Ayn Rand and the World She Made
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three and a half million copies have been sold: EOA, p. 27.
“more precious to me than anything I have ever considered writing”: Unpublished letter to Norman Flowers, January 2, 1938; cited in EOA, p. 27.
fond of Watkins: Unpublished letter to Ann Watkins, circa 1940, cited in “The Hero in the Soul Manifested in the World.”
in the fall of 1937: BBTBI.
this calamity was compounded: Royalty statements, A. Watkins Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 178.
Rand walked away: BBTBI.
taking the copyright to We the Living with her: “Copywright Reassignment for We the Living,” A. Watkins Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 178.
settled on the Upper East Side of Manhattan: AR lived at 173 East Seventy-fourth Street from October 1937 to September 1938, and at 160 East Eighty-ninth Street from October 1938 to September 1940 (Bin-swanger, dinner lecture, April 24, 2005). At that time, New Yorkers traditionally changed apartments on October 1.
throw a party in Town Hall: “The Hero in the Soul Manifested in the World,” based on a newspaper account.
pronounced the FBI director “charming”: Hope Ridings Miller, “Lady Boileau, Here, Finds G-Men Most Interesting,” Washington Post, February 23, 1938, p. X14.
would try, and fail, to see him: AR was denied permission to see J. Edgar Hoover twice, once in October 1947, when she made a trip to Washington, D.C., to serve as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and once in January 1966; FBI archives, U.S. Department of Justice, FOIA memo to author from U.S. Department of Justice, December 11, 2003.
offer of ten thousand dollars: Contract between AR, A. H. Woods, Ltd., and RKO Radio Pictures, July 13, 1938 (A. Watkins Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 152); see also The Saturday Evening Post, November 11, 1961, p. 100.
intended to cast Claudette Colbert: News clippings about RKO stars and American Film Institute archive notes; thanks to Jenny Romero of the Margaret Herrick Library.
came to think of as “a phony”: BBTBI.
signed a contract with Knopf: Contract with Alfred A. Knopf, June 27, 1938 (A. Watkins Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 152).
FIVE: THE FOUNTAINHEAD: 1936–1941
“I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life”: TF, p. 685.
how a moral man can live in a corrupt society: BBTBI.
just as Rand remembered Cyrus laughing: BBTBI. In a lecture entitled “The Road to Roark,” Milgram points out that AR remembered incorrectly. Nowhere in The Mysterious Valley does Cyrus laugh (ARI Conference in Industry Hills, California, July 2003). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra does laugh, however, and he avers that “not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 315).
as supple as a cat: AR often described FO this way.
Like Zarathustra, he welcomes difficulties: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 25–27.
“walk over corpses”: TF, p. 89.
“a soul that has reverence for itself”: December 26, 1935 (JOAR, p. 88). AR is quoting Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. The passage reads: “What is noble? What does the word ‘noble’ still mean to us today? How do noble people reveal who they are, how can they be recognized under this heavy, overcast sky of incipient mob rule that makes everything leaden and opaque? There are no actions that prove who they are, actions are always ambiguous, always unfathomable; and there are no ‘works’ either. Among artists and scholars these days, you will find plenty of people whose work reveals them to be driven by a deep desire for nobility. But this very need for nobility is fundamentally different from the needs of the noble soul itself, and almost serves as an eloquent and dangerous testimony to the absence of such needs. It is not works, it is faith that is decisive here, faith that establishes rank order (this old, religious formula now acquires a new and deeper meaning): some fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be looked for, cannot be found, and perhaps cannot be lost either. The noble soul has reverence for itself. “(Judith Norman trans. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], p. 172.) From her earliest notes, AR used this passage as an inscription to TF, but just before publication in 1943, she removed it. By then, she disapproved of Nietzsche’s discussion of faith.
archetype of the creator: BBTBI.
the first germ of the idea: BBTBI.
In 1931 or 1932: The dates are based on the fact that Selznick came to RKO in 1931 and that AR left RKO in 1932 (AR, p. 50; TPOAR, p. 132; BBTBI).
fascinated by her next-door neighbor, Marcella Bannert: BBTBI.
helped her to place Red Pawn at Universal Pictures: “Ayn Rand’s Family and Friends.”
