With the help of a well-connected neighbor in her North Gower Street apartment building—a young woman named Marcella Bannert, who would later provide a model for the character of Peter Keating in The Fountainhead—Rand sent Red Pawn to an agent who worked for the powerful Myron Selznick agency. The agent, coincidentally named Nick Carter, submitted the scenario to the story department at RKO, to Universal Pictures, to Marlene Dietrich, and to Paramount Pictures, which had Dietrich under contract. According to the author, the sultry thirty-one-year-old German star liked the screenplay, but her director and handler, Josef von Sternberg, turned it down. At the same time, Rand dispatched a carbon copy to Gouverneur Morris, a well-known politically conservative short story and screenplay writer who was on staff at Universal. He later said, “In all my life, [Red Pawn] was the first script sent me by an unknown youngster which showed positive genius.” Morris became her advocate at Universal. In September 1932, the studio paid her seven hundred dollars for the story and hired her for a fee of eight hundred dollars more to turn the scenario into a working screenplay for the studio’s new Austrian star, Tala Birell. Rand was “burning with ambition, just burning,” said Marcella Bannert. “From that point on, you couldn’t stop her.”
All the studios “were interested in Russian stories,” Rand wrote to Sarah Lipton that November, “but have had trouble finding any, so that helped me.” The subject also helped her to attract press attention. In one newspaper interview about Red Pawn, headlined “Russian Girl Jeers at Depression Complaint,” she belittlingly compared the hardships of the American Depression with the unending drudgery of life in Communist Russia. “The high-priced executive in Russia does not have the physical comforts of the laborer in America,” she sniffed. The lump-sum payment and the script-writing contract established her as a writer. When she finished the screenplay, Universal hired her to rewrite an unrelated project. Red Pawn was never produced, as it turned out, but its sale helped her to make a small name for herself and let her escape the RKO wardrobe department and write full-time. She and O’Connor moved into the stately new Trianon Apartments, designed by Leland Bryant.
O’Connor, too, was doing relatively well. He had resumed work as an actor, at first sporadically and then with greater regularity. He was landing small parts in early talking pictures: Shadow of the Law (1930), Cimarron (1931), Ladies’ Man (1931), Arrowsmith (1931), Three on a Match (1932), and Handle with Care (1932). He was earning enough to buy his young wife her first portable American typewriter, a radio, and a beautiful made-to-order walnut desk. He presented her with a brand-new copy of Webster’s Daily Use Dictionary, inscribed with a love poem he wrote, based on the letters of the alphabet: “Ayn; adorable; angel; / Beloved; / Cupid; / Darling; / Everything; / Friend,” until he got to “Zenith.” Together, they purchased their first car: a used Nash, bought on time, which Rand would never learn to drive. He decorated their new apartment, giving his wife another glimpse of his artistic talent. They were happy.
While working on We the Living, “a real big novel … about Russia,” she also drafted her first stage play, a stylized murder mystery that was eventually known as The Night of January 16th. (Rand originally called it Penthouse Legend but changed the title, first to Woman on Trial and then to The Night of January 16th.) Many years later, she referred to it as a “sense-of-life” play, by which she meant that the events were less important than the characters’ attitudes toward them, and hence toward life. This may have been her way of deflecting attention from her protagonists, who once again were criminals and, because the play was later published, eventually became an embarrassment to her.
