Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  By March, she was back in a Warner Bros. office, with a secretary, and was working on the screenplay. Blanke and director Vidor were casting the remaining roles, and competition intensified for the part of Dominique. Hedda Hopper hinted that Lauren Bacall had accepted the part; Margaret Sullavan said she wanted it; Vidor had his eye on Jennifer Jones. Rand, who lobbied for the forty-three-year-old “Swedish Sphinx” Greta Garbo, was ordered by Blanke to tell their long-suffering mutual friend Barbara Stanwyck that the studio thought she was too old at forty. In early June, a month before the filming started, Vidor hired Patricia Neal, a twenty-two-year-old ingenue who had only once before appeared on screen. When Rand heard Neal’s Kentucky-bred voice on a screen test, she was horrified. So, the story goes, was Gary Cooper. He swore he’d have her fired; then, over dinner with Vidor, he met her and they fell in love. “They went for each other right away,” the director told one of Cooper’s biographers. “After dinner we never saw the two of them again except when we were shooting.” The love affair between Cooper’s Roark and Neal’s Dominique was genuinely searing and continued offscreen until 1951.

  Rand completed the screenplay in late June. As the shooting began in a quarry near Fresno, she remained on the lot to fine-tune the dialogue and explain her characters’ motivations to the actors. In letters, she sounded euphoric. She had turned in her script in a blaze of glory, she wrote to Ogden, and Blanke and Vidor had promised not to make any changes unless she approved and wrote them. Vidor, in whose hands the project rested, was an excellent director. She seemed even more delighted, if possible, in late September, when the filming ended with her plot and theme intact. “For the first time in Hollywood history,” she wrote proudly to Paterson’s friend John Chamberlain, “the script was shot verbatim, word for word as written.” When the first trial screening of the film took place in front of a live audience in January 1949, it went so well, she told her literary agent Alan Collins, that the studio executives decreed that additional screenings would not be necessary. When she suggested a few cuts that could be made during prerelease editing, the executives positively forbade her to touch a single line. They were in an uproar of excitement, she informed Collins. The front office expected The Fountainhead to be the most talked-about movie of 1949.

  A decade later, Rand told a dramatically different story about the making of The Fountainhead. In an early 1960s interview she said, “The whole thing was an enormously miserable experience.” Producer Blanke meant well, she said, but constantly caved in to pressure, especially when it came to casting Patricia Neal. Director Vidor was a vegetable, a frightened has-been whom no other studio wanted and whose career was hanging by a thread. Fired from his previous job because of cost overruns, he was concerned only with getting this movie in on time and under budget. She recalled endless unpleasant conferences with the production staff and continual arguments with Vidor over ideological and stylistic issues. Her most nightmarish moment took place during the filming of Roark’s trial. Arriving on the set one day, she found Vidor shooting an abbreviated version of her hero’s speech—the soliloquy that gave the book and the movie meaning, in her view. She rushed to Blanke’s office, “screaming at the top of my voice,” she said. She threatened to take her name off the movie and publish ads telling her millions of readers not to see it. Blanke, speaking for Jack Warner, overruled Vidor, and the scene was shot as written. Warner issued an edict: There were to be no more changes made to the script on the set. Her troubles didn’t end there, though. The Hollywood censorship authority, the studio’s business office, even Gary Cooper’s personal attorney all badgered her to water down her central philosophical theme of the morality of selfishness. Making good use of her aptitude for calling the bluff of duller wits, she defied them all. To the business manager, who fretted that Roark’s declaration that man is not “a sacrificial animal” would alienate (presumably Christian) audiences, she said, “So you think man is a sacrificial animal?” He backed down. Speaking to her interviewer, she explained, “That’s how one should treat all underground pressure that doesn’t dare come out into the open. Make it open. Name what they are implying.” This was good advice, and she used it brilliantly for the better part of her career. Still, after a day of shooting, she recalled, she came home and pounded the arm of her favorite chair in frustration, enraged at being forced yet again into battle with the agents of conformity and pointless compromise. Worse, she knew that the movie was “no good” as soon as she saw a rough cut, long before the supposedly triumphant early screening. The script wasn’t long enough to showcase the characters and theme, she said. The people involved were unworthy of the project. Then and there, she told her interviewer, she decided to wash her hands of the movie industry and never write another movie. The last trace of her youthful love of Hollywood as a utopia of beautifully costumed, strong-willed, dashing men and women was gone.

