Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  In her spare hours, she set up luncheon meetings with Emery’s friends and others who could, if persuaded, give or lend her the ten thousand dollars she estimated she needed to advertise the book. Despite the power of her arguments, her lunch companions were hard-pressed to believe that a novel—especially, perhaps, one written by a woman—could advance their cause against the monster Roosevelt. After months of crusading, including arranging for an intermediary’s approach to the du Pont family, her only prospective donor was a Kalamazoo, Michigan, fishing-tackle manufacturer named Monroe Shakespeare. This first experience with fund-raising added a crust of bitter personal disappointment to her disenchantment with Republican conservatives.

  During this period, O’Connor was determined to help out. He found a job as a sales clerk in a cigar store, probably earning the New Deal—mandated minimum wage of thirty cents an hour, and another job selling shoes. Able, self-effacing, charming, and droll, he endeared himself to the shoe-store owner, who asked him to stay on as a manager. He might have accepted and excelled at the job had Rand’s fortunes not quickly changed. At the moment, however, financial hardship, anxiety over the fate of The Fountainhead, and embarrassment at (as she saw it) hawking her book to anti-intellectual businessmen reinforced her feeling of living in “a gray desert.” For a time, she practiced lowering her expectations. She told Isabel Paterson that if The Fountainhead stopped selling—if it went the way of We the Living—she would resign herself to working at a dead-end job and writing only at night, for future generations. That would be her life. When Paterson, herself the author of eight moderately successful novels as well as The God of the Machine, asked why Rand was placing so much emphasis on a single book, the younger woman replied that she considered The Fountainhead to be so good that if it didn’t sell she could hope for nothing further from this culture in her lifetime.

  Paterson mulled this over and followed up, perhaps during a vacation she persuaded Rand and O’Connor to take at her Connecticut country house in July; Rand had been working much too hard and needed a rest, Paterson told her. The novelist was grateful. In her fifties, she would tell an admirer that those two weeks were the only formal vacation she had ever taken; she didn’t mention her childhood trips to the Baltic Sea or the Black Sea in summer, as, by that time, she avoided mentioning anything about her Russian past. Paterson asked what it would take to convince her that The Fountainhead was a success. “A sale of one hundred thousand copies,” Rand immediately replied, watching as a look of disbelief crossed Paterson’s face. No doubt the more experienced writer thought the younger woman’s expectations bordered on lunacy and invited further disappointment. Very few books sell that well, Paterson pointed out.

  But the determined novelist, who had clearly given the issue some thought, insisted that nothing short of such a sale could guarantee that she had reached the right minds in the country—a group very much resembling Albert Jay Nock’s famous concept of “the Remnant,” a model of political deliverance he introduced in a famous essay called “Isaiah’s Job,” published in 1936. Nock, doubtful that pandering to the public at large would ever win large numbers of people over to his conservative viewpoint, conjured a conservative Remnant made up of a scattered, chosen few in every generation who would stand fast against the fickle masses and build a new society when the old one crumbled. This, of course, is practically a summary of Rand’s next novel, Atlas Shrugged. In any case, Rand eventually won the argument. One hundred thousand copies of The Fountainhead would be sold in 1945 alone.

  By now, in spite of occasional bickering, Rand and Paterson had designated each other “sisters” in a figurative family of shared values and personal grit. “Really, those women were enormously brave,” Paterson’s old friend Muriel Hall reflected in 2004. In the 1940s, “they were given the cold shoulder by almost everyone they met—they were scorned” by the great majority of liberals, she said. So they championed each other. During the year 1943, Paterson favorably mentioned The Fountainhead and its creator eight times in her weekly Herald Tribune books column. She advised her “little sister [from] St. Petersburg” how to manage business disputes with Bobbs-Merrill over delayed press runs and paperback reprint rights, especially after the summer of 1943, when Ogden left the company to lead the Council on Books in Wartime. Rand, in turn, praised The God of the Machine to every influential conservative she met, even sending a long letter to Paterson’s editor, Earle Balch, at G. P. Putnam’s Sons, urging him to get behind what she assured him was the most important book in centuries. Sounding like the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual she essentially was, she wrote, “It takes a book to save or destroy the world.” Putnam might well have filed her letter under “agitator” or “eccentric,” as her own publisher was beginning to be inclined to do.