The Night of January 16th is an engaging, if stilted, courtroom melodrama, inspired by the public uproar over the 1932 suicide of Swedish Match King and con man Ivar Kreuger and largely modeled on a popular 1927 play called The Trial of Mary Dugan. In Rand’s play, a secretary is on trial for the murder of her ruthless boss and lover, a bankrupt Swedish financier named Bjorn Faulkner, who at first appears to have committed suicide. Evidence presented at the trial points in two other, mutually contradictory, directions: Either the secretary, Karen Andre, hurled Faulkner off a penthouse balcony in a fit of jealous rage over his recent marriage, as one eyewitness suggests, or else Miss Andre and Faulkner conspired to stage his suicide in order to give themselves a fresh start with his father-in-law’s money—a ruse that would have succeeded had the father-in-law not discovered the plot and killed the financier. The play’s chief innovation, which proved popular, was to leave the verdict to a jury chosen each night from the audience. What members of the jury had to decide, Rand said, was whether they were romantics who believed in the passionate devotion of Karen Andre to the domineering, antisocial, but fiercely attractive rascal Faulkner or whether they were predisposed to accept the mewling, self-righteous testimony of the witnesses against Andre, who portrayed her as a jealous viper and the father-in-law as an upstanding citizen. If they chose the latter, she implied, they were judging their own “sense of life” and finding it unheroic.
The Night of January 16th was the culminating expression, to this point, of her growing preoccupation with the envy and ill will she saw around her and with the nobility of Nietzschean outsiders. She later renounced her romantic fascination with criminals, explaining that characters such as Bjorn Faulkner had been her youthful symbol for the man who stood alone against conventional society. But she remained passionately attracted—at least in her imagination and her work, if not in life—to ruthless, defiant, potentially violent figures who could easily dominate not only conformists and milksops but also powerful and brilliant women like herself. It must have surprised her, and perhaps not entirely pleased her, that when the play opened in Hollywood, audience juries overwhelmingly found in favor of Karen Andre.
She wrote The Night of January 16th in a few months’ time, hoping to make money, as The Trial of Mary Dugan had lavishly done for its author, Bayard Veiller, and for a first theatrical effort, it was remarkably successful. The play opened as Woman on Trial at the Hollywood Playhouse in October 1934, in a production by sometime actor E. E. Clive and featuring former silent-screen actress Barbara Bedford. Critics and a star-studded first-night audience, including Rand’s Polish idol Pola Negri, Frank Capra, Jesse Lasky, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, three members of the White Russian aristocratic diaspora, and Rand’s friend Ivan Lebedeff, among other film celebrities, praised the plot and were beguiled by the volunteer jury.
Afterward, at a party Lebedeff threw for the young writer and her handsome husband at a stylish Hollywood café called the Russian Eagle, the stars toasted her literary debut. Ever shy, she later told a friend that she had felt uncomfortable at the party. The public attention and critical acclaim didn’t wholly please her, either, although years earlier she must have imagined that they would. When reviews appeared the next morning, she was disappointed to find that critics had missed the point of her play; diverted by its resemblance to Mary Dugan and focused on what they saw as its principal improvement, the jury “gimmick,” they failed to note its theme, Rand’s heroic “sense of life.” They also overlooked what, to her, was its chief virtue, its underlying force as a drama of ideas—specifically, the Nietzschean idea that the heroic individual must resist ordinary people in order to live as a free man.
In spite of her conscious use of tiers of meaning, Rand found this critical oversight hard to bear. From her teenaged years onward, if not from childhood, she had expected “superlatives or nothing,” she later confided to a friend. “I wanted raves that raved about the right things. The reviews [of the play] were not intelligent.”
It is baffling to discover that Rand’s predominant feelings at the moment of her earliest public triumph were of discontent. She had wanted to leave Russia and become a famous writer in a culture and language she hardly knew. In a mere eight years, she had taken a big first step, while some of her favorite movie stars looked on. Why couldn’t she celebrate? For this deeply driven wo
man, who paid tribute to human achievement and worked ceaselessly to be its avatar, her own triumphs were never quite enough. This was the nature of her drive, and the stakes kept getting higher.
Woman on Trial had a limited though successful run. In October 1934, MGM bought an option on the film rights and paid Rand an unspecified amount to write the screenplay for Loretta Young. MGM wanted the script to be funny in places, and Rand, who could occasionally crack an uproarious joke, wasn’t able to write comedy to order. When the work was finished, she wasn’t happy with the result; perhaps the studio wasn’t, either, because the screenplay was ultimately shelved. Film rights to The Night of January 16th would later be passed, at rising valuations, from MGM to RKO and finally to Paramount. The play would not be filmed until 1941 and would be based on a new treatment commissioned by Paramount and created without Rand’s participation or approval.