If some people had an automobile: BBTBI.
would want people to know: In 1996, when Scott McConnell of ARI found and interviewed Marcella Bannert (by then married and named Rabwin), the woman had no recollection of this exchange with AR. As for her attitude toward AR in the 1930s, she was as unimpressed with AR as AR was contemptuous of her. Bannert said, “She [AR] was rough. She was masculine. … She was the worst-dressed woman I have ever known in my life. She had a terrible figure in the first place. She went around with no makeup on” (100 Voices, Marcella [Bannert] Rabwin, pp. 42–43).
a genius surrounded by mediocrities: “Ayn Rand in Russia.”
“the collectivist motivation”: BBTBI.
they love what is average: February 22, 1937 (JOAR, p. 107).
“He was great”: TF, p. 188.
a seeming change of personality in her sister: AR remembered NR as an independent, nonconforming child, with tastes and attitudes like her own; NR remembered herself as Ayn’s “shadow and yes-man.” AR’s evidently mistaken perception of her favorite sister as a soul mate rather than a follower foreshadows her relationship with her young acolyte and lover, NB, in the 1950s (quote from NR comes from 100 Voices, p. 13).
seemed to live to make others jealous: The letter was written in 1933 (“Ayn Rand in Russia”). This was not an entirely new development in NR; sixteen when AR left Russia, NR had been known to imitate her successful older sister’s handwriting and prose style and to hoard the letters and stories AR sent home.
Roark chuckles: TF, p. 634.
based on Louis Sullivan: The mentoring relationship between Cameron and Roark resembles the early apprenticeship of FLW with Louis Sullivan, as described in Wright’s autobiography. Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (London: Longmans Green, 1932; rev. ed. Petaluma, Calif.: Pomegranate Communications, 1943).
a flame he holds on a leash: TF, p. 85.
thrusts and shoots through the earth’s crust: TF, p. 726.
“convulsion of anger, of protest, of resistance”: TF, p. 207.
“a first cause”: TF, p. 711.
“The act of a master”: TF, p. 220.
finally made and met someone who does: That AR is not advocating rape in an ordinary sense is made clear in a letter she wrote to a fan in 1946: “You write as if you thought that the lesson to be derived from [the relationship of Howard Roark and Dominique Francon] is that a man should force himself on a woman. But the fact is that Howard Roark did not actually rape Dominique; she had asked for it and he knew she wanted it. A man who would force himself on a woman against her wishes would be committing a dreadful crime. What Dominique liked about Roark was the fact that he took responsibility for the romance and his own actions. Most men nowadays, like Peter Keating, expect to seduce a woman, or rather they let her seduce them and they shift the responsibility to her;” letter to Waldo Coleman, June 6, 1946 (LOAR, p. 282). In the 1960s, some of AR’s male followers would make the mistake the letter writer made and try to force themselves on girls whom they considered “Dominiques.”
a contorted form of hero worship: TF, p. 245.
“myself in a bad mood”: TPOAR, p. 134.
find ecstasy in their st
ruggle: TF, p. 221.
opens in 1922: March 8, 1938 (JOAR, p. 166).
materials on architectural history: BBTBI; in an essay by Shoshana Milgram entitled “The Fountainhead from Notebook to Novel,” in EOTF, a footnote states that on March 18, 1936, Jennie M. Flexner, readers’ advisor at the New York Public Library, prepared an annotated list of recommended architectural texts for AR.
studying the masters: BBTBI.
she had barely heard of Wright: BBTBI.
“temple to man”: Wright, An Autobiography, p. 154.
echoes the young Wright’s argument: Wright, An Autobiography, pp. 125–28.
substitutes the name of H. L. Mencken: April 25, 1938 (JOAR, p. 182).
“Dear Mr. Rand”: Letter from Eugene Masselink, December 31, 1937, Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona, R022D05.
Taliesin West: Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 495.
arranged to be introduced: According to Secrest, the intermediaries were Blanche Knopf and Ely Jacques Kahn; Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 496.
