Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  Rand’s self-confidence as a writer was at a peak. From her office in Paramount’s Art Deco—style studio lot in Hollywood, Hal Wallis became her affectionately nicknamed “Boss” and she his jocular “loyal wage-slave.” She worked for him uncomplainingly on a series of B movies that the Oscar-nominated director now, for some reason, chose to produce in the company that bore his name. During her first work term, extending from summer 1944 until late spring 1945, she wrote three screenplays. The best known is Love Letters, adapted from a novel by British writer Christopher Massie. Rand’s lifelong fondness for Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac came in handy here; the plot features an American soldier who writes a second soldier’s love letters and eventually marries the woman to whom they are addressed (although she is an amnesiac and possibly a murderess). The movie starred Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones and was a box-office hit but a critical failure. She also co-wrote You Came Along in collaboration with its original author Robert Smith. A wafer-thin wartime romantic comedy, the script is interesting for its characterization of a government agent as a “wet nurse” (a term she later deployed as Hank Rearden’s nickname for a heart-warming minor character in Atlas Shrugged) and for the four distinctly different endings that Smith supplied and Rand polished and presented to Wallis, demonstrating the plotting proficiency and by-the-yard ingenuity of writers for the movie industry that would come in handy in the composition of her most celebrated work. She drafted a third screenplay, based on a novel called The Crying Sisters by mystery-crime writer Mabel Seeley, which she had read on the recommendation of her old friends, the attorney Pincus Berner and his wife, and brought to Wallis. The movie was not produced. She also tried unsuccessfully to interest Wallis in acquiring her 1932 screenplay Red Pawn, still owned by Paramount. She and Wallis worked well together and even flirted mildly now and then.

  She entered her initial sabbatical period in June of 1945. The first thing she did was to buy the collected works of Aristotle, which she had wanted to read since her university years, and three new outfits by Adrian, the former DeMille wardrobe assistant who, upon her 1926 arrival in Hollywood, dressed her for a walk-on role in the movie King of Kings. He was now a modish dress designer and her nearest neighbor at the ranch. Then she scrambled to finish a short nonfiction book she had promised to Bobbs-Merrill. Called The Moral Basis of lndividualism, it was an attempt at a brief, orderly explanation of the ethics of The Fountainhead, exactly the kind of book that Isabel Paterson had urged her to write in 1943. In notes, she explained the moral necessity of Howard Roark’s defiantly independent stance and contempt for the opinions of others. Among man’s inalienable rights, she noted, the right to life is the most fundamental. Yet an individual can survive only through the use of his rational ability. To prove that reason is man’s only tool of survival in a world he cannot understand instinctively, she began to elaborate the nature of human existence itself, as she wrote to Paterson. In her notes, she described what she knew for sure: that humans exist; that the world around them is real; and that the faculty of “rational consciousness” is the only way for humans to know and control the real world. How else but through meticulous reasoning could Roark have built grand new structures that did not fall down? How else could Peter Keating have failed so bitterly, except by letting others do his thinking for him? Roark’s unspoken code is a morality of reason. He is the Active Man, the creator, producer, egoist, life-giver; Keating and Toohey are examples of the Passive Man, the parasite, the imitator, the collectivist, the “altruist,” the mediocrity, the death-carrier. Severely condensed, an early draft of the book appeared as “The Only Path to Tomorrow” in the January 1944 issue of The Reader’s Digest, where Eugene Lyons, whose The Red Decade had first attracted her to Macmillan and who was now her friend, was working as an editor. She found expository writing boring and difficult at this stage in her career and never finished the book.

