Ayn Rand and the World She Made
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she and her husband took a borrowed car: The car belonged to one of the friends who acted as official witnesses: Dorotha Bensinger and Harrison James Carter (“Application for Immigration Visa,” C-file number C-3447608, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Department of Homeland Security, Washington, D.C.). One of her procedural witnesses was her boss in the RKO wardrobe department, costume designer Walter Plunkett (“Petition for Citizenship No. 32336,” National Archives, N.Y.).
She recrossed the border: Henceforth she seems to have reported her original immigration date as 1929 instead of 1926 (Bureau of the Census, Fiftieth Census of the United States: 1930, Los Angeles, Assembly District 55, April 10, 1930).
a rapid evaluation to become a permanent resident: Author interview with Marian L. Smith, historian, Department of Homeland Security, May 19, 2005.
proved that she wasn’t wanted for crimes in Soviet Russia: Alice O’Connor’s petition for citizenship, courtesy of Marian L. Smith, historian, Department of Homeland Security.
“a shotgun wedding”: TPOAR, p. 93.
which of them would marry her and rescue her from deportation: TPOAR, p. 93.
Months earlier she had moved out: AR shared her first apartment with a Studio Club friend named Nell McKenzie. O’Connor family lore had it that Nell had to leave when FO visited (taped interview with MS, conducted by BB, February 18, 1983).
“He loved Ayn better”: Taped interview with MS, conducted by BB, February 18, 1983.
a small apartment at 823 North Gower Street: 1930 U.S. Census, City of Los Angeles, sheet 11A, lines 8–9.
“Just after the wedding, Ayn said”: Taped interview with Millicent Patton, conducted by BB, December 5, 1982.
July 1929: Noted in AR’s “Application for a Certificate of Arrival and Preliminary Form for Petition of Citizenship,” October 15, 1930 (C-File number C-3447608, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Washington, D.C.).
Ivan Lebedeff: AR, p. 36.
version of The Angel of Broadway: Ivan Lebedeff also played Rosengoltz in the 1943 film Mission to Moscow, the subject of AR’s voluntary testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947.
helped Rand to get a full-time clerical job: AR, p. 36; McConnell, “Paramount Studio Tour,” speech given on the Paramount Studio lot at the ARI premiere of the movie Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, November 2, 1996.
eventually became the department boss: Millicent Patton told an interviewer in 1982 about AR’s career in the RKO wardrobe department: “Anybody who got in her way she just brushed aside and stepped ahead. Anybody who was over her she naturally just—she’d see to it that that person got out of her way and would rise up over that one and get to the next one. She had such drive. Maybe she just learned a few little things about somebody who wasn’t doing what they should be doing and just let it be known.” This, of course, is a tactic Peter Keating perfects in TF (taped interview with Millicent Patton, conducted by BB, December 15, 1982).
started at a salary of twenty dollars: TPOAR, p. 94.
began to send money: Author correspondence with Michael Berl iner, September 27 and 28, 2005, based on unpublished Rosenbaum family letters.
Soviet government was desperate for foreign currency: Thanks to Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, professor of Russian and European intellectual history at Fordham University in New York, who provided this information and also cited Eugene Lyons’s Assignment in Utopia (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937).
“I loathed [that job]”: TPOAR, pp. 93–94.
“to cook, and wash dishes, and such”: Unpublished letter to Sarah Lipton, November 27, 1932, courtesy of FB.
He decorated their new apartment: BBTBI.
“I came to America to write”: Unpublished letter to Sarah Lipton, November 27, 1932, courtesy of FB.
film scenario, called Red Pawn: AR apparently composed two film scenarios in 1930–31, Red Pawn and another called Treason, which has been lost (“Ayn Rand’s Family and Friends”).
The story begins: In a thirteen-page synopsis of Red Pawn later written by AR, the American character Joan becomes a Russian character called Tania Sokolova. Tania seduces the prison commandant by teaching him the basic joy of living rather than the specific sensual superiority of Western values. Paramount owned Red Pawn, and AR showed the new version to both Hal Wallis and Barbara Stanwyck (letter to Barbara Stanwyck, September 7, 1946 [LOAR, pp. 317–18]; copy of the synopsis courtesy of Al Ramrus, to whom AR gave it in the 1960s).
displaying too much “ability”: Red Pawn, TEAR, pp. 154–227.
