Back to Africa

We were surrounded by ostriches. Just stay in place, I heard Jeremy Railton tell me, let them get to know you. I raised my eyes from the bare brown earth to see seven long, flexible necks and seven wackily intense faces moving in on me with their rounded beaks. This was as up-close-and-personal as I’d ever been with a 7-foot-tall bird of prehistoric countenance.

Suddenly the pecking began, starting low and moving upward: hands, arms, shoulders, scalp, all of it relentless, generally painless and even, after a minute or two, kind of pleasurable in its rhythm and style. More like affectionate pokes, or pecking, as in kissing. Feathers puffed and fluttered. A female got fixated on my rings. A male slapped his beanpole legs forward and grabbed a few strands of my hair. Birds, it came to me, are really witty, so Monty Pythonesque; I felt dangerously close to bursting out in some embarrassing happy-face song -- Getting to know you, getting to know all about you, getting to like you, getting to hope you like me ...

Down at the horse corral, an Arabian nuzzled our backs, massage-like. Emus gathered for head strokes. Deer raced by. Dust swirled, heat rose. Frantic, two peacocks squealed: Their baby had escaped the pen. A male turkey of preening magnificence strutted and showed off in front of us and his “wife and girlfriend,” as Jeremy referred to them. “He’s got a good eye for a skirt, that one.”

On his Three Rivers farm in the southern foothills of the Sierra Nevada, you can’t escape intimacy with animals or the natural world, but you’d be a fool to be here if you had a problem with that. Intimacy, in all its raw, undisguised glory, is the essence of this place. You’re not only here with Jeremy, the kind of man you can’t remember ever not knowing even though you’ve just met him, but also with an irresistible array of dogs, cats, bats, horses, goats, pigs, ducks, geese, guinea fowl, chickens and, of course, his beloved ostriches, which bring him back in time to his homeland, Zimbabwe. “There are moments when the whole thing looks just like Africa,” he said. And it does.

As it happened, Jeremy and I had Africa in common, farms in Africa, to be precise. For many years during my marriage I traveled back and forth to South Africa, where my husband and I had an apple farm in the mountains near Capetown. Jeremy, born in what was then Rhodesia, spent the early years of his childhood on a farm, later moving with his parents to their 25,000-acre game preserve. Growing up with lions and tigers has a way of making a fellow impressively nonchalant about the bobcats, bears and wild boars of the Sierra, I couldn’t help observing during the two days I was with him.

Still, I had no notion of how familiar everything would seem when I drove up through the mountains and past mile after mile of citrus groves to visit the farm in Three Rivers, a village of 3,000 people and no mayor, with a tiny strip of businesses on the highway that barely qualifies as a Main Street. But almost as soon as I turned from the paved public road onto the bumpy private road and spotted Jeremy out in the lower gardens with clippers in hand, I felt curiously in my element. He jumped in the car and we bounced onward toward the farmhouse, tucked in a forest of 200 valley oaks. A huge, glittery painting was propped against the door of the barn, my first inkling that, despite the familiarity, this was not going to be a commonplace experience.

It should have come as no surprise. Jeremy is the owner and creative director of the Marina del Rey-based Entertainment Design Corp., and so varied are his skills, so numerous his achievements, so modest his manner that even he can’t seem to keep up with everything he’s done or explain it in a concise, comfortable way. I had to go to his Web site, www.entdesign.com, to get the full picture.

Here’s what I found out: He has been a set and production designer for movies, TV, video, theater, awards shows, game shows, commercials, music tours, benefits, concerts, corporate events, the Olympics. Hundreds of them. His clients include Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, NBC, ABC, CBS, MTV, Fox, Caesar’s Palace. He has won three Emmys, one of which was for the 57th Academy Awards. Most recently he has been doing what he calls “themed entertainment and themed architecture and theme parks” everywhere, from Las Vegas to Tokyo to Saudi Arabia.

Jeremy had already told me the rooms of his farmhouse were “themed,” but I didn’t quite process the meaning until I got there and saw for myself. Two mixed-breed dogs gave me their exuberant dog welcome; a shy white cat stretched and contemplated whether to come near. Jeremy led me to the side door, across a bridge built over a gentle stream and onto a veranda with rocking chairs that overlooked a little waterfall. We entered the vast open space of the two-story, lodge-like cedar house -- all tall ceilings and rambling floor plan -- directly into the dining room-kitchen, where Yolanda Araiza, the caretaker and surrogate family member, was making homemade enchiladas. Cooking smells hung in the air. I decided to sit here in her soothing presence for a little while, chat aimlessly, drink peach tea at the , 14-foot-long dining table made from a tree that had died in nearby Sequoia National Park. I was back in Africa.

I wanted to look around the rest of this themed house, and as we wandered from carefree room to carefree room of the 5,000-square-foot home, I saw that it was perfectly in concert with Jeremy’s life, that it roamed the map just as he has, that it is a re-creating of his childhood in Africa, and that it employs all his considerable talents as a painter and set designer. It is an extravagantly imagined setting: Skulls and antlers hang near a gilded altar; landscape paintings hang on verandas, where beds are set up for alfresco sleeping. Family and friends come and go with great frequency, and those friends eventually become part of his “extended family.” Ryan Sweeten, a painter (his second solo show opened Tuesday at the New Space Gallery in Los Angeles and runs through Oct. 11), is one of them. “Jeremy’s the most generous human I know in the world. He’s everything to me -- mother, father, brother, best friend.”