  In late fall, 1943, sales of The Fountainhead began to rise dramatically. Readers had begun to tell one another about the tale of lust and defiance they had read, and other readers bought the book. By Thanksgiving, after two hurried new printings by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, eighteen thousand copies were in readers’ hands, an impressive sale for a novel by a little-known author.

  D. L. Chambers, Bobbs-Merrill’s budget-conscious president, in town from Indianapolis, phoned and asked Rand to meet him for lunch. Observing that sales had gained momentum, he proposed a deal. If she would agree to waive a scheduled increase in her royalties, from 10 percent to 15 percent after the ten-thousandth copy had been sold, he would match the money she gave up and use the entire sum to fund a new, more dramatic ad campaign. The Bobbs-Merrill ads would run for a month or two, he told her, after which time the company would restore her higher royalty rate. She agreed. This was what she wanted—to increase advertising of her book.

  A day or two later, a Warner Bros. story editor phoned her at home. Earlier in the week he had been in touch with Bobbs-Merrill, he said, and when he inquired who was in charge of movie rights for The Fountainhead he had been referred to her. She immediately passed him along to her new literary agent, Alan Collins, president of Curtis Brown, Ltd. But a suspicion that Mr. Chambers had known about a possible movie deal when he invited her to lunch and had calculated the advantages of proposing a joint effort before she found out about it, too, arose and took hold. She made a note to add this possible deception to a growing list of grievances against Bobbs-Merrill.

  Grievances, however, were not much on her mind in late 1943. Mr. Chambers was preparing bold new full-page ads for placement in newspapers, she wrote happily to Paterson, who was on vacation. More surprising, Warner Bros. seemed to be serious about making an offer for the book. Alan Collins, who had demonstrated his good judgment by approaching her to initiate a business relationship after reading an advance copy of The Fountainhead, was conducting negotiations. The sticking point was Rand’s asking price: $50,000. This, Collins told her, was an unrealistic—a fantastic—sum. True, the great Ernest Hemingway had recently been paid $150,000 for movie rights to his best-selling novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. But Dashiell Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and other box-office hits, got only $25,000 for The Glass Key. Six months after publication, there were not likely to be any competing offers to drive up the price. He advised her to ask for $25,000 and settle for $20,000.

  Although $20,000 represented years of living expenses at the O’Connors’ current rate of spending, Rand staunchly told him no. She explained her reasons. In the 1930s, Universal Pictures and MGM, respectively, had bought and then traded or resold the rights to Red Pawn and The Night of January 16th. Both studios had made a hefty profit. She had been pleased to discover that her work was worth so much. But she was a mature writer now and did not want to put too small a price on The Fountainhead. She was sure that it would soon be worth much more than she was asking.

  Ten days later, to everyone’s amazement, except Rand’s perhaps, Warner Bros. made the hoped-for offer: $50,000. As part of the purchase price, the studio wanted her to travel to Hollywood to write the prelimina
ry screenplay from the novel. It would pay round-trip fare, for both her and O’Connor, and estimated that the job would take a month. In the event it took longer, the studio would pay her $500 a week for every additional week she worked; this was a good rate for a largely untested screenwriter, and she was impressed with Collins for negotiating it into the contract. If Hollywood had earlier blackballed her as an outspoken anti-Communist, it was pursuing her now. The hitch was that Warner Bros. had no obligation to use her preliminary screenplay, and it could assign the writing of the final script to anyone it chose. It could cast Margaret Dumont as Dominique and Gabby Hayes as Roark. It could do anything it pleased. Rand, knowing how bad it could become, agreed. If she did a good job, she hoped the studio would hire her to write the final script. At worst, the publicity from the movie would help to sell the book.