“a right to the joy of living”: Letter to Hollywood producer Kenneth MacGowan, May 18, 1934 (LOAR, p. 6).
“building a story in tiers”: Letter to Kenneth MacGowan, May 18, 1934 (LOAR, p. 6).
the kind of romantic triad that Rand was now elaborating: AR:SOL, p. 3.
powerful Myron Selznick agency: “Ayn Rand’s Family and Friends;” EOWTL, p. 259.
The agent, coincidentally named Nick Carter: Paramount appears to have rejected Red Pawn in 1932 but then changed its mind and acquired the script from Universal in 1934 with Dietrich in mind (“Paramount Gets Red Pawn, Maybe for Dietrich,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 20, 1934, p. 1).
According to the author: “Russian Girl Finds End of Rainbow in Hollywood.”
Gouverneur Morris: Lee Shippey, “The Lee Side o’ L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 1936, p. A4. Morris happened to be the great-grandson and namesake of a signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. His grandfather was a vice president of the New York and Harlem Railroad.
“[Red Pawn] was the first script sent me”: “Russian Girl Finds End of Rainbow in Hollywood;” unpublished letter to Sarah Lipton, November 27, 1932; letter to Jean Wick, August 29, 1934 (LOAR, p. 14).
“From that point on, you couldn’t stop her”: 100 Voices, Marcella Rab-win, p. 41.
studios “were interested in Russian stories”: Unpublished letter to Sarah Lipton, November 27, 1932.
“The high-priced executive in Russia”: “Russian Girl Jeers at Depression Complaint,” p. 9.
Universal hired her to rewrite an unrelated project: Unpublished letter to Sarah Lipton, November 27, 1932. AR was assigned the job rewriting others’ attempts at a screenplay called Black Pearls, which does not appear to have been released by Universal.
Red Pawn was never produced: Two years later, in June 1934, Paramount acquired Red Pawn by trading a twenty-thousand-dollar property it owned, called The Great Impersonation, for the script. Paramount wanted Josef von Sternberg to direct it, with Marlene Dietrich in the starring role. AR spent four weeks at Paramount, earning one hundred dollars a week, waiting for orders to revise the script. For a second time, von Sternberg decided against the project (EOW/TL, pp. 259–60).
He was landing small parts: My thanks to David Hayes for compiling FO’s movie titles. The list appears at http://movies.davidhayes.net.
earning enough to buy his young wife: AR:SOL, DVD.
“Ayn; adorable”: Bonhams & Butterfields, The Library of Ayn Rand, auction catalog, Los Angeles, June 28, 2005, p. 40.
“a real big novel … about Russia”: Unpublished letter to Sarah Lipton, November 27, 1932.
Rand originally called it Penthouse Legend: The play has been edited and re-edited many times. The “authorized” edition appears in Three Plays.
“sense-of-life” play: Three Plays, p. 3.
Swedish Match King and con man Ivar Kreuger: Three Plays, p. 5.
her growing preoccupation with the envy: Echoing Nietzsche, she describes Bjorn Faulkner as “young, tall, with an arrogant smile, with kingdoms and nations in the palm of one hand—and a whip in the other” (Three Plays, p. 21).
She later renounced her romantic fascination with criminals: TPOAR, p. 110.
audience juries overwhelmingly found in favor of Karen Andre: “Jury in Drama Usually Votes for Acquittal,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1934, p. 12.
She wrote The Night of Januar
y 16th in a few months’ time: TPOAR, p. 110.
opened as Woman on Trial: Lee Shippey, “The Lee Side o’ L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1934, p. A4.
Critics and a star-studded first-night audience: Advertisement, The Hollywood Citizen, October 19, 1934; “That Certain Party,” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1934, p. A1; “Window to Civilization,” quoted in AR:SOL, DVD.
at a party Lebedeff threw: “That Certain Party,” p. A1.
she had felt uncomfortable at the party: TPOAR, p. 110.
“superlatives or nothing”: TPOAR, p. 111.
for Loretta Young: Thanks to archivist Jenny Romero of the Margaret Herrick Library.
wasn’t able to write comedy to order: TPOAR, p. 111.
She had come to despise: BBTBI.
a box-office chaser: BBTBI.
advantageous to her as a writer: Letter to Jean Wick, July 19, 1934 (LOAR, p. 12).
he wasn’t earning much money: O’Connor earned about seven dollars a day as a film extra (100 Voices, Marcella Rabwin, p. 41).
