City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

  In 1930, she began a novel about the Soviet Union, We, the Living, which she described as “a novel about Man against the State.” To finance that, she wrote a movie script set in a Siberian prison camp, “Red Pawn,” and after a few rejections, she sold it to Universal for fifteen hundred dollars. She quit her job in the wardrobe department. She wrote a play, The Night of January 16th, in which the outcome of a trial was decided by a jury drawn from the audience, different each night. A Broadway producer invited her to New York to help with rehearsals, but when the producer ran out of money, she had to scramble for piecework as a free-lance reader for RKO. When the producer finally began rehearsals, he and Miss Rand quarreled fiercely about revisions. The resulting compromise ran seven months on Broadway but left Miss Rand frustrated and angry. In 1936, her novel finally appeared and received poor reviews, many of them criticizing her anti-Soviet views.

  By this time, she was already immersed in a much bigger and more complicated novel, The Fountainhead. “The first purpose of this book,” she wrote in one of her early notes on it, “is a defense of egoism in its real meaning.” Her idea had come partly from the New York skyscrapers that she had first admired in photographs she had seen in Russia. She wanted to write about the men who made them. She was more directly inspired by a woman she knew in Hollywood, an executive who kept scheming and maneuvering in pursuit of success. “Can you tell me what it is that you want?” she had asked her. “What is your goal in life?”

  “I’ll tell you what I want,” the woman had answered. “If nobody had an automobile, then I would want to have one automobile. If some people have one, then I want to have two.”

  “I see,” said Miss Rand, dismayed at the pointlessness of such a goal. How different from her own view of her own ambitions, a relentless pursuit of truth, regardless of material rewards. In the spirit of the times, she turned these contrasting female dummies into contrasting male dummies. Thus were born Howard Roark, the hard, fierce, uncompromising Randian genius, and Peter Keating, the whining, untalented manipulator. And, of course, the rich and beautiful Dominique, whom Miss Rand described as “myself in a bad mood.” Dominique teased and then rejected Keating, who wanted to marry her for social reasons, but when she encountered Howard Roark in a quarry, splitting open walls of rock with his pneumatic drill, she began quivering. “She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth,” Miss Rand wrote, perhaps with a little quivering of her own, “the planes of his gaunt, hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see. . . . She felt a convulsion of anger, of protest, of resistance—and of pleasure. . . . She was wondering what he would look like naked.” She heard that some of the workmen were ex-convicts, and she wondered whether Roark was one too. “She wondered whether they whipped convicts nowadays. She hoped they did. At the thought of it, she felt a sinking gasp. . . .”

  Miss Rand spent three years on planning and research (she even spent several months as an eavesdropping typist in a New York architect’s office), and she spent two more years writing and rewriting her opening chapters before she reached that throbbing encounter in the quarry. Her agent urged her to submit the first third to a publisher. It apparently never occurred to her that anyone might have aesthetic objections to both her novel and her hero, whose fearlessly “modern” projects have been described by Nora Sayre as resembling “the Los Angeles airport combined with the visions of the early Uris brothers.” Some of the publishers raised political objections, though, to the Rand/Roark tirades against “the rule of the mob,” which the publishers euphemistically described as against the spirit of the times, too intellectual, too controversial.

  Miss Rand decided that President Roosevelt was leading her new nation toward the same kind of “collectivism” that she had fled. She volunteered her services to the Republican presidential campaign of Wendell Willkie and spent several months writing polemics and addressing street-corner gatherings in New York. Willkie’s failure to run an aggressively conservative campaign dismayed her; he lacked that Roarkian refusal to compromise. By now penniless, she returned to the drudgery of reading scripts at Paramount while she labored by night on the novel that nobody seemed to want. Into it she wrote more and more details of the artist rejected. Finally, toward the end of 1941, she found a publisher of somewhat conservative cast, Bobbs-Merrill, and after two more years of hard work, she finished her novel with a characteristically erotic scene of Dominique soaring upward in the elevator of Roark’s skyscraper. At the top, she found, “there was only the ocean and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark.”

