Last roundup at Lazy J

Jerry Johnson has given a Christmas party at Lazy J Ranch every year for 52 years, first at the original location in Canoga Park, more recently at the second site in the Malibu hills. For the last several years, those around her have worried that the parties were too much work, that she’s too old. This year, they insisted. The invitation read, “Please join me as I host my end-of-a-tradition Christmas Party with a little help from my friends.”

She has no shortage of them. Lazy J is a children’s camp. Since 1945, Hollywood movie stars have sent their kids to Johnson to be taught character -- and how to muck out stables. Johnson started the parties for camp counselors. Over the years, the guest list grew, as guest lists do. Young counselors brought their parents. Older counselors brought their children. The children had more children. Neighbors got wind of the eggnog. Soon the parties became an annual event.

They attract a horsy bunch. Go to a Lazy J party without ever having been on a horse and you’ll leave knowing the difference between a flip mount and a pony express mount, and able to argue the merits of bareback riding. Yet you also will come away sure that Christmas at Lazy J is about much more than camping or riding. As working ranches disappear from Southern California, the place where Maverick and Madame X -- James Garner and Constance Bennett -- shipped their kids has become a kind of living museum, a holdover from the glory days of old L.A. Against all odds, it’s still a place of big country, big cars, big drinks, of love, death, glamour, grudges and grit.

The setting could not be more Californian. In the late 1950s, after developers forced the camp from its original 40-acre site in Canoga Park, Johnson moved the ranch to a 165-acre spread in Ventura County, in the Malibu hills. It is far enough away from L.A. that there are blankets of stars, coyotes, mountain lions, snakes and the darting scrub birds of the chaparral.

The ranch house was built in 1929 by William Boyd, a silent screen actor in Cecil B. DeMille films, and later “Hopalong Cassidy” in the talkies. It also was briefly owned by Duncan Renaldo, the “Cisco Kid,” whose child went to Johnson’s camp. To picture it, imagine a San Simeon that a movie cowboy could afford. The result, oddly enough, is a place that would have suited Zorro: earthy and fantastical at the same time, and altogether lovely.

Structurally, the house is little changed from Boyd’s day. After entering through a tiny kitchen with a wood-burning stove and lined with Malibu tiles, one proceeds into a living room-great hall with an arching timbered ceiling and flanks of windows along each long wall. There is a walk-in fireplace, the baronial sort big in the ‘20s. The western flank of windows overlooks a voluptuous canyon covered in blue-green scrub. This descends to the Pacific. From the eastern windows, there is a view of the ascending hillsides, the Santa Monica Mountains, with a craggy peak, Old Boney, finishing off the horizon.

Given the theatrical scale of the place, most Angelenos would hire an interior decorator. But when Johnson moved in more than 40 years ago, she furnished it herself. She was so satisfied, she left it that way.

Several days before the party, the tree is up and lighted, and the banquet table built by Boyd to go with the house partly laid. The great room is furnished gentleman’s club style, with a maze of grouped chairs and couches. The positioning of the furniture says much about Johnson’s big-heartedness. It directs people into convivial groups. A better collection of mismatched but somehow highly compatible lamps would be hard to find outside the haphazard elegance of English drawing rooms. The play of color in the seemingly random choices of upholstery also could be English. Its rightness only looks like a happy accident. Chintz and moss green are interspersed with rich swathes of red. Pale blue walls set off gold curtains. The play of cool and warm colors is assured.

Then there is good junk -- colored glass, horse heads, cowboys and Indians -- all displayed with elegance, heart and humor. When it comes to this Wild West clutter, Johnson’s making her jokes and living with them too. Four-foot-high carved and painted cowgirl and cowboy figures hold up some big lampshades.

Johnson isn’t a born Westerner. She just liked it here. She learned the principles of design so evident in her living room back East. She was born to an affluent family in Winnetka, Ill., near Chicago, at a time when people wore gloves and hats to town. A beauty, she briefly worked as a hat model at the grand old department store, Carson Pirie Scott & Co. In addition to a teaching degree from Northwestern, she studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago.

She seems to have had a choice of men. A high school infatuation with a fellow named Hank Anderson didn’t take. She introduced him to another hat model from Carson Pirie. She married Par Johnson, a great bear of a man, full of gusto and play, some years her senior. Friends remarked that it suited her that she didn’t have to change her name. Her maiden name also was Johnson.

After her parents moved to California in the 1940s, she and Par followed. They bought a 40-acre spread in Canoga Park. It was formerly Bob Hope’s place, says Johnson. Movie people approached her because of her looks, but she stuck to teaching -- art -- at the School of Progressive Education across from the Hollywood Bowl. “It had all the movie star children,” she says. “Gene Kelly’s, Doris Day’s. They used to come out to my house in the Valley, learn how to saddle a horse and so on. So the parents said, ‘Why don’t you do it all summer?’ ” In 1945, the camp opened.

The first party for counselors was in 1951. John Bolero, now a retired professor of Recreation Parks and Tourism from Cal State Northridge, was there. He ended up at Lazy J one dark night in the fall of ‘51, dumped there in nothing but his long johns as part of a Hell Night for Delta Phi Delta fraternity at L.A. City College. Within months, a frat brother already working at the ranch invited Bolero to a Christmas party and to be inspected by the Johnsons as a potential counselor.