  Two years earlier, she had written an inscription in Paterson’s copy of The Fountainhead that quoted Roark’s tribute to Gail Wynand: “You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated.” This was a warm commendation, conveying affection and respect. Yet it also carried a subliminal, elegiac note, one that echoed Roark’s mixed sympathies for Wynand. Rand was beginning to think of Paterson as stubborn, even stifling. On first moving to Hollywood, she had traded long, fond letters with Paterson. But by 1945, her side of the correspondence had cooled. In the midst of sisterhood, conflicts had opened a narrow rift between them. God the father was one sore point. Rand had always known that Paterson believed in God, although she also knew that the crotchety individualist did not endorse any organized religion and thought that the Christian morality would one day be replaced by something better. Rand held faith of any kind to be inconsistent with rationality; she particularly despised Christianity, with its insistence on suffering and brotherhood, as “the best possible kindergarten of communism.” The women had punted and dodged this issue for years. But in their letters it rose acrimoniously to the surface, with Rand at one point writing that “an omniscient being, by definition, is a totalitarian dictator. Ah, but he won’t use his power? Never mind. He has it.” The two also conducted a fascinating, though highly charged, argument about the limits of Aristotelian deductive reasoning. Paterson thought that Rand’s use of logic sometimes resembled the arid arguments put forward by the philosophers Rand most disliked. When such philosophers “had strung some words together, in the form of a syllogism or other logical construction, they thought that [the formulation] had to be so—without asking if the facts which constitute the necessary premises are so,” Paterson wrote. Take, for example, the logic of, “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal. That is a good syllogism,” she wrote, “but its truth depends on the premises being true—that men are mortal, that Socrates is a man. Logic is an instrument for dealing with whatever you can get into its measure.” The older woman thought that God and men were both to some degree immeasurable. She argued that Rand trusted deductive reasoning too much and overlooked matters that reason might identify as being worthy of investigation but that were illogical, or inexplicable, at least for now. Rand thought that the alternative to a morality of reason was “the fiat of revelation,” and that to hypothesize entities and spheres that the human mind was by its nature inadequate to understand was at best perverse.

  More personal matters also troubled their friendship, or at least disturbed Rand. Later, she would describe how, in 1942, Paterson had made a point of asking permission to paraphrase some of her arguments against altruism in The God of the Machine, including the gist of her argument about Boswell and the baby. In the chapter on “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine,” Paterson had adapted Rand’s insight, that a baby cannot survive in a tower without an adult to care for her, to make a case that professional humanitarians will sooner or later halt production by turning everyone into a needy person—a dependent baby—in an effort to increase their own sense of power. If the baby lives and production ceases, whither the baby? At the time, Paterson had explained that she didn’t want to mention Rand’s name in print because she disliked footnotes; and the inexperienced writer was pleased and flattered that her older, better-known friend wished to mention and publicize her ideas. She was reassured by the fact that Paterson had privately described her basic insight—that human reason, not an impossibly good deity, is the basis of morality—as the most important ethical discovery since Christianity. But after the publication of the book, Rand became increasingly suspicious of Paterson’s motives. In the published copy, the older woman had acknowledged the contributions of a number of prominent people. Why not Rand? Was it because she was not yet famous in 1942 and 1943? Because Paterson wanted to present the younger woman’s ideas as her own? As Rand brooded on the matter, Paterson’s decision not to give her credit struck her as enormously improper. That she hadn’t yet confronted her friend in person or in writing was a mark of how deep were her deference and attachment
.

  If Rand’s final dismissal of Paterson’s musings on God as a creative force offended the older woman, so did the lengthening intervals between Rand’s letters. Paterson felt neglected. Rand felt harassed. The correspondence between them became more frequent again in the summer of 1945, and they carried on a kind of epistolary lovers’ quarrel. In one letter that July, Rand boasted that The Fountainhead’s sales had now topped 150,000 copies, injudiciously reminding Paterson that she had set a goal of one hundred thousand copies. Paterson remembered, all right. She replied that “sometimes I [think] you might [be] more tactful” in proclaiming the triumphs of The Fountainhead, since she, Paterson, had to see the book displayed in bookstore windows all over New York, while The God of the Machine “could not sell at all.”

