Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  On September 2, Ayn Rand wrote the first sentence of the first formal draft of Atlas Shrugged—which happens to be the date (minus the year) displayed on a lighted calendar that seems to float ominously above New York City’s skyline at the beginning of the novel. Three weeks later, she rejoined Hal Wallis for what would turn out to be her last few months of work for him.

  By now, the Boss was in a slump. The films he was working on for Paramount were fewer and far less distinguished than those he had produced for Warner Bros. in the early 1940s, where he had received twelve Oscar nominations. Rand’s projects were no worse or better than the others. From September 1946 through mid-January 1947, and then again briefly in the fall of 1947, she worked on a movie called House of Mist, a tepid love story adapted from a novel by Chilean writer Maria Luisa Bombal. Like The Crying Sisters, Top Secret, and the Tchaikovsky movie, House of Mist was never filmed. But a draft found among Wallis’s papers bears distinct marks of her thinking at the time. The story’s heroine, Helga, like the developing heroine of Atlas Shrugged, “looks like a young girl who has never known any sorrow.” Orphaned and poor, Helga tells her cousin Teresa something that a younger Rand may well have said or thought. “I don’t believe in unhappiness,” says Helga. “I won’t let [unhappiness] make me bitter and ugly. I will think of things as they should be … even when they aren’t.” The film was finally shelved in October 1947. Without resigning, Rand left Wallis, never to return.

  By then, she had finished seven chapters of Atlas Shrugged and was steering Dagny and Hank Rearden into their once-in-a-lifetime adventure on the John Galt Line. As the main plotlines unfolded without much difficulty, she thought that the book would be shorter and quicker to write than The Fountainhead and predicted that she would soon be finished. But when she began to consider the philosophic underpinnings of her plot and characters, she realized that she would have to probe more deeply. Asking herself, “Why is the mind important? What specifically does the mind do in relationship to human existence?” she decided that “my most important job is the formulation of a rational morality of and for man, of and for his life, of and for this earth.” It would take her a total of thirteen years to complete the intricate and sweeping web of Atlas Shrugged.

  On Thursday, October 16, 1947, she and O’Connor boarded a train for the nation’s capital, where she had agreed to testify as a friendly witness before HUAC. The hearings opened on the following Monday, as into the marble caucus room of the old House Office Building strode Rand and a crowd of film celebrities, some wearing sunglasses against the glare of klieg lights. Looking for seats behind them were hundreds of newspaper reporters, photographers and cameramen, spectators, and a television crew. Outside, fans fought police for a glimpse of their favorite stars. It was the hottest show in town.

  By prearrangement, the MPA supplied most of the twenty-four friendly witnesses expected to appear, including Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, Walt Disney, and Ayn Rand. The nineteen unfriendly witnesses—those suspected of Communist Party ties or sympathies—had been subpoenaed to appear against their will. Ten of them would be sentenced to prison for refusing to answer the infamous question that introduced an era: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” Cited for contempt of Congress as a result of their refusal to answer, each of the “Hollywood Ten,” as they came to be known, would serve between six months and a year behind bars. They would be blacklisted by the major studios and would be a liberal cause célèbre for decades. They were Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Mannheimer’s former friend Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo.

  Rand was sworn in and testified on the first afternoon of the hearings. She didn’t name names or inform against her colleagues, though others did. As the only individual present who had lived in Russia, she answered questions about the misleadingly cheerful impression of Russian Communist life conveyed by a 1944 wartime romance called Song of Russia. In the movie, an American symphony conductor, played by Robert Taylor, tours the USSR and falls in love with a Russian pianist named Nadya, who invites the conductor, John, to attend a music festival in her native village. The village peasants are pictured as strong, prosperous, happy, musical, and free—they ride state-of-the-art tractors, seem to own the land they farm, and excel at playing orchestral instruments. When the German army invades, the peasants fight valiantly but lose. John and Nadya flee to America, where they assure large audiences that the liberty-loving Russian people will soon defeat the Nazis. With U.S. government encouragement (if not actual arm-twisting), Song of Russia, like Howard Koch’s Mission to Moscow, was produced by MGM as war propaganda, to help persuade Americans to support Russia’s post-invasion conversion to the Allied side.

  Rand was offended by Song of Russia, incensed by it, even pained by it. She explained to the committee that the country she came from was a land of frozen borders, omnipresent GPU (or NKVD) agents, meager food, prison camps, and constant, purposeful terror waged among average, ill-fed people, who didn’t smile gaily and make music, as they did in the film. She pointed out the obvious and less obvious elements of propaganda. In one scene, a Russian band plays “The Star-Spangled Banner” while the camera lingers on a Soviet flag. In another, John’s hard-boiled American road manager tells Nadya that, although her determination to fight the Germans personally makes her a fool, “a lot of fools like you died on the village green at Lexington,” during the American Revolution. “I submit that that [speech] was blasphemy,” Rand announced to the committee. She did not discuss the film’s screenwriters, Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins, both of whom later identified themselves as members of the Communist Party.