Meanwhile, she began to contemplate moving to New York as the next logical step in her career. She had come to despise Hollywood’s taste for overly sweet stories and its intellectual timidity in pursuit of commercial success. After a few years, she had even lost her high regard for Cecil B. DeMille, who she said was a box-office chaser. Living in the publishing capital of the nation would be advantageous to her as a writer, she wrote to a New York literary agent in the summer of 1934, especially as she was nearing the completion of her Russian novel.
At the time, O’Connor’s acting career was slowly gaining momentum. In 1933 and early 1934, he had small parts in six or seven films, including the sequel to King Kong. But he wasn’t earning much money, and he wasn’t getting major roles. Rand began to chafe under the impression that he was being passed up for the romantic leads she thought he had been born to play. She later described as heartbreaking the experience of seeing her handsome husband portraying characters who were clumsy or foolish. That she communicated her distress to O’Connor is likely, since years later she spoke of it openly, in his presence, usually adding soothingly that he was very good in the parts he got. If O’Connor had another view of his work, he didn’t publicly express it.
Woman on Trial closed in late November 1934. As she was looking around for what to do next, her prospects for a move to New York brightened considerably. An offer came from a well-known East Coast theatrical producer named A. H. Woods to take her play to Broadway. That he was the man who had successfully produced The Trial of Mary Dugan made the offer especially compelling. The contract he offered permitted him to make script changes, and he demanded a new title, The Night of January 16th. Somewhat warily, she agreed: here was her ticket to New York, and possibly to fame and fortune.
Later, she often proclaimed that O’Connor was at least as happy to leave Hollywood and the film industry as she was. The poor quality of movies in general and of the roles he was being offered in particular “killed his ambition to work as an actor,” she said, and gave him “enormous contempt” for the whole movie business. But it’s hard to imagine this mild, adaptable man expressing enormous contempt for anything, and he himself seems never to have openly articulated a negative view of the movies. He was reserved in his opinions and modest in his aspirations. With her magnificent way of marshaling arguments, she no doubt found it easy to persuade him to move. “His downfall was his enormous respect for her,” said his niece Mimi many years later, “just as [his father] Dennis respected [his mother] Mary Agnes: a cut above.” Besides, his beloved brother Nick Carter was already in New York, working off and on as a reporter.
Preparations for the Broadway production would begin immediately, A. H. Woods told her; she had to depart for New York quickly. Within days, she and O’Connor packed up their belongings, including her new typewriter and her handmade desk, piled some of them into their car and had others shipped, and bade their friends good-bye. They were going off to live in “the greatest monument to the potency of man’s mind” in human history. It was another dream come true.
Before the dream lost any of its sweetness, she mailed a copy of The Night of January 16th to her family in St. Petersburg. Nora, proud and possessive of her older sister’s glamour and success, locked up the play and wouldn’t let anyone see it. Anna pried it loose and translated it into Russian so that Zinovy and the non-English-speaking members of their extended family could read it. Afterward, her father wrote to her that he was in awe of her achievement. He compared the beauty and economy of her language, even in translation, to that of Shakespeare. Nora sent a sketch of a theater marquee with the name “Ayn Rand” emblazoned in lights. Anna rhapsodized about the radiance, human suffering, and hope that the play projected and commemorated MGM’s purchase of the play by writing, “Hollywood with its caprices at last used common sense and is forced to admit that white is white”—a fascinating forward echo of Rand’s later philosophical rallying cry that “A is A.” But she also conveyed a warning. On the basis of her daughter’s previous letters, she foresaw that the young writer would soon be surrounded by jealous competitors and gatekeepers who would resent her intelligence, originality, and drive. It didn’t matter whether or not the play was a success in New York, Anna wrote. What mattered was to retain her belief in her talent. Weak people give up easily and lower their heads in defeat, she admonished, but “the strong who grow strong in battle grow ten times as strong.” What everyone was proudest of were Rand’s optimism, her iron will, and her determined belief in her abilities.
