quoted an old saying: “ ‘Art is long but life is short.’ You can’t do it all.”

But he added: “Come back in 20 years and you’ll really see something.”