Chatsworth Shrugged: Remembering Author and Screenwriter Ayn Rand

Author Ayn Rand, best known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and the philosophical theory she developed that became known as Objectivism, spent several fruitful years living and working at 10000 Tampa Ave. in Chatsworth.

Rand, together with her husband, Frank O'Connor, lived in a home built in 1935 by modernist architect Richard Neutra. The house, which was originally designed for the film director Josef Von Sternberg, was demolished in 1972 to make way for a subdivision in what is now Northridge.

Kevin Roderick, in his book The San Fernando Valley: America's Suburb, calls the house "a lost masterpiece." He mentions Rand among its owners, writing that she bought the property in 1942, while working on Hollywood scripts and her novel, Atlas Shrugged.

According to Roderick, the house was "fashioned of glass and steel and surrounded by a 16-foot moat with drawbridge."

Jeff Britting, archivist at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, recounted to Patch the details of the author's stay in Chatsworth.

According to Britting, Rand and O'Connor moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1943, after she had sold the movie rights to The Fountainhead. While they were staying in apartments in Hollywood, her husband was scouting for a possible house when he found the Von Sternsberg house in Chatsworth.

"He [O'Connor] came up with the idea that this would be a good investment property," said Britting, "he anticipated the growth of Los Angeles into the Valley and into the Western end of the Valley."

Britting said that O'Connor had peacocks that roamed freely in the land that surrounded the home, and cultivated alfalfa and hybridized gladiolas for commerical sale. Rand, meanwhile divided her time between writing screenplays and fiction. She wrote the scripts for three produced films and a number of unproduced ones during her time on the ranch, according to Britting, and it was there that she began work on her novel Atlas Shrugged.

Ultimately, said Britting, the couple left the house because "she [Rand] didn't care for California particularly, she really wanted to go back to New York. She was looking for a point in the novel [Atlas Shrugged] where she could stop writing and consider a major move."

Los Angeles and the Valley, it seems, were not ultimately a good fit for Rand.

"She found Hollywood a dismal place," said Britting. "She didn’t like the country aspect of living—she preferred city life and the kind of city life that was true of a major eastern city like New York, over the more relaxed lifestyle of California."

Perhaps, said Britting, it was her love of New York City that drew her to the Von Sternberg house.

"She loved skyscrapers, and she loved the dynamic of steel and concrete ... she was living in Chatsworth, in a steel and glass house."

The son of architect Richard Neutra, Dion Neutra, trained with his father from the age of 11, and continues the craft of building design in Silver Lake on Neutra Place, home of many of his father's creations.

Dion Neutra still remembered his father's involvement with the Von Sternberg house, and with Rand.

“I don’t know quite how she [Rand] first took an interest in the house; she was about the fourth or fifth owner," Neutra told Patch.

Dion Neutra said his father was “not really a fan” of Ayn Rand, although they got on well enough for him to teasingly tell her he was the inspiration for one of her characters, Howard Roark, an architect in her novel The Fountainhead. It was common knowledge, however, that he was actually based on Frank Lloyd Wright.

Neutra said his father would often visit his houses years after they had been built.

“He did have a tendency to try to drop in on places when he was out and about; he would drop by unexpectedly and see what the status was.”

On the day he met Rand, though, Dion (who was ten years old at the time) thinks it was most likely arranged, as photographer Julius Schulman was in attendance.

Dion Neutra also spoke about the Richard Neutra-designed house built for Herbert Kronish in Beverly Hills that is currently up for sale and may be demolished to make way for another development. (A representative from the office of Hilton and Hyland, a division of Christie's Great Estates, confirmed this.)

According to Britting, although the author lived in many locations in Los Angeles, New York, and Russia, there are no plaques or memorials to her in any of them. In Chatsworth, too, nothing of Rand remains.

Photos of Ayn Rand in the Von Sternberg house in Chatsworth can be found by clicking here and here.