Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  SIX

  THE SOUL OF AN INDIVIDUALIST

  1939–1942

  Renunciation is not one of my premises. If I see that the good is possible to men, yet it vanishes, I do not take “Such is the trend of the world” as a sufficient explanation. I ask such questions as: Why?—What caused it?

  —Introduction to The Romantic Manifesto, 1969

  My research material for the psychology of Roark was myself.” In the four and a half years it took her to write The Fountainhead, from late June of 1938 through Christmas of 1942, her psychology was increasingly volatile. All around her, in news about the impending war in Europe and among the top players in political and literary circles, she thought she saw Keatings and Tooheys triumphing in matters of policy and popular opinion. Her own professional setbacks—the collapse of a theatrical venture, renewed difficulty in earning a living as a writer—stung more than ever. The perception that she was being passed up, even undermined, as a result of her courage in speaking out against Communism grew more acute. The period was not all darkness, but she remembered it as if it were. About her life at this time, she wrote, “Frank was the fuel. … He helped me to maintain [the “sense of life” that I was trying to capture in The Fountainhead] over a long span of years when there was nothing around us but a gray desert of people and events that evoked nothing but contempt and revulsion.” Hollywood, New York, America—these might not be Atlantis, after all.

  Her husband returned her idealized love with loyalty, support, and a strong sense of protectiveness. He enjoyed meeting people and attending movies and plays. She had lost her interest in movies and preferred to stay at home, and so they did. “I have no hobbies,” she proudly noted in an open letter to readers of The Fountainhead in 1945. “I have few friends. I do not like to ‘go out.’ … Nothing [besides writing] has ever mattered to me too much.”

  Nothing except him, that is. He mattered a great deal, though not in an ordinary way. Everyone who knew them believed she loved him passionately. But she possessed little or no empathy, a useful and maybe a necessary tool for intimacy. She sometimes didn’t seem to know who he was. She conflated him with her heroes; she insisted that he shared all her convictions, her desires, her tastes, and her propensity for moral outrage and contempt. “He’s on strike,” she would later tell friends who wondered why such a powerful woman had chosen to marry such a sweetly unambitious man. The only time his temper flared was when he saw Ayn being badly or unjustly treated—and sometimes when they argued. Even then, the larger issues between them remained unspoken.

  She wanted to know everything about him, however, and when his father died in late December 1938, at the age of seventy-four, from the effects of arteriosclerosis on the heart, she went with him to the funeral. She was curious to see Lorain, Ohio, the small Lake Erie steel town where her husband had been born and raised, and to view Dennis O’Connor’s body at the wake, she told Mimi Papurt. She wanted to know whether Frank had inherited his willowy beauty from Dennis, a retired steel roller. By all accounts, he had. She was less curious about the rest of the O’Connor family, most of whom she was meeting for the first time. No doubt she disapproved of the Roman Catholic funeral ceremony and felt uncomfortable amid family small talk; small talk remained something she didn’t do well and often didn’t try to do. The Ohio O’Connors, in turn, did not entirely take to her. With her Russian accent, mesmerizing gaze, and air of being intellectual but also bored and fidgety, she struck them as aloof, high-handed, and too “drab and homely” for Frank, said Mimi’s younger sister Marna Papurt, later Wolf. Marna, then eleven years old, thought her new aunt’s clothes and shoes were dark and “junky.” She also objected to the way the woman “mothered” Uncle Frank, telling him what to eat and not to eat. During one dinner, Marna recalled, Rand warned him not to drink a glass of cold water and then eat ice cream; he might get a chill and come down with polio. The polio virus that had crippled Franklin Roosevelt in the 1920s was a source of dread throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but the disease could not be caught as the result of a chill. She had an ongoing phobia about germs, however, perhaps a vestige of an adolescence in which waves of typhoid and cholera rolled through her native city. Still, Frank didn’t eat his ice cream. Marna’s mother Agnes Papurt, Frank’s younger sister, and other relatives were wary, lest one of their family favorites become separated from them by marriage to an exotic stranger. This didn’t happen; Rand was immensely fond of Nick and Joe, kept in touch with other members of the family, and became good friends with Mimi. Later in the marriage, however, acquaintances recalled, Rand did increase the distance between her husband and his family, even if unintentionally. She grew more possessive of him as time went on.