  Collins delivered the good news early one afternoon while Rand was at lunch with a proper old businessman who had no intention of writing a check to raise advertising funds for her continuing campaign. When she got back to the apartment, tired and downcast, her husband was waiting in the dimly lit living room, a peculiar look on his face. “Well, darling,” he said, after a dramatic pause, “while you were at lunch you earned fifty thousand dollars.” That evening, the two celebrated with dinner at a local cafeteria where they had eaten many times before. As they studied the menu’s right-hand column, where the forty-five-cent meals were listed, it suddenly occurred to them that they were no longer poor. They could afford to order whatever they wanted from the sixty-five-cent side of the menu, and so they did. That meal made real the issue of her wealth, she later said. They stayed awake all night, “gloating” together, until the sun rose over 139 East Thirty-fifth Street.

  A few weeks later, on their way home from signing the official Warner Bros. contract, they stopped for a champagne cocktail at the Roosevelt Hotel. They were as happy as they had ever been. The hard work, the single focus, and the courage not to compromise had all paid off. To reflect on the money she had earned was exhilarating. To experience the momentary assurance of a sought-after success was deeply satisfying. She did not regret the past. If she had achieved financial success and recognition in a gentle upward line, over time, she and O’Connor told each other, this moment would not have been as sweet. She had become a capitalist overnight, she jested to her friend the economist and writer Ruth Alexander.

  Of all her hard-won accomplishments, why did this one finally touch her? She had no more respect for the judgment of Hollywood than for the New York publishing world; indeed, she had less. And she most emphatically did not believe that wealth alone signals worth. A clue may be found in the dazzling speech she would later write for Francisco d’Anconia, one of three capitalist heroes in Atlas Shrugged. “Money is the root of all good,” Francisco famously announces to a group of hypocritical politicians and professional humanitarians assembled at a wedding party. “Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.” Francisco goes on to deliver a virtuoso defense of the profit motive; in all of history, he tells his listeners, the free exchange of money has been the only nonviolent, orderly, and socially transparent means of calibrating the value men place upon one another’s work. Without money, and particularly money backed by gold, force decides, Rand argued.* Perhaps it was natural, then, that after many disappointing encounters with politicians, businessmen, theatrical producers, and literary rainmakers, money pleased her more resoundingly than praise. At best, praise could be marred by errors of understanding; even the admirable Lorine Pruette had tarnished an otherwise perfect review by comparing The Fountainhead to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a novel Rand considered both ponderous and ludicrously mystical. Most important, money gave Ayn Rand the time and the freedom to write.

  In her ebullience, the thirty-eight-year-old author must sometimes have turned her thoughts to her parents and sisters, from whom she had heard nothing in six long years. From the 1920s on, the Rosenbaums had lived primarily to applaud their eldest child’s achievements in America; now that she had what for her was real wealth, she must have wished that she could share it with them and relieve their hardship. But communication with Russia was still impossible. Even if Stalin had permitted mail to flow freely from the West, Europe’s transportation infrastructure was in tatters. Absent the power to contact them or even find out if they were alive, she may simply have avoided dwelling on thoughts of them. She did not mention them in letters or in published working journals. She did, however, send a signed copy of The Fountainhead to her mother’s cousin Minna Goldberg in Chicago. Minna’s daughter Fern Brown remembered the book, and also remembered her mother’s caustic asides about the fact that their celebrated young relative did not then or later repay the money she had borrowed from the family in 1926. She most certainly did not send Minna a mink coat—an oversight that was not forgotten by the Goldbergs, Stones, and Liptons.