Rand began to chafe under the impression: BBTBI.
described as heartbreaking: BBTBI.
very good in the parts he got: BBTBI.
he didn’t publicly express it: At least one friend at the time believed that AR preferred O’Connor not to be successful. “If Ayn had wanted him out there [in front of movie audiences], she would have pushed. But I think she wanted him right there, by her side,” said Millicent Patton (taped interview with Millicent Patton, conducted by BB on December 15, 1982).
closed in late November 1934: “‘The Night of January 16th’ Unique Courtroom Drama,” Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1936, p. 17.
“killed his ambition to work as an actor”: AR:SOL, DVD.
“enormous contempt” for the whole movie business: TPOAR, p. 135.
“His downfall was his enormous respect for her”: Taped interview with MS, conducted by BB, January 20, 1983.
“the greatest monument to the potency of man’s mind”: FTNI, p. 49.
translated it into Russian: “Ayn Rand in Russia.”
compared the beauty and economy of her language: “Home Atmosphere.”
a sketch of a theater marquee: AR:SOL, p. 71.
“A is A”: “Ayn Rand in Russia.”
determined belief in her abilities: “Ayn Rand in Russia.”
FOUR: WE ARE NOT LIKE
OUR BROTHERS: 1934–1938
“Men have been taught”: TF, p. 713.
left Los Angeles in their secondhand Nash: Letter to Jean Wick, November 24, 1934 (LOAR, p. 20).
in Virginia the car hit a pothole: TPOAR, p. 119.
She had already begun to make mental notes: According to JOAR, p. 77, AR made her first actual notes for TF on December 4, 1935. Shoshana Milgram, who has access to the ARI Archives, claims that AR was already working on an outline when she traveled from California to New York (Shoshana Milgram, “The Hero in the Soul Manifested in the World,” a lecture presented at the ARI’s Centenary Conference, New York, April 23, 2005).
The car was wrecked: “The Hero in the Soul, Manifested in the World.”
She also got on well: Letter to Mary Inloes, December 10, 1934 (LOAR, pp. 20–21).
one-room furnished apartment: Harry Binswanger, dinner lecture, ARI Centenary Conference, April 24, 2005; thanks to Fred Cookinham for his notes. In TPOAR, p. 120, BB mistakes the address as being on East Sixty-fifth Street.
Woods informed her that the play would not open: TPOAR, p. 120.
she needed money: Letter to Mary Inloes, March 16, 1935 (LOAR, pp. 21–22).
cash advance against the play’s New York box office: “Contract with A. H. Woods, Ltd.,” November 14, 1934 (A. Watkins Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York, New York, box 80).
complained in a letter to Mary Inloes: Letter to Mary Inloes, March 16, 1935 (LOAR, pp. 21–22).
“It was just a matter of what she had to do”: Taped interview with Millicent Patton, conducted by BB, December 5, 1982.
literary agent, a woman named Jean Wick: Letter to Jean Wick, July 19, 1934 (LOAR, p. 12).
“the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Soviet Russia”: Letter to Jean Wick, October 27, 1934 (LOAR, p. 19).
warned that its anti-Communist message might hurt it: Letter to Jean Wick, June 19, 1934 (LOAR, p. 10). “The literary set also turned against H. L. Mencken … because of his opposition to the New Deal” (from Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., “Biography of Henry Hazlitt,” http://www.mises.org).
disbelief and indignation: BBTBI; JMB, a friend of AR’s from the early 1950s until the 1970s, told Jeff Walker, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter, “She had such a glamorous view of America as a child and as a young person in Russia that she was genuinely horrified that there were such things as liberals and socialists; she couldn’t believe that it was true of this country at first, and then of course she came to believe that there was little else” (from taped, unpublished interviews by journalist JW in preparation for a CBC special report on the tenth anniversary of AR’s death, titled Ideas: The Legacy of Ayn Rand, 1992).
couldn’t be more than a handful of Communists: BBTBI.
Americans would “scream with horror”: Letter to Jean Wick, October 27, 1934 (LOAR, p. 18).
first vote as a U.S. citizen: TPOAR, p. 158.
she had been intimate with relatively few people: BBTBI.
“pink” penetration in America: Ayn Rand and the Song of Russia, p. 75.