Bolero worked that Christmas vacation, the following summer, the next Christmas. By 1953, he was head counselor -- “meaning I got first pick of where to sleep in the chicken coop,” he says.

Roughing it with rich kids was an education. They were brats, he thought. “They were very spoiled and not easy to work with, but Jerry had this way with them.” Johnson’s daughter, Judy, then a horse-mad 12-year-old and future Miss Canoga Park, wasn’t much easier, he laughs. “She used to make them believe that if she didn’t like them, they wouldn’t be able to ride horses,” he says. “I remember Jerry trying to rein her in.”

If they went into camp as brats, they came out sweet kids. After the camp moved to Ventura County, a grateful Los Angeles County dedicated a park in Lazy J’s honor in the Valley.

The night of the End of an Era party, the sky has cleared after an early shower. The scrub is luminous as the setting sun catches a thick beading of rain. One of the first to arrive is Johnson’s first head counselor, John Bolero himself. His old frat brother, Wally Matsuura, with whom he was dumped in Canoga Park 52 years ago, is in the kitchen. “Wally!”

“John!”

Later that night, Bolero learns that the only way Matsuura managed to phone for help was because his mother sewed a dime in his long johns.

As the crowd swells, everyone has a reminiscence. Mary Martin, a counselor from 1965 to 1997, tells how five people in her family all worked at the ranch, all starting in the stables. Lisa Bryant, who started the camp at age 6, and is now at the party with her 10-month-old son, recalls what an exquisite honor it seemed to be selected for a ride on Par’s tractor. Becky Martin, a counselor for 28 years, refers to “Mrs. J” as a second mother after her parents died. Bolero talks about Johnson’s driving, the 1962 four-door Lincoln Continental convertible that caught fire and the way, long before SUVs, she’d take off across a field in her station wagon if she wanted to go a way the road didn’t go.

Many glasses are raised to Par Johnson. “Par was a John Wayne type,” says Bolero. “He was a big man, 6-foot-2. Had bright red hair. Rode a horse like he was glued to it. In the old days, he used to ride around the ranch on Parents Day with gun and holster on.”

He was also a drinker. He had six-packs of Miller beer tucked here and there all over the ranch, including in the famous blue tractor, all hidden from Jerry, remembers Bolero. Jerry did most of the running of the place. “She was the Barbara Stanwyck of that Big Valley,” he says. “She did the programming, the buying of the food, the training of the counselors, everything but the horses.”

Par Johnson died in 1984. His thirst was stronger than his liver, says Bolero. An intimate den off the main room feels like Par’s kingdom. Craig Johnson, a counselor and then the camp director since 1968, looks at the bar at the end of the room and laughs, “The nights we had in here!” In the hallway outside the den, photos line the walls. There’s one of King, Par’s quarter horse, a full 17 1/2 hands high. Dash, Judy’s horse, with her French poodle, Jigger.

Only one kind of memorabilia dominates the great room: Judy Johnson’s riding awards. “She’s the U.S. Champion in Western riding,” says Johnson.

After her husband died, she kept the camp going. It took someone who knew her before she was a ranch boss to see the formidable “Mrs. J” in a romantic light. Hank Anderson, the high school sweetheart who she had introduced to a fellow hat model from Carson Pirie, was widowed. Johnson invited him out for a holiday from the ferocious Chicago cold. When friends and staff spotted them having cocktails at sunset under the olive tree, they approved. “He was an old friend of both Par’s and Jerry’s,” says Bolero. “Neat guy, matter of fact. He was certainly not like Par. He had a lot of polish to him. He was much more genteel. Very warm, pleasant, friendly and very willing to acknowledge Jerry’s marriage to Par.”

Anderson was in Chicago when fire swept through the Malibu hills in 1993. The phones were cut off, so he flew out and appeared at her door. When he died more than a year ago, his family sent her some of his ashes.

Johnson was 69 when Par died. Today she must be close to 90, Bolero thinks, though he says she looks 20 years younger and acts younger still. Asked how many children she and her counselors have taught since 1945, she says, “Oh, I have no idea. Thousands. Thousands and thousands.”

Her friends worry that the annual Christmas parties are becoming too much. “They’re trying to get me to stop because it’s a lot of work,” says Johnson. “It doesn’t bother me.”

Is this really the end of an era?

“We’ll see,” she says.

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Throwing a good party

Jerry Johnson isn’t the type to dole out party tips. She’d sooner tell you how to get on a horse. But in fact, she does it very well. Here is the Johnson method observed:

Send invitations. Open houses fill up with boozers.

Invite only people you like. The person who bugs you in everyday life will only irritate you more when inquiring if you have any nondairy cheese.

Discourage guests from bringing small children.

Have it between 4 and 7 p.m., before the roads get too tricky.

Have it on Sunday, so people have done their hard drinking the night before.

Serve traditional food: turkey, ham, cheeses, olives. Experiment with trendy foods on guests at smaller dinner parties. Use two small turkeys instead of one big one. They have better flavor.

Leave plenty of room around the banquet table to avoid traffic jams.

Have some loyal friends man the entrance to grab potluck offerings and make sure only the presentable ones make the table.

Put punch and eggnog in a prominent place and hard liquor in the kitchen.

Clean the room with the pool table. The teens will find it and have a good time in spite of themselves.

If you have an interesting house, make your bed.

Invite your best friend to observe everyone while you meet and greet, and, afterward, to raise a glass and give you a postmortem.