Clearly, Anna had been won over to the side of her daughter the writer—but not without foreseeing struggle or giving a small competitive jab suggestive of troubles to come.
FOUR
WE ARE NOT LIKE OUR BROTHERS
1934–1938
Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees…. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.
—The Fountainhead, 1943
Ayn Rand and Frank O’Connor left Los Angeles in their secondhand Nash on November 24, 1934. The actor drove the drafty old convertible across the southern half of the country, replacing worn brake linings and a dying battery along the way, until on a back road in Virginia the car hit a pothole in the rain, rolled over, and refused to budge.
The car was towed to the nearest town. The travelers, unhurt, followed behind, taking in the landscape of the as-yet-undeveloped rural South. At one point, they glimpsed an antebellum plantation house on a broad lawn, with a convict gang working on the road outside. With an instinct for Gothic drama, Rand committed the sight to memory. It gave her the idea for Dominique Francon’s Connecticut country mansion and the nearby granite quarry in The Fountainhead, where the heroine first sees the lean, muscular, half-naked Howard Roark perspiring as he breaks rock. She had already begun to make mental notes for what would be her third novel and needed a point of conflict to ignite the love affair between cool, aristocratic Dominique and working-class Roark. The car was wrecked, but the author spent the day in an ecstatic mood, waiting for a bus to carry them north in the rain.
They arrived in New York City during the first days of December. Almost immediately, her new producer, A. H. Woods, put her to work preparing The Night of January 16th for its Broadway premiere. Woods was hoping for an early January opening, and while she trimmed lines and polished scenes, he laid out his ambitious production plans, whose intricacy and scale Hollywood could never match, he told her. Rand was naturally elated. The producer was wonderfully easy to work with, she wrote to her former Hollywood agent Mary Inloes, and so far had sought few changes. She also got on well with her new theatrical agent, Sidney Satenstein, who struck her as an able businessman.
Almost as soon as she handed in the hastily revised script, in mid-December, and while she and her husband were still arranging their belongings in a one-room furnished apartment they had rented at 56 East Sixty-sixth Street, Woods informed her that the play would not open in January after all. His funding had fallen through. New funding was needed. Casting and rehe
arsals would have to wait.
Rand accepted the bad news with unusual equanimity. Still, she needed money. Her cash advance against the play’s New York box office royalties had been $250, plus $100 traveling expenses; this was enough to get her to New York and let her live for a few weeks, but not enough to weather a delay, even in the cut-rate fifth year of the Great Depression. Fees from her recent screenwriting projects had apparently been spent, perhaps partly in support of her parents. Yet with her small but growing reputation, she was in a good position to get whatever contract work there was. Her theatrical agent, Satenstein, found her a freelance job as an East Coast reader for RKO, her former Hollywood employer, although she complained in a letter to Mary Inloes that her hours were long and her pay small, on average about ten dollars a week. To help keep her household going until the play opened, she borrowed money from her Hollywood friend Millicent Patton, who had relocated to New York. “She was very direct,” said Patton. “She said, ‘I’m going to [produce] this play and make some money, and then I’m going to write what I please.’ “Patton and her husband made the loan, and Rand repaid it. But she never acknowledged that Patton’s help had made a difference to her. “I don’t think it entered her mind,” Patton said years later. “It was just a matter of what she had to do” to survive and reach her goals.
She and O’Connor had to economize on everything, including the food they heated on a hot plate in their room. She didn’t like the hardship, but she was resolute and hopeful. She lived in the greatest city in the world. Her play might eventually attract the kind of sophisticated intellectual attention she craved. And her new East Coast literary agent, a woman named Jean Wick, was circulating the completed manuscript of We the Living to some of New York’s most prestigious publishing houses.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 11