  Most of the reviews were again hostile, though a woman named Lorine Pruette hailed Miss Rand in the New York Times Book Review as “a writer of great power . . . a subtle and ingenious mind.” Sales were slow, but after a few months they mysteriously began to climb, as though Miss Rand had tapped some political or psychological fountainhead that no one else had recognized. Warner Bros. began to inquire about movie rights. Miss Rand demanded a very ambitious $50,000. “One day, the rights to The Fountainhead will be worth much more than that,” she said. Warners agreed to meet her price. Two years later, when sales of the novel had reached an astonishing 100,000 copies, Paramount would offer Warners $450,000 for the movie rights, and Warners would reject the offer.

  Miss Rand, who had left Hollywood in 1934 as an obscure and badly paid scriptwriter, returned nine years later with a new mink coat and a Warners contract to adapt her best-selling novel for the screen. She bought a fourteen-acre ranch in the San Fernando Valley with a steel-and-glass house that might have been designed by Howard Roark but was actually by Richard Neutra. She had always been ultraconservative, of course, but in her new state of prosperity, she was appalled by the extent to which “collectivist” ideas had taken hold in wartime Hollywood. She was one of the earliest members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, the organization that Sam Wood had founded in 1944 to lobby for the view that the movie business is “dedicated to the preservation and continuance of the American scene.”

  She finished her Fountainhead screenplay in six months, and Mervyn LeRoy hoped to film it with Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck in the lead roles, but Warners decided that this was too big a production to undertake until wartime restrictions ended. Miss Rand found other things to do. Not only did she sign a long-term contract with Warners, but she wrote for the Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals an interesting tract entitled “Screen Guide for Americans.” “The purpose of the Communists in Hollywood,” she said, “is not the production of movies openly advocating Communism. Their purpose is to corrupt our moral premises by corrupting nonpolitical movies—by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories—thus making people absorb the basic principles of collectivism by indirection and implication.”

  Miss Rand provided a handy set of rules for every patriotic moviemaker to follow:

  “Don’t Smear the Free Enterprise System.

  “Don’t Deify the ‘Common Man.’

  “Don’t Glorify Failure.

  “Don’t Smear Industrialists.

  “Don’t Smear Success.”

  “All too often,” Miss Rand declared, “industrialists, bankers, and businessmen are presented on the screen as villains, crooks, chiselers, or exploiters. It is the moral (not just political but moral) duty of every decent man in the motion picture industry to throw into the ashcan, where it belongs, every story that smears industrialists as such. . . . It is the Communists’ intention to think that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others and that every man has hurt somebody by becoming successful. . . . Don’t let yourself be fooled when the Reds tell you that what they want to destroy are men like Hitler and Mussolini. What they want to destroy are men like Shakespeare, Chopin and Edison.”

  No Communist propagandist was ever more hostile to successful businessmen than Miss Rand herself—
The Fountainhead is full of tirades against their philistinism—but her credentials as a right-wing polemicist almost inevitably brought her before the HUAC hearings of 1947 as a “friendly” witness. And since sales of The Fountainhead had by now reached a prodigious 400,000 hardcover copies, Warners treated it as a “prestige” film when it finally went into production in 1948. Gary Cooper, who had just signed a six-picture contract after an unsuccessful attempt at independent production, selected The Fountainhead as his first choice. For Dominique, Warners picked a young actress whom it hoped to develop into a major star, Patricia Neal. As director, the studio hired King Vidor, who had worked on large-scale pictures like M-G-M’s Northwest Passage and Selznick’s Duel in the Sun.

  To Miss Rand, this was just a new battlefield on which she had to defend every line in her story. “She was under constant pressure to disguise, dilute or tone down the philosophical theme of her novel . . .” according to one of her followers, Barbara Branden. “She argued with studio executives, with the agents and lawyers of various stars, with the Johnston Office. . . . She won. Her script was shot exactly as she wrote it. In an unprecedented studio ruling, the actors were forbidden to improvise on the set.” Perhaps that accounts for the listless quality in this expensively glossy production. Veterans like Cooper and Raymond Massey looked as though they had difficulty in believing the rhetoric that Miss Rand had written for them. Her erotic imagery, however, was just as faithfully preserved. Her heroine first spied Gary Cooper forcing his pneumatic drill horizontally into a wall of rock. She, on horseback, looked scornfully down at him; he, clutching his drill, looked scornfully up at her; she lashed him across the face with her whip. And so on.