We went into the darkish, downstairs Green Room -- part Victorian parlor, part English library, part New Orleans bordello -- and on upstairs into the brightly colored African bedroom, where Jeremy had painted folk art onto interior doors and, with Sweeten, nailed bottle caps all around the French doors that made them look from a distance as if they were jeweled. And across the hall to the Raj bedroom, its headboard dripping with beads left over from Cher’s 2002 tour, and on down the hall to the Chinese bedroom, with its headboard constructed of swap-meet wood inlaid with old frames cut into odd shapes. We ended up in yet another bedroom where the walls are filled with photos of Jeremy’s parents and ancestors in Africa, and where we sat on top of a bedspread crocheted by Zulu women looking through more family pictures.

Everything in the house, except the appliances and the bits and pieces inherited from his grandparents, has been bought at the local swap meet or salvaged from the sets he has created. “My whole thing is to do it fast and cheap and make it look good,” Jeremy said.

There is layer upon layer of things and themes, adding up to a wildly engaging fantasy house -- “a childish fantasy is what it is,” he said, embellishing the point:”the farm without the parents. It’s a great wizard’s house. In your own house, you don’t have any rules. Mine is totally self-indulgent. But that’s the joy of it -- that it’s totally unserious, totally without discipline.” In other words, build a bridge, build a treehouse, have all the animals you want, any kind you want, no matter how goofy or exotic. Go riding about the grounds in a golf cart. It was late afternoon, and the coolness of evening had begun to hint. We hopped on the red cart and took off down the lanes winding through the thick bosk of Jeremy’s immediate acreage.

Nearly 20 years ago, he was in Sequoia National Park with a close friend, the late Tim Wilson, a writer. “We saw those magnificent trees -- did you know they’re the largest living things on earth, larger even than the whale? -- and we swam in the Kaweah River and jumped over waterfalls, and I thought how wonderful it would be to live here. I had no money then, but I was able to get 10 acres for $55,000, only putting down $2,000. And then I called Anjelica to come up.”

Anjelica is Anjelica Huston, whom Jeremy has known since she was 16, when he was an art student in London. “I fell wildly in love with her immediately,” he said with what I quickly came to know as his absolute candor about his whole life. He moved in with her family (“They sort of adopted me”)(until, in short order, Anjelica left to film the 1969 movie “A Walk With Love and Death,” and he was given a contract by Gordon Davidson to do sets at the Mark Taper. He stayed on in L.A. after Cecil Beaton hired him as an on-site costume designer for the 1970 Civic Light Opera production of “My Fair Lady,” and for two years he and Anjelica lost touch. They met again by accident at the Cafe Flor in Paris, and eventually became platonic roommates in a house on Beachwood Drive.

From the beginning of their friendship, they made a youthful vow that they would have “a nice, big house in the country, although we intended it to be England,” Jeremy recalled. Still best friends, she came to see Three Rivers in the middle of summer, when it was dry and too hot even for the armadillos, and said oh, no, not possible, this looks like coyote country, which it was. But that winter Jeremy put in a big pond, she came back, and, “since then, we’ve been slowly buying up parcels and now have 160 acres, all joined together. It’s kind of become a center for us.” She lives in a stone cottage, original to the property, a few minutes away, and the two of them -- doing most of the work themselves -- have put in more ponds, planted willows, wisteria, sycamores, mimosas, fruit trees, almond trees, a huge vegetable garden that grows, everything they need for salad, soup and side dishes. “Anjelica makes jams and jellies really well. I keep telling her that’s what’s gonna make her famous.”

And there’s a memorial garden with urns containing the ashes of Anjelica’s Aunt Iris and her dog Minnie, her husband Robert Graham’s Aunt Mercedes and of Tim Wilson, who died eight years ago. “Eventually, we’ll all end up there,” Jeremy said.

Jeremy and Anjelica share Yolanda, the gardening and the care of many of the animals, like sweet, elderly Jake, the spaniel/lab who appeared one day when he was a puppy, Frances the whippet mix, and Chumpy the cat, found in a parking structure at LAX. “Basically I see myself as the caretaker of birds and animals up hereand not just domesticated,” Jeremy said. “We don’t kill any indigenous wild animals. We moved up here because of nature, and I don’t want to end up battling nature. The 55 acres just above the house, the hillside there, I bought that so there would always be some place for the wild animals to go if they’re pushed out by developments. I never will trap or harm one of them. In fact, we’ve never even chopped down a tree.”

The next morning I was awakened by the roosters. Jake wandered back and forth into my room and out onto the veranda. A momentary breeze clicked through Cher’s beads. I went with Jeremy to the coops adorned with Victorian chimney pieces on the wooden doors, and gathered black and white feathers shed by the ostriches, spotted ones by the guineas, golden brown ones by the chickens, striped ones by the turkeys. “Here’s breakfast,” he said, handing me fresh eggs. While he scrambled them, I sat at the big oak table stroking Chumpy, who’d slunk politely and elegantly into my lap. Frances was on alert at my feet, waiting for bacon handouts. Jeremy called Yolanda to come down and join us. We ate from plates that were exactly like the ones I ate breakfast from in my childhood, collected by my mother from cornflakes boxes.

This house, I realized, for whatever simple or complicated reasons, was more a Proustian environment that conjured up visual associations and memories rather than a decorated place, and this whole setting was an environment that brought up the most elemental, primal evocations.

“These are my roots,” Jeremy told me. “When I come here, I feel like I’m coming home.”

The farm is meant to bring you home, in every sense of the word. And even before I drove out through the stone gate arched with the big metal heart, I already missed it.

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Barbara King is the editor of the Home section. She can be reached at barbara.king@latimes.com.