“I felt this would be an unrepeatable occasion”: TPOAR, p. 189.
felt no immediate rapport: Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 496.
imploring him to see her: Letters to FLW dated December 12, 1937, and November 7, 1938 (LOAR, pp. 108–111); thanks to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Ariz., for authentication of Wright’s letters to AR.
compared their attitudes to those of Wright: February 23, 1937 to November 28, 1937 (JOAR, pp. 122–44).
Lewis Mumford: Mumford was the author of an architectural survey called Sticks and Stones. Toohey’s fictional history of architecture was called Sermons in Stone.
“You could sense the bared teeth behind [his] smile”: BBTBI.
Toohey in the flesh: BBTBI.
in 1935: December 26, 1935 (JOAR, p. 89).
“You held a leash”: TF, p. 691.
“rules the mob”: JOAR, p. 89.
“individualism versus collectivism”: In BB’s biographical interviews from 1960–61, AR stated that she had understood her theme in 1935. The quoted description is from 1942 (undated entry, JOAR, p. 223).
the rights of the creative individual: BBTBI.
vindication of modern architecture: BBTBI.
brought her along to professional seminars: December 6, 1937 (JOAR, p. 152).
helped to engineer her introduction to Frank Lloyd Wright: Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 496.
“valorizes [that group’s] cacophony”: Author interview with Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, July 5, 2005.
based on the department store magnate Marshall Field III: Note from Bobbs-Merrill editor Archibald Ogden to company president D. L. Chambers, March 6, 1943; Bobbs-Merrill Collection, courtesy of the Manuscripts Department, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Blooming-ton, Indiana.
completing a dream: Richard Siklos, “Hearst’s New Home: Xanadu in Manhattan,” NYT, June 5, 2006, p. C6.
“in its real meaning”: “The first purpose of this book is a defense of egoism in its real meaning” were the first words AR wrote in her notes on TF (December 4, 1935 [JOAR, p. 77]).
“All that which proceeds”: February 22, 1937 (JOAR, p. 105).
either they are “economic man”: Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State (Tampa, Fla.: Hallberg Publishing Corp., 1983), cited in Raimondo’s Reclaiming the American Right, p. 116. Nock, also the author of Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002), was an outspoken and articulate opponent of both a government-managed economy and the Left’s faith in the “wisdom of the common man.” AR met Nock in late 1940 or early 1941. See chapter 6, note 51, and chapter 10, note 20.
“The creator’s concern”: TF, p. 712
a nineteenth-century Eastern European Jew: Thanks to JW and his unpublished book, Go Ask Alyssa: The Jewish/Nietzschean Worldview of Ayn Rand, courtesy of author.
“Enjoyment is not my destiny”: TF, p. 664.
Compromise is said to be an insult in Russia: “The Russian Subtext of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.”
envied him his simple pleasure: JW’s taped, unpublished interviews with Philip and Kay Nolte Smith in preparation for a CBC special report on the tenth anniversary of AR’s death, titled Ideas: The Legacy of Ayn Rand (1992).
wrote and rewrote: TPOAR, p. 147.
“makes John Barrymore look like an office boy”: 100 Voices, Al Ramrus, p. 162.
about a third of the novel in first draft: Ayn Rand Papers, LOC, box 18, folder 11.
couldn’t say with certainty: BBTBI.
contract with the publisher was canceled: The contract was officially nullified in October 1940 (unpublished letter from Blanche H. Knopf to Ann Watkins, October 25, 1940 [A. Watkins Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 80]).
SIX: THE SOUL OF AN INDIVIDUALIST: 1939–1942
“Renunciation”: Introduction to The Romantic Manifesto (New York: World Publishing, 1969).
“My research material”: Quoted in Milgram, “The Road to Roark.”
four and a half years: The first page of the first handwritten draft of TF is dated June 26, 1938 (Ayn Rand Papers, LOC, box 18, folder 1).
“Frank was the fuel”: Introduction to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of TF (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), p. viii.
conflated him with her heroes: TPOAR, p. 136.
“He’s on strike”: TPOAR, p. 135.
father died in late December 1938: Dennis O’Connor died on December 21, 1938, State of Ohio death certificate for Dennis O’Connor, Archives of the Lorain, Ohio, City Health Department.
curious to see Lorain, Ohio: TPOAR, p. 152, based on an interview with MS.
the rest of the O’Connor family: AR and FO also traveled to Cleveland during the 1938 trip to Ohio, and that’s where AR first met the Papurt family (author interview with MW, December 16, 2006).