  If Pat Neal seemed somewhat more credible than the script, that was because her main function was to be in love with Cooper, and she was. In his younger days, Cooper had been well known for pursuing any actress within reach, but since his marriage in 1933 to a wealthy New York girl named Veronica Balfe, he had made a reasonably conscientious effort to remain faithful. Pat Neal ended all that. She was twenty-two and beautiful and talented and in love with him. She wanted to marry him. He was forty-seven, past the peak of his career, and susceptible. The affair that began on the set of The Fountainhead continued through another film they made together, Bright Leaf, continued after her departure from Warners in 1950, continued through his comeback in High Noon. When Cooper’s health began to disintegrate in a series of operations for hernias and ulcers, Miss Neal was at his bedside; his wife sent flowers.

  Cooper repeatedly told Miss Neal that he couldn’t leave his wife; there were separations and reunions. As Veronica Cooper became aware of the situation, she, too, veered between rejection and acceptance. At one point, she announced: “I am a Catholic and under no circumstances would I consider absolute divorce.” At another, she was quoted as saying, “Any time Gary wants a divorce he can have one.” Cooper still couldn’t decide, and after five years, Miss Neal finally decided to marry the English writer Roald Dahl.

  The Fountainhead proved to be another message picture that did not do very well. Even in the Cold War atmosphere of mid-1949, the reviews were tepid, and the box office brought no profits. History has not been kind either. Nora Sayre wrote in Running Time that Cooper played his love scenes “with all the sexuality of an ironing board,” and that his relationship with the heroine was “a sadomasochistic passion in which rape is more satisfying than ‘surrender.’ ” All in all, she concluded, since “only those who had read [the novel] could have followed the tormented logic of [the] script,” the screen version “can be revered as one of the funniest films of any period.”

  Roberto Rossellini probably didn’t have to go to America to sign up Ingrid Bergman for his new film, but in January of 1949 the New York Film Critics chose Paisan as the best foreign movie of the previous year and invited Rossellini to come to New York to receive their award. Before he left Rome, according to a correspondent for a Los Angeles newspaper, Rossellini said, “I’m going to put the horns on Mr. Bergman.” In New York, he sent Miss Bergman a wire: “I JUST ARRIVE FRIENDLY.” She cabled back: “WAITING FOR YOU IN THE WILD WEST.”

  Rossellini needed no further invitation to take the train for California and register at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Miss Bergman promptly invited him to save money by coming to stay at her house on Benedict Canyon Drive. She also started raising money for his film. Sam Goldwyn had long wanted her to star in one of his pictures, but he had never managed to find the right story. Now she telephoned him and said, “Sam, I have a story I like. Would you like to do this one? It’s by an Italian named Roberto Rossellini.”

  “Sure,” said Goldwyn. Only then did he venture to look at the murky outline that Rossellini had sent to Miss Bergman. “Sounds very artistic,” he said. Miss Bergman brought the two of them together, and she served as interpreter for Rossellini’s version of French and Goldwyn’s version of English. Then the press was called in to witness Goldwyn and Rossellini signing contracts. Goldwyn invited various Hollywood grandees to have dinner at his house and see Rossellini’s unreleased new film, Germany, Year Zero, a bleak quasi-documentary that Rossellini imagined to be the completion of a trilogy begun by Open City and Paisan. “The picture finished and the lights went on,” Miss Bergman recalled. “And no one said a word. Not a word. No applause. Complete silence. Twenty people. Not a sound. This freezing cold silence from all these people. Instinctively I stood up and walked to Roberto, threw an arm around him and kissed him on the cheek, to show everybody—something—I didn’t know what I wanted to show—but I had to protect him.”

  Goldwyn understood the signs—not Miss Bergman’s kiss for Rossellini but the silence of his dinner guests. He telephoned Miss Bergman and canceled his financial support. “I’m sorry, I can’t do the movie,” he said. “I can’t understand the man. I don’t know what he’s doing, what he’s talking about.”