  In late 1938 and 1939, Ayn and Frank were living in a large, modern red-brick apartment building on East Eighty-ninth Street in New York. Rand’s second cousin Fern Brown, now twenty years old and in college, came to see them one evening in June of 1939, on her way home from a summer job in Pennsylvania. Fern hadn’t set eyes on her Russian cousin in thirteen years, since Rand left Chicago for Hollywood. She remembered being profoundly impressed by Rand’s literary conversation and accomplishments, her lovely apartment, and her welcoming, handsome husband. To Fern’s astonishment, O’Connor cooked and served a Russian dinner, dressed in a smoking jacket. (“The man cooking was something I’d never heard of in those days,” she said.) Rand remained at the dining-room table talking with Fern and chain-smoking through a long cigarette holder. After dinner, they attended the ballet. Fern eventually decided to become a writer herself and went on to publish more than twenty young-adult biographies and novels.

  That summer, the 1939 New York World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows, Queens, to crowds from all over the nation and the world. Twenty million visitors came to New York to tour the World of Tomorrow pavilions, where they could see early prototypes of a Xerox machine, a jet-propelled airplane, RCA’s first television set, a speech synthesizer, and many other engineering triumphs in Art Deco shapes and colors. The architectural exhibition, labeled “Pacifica” for its Far Eastern theme, probably provided Rand with some details for her fictional March of the Centuries exposition in The Fountainhead, a massive project in which Roark refuses to participate because it is “architecture by committee” (a phrase coined by Frank Lloyd Wright) and of which Peter Keating then takes leadership.

  Mimi, also twenty and an art student, came to stay with the O’Connors that summer, perhaps to visit the World’s Fair. She was attractive, high-spirited, and (unlike her mother and sisters) full of awed admiration for her aunt by marriage, whom she had first met and idolized while visiting her uncle Nick in December 1934. She was on hand to witness the many ups and downs of her aunt’s long summer. Rand, having missed her first Knopf deadline and with only a year left to finish The Fountainhead and meet her second deadline, had just agreed to set aside her work on the novel and concentrate on what she hoped would be a money-making proposition: a new production of her 1936 play rendition of We the Living. On the recommendation of a Russian-born actress named Eugenie Leontovich, the well-known director George Abbott had offered to produce the play after cash-strapped Jerome Mayer backed out. Abbott, who later shared a Pulitzer Prize with Jerome Weidman for the musical Fiorello!, was then best known for jovial Rodgers and Hart musicals, including the previous year’s hilarious Shakespeare spoof The Boys from Syracuse. The cast he chose was a wild assortment of types. Leontovich herself, thirty-nine years old and a veteran of the Stanislavskian Moscow Art Theatre, took the role of twenty-year-old Kira. Actor John Davis Lodge, the brother of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and a future governor of Connecticut, tried but failed to bring to life the character of Andrei Taganov; Abbott replaced him with an up-and-coming young midwesterner named Dean Jagger, later to be famous as a high-school principal in television’s Mr. Novak. Broadway hand John Emory played a lackluster version of Leo. Frank O’Connor understudied the part and also earned Actors’ Equity pay as a GPU deputy commissar. Reh
earsals began in June.

  This time, Rand retained script control, and she asked for and received a one-hundred-dollar-a-month stipend while rehearsals lasted. She assumed that any rewriting of the play would be quick and straightforward. She was wrong. Once the production was under way, Abbott, like A. H. Woods, wanted extended revisions.

  Having once mapped out a complex plot in novel form, Rand later said, her mind rebelled against reshaping it in another genre. As a result, her stage adaptations, like some of her screenplays, tended to be literal, stiff, and nakedly melodramatic, and it was partly these theatrical defects that Abbott wanted to correct. Before long, he asked her to work alongside another contract writer, the respected playwright S. N. Behrman, and she agreed. She liked Behrman and was fond of Abbott but was impatient with what she thought of as their “unstylized” sense of the dramatic. Like Woods, they advised and cajoled her to soften her characters’ hard symbolic edges and, as she saw it, give Leo, Andrei, and Kira the flavor of “the folks next door.” This, of course, she could not do. If form followed function, as she believed it did in literary art as in architecture, then the special, the exalted, the highly stylized was her medium and her message. She did her best to make the play commercially viable, but The Unconquered, as Rand titled it (invoking the designation Liberty 5–3000 had given to Equality 7–2521 in Anthem), tottered woodenly toward its opening.

