This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Aline Barnsdall inherited roughly half of her father Theodore Newton Barnsdall's fortune, estimated at fifteen million dollars, when he died in February 1917, and she spent a considerable share of it on causes that scandalized the polite society she had been born into. An experimental theater producer in Chicago from about 1913, work that first brought her into contact with Frank Lloyd Wright, she was also, by the time she settled in Los Angeles, a close friend of the anarchist Emma Goldman, whose own autobiography credits Barnsdall with a five thousand dollar donation toward Goldman's legal defense. On her Olive Hill property she put up billboards supporting the labor organizer Thomas Mooney's case and Upton Sinclair's campaign for governor of California, and she socialized easily with figures like Charlie Chaplin and Sinclair himself, a social circle built around shared politics as much as shared wealth. Her radicalism was not confined to causes she could write checks for. On August 19, 1917, she became an unmarried mother by deliberate choice, an act genuinely scandalous for the period; her daughter, born in Seattle and given the Barnsdall surname, was nicknamed Sugartop, though the sources disagree on who the biological father actually was, a detail Barnsdall herself apparently never settled publicly. She extended her patronage beyond theater and politics into architecture and photography, supporting Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, both of whom would go on to become major figures in Southern California modernism partly on the strength of the reputations she helped build, as well as the photographer Edmund Teske, and she contributed financially to the Hollywood Bowl. Taken together, the pattern is consistent: an heiress who used her inheritance not to preserve her social position but to bankroll people and causes well outside it, years before Hollyhock House, the commission she is now most remembered for, ever broke ground.