Throughout its history as both a place and an idea, Hollywood has evoked a spectrum of images: as the generator of significant art and as the purveyor of meretricious glitz. The same range of images has characterized, not surprisingly, the values and tastes of the people who have shaped the industry from moguls and actors to writers, composers and craftsmen. While many “homes of the stars” have gravitated toward a conservative historicism and to what sociologist Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption,” others have exemplified an adventurous commitment to the elegant simplicity of the modernist avant garde.

Hollywood’s underrecognized penchant for modernism has indeed run counter to popular notions of movieland taste as reflected in such Hollywood novels as Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust. There, Tod Hackett, the painter and set designer, observed the scene as Vine Street turned into Pinyon Canyon, where “not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses. Only dynamite would be of any use against the . . . Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles…. On the corner of La Huerta Road was a miniature Rhine castle with tarpaper turrets pierced for archers. Next to it was a highly colored shack with domes and minarets out of Arabian Nights…. Both houses were comic, but he didn’t laugh…. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”

Neutra’s most celebrated “Hollywood” house was designed in 1935 in the largely undeveloped San Fernando Valley for Austrian émigré director Josef von Sternberg (on the set of The Scarlet Empress in 1934). Their personalities would later collide, but early on the two sat up all night discussing their respective worlds of film and architecture and how they could relate their visions to the design of the house.
One of the most gifted modernist architects to work in 1930s Hollywood was Richard Neutra (1892-1970), who was born and trained in imperial Vienna and who reached Los Angeles in 1925, after a Wisconsin apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright. Despite acclaim for his radical Lovell House (1927-29), a Los Angeles variant of the incipient International Style, Neutra, in the early 1930s, had little work in his adopted city and considered moving to New York, Chicago or San Francisco, where prospects seemed better. In 1931 his wife, Dione, in a letter to a friend, lamented that “this life of no work is very hard on Richard. He is very busy always, but nothing which brings in any money” She had come to “realize more and more that we do not know anyone of importance here; it is such a strange town.”

Yet, after the resuscitation of Neutra’s practice almost immediately following that period, the “strange town” held them for the rest of their lives. In retrospect it is difficult to imagine his style developing anywhere else or to imagine twentieth century Los Angeles without his contribution. It is equally hard to envision his success without the patronage of several crucial Hollywood commissions. That such support should come from an industry that thrived on the country’s needs for escape and elevation was fitting.

Neutra’s first major Hollywood project was a multiple-use building (1931-32) for Universal International Pictures at the then fashionable intersection of Hollywood and Vine. Universal’s offices covered the entire second floor over the chic shops and restaurant; above them rose the structure’s most noteworthy features: a dramatic corner clock tower and two rows of huge, integrally attached billboards advertising the studio’s new releases. To create a consistently abstract modernist pattern, Neutra insisted that only one movie be advertised at a time and that the line of juxtaposed images be identical (Frankenstein, Frankenstein… ). This not only gave greater impact to the film being featured but integrated the billboards with the building’s ribbon windows. In the 1950s, ironically, the structure was “modernized” into a Howard Johnson’s restaurant; today, only one of the shops and the stunning rear fenestration patterns have survived.

After the 1929 Lovell House, the first large residence that Neutra designed was for actress Anna Sten and her husband, director Eugene Frenke. Samuel Goldwyn had imported the Russian born Sten to be his studio’s rival to Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Though Sten never became the “Russian Garbo,” she and her husband built one of Neutra’s most distinguished houses. Initially it was Frenke who wanted a modern house and decided that Neutra was the best architect on the scene; Sten apparently embraced her role as modernist patron more slowly and skeptically.

The couple acquired a spectacular lot overlooking the Pacific in the still rugged and underpopulated Santa Monica Canyon. To maximize views from the broadly glazed living areas, Neutra sited the white stucco house with its silver-gray trim at the base of a steep hill at the rear of the property. The large rectangle was textured by attached porches and pergolas and by a curving bay in the living room that Neutra, in the German manner, labeled a winter garden.

It was likely Sten’s need for color and drama that resulted in mauve and green tiled baths and high French doors. The doors, unique in Neutra’s work, opened to a terrace paved in craggy flagstone. This also was not a characteristic of the International Style and may have been the architect’s California homage to his mentor, Wright. Though it was later compromised by a huge apartment building that aggrandized the cliff above it, the 1934 Sten Frenke house remains one of Neutra’s finest achievements.

Neutra’s most famous Hollywood house was for the Austrian émigré director Josef von Sternberg, best known for his films, and relationship, with Marlene Dietrich. It was built in 1935 in the then rural San Fernando Valley. “I selected a distant meadow,” von Sternberg recalled, “in the midst of an empty landscape, barren and forlorn, to make a retreat for myself, my books, and my collection of modern art…. I chose a comparatively unknown (at the time) architect to carry out my ideas of what a house should be.”