Matthew Josephson: Josephson’s book The Robber Barons (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962) set the tone for much 1930s writing about ruthless, greedy industrialists. Cited in John Chamberlain, A Life with the Printed Word (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1982), p. 47. It was a point of view that AR would attempt to refute in AS.
“Red Dawn”: Page Smith, Redeeming the Time (New York: McGraw Hill, 1987), p. 532. It’s not impossible that AR had heard this phrase in Hollywood and had named her screenplay Red Pawn as an ironic commentary on it.
the extent of the pro-Communist bias: BBTBI; by mid-1936, she was writing to Gouverneur Morris, “New York is full of people sold bodies and souls to the Soviets. The extent of it almost frightens me” (letter to Gouverneur Morris, April 14, 1936 [LOAR, p. 28]).
vowed to confront the messengers of collectivism: Letter to H. L. Mencken, July 28, 1934 (LOAR, p. 13).
began a program of extensive reading: The Library of Ayn Rand, pp. 34–51; “The Hero in the Soul Manifested in the World.”
the most persuasive: AR’s youngest sister, NR, who turned against AR in old age, didn’t think the novel was persuasive. In a 1997 interview, NR said, “I can’t admire this falsehood. Go ahead, judge me! She had just artificially constructed the whole thing while living in America, that’s all. She had made up all of our lives, do you understand?” (100 Voices, NR, p. 4).
“Russia is a huge cemetery”: TPOAR, p. 60.
“we are dying here”: Isabel Paterson, “Turns with a Bookworm,” New York Herald Tribune, June 29, 1941. In 1925, many Russians still believed that if Western countries only understood their plight, they would be rescued.
St. Petersburg, or Petrograd, in 1922 and 1923: The Argounovas’ fictional return to St. Petersburg takes place a year later than the Rosenbaums’ actual return in 1921. Kira Argounova is depicted as being a little more than a year older than AR at the time of the events of the novel; specifically, Kira is said to have been born on April 11, 1904, a few days before Anna and Zinovy Rosenbaum’s wedding on April 20, 1904. In the first typed draft of We the Living on file at the Library of Congress, AR originally made Kira her own age. “‘Born in 1905, eh?’ said the Soviet official” is crossed out, and “1904” is penciled in, presumably to avoid giving the impression that the novel was purely autobiographical. (Ayn Rand Papers, LOC, box 26, reel 17, p. 108, begun on April 18, 1933.)
she enrolls in the city’s free State Technical Institute: Lev Bekkerman was an engineering student at Petrograd Te
chnical Institute from 1918 until 1925 (EOWTL, p. 54). In the novel, Leo Kovalensky is said to be a student of history and philosophy at Petrograd State University, otherwise known as St. Petersburg University, just as AR was.
son of a slain aristocrat: WTL, p. 62. Leo Kovalensky’s father, Admiral Leo Kovalensky, who AR suggests served heroically in World War I and was executed without a trial (WTL, p. 48), may be based on the husband of the woman who tutored AR in English in 1925, one Marie von Strachow. Her deceased husband had been an admiral; author correspondence with Michael Berliner, June 2, 2005.
just as Rand was during the same years: AR was a student of history and philosophy from 1921 until 1924. In an earlier draft of WTL, Kira Argounova was also a student of history.
campus GPU leader: The GPU, Russia’s secret police force, was the forerunner of the KGB.
“the rule of brute force”: Preface to WTL (written in 1958 and reprinted in the Signet edition, 1995), p. xv.
“The individual against the masses”: Letter to Jean Wick, October 27, 1934 (LOAR, pp. 17–19).
“too strong to compromise”: This description also characterizes AR’s father after 1921 (EOWTL, p. 23).
a mouth “like that of an ancient chieftain”: WTL, p. 61.
spiritual self-destruction: EOWTL, p. 54; BBTBI.
upholding values, even in the airtight atmosphere: AR’s circa 1930 working title for WTL was Airtight: A Story of Red Russia (JOAR, pp. 56–57).
“the state,” “the public,” or “the common good”: Quoted phrases from Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966), pp. 11–34.
cannot be broken: circa 1930 (JOAR, p. 59).
would have chanced death: TPOAR, p. 60. In about 1930, AR told Millicent Patton that she had risked death by walking across the Russian border, working her way west from St. Petersburg and finally “creeping through barbed wire in the snow.” If Patton was remembering correctly, AR seemed to be trying Kira Argounova’s story on for size (taped interview with Millicent Patton, conducted by BB, December 5, 1982).