F E a t u re Photo by Jorge M. Vargas Jr.
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Odd numbers: Jay Griffith’s former home on Palms Boulevard in Venice Even numbers: Griffith’s former Venice office on California Boulevard tion’s public outreach coordinator and a former member of its board. “If there’s going to be any low-income people left in the community, Venice Community Housing will be the one housing them,” she says. Griffith and Lucks go back 23 years as original organizers of the Venice Garden & Home Tour, currently on hiatus, that raised millions of dollars for the Neighborhood Youth Association. Griffith and Venice Community Housing Corporation Executive Director Steve Clare became neighbors when Griffith bought his first home, a modest bungalow on Palms Boulevard with a big yard, for all of $25,000 in 1973 shortly after completing visual arts grad-school studies at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Clare had a unit in an aesthetically challenged co-op apartment complex. “He would look across the wall at our two stucco boxes facing each other over scraggly grass — he always referred to it as Stalag 17 — and tried mightily to help us upgrade our landscaping,” Clare recalls.
“We became much more appreciative later.” Griffith sold the house on Palms seven years ago in order to save a restored Spanish Colonial Revival home in Pacific Palisades from the wrecking ball. The 1925 home with sweeping canyon views in its backyard was designed by celebrated Santa Monica architect John Byers for actress Billie Dove and later belonged to actor Eddie Albert and his actress wife Margo. Griffith now lives there with five small rescue dogs, an overfed goat and an American miniature horse, and that’s where he’ll host Saturday’s party. “Everyone wanted to tear this down because it’s Spanish and Spanish is out of style in this neighborhood. These people have never heard of genius loci — sense of place,” he says. “They have a very myopic view of life and a very myopic education. They used to teach music appreciation, wood shop, auto shop in school. Now they teach the basics and a lot of computer technology, and people are excelling in very specific fields but they don’t know Shinola from Chopin.”
Griffith’s education was anything but narrow. Griffith grew up in Woodland Hills, the youngest child of a Hollywood lighting director and an artistically inclined mother by a margin of 10 years — “a love baby,” he says, and one whose every creative impulse was indulged by mom, dad and wealthy grandparents in equally generous measure. “I could draw. I could paint. I could sculpt from a very young age. I was a backwards child from the point of spoken or written word — slightly dyslexic — but I have a photographic memory when it comes to anything visual,” says Griffith. “I failed geometry. I failed math. I’m an idiot savant, if I must say so. The point is I really have a calling for what I do.” Like his grandparents, Griffith’s parents were avid gardeners. “We had this pretty crazy garden — a lot of groovy plants, a tropical forest in the backyard,” he says. “For my birthday or Christmas they’d ask what I wanted and I’d say I wanted to go the nursery and buy some plants.”
Griffith says his gardening bug was also nurtured by the world-class horticultural education programs offered by San Fernando Valley public schools at the time, a relic of the area’s pre-World War II agricultural roots. “I was a gardening major in grammar school. I was a landscape prep major at Taft High. To get out of high school I had to know Latin names for all the plants,” he says, naming the various plants in a section of his backyard: camellia japonica, kentia howea, philodendron salome, acanthus mollis. The high school art teacher who lobbied for Griffith’s diploma despite his poor grades urged him to forgo plans to study agriculture in favor of a liberal arts education, a path that would eventually lead him to Mexico. “At graduation my grandmother gives me a letter from her bank — carte blanche for school, clothes, a car, everything: $10,000 now, $10,000 for graduate (Continued on page 16) April 23, 2015 THE ARGONAUT PAGE 15