| | Dietrich and von Sternberg made movies together, and they were an item (as were Dietrich and just about everything that moved), but she didn't have a hand in building the house. They had made their last movie together the year before he commissioned it, and their romantic involvement apparently ended a few years before that. Some of the biographical sources on Dietrich and on Richard Neutra, the architect, mention the Rand connection, but only Rand-related sources say that Dietrich lived there.
Our best source, I should think, would be her daughter Maria Riva. In her memoir Riva mentions a single visit to the house shortly after von Sternberg moved in. She was a child at the time, living wherever her mother lived, so she would have mentioned living there. My own hunch is that a real estate agent, noting Rand's fascination with movie stars, invented the story. It's in one of Branden's memoirs and in the 1961 Saturday Evening Post profile; Rand was presumably the source for both.
Neutra was fond of telling people that he didn't know where Rand got her politics but the sex in that book was modeled on him. He may be the only person in history who met both AR and Ludwig Wittgenstein, though the evidence for the latter is only circumstantial.
For some photos, check out the slideshow.
A few years before von Sternberg built the house and more than a decade before Rand bought it from an intermediate owner, she, von Sternberg and Dietrich had been scheduled to make a movie of Rand's Red Pawn, though this never came off. As far as I know her buying the house was just a coincidence, unrelated to the earlier movie project.
(Edited by Peter Reidy on 10/09, 5:58pm)
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