  In many ways rehearsals that summer were a repetition of The Night of January 16th, with two important differences. One was that she made a fast, close friend of her majestic leading lady, Eugenie Leontovich, who had escaped from Russia four years before Rand. Mimi remembered being in the O’Connors’ apartment, listening as the two redoubtable expatriates chatted on the phone for hours, mixing Russian with English. Then one day, Mimi recalled, the friendship was over. The actress hadn’t been adapting well to the role of Kira or to the mixed approaches of her fellow actors. In any case, Leontovich’s husband, Gregory Ratoff, apparently convinced her that performing the lead in an overtly anti-Communist play on Broadway might hurt her nascent Hollywood career, and she quit. Rand was furious, and probably wounded and worried. Abbott replaced the Russian diva with a tepid American actress named Helen Craig, and, according to Mimi, Rand never saw or spoke to Leontovich again.

  There were other ruptures with friends in the 1930s, Mimi recalled, although she never knew exactly what had caused them. When she asked about people whom she had seen and no longer saw during her visits, her uncle Frank explained that they and the O’Connors had not seen eye to eye on some subjects, so “we don’t see them so much.” These people included actor Robert Shayne, who had played a small part in The Night of January 16th, and his wife, Elizabeth, who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand Rand’s concept of selfishness; Ivan Lebedeff; and a newspaper publicist named Frank Orsini. “Almost everybody,” Mimi said.

  This was an example of an emerging trend in Rand’s personality that is characteristic of both ideologues and narcissists: sudden and acrimonious breaks with friends. Leontovich may have defended her acting by criticizing the character of Kira or may have disagreed with Rand about Russian or American politics. Whatever she did, she broke the spell of consensus Rand increasingly required.

  The second notable event was a romantic flirtation she carried on that summer with Dean Jagger. She was fascinated by the handsome thirty-six-year-old Jagger’s bald pate, and he went out of his way to be warm and courtly to her during rehearsals and cast gatherings. As close acquaintances pointed out, men were often drawn to Ayn Rand’s brains and intellectual conviction but almost never to her physical womanhood. Jagger was. Mimi, who attended rehearsals, noticed that her aunt’s eyes lit up whenever she and Jagger met. One day, the niece said boldly, “I bet you’d like to have an affair with him, but you’d be afraid to take a chance, because you’d be afraid of losing Frank.” Rand smiled genially and said, “You’re absolutely right.”

  O’Connor was also working on the set, and it’s likely that he was aware of his wife’s mild flirtation. He may have been uneasy but may also have felt relief that she had found a source of pleasure. At home, her fear of running out of money and her growing anxiety over time spent away from The Fountainhead gave rise to changeable moods of depression and irritation. Mimi witnessed Rand’s angry outbursts at O’Connor, fast-rising storms that he weathered without protest. He was proud of his brilliant and courageous wife, he confided to his niece. But Mimi thought he appeared less guarded and more at ease when Rand wasn’t present. At one point he told her that he would have liked to have children but that “it wouldn’t fit with Ayn.” Mimi may already have known of her aunt’s decision to have an abortion earlier in the 1930s, since Mimi’s father, A. M. Papurt, had loaned O’Connor the money to pay for it. It is interesting to note that children do not figure much in Rand’s fictional universe, with the exception of a few flashbacks and the character of eight-year-old Acia Dunaeva in We the Living, who behaves like a spoiled five-year-old. In homage to their philosopher-queen and her characters, some of her followers would also forgo having children.

  Beginning with We the Living, Rand wrote the first drafts of her novels in longhand, and after completing a scene or a section read it aloud to Frank and Nick. So it is also likely that she and her husband discussed her fictional sexual triangles in both We the Living and The Fountainhead. Based on material in her journals, at least one commentator has argued that her basic model for male sexual psychology in her novels was Frank O’Connor and that he enjoyed her three-sided sexual fantasies and, perhaps, her first and subsequent flirtations.