  Rand’s remarks directly followed the much-publicized testimony of Jack Warner, Sam Wood, and Louis B. Mayer. Warner repeated testimony he had given the previous spring, in Hollywood, naming sixteen Warner Bros. screenwriters whose views he considered to be un-American. One of them was Koch, Rand’s old office mate, who, though not a Communist, would nonetheless not be able to secure work for the next seven years. Independent producer Wood, who was the president and founding member of the MPA, had been keeping a “little black book in which he jotted the names of radicals,” according to Hollywood historian Neal Gabler; Wood accused seven screenwriters of being Communists, including four of the Hollywood Ten. MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer took a more cautious position; he simply denied that there was any Communist influence exerted on or radical propaganda produced by MGM. It was then that the committee, prepared to prove him wrong, called Rand to talk about MGM’s Song of Russia.

  Rand later said, quite credibly, that she had been promised an opportunity to make a full statement of her views on the dangers of Communist propaganda in the movies and to read aloud from her “Screen Guide for Americans.” Instead, the committee used her for its own purposes. Not listed in the schedule of speakers for that day (or any other day), she was called upon ad hoc, primarily to discredit Mayer’s testimony. Her function was to demonstrate that in making Song of Russia MGM had, in fact, engaged in Communist propaganda. Had Mayer not taken what the committee considered an evasive stance, Rand would not have been called as a witness. She remained on hand throughout ten days of hearings, encouraged by Chairman Thomas to believe that, from one day to the next, she would be allowed to complete her statement. When she wasn’t called, she remembered having a “violent scene” with the chairman in his office. He tried to placate her with promises of a “whole [new] special hearing devoted to nothing but ideology,” where she could bring out “all the facts.” She told him that, if she came back to testify at all, it would be on her terms. “What terms?” he asked, visibly nervous. Why, philosophical terms, of course, she answered. Relieved, he said, “Oh, I thought you meant money.” “That gave me an insight into [his] psychology,” she later told a friend, adding, “You know, in Washington, if you talk about terms, it’s not philosophy.” She wa
s quite right. The following August, Thomas was convicted of taking kickbacks for favors and sent to a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where Lester Cole and Ring Lardner, Jr., two of the Hollywood Ten, were also jailed. Cole and Lardner would sometimes pass ex-chairman Thomas in the prison yard, where inmates tended chickens. “Still handling the chicken shit, I see,” Cole is said to have remarked to him.

  The HUAC hearings ended abruptly ten days after they began. Thomas told the press that there were rumors of planned Communist street demonstrations and that he wanted to thwart them. The real reason seems to have been that press coverage had turned negative.

  In order to deliver a fresh scandal on the final day, the committee arranged for provocative testimony about, of all people, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Chairman Thomas called to the stand a HUAC investigator who claimed that, five years earlier, in 1942, the physicist had been approached by an American Communist agent seeking atomic secrets; this had taken place, the investigator said, with the help of a prominent Hollywood hostess, who had extended hospitality both to the alleged agent—a colleague of Oppenheimer’s named Haakon Chevalier—and to two members of the Hollywood Ten, albeit on entirely different occasions. “The connection with the motion-picture industry was little more than incidental,” The New York Times mildly observed. As for the motion-picture industry itself, studio flacks hailed the curtailment of the hearings as an exoneration of Hollywood. But the inquiries would go on.

  For Rand, HUAC was “nothing but disappointments,” she said. It was also a publicity disaster. Liberal newspapers mocked her and her novels and treated her as a certified member of the right-wing “nightshirt fringe” and as someone whose opinions on politics and social issues could not be taken seriously. For the next fifty years, almost every book written about Hollywood and HUAC, including Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time, presented her as a semihysterical reactionary who condemned Song of Russia strictly because it pictured Russians smiling. Unjust as this was, it made her fair game in the political as well as the literary press. Moreover, it was reported that she had annoyed Louis B. Mayer by contradicting him about the issue of Communist influence at MGM and irked Jack Warner with her initial intention of criticizing not only Song of Russia but also Mission to Moscow, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Hellman’s Little Foxes.

  Although she later admitted that the hearings were “a disgusting spectacle,” she never changed her mind about their legitimacy. Far from conceding that a U.S. government agency had no business investigating citizens’ political affiliations in the absence of a crime, she insisted that belonging to the Communist Party was a crime; that is, to be a member of a closed, secret, though legal political organization that advocated the overthrow of the American government and engaged in acts of espionage, sabotage, and murder was on its face to participate in a criminal conspiracy. This boils down to guilt by association—an odd stance for a radical individualist and admirer of the U.S. Constitution. It suggests a limited understanding of American jurisprudence, notwithstanding the teaching of Paterson, and, perhaps, a trail of ideological crumbs from her insurrectionary homeland.