Roman Catholic funeral ceremony: Death notices, Lorain [Ohio] Journal, December 23, 1938, p. 18.
small talk remained something she didn’t do well: Author interview with JMB and Dr. Allan Blumenthal, March 3, 2004.
“drab and homely”: Author interview with MW, June 21, 2004.
During one dinner: This took place in 1947, at the Essex House in New York (author interview with MW, December 16, 2006).
Rand did increase the distance: TPOAR, p. 153; taped interview with MS, conducted by BB, January 20, 1983.
modern red-brick apartment building: At 160 East Eighty-ninth Street.
served a Russian dinner: FB, from a taped interview by BB with FB, Minna Goldberg, and MS in Chicago, February 20, 1983.
“The man cooking”: FB, from a taped interview by BB with FB, Minna Goldberg, and MS in Chicago, February 20, 1983.
twenty young-adult biographies and novels: Author correspondence with FB, February 18, 2006.
“architecture by committee”: Wright, An Autobiography, p. 152.
Mimi, also twenty: Facts about MS thanks to MW, December 11, 2005.
first met: Note from BB, June 21, 2006, based on her interview with MS in the early 1980s.
offered to produce the play: TPOAR, p. 150.
one-hundred-dollar-a-month stipend: “Contract with George Abbott” dated May 9, 1939 (A. Watkins Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 178).
her mind rebelled against reshaping it: BBTBI.
“the folks next door”: TPOAR, p. 150.
might hurt her nascent Hollywood career: Taped interview with MS, conducted by BB, February 18, 1983. Gregory Ratoff would later direct the movie Song of Russia, which was AR’s primary example of the glamorization of Russia by Hollywood in her 1947 testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
never saw or spoke to Leontovich again: Taped interview with MS, conducted by BB, February 18, 1983.
“Almost everybody”: Taped interview with MS, conducted by BB, February 18, 1983.
most often
drawn to Ayn Rand’s brains: TPOAR, p. 154.
“You’re absolutely right”: Taped interview with MS, conducted by BB, February 18, 1983; TPOAR, p. 154.
appeared less guarded: TPOAR, p. 153.
“it wouldn’t fit with Ayn”: Taped interview with MS, conducted by BB, February 18, 1983.
decision to have an abortion: Agnes Papurt told her daughter MW that she, MW, had been a toddler when this event took place, which would set it in the early 1930s (author interviews with MW, June 21, 2004, and December 21, 2005).
Based on material in her journals: Author correspondence with James S. Valliant, author of The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics: The Case against the Brandens, May 24, 2007.
“Where have you been?”: Taped interview with MS, conducted by BB, January 20, 1983.
February 13, 1940: “News of the Stage,” NYT, January 4, 1940, p. 18.
theatrical and film-world celebrities: TPOAR, p. 154.
“one of the season’s mishaps”: Richard Watts, Jr., “Red Terror,” New York Herald Tribune, February 14, 1940, p. 14.
“there would be a play”: “The Play,” NYT, February 14, 1940, p. 28.
days in bed, despondent: Taped interview with MS, conducted by BB, February 18, 1983.
safeguarding the individual: Letter to Tom Girdler, July 12, 1943 (LOAR, p. 81).
left off again in May: February 18, 1940, to April 22, 1940 (JOAR, pp. 205–15).
One night in early June: Thanks to Shoshana Milgram for her analysis of the timing of this incident in “The Road to Roark.”
“Frank talked to me”: “The Road to Roark.” This statement appears, in a slightly different form, in AR’s twenty-fifth-anniversary introduction to TF, pp. viii—ix.
Rand had written a letter: Letter to Aleksandr Kerensky, undated (LOAR, p. 42).
government-backed manufacturing cartels: Redeeming the Time, pp. 454–55.
from Stalinism to syphilis: Redeeming the Time, p. 612.
there might never be another federal election: Stephen Cox, The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America (Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2004), p. 219.