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Aline Barnsdall: Creating Hollyhock House by Cheryl Johnson
line Barnsdall, the donor of Barnsdall Art Park, was the ultimate iconoclast—a fiercely independent feminist, a bohemian, a devotee and producer of experimental theater, and an enormously wealthy heiress. She was a single mother at a time when women were simply not single mothers. More importantly, she was also the real mother of modern architecture, having brought Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra to California to work on the avante garde theater colony she envisioned for Olive Hill in Los Feliz. Kindred spirits in many ways, it was Barnsdall who reached out and bankrolled Frank Lloyd Wright after his notoriety killed his domestic practice. She was generous, supportive and patient while Wright was consumed with his personal travails and the construction of the monumental Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Aline’s father, Theodore Barnsdall, was the largest independent oil producer of his time in the United States. Aline would travel extensively with her father throughout Europe, where she studied theater—her real passion in life—that landed her in Chicago in 1913. This pioneering, avante garde theater troop was located in the same building as Frank Lloyd Wright, and they met shortly after his Taliesin disaster.
10 DISCOVER HOLLYWOOD / WINTER 2024
RIGHT: Aline Barnsdall with daughter “Sugartop.” BELOW: Hollyhock House, interior courtyard. Anthony Nelson photo Wright was a celebrated, prominent architect before his major self-destruction. In 1909, Wright had fled to Europe with the neighbor’s wife, abandoning his wife and six children and his Chicago architectural practice and reputation. Wright was just beginning to overcome the notoriety of abandoning his family when the horrific murder of his mistress by a berserk employee put him back in the headlines. By 1916, however, Barnsdall had tired of Chicago and after a short stay in San Francisco, left for Los Angeles where she spent a year producing plays at a theater at Ninth and Figueroa drawing enthusiastic raves and a congratulatory telegram from Charlie Chaplin. That year Barnsdall revealed that she was pregnant and was open about the fact that Richard Ordynski, a Polish actor, was the father. Theodore Barnsdall died in 1917, leaving his estate to Aline and her half-sister, Francis, who bought out Aline’s interest in the Barnsdall Oil Company for $3 million. Aline had retreated to the Seattle area with Roy George, a writer and author who agreed to be named as the father of Barnsdall’s baby girl nicknamed “Sugartop.” For his part, George received a mortgage-free ranch. Neither her pregnancy nor the closure of her LA theater productions dampened Aline’s desire to create a visionary theater venue. Without any particular site in mind, Aline pestered Frank Lloyd Wright in early 1916 to design a new theater colony. Her timing was bad, however, as Wright had no domestic practice left, and had thrown himself into construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo between 1917 and 1921. Between 1916 and 1918, Wright did manage to do some rough sketches of a theater and residence for Barnsdall. These earlier sketches, including those of the Hollyhock House, were made without any idea where the project would be sited.