  Most inflammatory, perhaps, were Paterson’s repeated attempts to browbeat Rand into giving up “the dope you take.” “Stop taking that benzedrine, you idiot,” she wrote in July 1945. “I don’t care what excuse you have—stop it.” Rand’s reply is missing from the archived correspondence, but she seems to have defended herself by insisting on the pressure she was under to produce good work on deadline, her exhaustion, low spirits brought on by the spread of Communist influence in Hollywood, and her doctor’s willingness to write prescriptions. Paterson responded, “I am seriously vexed with you for believing such nonsense as that the dope you take won’t hurt you because a doctor told you so.” She added, “Don’t take that stuff to work on. If you persist, believe me, you are running into a perfectly hellish time within a few years.” At one point, she issued a mock warning: “If you take any more of that benzedrine I will come out there and spank you to a blister.” Paterson didn’t visit until 1948 and probably wouldn’t have made any headway if she had. Rand would continue to use amphetamines for the next three decades.

  Late that summer, Rand and O’Connor made the first of two or three trips back to New York to confer with her agent and publisher. She looked forward to seeing Paterson, but the two women must have argued, for after that their correspondence stopped abruptly and didn’t resume for many months. She also visited Eugene Lyons of Reader’s Digest, who invited her to a party in his apartment, where she encountered the political idol of her early adolescence, the former Russian prime minister Aleksandr Kerensky. He was now in his sixties, immaculately dressed, with thick glasses and a slight stoop. Introduced, they spoke in Russian. As they discussed their native land, she wondered if he would express second thoughts, or possibly regret, about his government’s failure to take seriously enough the Bolshevik threat in 1917. Instead, she listened, appalled, as he prattled on about how much Russians hated Stalin and how much they had loved Kerensky. Worse, summoning a mystical fatalism she deplored in her native culture, he insisted that the soul of the Russian people would one day set them free. He was a typical Russian sentimental fool, with a fat Russian smile and no capacity for analytic thought. He was a mere zero, she said afterward.

  One of Paterson’s earlier letters had mentioned the successful novelist’s bloom in middle age. “You can knock the world for a loop now,” Paterson declared. And there is no doubt that Rand was glamorous. At the age of forty, she wore expensive, elaborately tailored suits and gowns by Adrian. She chain-smoked through a long cigarette holder, wore her dark hair short and straight in 1920s flapper mode, and carried her fame regally, like Catherine’s invisible crown. She was conscious of her power and achievement and loved to hear her writing praised, but—apart from basking in a compliment when especially well dressed—was largely without conventional vanity. Ruth Ohman, the daughter of Morrie Ryskind, a Pulitzer Prize—winning playwright, remembered, as a little girl, watching Rand at parties in her parents’ living room. All the men in the room would cluster around her, listening, rapt, as she discoursed on politics and economics. The other women hung back, talking among themselves. “I admired her. She gave me confidence and hope,” said Ohman. Rand had not yet learned, and never would learn, the despised art of small talk and got “furiously nervous” before every social occasion. To Paterson, she had written, “I am becoming more antisocial than I was—and the reason is the same as yours. I can’t stand the sort of things people talk about.” Her conversation about political trends in Hollywood and the importance of individual rights, however, was more scintillating, brainier, and more original than ever. Men, especially young men, noticed, and were attracted.

  She began to collect the most interesting young men she could find, those who appealed to her for reasons of merit or like-mindedness. An early example was Thaddeus Ashby, who came to live on the ranch in the spring of 1945. An irrepressible twenty-one-year-old fan, he had written to her from New York, calling her the most important philosopher living and suggesting that, because he understood the character of Howard Roark better than Warner Bros. ever could, she should appoint him producer of The Fountainhead. He held an entry-level job at the McCann-Erickson advertising agency on Madison Avenue and typed his letter on company stationery. Was he important? Rand and O’Connor apparently wondered. Later, Ashby discovered that they had sent Frank’s older brother Joe, who happened to be in New York, to the advertising agency to check him out. “I was just a flunky, a clerk,” Ashby said, “and I couldn’t really help her.”