  Well, who else was there? Well, there was always Howard Hughes. Like almost everyone else, Hughes had yearned for Miss Bergman. He had even enlisted Cary Grant to arrange a double date for the two of them with Miss Bergman and Irene Selznick. Then, dancing at El Morocco, Hughes had said, “I’m so lonely, I’m so terribly lonely.” Miss Bergman told him not to be silly. She found him rather tiresome.

  When Hughes acquired RKO, he telephoned Miss Bergman and said, “I’ve just bought a film studio for you.”

  “What have you done?” said Miss Bergman, who had been drying her hair when she picked up the phone.

  “I’ve just bought a film studio for you,” Hughes repeated. “I’ve bought RKO. It’s yours. It’s my present to you. Are you happy now?”

  Miss Bergman treated it as a joke, and turned Hughes aside, but now her husband suggested that Hughes would finance Rossellini’s film if Miss Bergman just asked him.

  “No, I don’t want to,” she said. “You know I’m afraid of that man.”

  “I’m sure you can handle him,” Dr. Lindstrom said. So she called Hughes at his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and he appeared on her doorstep fifteen minutes later in his white tennis clothes and white shoes.

  “Sure, okay, I’ll do the picture,” Hughes said. “How much money do you need?”

  “Listen, don’t you want to hear the story?” Miss Bergman asked.

  “No, I don’t want to hear the story,” Hughes said. “I’m not interested. I don’t care what sort of story it is. Are you beautiful in it? Are you going to have wonderful clothes?”

  “No, I’m playing a DP in some horrible camp,” Miss Bergman said, laughing. “I’m going to wear the worst and cheapest things you ever saw.”

  “Too bad,” Hughes said. “The next picture you’re going to do you’ll look great.”

  With the financing arranged, Rossellini headed back toward Rome at the end of February while the Lindstroms went skiing in Aspen. There had already been items in the gossip columns about Rossellini and Miss Bergman going on drives together, but all three players in the game seem to have a
greed tacitly to pretend that nothing was happening. “I knew that he [Rossellini] liked me,” Miss Bergman recalled later, but she added, “If people had looked suspicious when I mentioned Italy, I would certainly have said quite indignantly, ‘I’m going to make a movie—that’s all I’m going for.’ ”

  This guileless masquerade hardly lasted beyond Miss Bergman’s arrival in Rome, where she was greeted by a cheering crowd of well-wishers. From the throng emerged Rossellini, who presented her with a large bouquet, kissed her on both cheeks, and whispered, “Je t’aime.” Then he escorted her into his red sports car and drove her off to the Excelsior Hotel, where more crowds welcomed them, and friends waited with champagne. “I was simply overwhelmed,” Miss Bergman said.

  That was just the beginning. Rossellini took his star on a leisurely tour down the coast, to Monte Cassino, Capri, Amalfi. “He knew all about the history and the monuments and the ruins . . . all about the legends,” she said. As they climbed hand in hand up a stairway toward one of those round towers guarding the coastal route, a pursuing photographer took their picture, and it appeared on a full page in Life. Newspaper editorialists began to cluck with disapproval. Miss Bergman ignored them. From Amalfi, she wrote to Dr. Lindstrom that she was leaving him for Rossellini. “It was not my intention to fall in love and go to Italy forever . . .” she wrote. “But how can I help it or change it?”

  Rossellini was determined to shoot his film on Stromboli, the northernmost of the Lipari islands, about fifty miles north of Messina and the Sicilian coast. It had a live volcano that periodically spouted lava from its two-thousand-foot cone, but it had very little else—no running water, no electricity, no telephones, no newspapers. The five hundred or so inhabitants, mostly old people, lived on money sent by relatives on the mainland. A steamer made the fourteen-hour trip from Naples once a week to bring food and mail. Rossellini’s preparations for his movie were almost equally primitive. He had no script, and except for Miss Bergman, no cast. He had picked up two fishermen on a beach and planned to use one or the other as the leading man. Then, with some of the local villagers, he would improvise.