  Surprisingly, Ayn Rand did purchase a mink coat for herself. On learning of the Warner Bros. deal, her first thought was, Now I can pay for my own extended ad campaign. That notion quickly gave way to an anxious resolve to save every penny so that she would never again have to work when she needed time to write. But she didn’t foresee a friendly conspiracy to add a touch of glamour to her wardrobe. With Paterson’s encouragement, Frank persuaded her to go with him to Saks Fifth Avenue, on a jaunt to replace her worn-out winter coat. Once inside the store he told her sternly, “You can choose any kind of coat you want—as long as it’s a mink.” He led her to the fur salon. The coat she chose cost $2,400. Later that day, she went up to Paterson’s office to show her friend her prize; Paterson wasn’t there, so she modeled the coat for the secretaries and assistants and passed it around for them to try on. Her pleasure in it was later captured in a speech by Hank Rearden, the self-made steel magnate in Atlas Shrugged. Rearden tells his lover Dagny Taggart, to whom he’s just presented a fur coat, that he had never before paused from his work to enjoy his wealth. “I couldn’t find any purpose for it,” he says. “I’ve found it now,” in the realization that “it’s I who produced that wealth, and it’s I who am going to let it buy for me every pleasure I want.” Rand had become a proud, conscious producer of wealth—a capitalist—and she would never be poor again.

  *Rand’s views on money, which influenced her disciple Alan Greenspan, are particularly interesting in light of the 2008 financial meltdown. Francisco’s speech continues: “Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’”

  EIGHT

  FAME

  1943–1946

  I decided to become a writer—not in order to save the world, nor to serve my fellow men—but for the simple, personal, selfish, egoistical happiness of creating the kind of men and events I could like, respect, and admire. I can bear to look around me levelly. I cannot bear to look down. I wanted to look up.

  —“To the Readers of The Fountainhead,” 1945

  The weeks she expected to spend in Hollywood turned into months and then years.

  The O’Connors arrived in high style in early December 1943. Warner Bros. had sent them to Chicago aboard the New York Central Railroad’s luxurious Twentieth Century Limited, where they slept in a paneled private compartment and ordered two impossible-to-get government-rationed steaks in the formal dining car. They continued on to Hollywood aboard the streamlined Santa Fe Super Chief, world famous for its elaborate meals and celebrity passengers. The fact that they had earned this modish trea
tment was what made it seem so marvelous, Rand said, adding, “The only advantage of poverty is that you can get out of it. The contrast is wonderful.”

  Apartments were hard to come by in wartime Hollywood, and the cat the O’Connors had brought with them on the train didn’t help in the hunt. After a few days’ search, they smuggled Tartalia, Russian for “Turtle Cat,” into a furnished flat not far from Hollywood Boulevard. (When the landlady inquired if they had any pets, Frank charmingly answered, “Only my wife.”) In the meantime, she reported to work at Warner Bros. studio in Burbank and was astonished to be given an office the size of a living room, with an outer vestibule occupied by two personal secretaries—one hers and the other assigned to a writer named Howard Koch, who worked in an adjacent office. To her delight, her secretary announced visitors and screened calls. These were the “mink-coat” conditions of a screenwriter’s life in Hollywood, she wrote playfully to Archibald Ogden, now living in Washington, D.C. So far they hadn’t tempted her to “go Hollywood,” she assured him, or to forget the raptures of writing exactly what she pleased.

  Rand wasn’t especially interested in meeting those actors and studio luminaries she called “Hollywood people.” In Koch’s memoirs, he recalled that she was almost always hard at work in her office and seemed to keep her distance from the bustle of studio life. One day, before he had found time to introduce himself, her secretary knocked at his door and informed him that Miss Rand did not wish to be disturbed—a prophylactic measure presumably taken because, in 1943, he had written the script of a movie called Mission to Moscow. The movie was based on a book by the same name, written by Roosevelt’s former ambassador to Soviet Russia, that presented Stalin as a defender of justice and a brave opponent of the Nazi onslaught. Unknown to her, and possibly to Koch, the movie had been made at the behest of the Roosevelt administration and on behalf of the war effort—a fact apparently not taken into account when Koch was blacklisted for Communist sympathies later in the decade. He didn’t meet her until one stormy evening when her secretary knocked again and asked if he would give Miss Rand a ride home in his car. She didn’t drive and couldn’t get a taxi. They chatted warily as they rode. When she opened the door to get out of the car, she remarked, “I didn’t know you were this way at all,” and dashed out into the rain. She was slightly friendlier after that.