  Rand didn’t answer his letter. Nevertheless, he quit his job, hitchhiked to Hollywood, and phoned her through Hal Wallis’s office at Paramount. Impressed by his persistence, she invited him to lunch on the Paramount lot. The attractive young man was working on a novel and wanted to be a writer, he said, and regaled her with passages from The Fountainhead that he had learned by heart. “I could quote it the way fundamentalist Christians quote the Bible,” he remembered. That night, Rand invited Ashby to supper at the ranch. When she learned he lacked sufficient money to continue writing, she invited him to stay. He moved in the following day and remained for between five months and a year.

  Rand’s friend and former neighbor in New York, Albert Mannheimer, the tall, curly-haired former Yale Drama School student and Communist apostate, was already living and working in Hollywood. He took to spending long weekends at the ranch, both during Ashby’s stay and afterward. Now a moderately successful young screenwriter, he still wanted to write for the theater and was working on a play called The Bees and the Flowers. According to Rand’s part-time secretary during those years, June Kurisu, Mannheimer looked more like a “sports hunk” than a standard-issue intellectual. Although Rand usually wrote seven days a week, all day long, especially after she started intensive planning of Atlas Shrugged in the spring of 1946, she deviated from her schedule when Mannheimer was with her. On those occasions, she spent her weekend afternoons and evenings closeted with him in the study, discussing his play and other writing projects, developing her ideas, exchanging Hollywood political gossip, and, as time went on, offering him emotional counseling and support. “They spent an awful lot of time in there,” said Kurisu, then an eighteen-year-old college girl whose Japanese-American parents worked as the O’Connors’ live-in housekeeper and handyman. During the summer of 1947, and on weekends afterward, Kurisu typed the author’s handwritten manuscript pages and her personal letters and sometimes typed for Mannheimer at Rand’s request. She worked and slept on a balcony overlooking the double-height O’Connor living room. Mannheimer slept on the study couch. “I never saw them touch, but I always wondered. Frank O’Connor never went in” the study while Mannheimer was in there with his wife, but he never seemed to mind the time they spent together, either. During the two years Kurisu worked at the ranch, Rand referred to Mannheimer as her “intellectual heir,” the typist recalled. Another frequent guest, Hal Wallis’s personal assistant Jack Bungay, similarly remembered, “She was terribly, terribly fond of him. They were very close friends. I thought he was going to be her heir then.” But “intellectual heir,” that odd honorific, which Rand seems to have made up, would not belong to Mannheimer for long.

  In 1945, another young man named Walter Abbott, a playwright who
m Rand and Mannheimer had befriended in New York, began to show up at the ranch. Abbott had met her in late 1935 or early 1936, shortly before The Night of January 16th closed on Broadway. A theatrical producer who knew them both gave her one of his plays to read; she was crazy about it, she told an interviewer, and she and Mannheimer had pooled their money to buy an option to produce it. They couldn’t raise the additional capital to bring it to the stage, and the project withered. But when Abbott arrived in Hollywood in the mid-1940s, he joined Ashby and Mannheimer in a threesome of regular weekend votaries to Rand. Although she eventually came to think of him as an “emotionalizer” and the kind of ne’er-do-well writer who works only when “inspired,” she lobbied Hal Wallis to give him a job as a junior screenwriter at $150 a week. His first, or nearly first, mission was to collaborate with her on a script about the life of the Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, a celebrated alumnus of the St. Petersburg conservatory where her sister Natasha had studied. Leonard Bernstein, then twenty-seven, tried out for the composer’s role. But the film was not produced, probably because a company called Monogram announced plans for its own Tchaikovsky movie. Abbott took to writing B-grade screenplays, such as Scared to Death (1947), with Bela Lugosi, in which a murdered woman narrates dark deeds from a slab in the morgue.