  What explains the disparities between her account at the time and her recollections twelve years later? For one thing, when she finally attended the movie’s gala opening night at the Warner Theatre in Hollywood in late June 1949, she discovered that one line had been cut in final editing, the sentence that summarizes Roark’s self-defense at trial: “I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.” The front office had demanded the cut, she later discovered, but no one seems to have had the courage to tell her in advance. For another, The Fountainhead was not a hit, either with film critics or at the box office. “High-priced twaddle” was the verdict of Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who, not satisfied to condemn the movie, wrote a second article reproving Warner Bros. for its role in helping to promote her doctrine of the Superman. A newspaper syndicate distributed an article facetiously headlined “Cooper in Race for Longest-Speech Oscar.” Though dramatically set and beautifully shot, the movie was stiff, and most reviewers said so.

  But the larger explanation for the disparity lies within Rand’s character. She would not admit that she had written a flawed script. From adulthood, if not before, she positively refused to consider that she bore significant responsibility for any of the conflicts, failures, or disappointments in her life. “In all the years I knew her, I never heard her say anything remotely to the effect that she had acted badly, mistakenly, or unfairly,” recalled a former friend. As her fame increased and she became conscious of her own iconic stature with readers and audiences, she tended increasingly to fuse her life with the lives of her characters, whose mistakes, if any, arose from ignorance of others’ bad intentions and not from a lack of objectivity, diplomacy, or wisdom. She remembered obstacles and disappointments less as ordinary, if infuriating, setbacks than as episodes in a tug of war—like Roark’s, like Equality 7–2521’s—with evil. People and events appeared as black or white. She minimized to the vanishing point the help she had received, failed to mention thinkers who had influenced her, and presented herself as a wholly self-created soul. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in the aftermath of her final falling-out with Isabel Paterson in June 1948, while she was still trying frantically to finish the screenplay of The Fountainhead.

  To some degree, Rand and Paterson seemed to have repaired their friendship during Rand’s visit to New York after the HUAC hearings in the fall of 1947. And no wonder: Paterson had taken the trouble to arrange a special treat for Rand on Rand’s way back to Los Angeles. This was a favor the younger woman was not likely to forget.

  It was the trip of a lifetime, Rand wrote to Paterson in February 1948. The aging columnist, on learning that Rand wanted to ride in a locomotive to gather background details for Dagny’s triumphant run on the John Galt Line, had contacted her good pal Colonel Robert S. Henry, a railroad executive and historian, and together they made arrangements for the novelist to travel partway home in the locomotive engine room of the Twentieth Century Limited, while Frank rode in a compartment car behind. When the Limited had pulled out of the underground tunnels beneath Grand Central Terminal, Rand wrote to Paterson, “Ever
ything I thought of as heroic about man’s technological achievements was there concretely for me to feel for the first time in my life.” At Croton-Harmon, New York, the train exchanged its coal-burning engine for a faster diesel engine, and outside of Elkhart, Indiana, she took the throttle and drove the train at eighty miles an hour. After touring Inland Steel in Chicago, she and Frank resumed their trip to Hollywood as passengers. They were treated like royalty, she wrote. But she didn’t exactly thank Paterson and afterward didn’t mention her former mentor’s help when describing the experience to others.