The top floor of the all aluminum structure featured an elaborately mirrored master bedroom and bath, which looked out onto a rooftop reflecting pool and led to a picture gallery balcony surrounding the double height living/dining room. The first level also included a studio, kitchen, servants’ rooms and garages—one for regular cars and another for the Rolls Royce—behind which lay a specially planned room for the owner’s exotic dogs.

To reflect and complement von Sternberg’s personal and programmatic idiosyncrasies and to enliven the otherwise simple, orthogonal industrial façade, Neutra designed, in the best cinematic manner, a series of remarkable “special effects” that extended the house into the landscape. The most significant of these was a technically advanced sprinkler system placed around the curving aluminum wall enclosing the front patio off the living room that could produce a variety of effects, from a gentle mist to a battering rainstorm.

Surrounding the wall which gave the house its streamlined identity and, in broken stretches, the entire house, was a shallow moat or reflecting pool for fish and water lilies. Neutra quipped later in his autobiography that the water should be “supplemented by electronic devices” to create a charge. He wrote, “The idea was that while the producer…was sleeping late in the morning, his Persian chauffeur would, before breakfast, remove from the moat any bodies accumulated during the night.”

Further exaggerating the relatively small size of the house was a long, high aluminum partition wall that surged from the west façade, dividing front and rear gardens. A ship’s searchlight over the porte cochere, along with the moat and front wall, imparted a wittily nautical atmosphere to the scene. The moat and walls were also a sly dig at the historicist fortresses of other members of the Hollywood nobility.

During World War lithe house’s shiplike character attracted the US. Air Corps, which used it as a mock bombing target. The zooming planes, among other factors, prompted von Sternberg to sell his modernist castle: It passed through several hands before the novelist Ayn Rand acquired it. In 1971 a developer bought the property and quickly demolished the house—moat, Rolls garage, imaginary rain and all.

In 1938, a few hundred yards from the Sten Frenke house, Neutra designed a handsome dwelling for director Albert Lewin, whose Surrealist films The Picture of Dorian Gray and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman would eventually earn him a cult following. Lewin was, as a critic observed, “one of the small number of Hollywood literati…who wished to raise the cultural level of pictures.” He was attuned to the other visual arts as well and had a great collection of the Surrealist masters Max Ernst and Man Ray and of such French primitives as Henri Rousseau. Lewin knew the Sten Frenke and von Sternberg houses and commissioned Neutra to give form to his own modernist commitments.

The house, of white stucco with navy blue trim, was built on a long, narrow slice of beachfront slightly north of the Santa Monica Pier. It offered sweeping views of the ocean from the living and dining rooms on the first floor and from the upstairs bedrooms, where Neutra placed a balcony above the elliptical living room bay.

In the 1960s, after the Lewins had returned to New York, the house was acquired by Mae West, who allowed her pet monkeys to use it as a menagerie. It continued to deteriorate until it was restored for a later owner by Gwathmey Siegel Associates (see Architectural Digest, October 1983).

Neutra built the 1937 Strathmore Apartments in Westwood himself as a speculative venture and design adventure. A midcentury modernist updating of prehistoric Southwest Indian pueblo forms—as well as the early twentieth century garden court apartments of Irving Gill—the Strathmore units, with their separate openings onto a terraced, central garden, offered avant garde design with a measure of privacy not known in older, monolithic apartment houses.

The Strathmore attracted an impressive roster of Hollywood celebrities as tenants. Orson Welles and Dolores Del Rio, according to Dione Neutra, rented a unit high and at the rear of the cluster as a trysting hideaway for their ultimately not so secret affair. Lilly Latte, the longtime companion of director Fritz Lang, valued her Strathmore apartment as a private retreat from the demanding social swirl of Hollywood. Lang was not to disturb her there.

After separating from her husband, playwright Clifford Odets, the Oscar winning Austrian actress Luise Rainer moved across the court from Welles and Del Rio. In 1938 Rainer confessed to Neutra that “I, myself, was one of those who intensely hesitated to live in one of those modern houses, believing that one could never feel warm and at home inside of them. Bit by bit, I came closer to such modern places, just like one comes to examine a wild animal, with jitters and a certain curiosity. In the process the revelation came…. The clearness, the long lines of windows which allow the light to come in and the eye to rove out far, far, all of this gives you a strange feeling of happiness and freedom.”

Not all of Neutra’s Hollywood designs were realized. One unbuilt commission was his suave penthouse for Tyrone Power, who pursued the idea in conversations with him off and on throughout the 1930s. The only surviving evidence of the fantasy is an undated, unannotated drawing in the Neutra Archive at UCLA. Neutra’s architect son, Dion, has spoken of his father’s wry surmise that the film idol used the recurring architectural discussions as a form of therapy between marriages and love affairs. As such, they constituted—like aspects of Neutra’s built designs—that Hollywood staple: the stuff of dreams.