  Before leaving Washington, she tried to see J. Edgar Hoover, who turned her down. What she wanted from him is not known. En route to California, she and O’Connor stopped for a few days in New York, where she focused on collecting background material for the railroad scenes in Atlas Shrugged. She toured Grand Central Terminal (the inspiration for the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad Terminal) and interviewed half a dozen executives of the New York Central Railroad, including the male vice-president in charge of operations, the real-life equivalent of Dagny Taggart. She showed Archibald Ogden the first six chapters of the novel and met with editors of Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest, and Life, presumably about assignments. She finally met Rose Wilder Lane, and she and O’Connor treated Marna Papurt, then twenty years old and back in Rand’s good graces, to an expensive dinner at the Essex House, where the O’Connors were staying. In their hotel room after dinner, she, Marna, and Frank acted out scenes from her script for House of Mist. She spent her final evening in New York with Paterson. Albert Mannheimer, who was also in New York and was present on that evening, recalled that Paterson told her, “I love you.” Mannheimer murmured, “I love you, too,” but the following day, he bolstered his statement in a letter: “You are the ultimate in human beings I have known: free emotionally, with a full natural ability to love and hate (and to be loved).” He added that the abundance of her love of life was an enduring inspiration to him. This is a rare spontaneous tribute to a personal warmth and charm that Rand most assuredly possessed but that few people described in writing.

  Mimi Sutton also visited her uncle and aunt by marriage in their room at the Essex House and witnessed an argument about money. O’Connor, always a stylish dresser, had been out shopping, and Rand objected to something he had bought. He told her, “Goddamn it, I will not account for anything I spend, buy, or do!” “She shut up,” said Mimi. “I think it was because I was there. She had embarrassed him.” In fact, she often backed down when Frank got angry. “She was afraid that she would lose him,” Mimi said.

  Back in Hollywood, she put the best face on the hearings. The studios moved immediately to conciliate the powerful committee, excising so-called un-American and overtly egalitarian content from their films and firing screenwriters whose loyalty to the country had been questioned. She took a measure of credit for these developments. “The ‘Screen Guide for Americans’ did it,” she told friends. Two weeks after the hearings ended, the guide was published in a conservative magazine called Plain Talk, whose editor Rand had met while in New York. The Sunday New York Times picked up the story and reprinted the guide’s itemized recommendations. Requests for reprints began pouring into the MPA from studios. Because of HUAC, she said in 1961, “all the points I made in [the guide], particularly about the attacks on businessmen as villains, disappeared” from Hollywood movies. “Watch old movies on TV [and] you’ll see.”

  Another immediate outcome of HUAC was that producers began looking for pro-capitalist, anti-Communist screen material. She and her Hollywood agent, Bert Allenberg, seized the opportunity to bring her 1936 novel We the Living to executives’ attention. She preferred to sell screen rights outright, Allenberg told trade reporters, but was willing to strike a deal with an American studio to distribute a two-part, six-hour Italian film version that had been made in Rome in 1942, at the height of the war, without Rand’s permission and without payment. When she was finally able to get hold of a print of the film and saw it, she loved its stark, old-fashioned beauty and was especially pleased by Italian actress Alida Valli’s superb performance as Kira. From Valli, now in Hollywood and under contract to David O. Selznick, she claimed to have learned a detail about the film’s Italian release that struck her as wonderful in itself and as excellent publicity. Two months after the movie opened to packed theaters, Valli told her, Mussolini ordered the film to be withdrawn and prints and negatives destroyed, on the grounds that it was anti-Fascist as well as anti-Communist. This proved the kinship of Communism and Fascism, “which even Mussolini recognized,” she wrote to her attorney. Luckily, an Italian producer had managed to preserve the master negative, and a print had been smuggled out of Rome by Rossano Brazzi, the actor who played Leo and who was also now in Hollywood. In February 1948, while post-HUAC fever still ran high, Rand contacted Jack Warner and offered to screen the print for him. Warner—perhaps still smarting over her planned testimony against Mission to Moscow—told her no. In the early 1950s, the Italian government paid her $35,000 in compensation for the unauthorized use of We the Living. Still angry at the theft, she was pleased with the payment and used part of the money to buy a new mink coat. It was not until 1972 that an artful splicing together of the film segments, Noi Viva and Addio, Kira!, with English subtitles, became available to art-house audiences, thanks to the efforts of three of her admirers. An American movie of We the Living has never been made.

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p; Jack Warner was on her mind for another reason. In January or February 1948, she came upon an item in a Hollywood gossip column announcing that The Fountainhead was about to go into production, with Gary Cooper as its star and King Vidor as director. The hiring of Cooper was welcome news, of course. But that the producer, Henry Blanke, had notified a gossip columnist and not Ayn Rand about the project was not good news—and was angering because, at the time the studio had suspended production of The Fountainhead, Blanke had promised to keep her informed. With no assurance that she would be hired to write the final script, she fired her Hollywood agent Bert Allenberg and took to phoning Blanke directly. Awaiting word, she “went through hell.” Then she remembered that one of the dozen businessmen at Leonard Read’s 1944 dinner party was employed as the studio’s chief legal counsel. She called him to report that someone (she thought Vidor, the director) was trying to keep her off the movie. Two days later Blanke phoned and offered her the job. The front office didn’t dare to hire someone else, she later told a friend. It didn’t understand the book’s popularity and was scared to death that it would blunder and inadvertently offend the fans.