  Rand had taken a train during almost every important journey of her life. Yet she admitted to Paterson that, as an adult, at least, she had often felt a nagging dread of railroad accidents. “I have seldom enjoyed anything concrete or in the present tense,” she wrote. “That locomotive ride was one of the very few times when I enjoyed the moment for its own sake.” This is a startling statement and provides an insight into Rand’s enormous drive and habitual placement of all real joy and satisfaction in the future. In Atlas Shrugged, she leaves it to Dagny to explain the connection between anxiety and the uncharted present moment. At the throttle on the John Galt Line, “she [Dagny] wondered why she felt safer here, where it seemed as if, should an obstacle arise, her breast and the glass shield [of the front window] would be first to smash against” the looming obstacle. Then Dagny understands: “It was the security of being first, with full sight and full knowledge of one’s course…. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know.” Alone in command of a powerful machine, not unlike her mind, Rand and her character were most alive.

  As they exchanged letters in early 1948 they traded compliments—until they started trading barbs. In response to something Paterson wrote, which has been lost, Rand mailed off a terse tract against Catholics (“those people”) and the emphasis they placed on suffering. The older woman asked how Rand could indict all “those people”—hundreds of millions of Catholics—without risk of indicting the entire human race. Easily, Rand replied, echoing Nietzsche: even if every person in the world other than she became a Christian, a socialist, or any other kind of collectivist “altruist,” the greatness of man would be vindicated by the lone remaining rationalist. In another letter, Paterson unwisely mused that she, Paterson, might well be the only person “alive or dead” who really understood capitalism. Rand answered testily, “Does it really seem to you that I haven’t been born yet?” Still resentful over the perceived failure of her former elder “sister” to give her credit in The God of the Machine, she reminded Paterson that, until she had explained that altruism asks the impossible of men, Paterson believed that altruism was an ideal to which to aspire. Paterson denied that she had ever said such a thing and then moderated the argument with a jest: Altruism was like sawdust, she wrote, in that both were indigestible to humans. Rand became conciliatory. She conceded to having learned the practical aspects of capitalism from Paterson, and apologized in case she had wrongly remembered their conversation. Never in her life had she doubted her memory, which added a note of grace to the concession.

  Rand was midway through her screenplay when Paterson phoned to say that she was coming to California. The reason for her visit was to raise money for a new magazine, which would be edited by their common friends John Chamberlain of Fortune and Henry Hazlitt of Newsweek. The magazine was to be called The Freeman in honor of Albert Jay Nock’s 1920s libertarian weekly and would advocate free-market politics and economics. Rand liked the idea; since Willkie’s defeat, she had believed that serious conservative thinkers needed a serious public forum. If she would furnish introductions to her high-powered conservative friends in Hollywood, Paterson proposed to do her best to win their financial backing for the magazine.

  Rand seemed genuinely pleased by the prospect of a visit from her friend. She paid Paterson’s plane fare and invited her to stay for ten days at the ranch. Rand’s affection for Paterson at this point is unmistakable. She wrote to the older woman that she hoped to be finished with the screenplay by the time Paterson arrived. If Paterson could be on the set when the first camera shot was taken, “it will be a wonderful philosophical omen,” she wrote. As it happened, the shooting didn’t begin until Paterson was back in New York, but Rand had rarely paid such a solemn compliment to anyone.

  Paterson arrived on May 28. Irascible by nature, she was in an especially irritable mood, according to her biographer Stephen Cox. She had not enjoyed the flight and regarded the entire fund-raising expedition as a tedious necessity. At sixty-two, she was battle-weary. She was also probably aware that Irita Van Doren and her other ideological adversaries at the Herald Tribune were on a campaign to have her fired. The following January, she would lose the job she had held for twenty-seven years. She would never really work again. Rand, too, was under pressure; one of her more minor complaints about Paterson’s visit was that her guest’s constant chatter made it hard for her to write.

  Rand behaved generously in her role as fixer, staging a series of parties with wealthy conservatives. The first hint of trouble came at the end of a small party attended by Rand’s friend the playwright Morrie Ryskind and his wife. After Ryskind left, Paterson apparently said to Rand, “I don’t like Jewish intellectuals.” Paterson’s biographer Cox surmises that this was merely an awkward joke, an attempt to disguise her boredom and discomfort with many of Rand’s friends, who were by no means New York—style literary intellectuals. Naturally, it struck Rand as an insult. In another example of her response to anti-Semitism, she asked, “Then why do you like me?” and answered herself sarcastically, “Of course! I’m not an intellectual.” Paterson apologized.