  At that time, O’Connor had a mischievous sense of adventure. One afternoon, he took Mimi around to modeling agencies for tryouts, as a lark. Another day, he brought her to the Town Hall Club, on West Forty-third Street, where he drank Scotch at the bar. They were away from home for five hours, and Rand was frantic when they returned. Frank remained calm when she cried, “Where have you been? I thought you were dead!”

  The curtain of Broadway’s Biltmore Theater finally rose on The Unconquered on February 13, 1940, six weeks later than announced. The first-night audience was packed with theatrical and film-world celebrities in tuxedos, evening gowns, and furs. Jagger gave an elegant opening-night party while the cast and crew awaited the reviews. But the reaction of critics was anything but festive, withholding from the play even the faint praise that, at a minimum, they had bestowed on The Night of January 16th. The conservative Herald Tribune, which had applauded the novel, called the play “one of the season’s mishaps” and observed that it was so clumsy as to confuse the audience about whether it might be advocating Bolshevik propaganda. The New York Times complained that it did not delve deeply enough into the individual rights of man, where, the reviewer wrote, “there would be a play.” It’s easy to imagine Rand’s anger and humiliation. She came home that night in tears and spent the next two days in bed, despondent.

  The Unconquered closed abruptly after a five-day run. It had not produced new royalties for her to live on and had in fact cost her money in car fare, restaurant meals, and other out-of-pocket expenses. It had further damaged her literary reputation. And it had led the nation’s premier newspaper to blame her for neglecting the very message she had been trying to deliver, one that she believed grew more urgent every day: safeguarding the individual against the majority, the mob, the collective, the church, the state, the Soviet.

  On February 18, the day after the final curtain fell and the cast disbanded, she resumed her work on The Fountainhead. For unknown reasons, she left off again in May, a month before her second and final Knopf due date. She may have been discouraged or depressed. One night in early June, she recalled, she “felt so profound an indignation at the state of things as they are that it seemed as if I would never regain the energy to move one step farther toward things as they ought to be,” in the shape of Howard Roark. “Frank talked to me for hours that night. He convinced me of why one cannot give up the world to those one despi
ses. That night, I told Frank that I would dedicate The Fountainhead to him because he had saved it.”

  At some point in 1938, Rand had written a letter, in Russian, to the short-tenured former prime minister Aleksandr Kerensky, who was living in exile in Paris and New York. Russia’s last republican had not yet earned her enduring enmity by publicly supporting Stalin during the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. She sent him a copy of We the Living, expressing the hope that he would find in it a worthy portrait of his homeland at its turning point. (Whether he responded is not known.) Now, in mid-1940, she decided that she must take direct political action to prevent a similar calamity at a crucial moment in the history of her adopted homeland. In July, FDR won the Democratic Party’s nomination for an unprecedented third term in office, breaking an uninterrupted tradition of American presidents serving for no more than two terms. A few weeks later, the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie to oppose him, and she signed on to be a foot soldier in the Republican presidential campaign. That fall, she took to the hustings for Willkie. It was the beginning and end of her active political career.

  Among conservatives in the late 1930s, FDR was viewed as a madman, a traitor to his class, a warmonger maneuvering America into World War II, and worse. It would be impossible to exaggerate how bitterly he was hated. Many on the Right had voted for him in 1932, when he appeared to be fiscally conservative and friendly to business. Once in office, he declared a need for extreme measures to lift the nation out of the Depression. He assumed large new presidential powers, transforming the economy from a minimally regulated free-for-all into a federally regulated system that his adversaries regarded as European-style socialism. He kept his promise to repeal Prohibition, but to the fury of some business interests and the political right, and the relief of many unemployed and working people, he also established the first minimum hourly wage, guaranteed unions the right to bargain collectively, created Social Security and unemployment insurance, and enacted 550 separate regulatory codes that capped industrial production, set wages and prices, limited competition, and gave rise to government-backed manufacturing cartels, all of which Rand would parody to the verge of surrealism in Atlas Shrugged. Most threatening of all, perhaps, to her, he prohibited the private ownership of gold, which made it possible for the U.S. government, like the Bolshevik government of her teens and the Nazi regime then ruling Germany, to inflate the currency and, she thought, arbitrarily redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. For her, the rise of the welfare state and a managed economy smacked of Fascism. It looked very much like a covert transfer of power from the old free capitalist class to a new all-powerful government elite.