  The next incident took place at a large gathering of members of the Motion Picture Alliance. There, a peevish Paterson spoke rudely to one of Rand’s colleagues at Warner Bros., a screenwriter named Gordon Chase, and he and his wife walked out. A night or two later she told six or so anti-Communist luminaries, seated around the dinner table at the home of Rand’s neighbor and friend Adrian Greenberg and his wife, the actress Janet Gaynor, that they knew nothing, nothing, about politics. (Years later, a repentant Paterson told a friend that Gaynor had said that night, “[That woman] ought to be kept out of sight and produced only on special occasions.” Paterson admitted that she had to agree.) Finally, during a party at the ranch, hosted by Rand in honor of the man she called her best conservative ally, William Mullendore, the sexagenarian had a public temper tantrum. When Adrian suggested producing a promotional dummy issue of the new magazine, with real articles by Paterson, she went into a fit. Hadn’t she worked hard enough in her lifetime? she shouted. Why should she write without pay? Why didn’t someone else do something for a change? Turning to Mullendore, who could have been helpful to her, she cried, “None of the businessmen do anything! None of them!” In other circumstances, with a businessman other than Mullendore, Rand might have agreed. Now she attempted to quiet Paterson, but the tirade continued. Mullendore left. That was it for Rand, she later told a friend.

  Paterson behaved badly, but the trouble between them was older and more personal than that. In addition to their dispute over who had taught what to whom, and who had received proper credit, Rand suspected that Paterson had not really liked The Fountainhead. For five years, Rand had resented the fact that Paterson had not openly praised the novel in the Herald Tribune or publicly defended her against the Left’s attacks. Of the many references Paterson had made to the book in print, most were gossipy or anecdotal, she complained. One day during the visit, Paterson, probably inadvertently, revealed that she was the mystery woman who had refused to review the novel for the Herald Tribune in 1943. According to Rand’s later account—the only one there is—when the novelist demanded to know why, Paterson gave an evasive answer. She didn’t agree with everything in the book, she muttered vaguely. She didn’t like the sex and was particularly uncomfortable with the fact that Dominique didn’t bathe after the “rape” by Roark because she wanted to keep his s
cent on her skin. She hadn’t wanted to attack her friend in print. Anyway, she added, by that time her literary influence was waning and a review by her would not have helped the book. Rand wanted to throw her out of the house right then and there but considered Paterson’s age and distance from home and let her stay. “I forgive you, but God won’t” was a favorite expression of Paterson’s. Rand gazed at her former friend with her laser-beam eyes and said, “God may forgive you, but I won’t,” and returned to her work.

  On the night of the Mullendore incident, Paterson offered to go home early. Rand and Frank didn’t plead with her to stay. The next morning, Paterson made a show of not knowing how to change the date of her airplane ticket. If she was hinting that she wanted to stay, her hostess didn’t take the bait. O’Connor chauffeured Paterson to the airport, Rand sitting silently up front while Paterson chatted from the back about books and authors and New York literary life. Listening to but not answering the kind of small talk she had always hated, Rand decided that Paterson was “gone” psychologically. She was “no good.”

  Rand and her first and only mentor saw each other once again, in February 1959, shortly before Paterson’s death. Paterson, then seventy-three and down at the heel, came to Rand’s New York apartment to ask her former friend for help in finding a publisher for her final novel, Joyous Gard. Isolated and regretful about the past, she also hoped to reignite their friendship, according to her biographer. Rand was not interested. She went right to the point, explaining without rancor that the novel was too dated, too old-fashioned, to be published. Then she gradually turned the conversation to what Paterson had thought of Atlas Shrugged, which had been published in 1957. The undiplomatic Paterson admitted that she had reservations about the novel’s treatment of man as a purely rational being—their old dispute. One of Rand’s disciples was in the room when Paterson said good-bye. She appeared burned out, sour, and defeated, he recalled. Rand was at the pinnacle of her fame. He couldn’t imagine what Rand and the older woman had ever had in common.