Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 22
One person she met immediately was her new boss, Henry Blanke, the Warner Bros. producer in charge of filming The Fountainhead. Blanke was small, dapper, and animated, a German immigrant who, in 1920s Berlin, had worked under two of her favorite silent-film directors, Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang, before going on to assist in the production of movies such as The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He loved The Fountainhead. “It’s magnificent,” he told her during their first meeting. Barbara Stanwyck had brought him the book, he told her, and he had demanded that Warner Bros. buy it. He thought of it as the tale of a great man fighting injustices—a story line that may have had special meaning for him, since he had won a 1937 Academy Award for The Life of Emile Zola. This was only roughly congruent with Rand’s own view of her novel. But as she began to write the script he encouraged her to retain as much of the original story and tone as possible, to test how well the novel in its entirety would translate to the screen, and this reassured her. All in all, she was pleased. Blanke “is almost an Archie Ogden,” she wrote to the real Archie Ogden, adding, “Of course I know that it is too early for me to judge.” Still, the producer’s advocacy at Warner Bros., like Ogden’s at Bobbs-Merrill, had convinced her that “it will be my fate, like Roark’s, to seek and reach the exceptions, the prime movers, the men who do their own thinking and act upon their own judgment.”
By early February, she had completed the preliminary screenplay, a 179-page treatment (later to grow to 283 pages) that preserved all the novel’s major characters and events, including both of Roark’s jury trials. According to her, Blanke and the studio bosses were very pleased with her work; the producer especially appreciated her impassioned love scenes and her stylized dialogue. Unfortunately, the studio executives soon concluded that building the sets for the movie would consume unacceptably large amounts of rationed wood, cement, and metal. They put The Fountainhead on hold, presumably until the following year, but it remained unproduced until 1948.
In January, Blanke had briefly taken her off The Fountainhead and loaned her to his friend and mentor, Hal Wallis, the Warner Bros. producer of The Maltese Falcon, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Casablanca. Wallis was shooting an ill-conceived sequel to Casablanca called The Conspirators and needed a writer to add heat to the romantic scenes between Hedy Lamarr and Paul Henreid. On the set one day, hoping to learn more about the leading lady, she invited Lamarr to lunch. She later said that she immediately understood why the film’s director had asked her to keep the dark-eyed beauty’s dialogue to a few lines at a time; rarely had she met a less intelligent woman. Rand told this story without rancor, but she seems to have been mistaken. In 1941, Lamarr, an Austrian émigré whose first husband had been an arms manufacturer, co-invented and patented a radio-controlled torpedo guidance system that the U.S. Navy at first derided and then impounded as a state secret, and that Sylvania refined, built, and deployed after the war.
After four months in California, Rand hated Hollywood as both shabby and vicious and longed for New York, she wrote to Ogden, adding, “Frank says what I love is not the real city, but the New York I built myself,” a shrewd remark. Still, when Blanke offered her a permanent job, she was tempted. The movie-industry pay scale and the accoutrements of studio life were irresistible after years of watching every dollar. She proposed a compromise: If the producer would allow her to work six months of the year and take an unpaid leave of absence for the remaining six, to pursue her own writing, she would stay on. Alas, he answered, Warner Bros. would never agree to such a contract. Hal Wallis, however, would. The prize-winning producer had argued with Jack Warner, a co-founder of Warner Bros., and had walked off the set of The Conspirators to launch his own production company in partnership with Paramount, and he invited Rand to join him as his first employee. (His second was Lillian Hellman, whom Rand “lost no opportunity to run down,” recalled a Hollywood acquaintance of the time. Hellman didn’t much like Rand, either, and later caricatured her as an anti-Communist puppet in her memoir Scoundrel Time.) In early April, her new West Coast agent, Bert Allenberg, met with Wallis and they drew up an attractive five-year contract. Her starting salary would be $750 a week, with rapid raises to $1500. From roughly July through December of every year, with the exception of 1944, her time would be her own; from January through June, she would work five-day weeks on projects chosen by Wallis. The first year, she was scheduled to begin in July and work through May 1945.
The timetable was important to her, and so was the money and the industry prestige. She was eager to begin her next novel, whose working title was The Strike and which would become her controversial magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. She also had a minimum and a maximum set of expectations for her film work. At worst, the money she earned would protect her savings; at best, she would achieve a position of influence in Hollywood such that the “pictures [I write] would be done my way,” she wrote to Isabel Paterson. “This last is not impossible,” she added optimistically—and also prophetically, although five years would pass before her prediction bore its fruit.
The theme of Atlas Shrugged had come to her one evening during the previous summer, soon after the publication of The Fountainhead. She was on the phone with Paterson, expressing her frustration with slow sales and inane reviews. Paterson pointed out that readers might be confused by encountering serious ideas in a novel, and why didn’t she write a nonfiction book explaining her individualist philosophy? “No!” she said. “I’ve presented my case in The Fountainhead. …. If [readers] don’t respond, why should I wish to enlighten or help them further? I’m not an altruist!” Paterson stuck to her guns. People needed to hear Rand’s ideas; the author had a duty to present them clearly. Oh, no she didn’t, Rand exclaimed, temper rising. Then she said, “What if I went on strike? What if all the creative minds in the world went on strike?” As an aside, she added, “That would make a good novel,” and moved on to other subjects. When she hung up the phone, O’Connor remarked, “That would make a good novel.” At once she saw the extended possibilities of a story line she had first conceived at the University of St. Petersburg: the story of the heiress who persuades a group of brilliant men to withdraw their talents from an increasingly evil world and go into hiding. The new novel would dramatize the consequences to society if all the best artists, inventors, and businessmen refused to exercise their skills. The novel’s theme would be “the mind on strike.”
She and O’Connor were still living in their cramped rental apartment. They had bought a 1936 Packard car (it was “magnificent looking—black, half-a-block long, and drips with chromium,” she gloated to Ogden), and on the strength of the Wallis contract, he began searching for a house and land to buy in the San Fernando Valley. The national inflation rate was high—wavering between 5 and 7 percent, and at that rate, he explained, the money they were saving in the bank was losing buying power. He also had a theory that proved to be correct: after the war, when gas rationing ended and people increased their driving distances, land values in the still-undeveloped valley would rise. A house would be a good investment, he told her. She was hesitant. She didn’t drive, and the San Fernando Valley was a twenty-mile commute from Hollywood. Then one day their landlady caught sight of Tartalia and issued an ultimatum: Choose the animal or the apartment. The cat was placed in a pet hostel while the O’Connors arranged to buy an astoundingly Roarkian house on thirteen acres of fertile farmland that Frank had discovered amid miles of orange groves in the rural town of Chatsworth in the valley. The four-thousand-square-foot house had been designed in 1935 for director Josef von Sternberg and his mistress Marlene Dietrich by Richard Neutra, a Viennese architect who had been an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. It was a swan-shaped structure made entirely of glass, steel, concrete, and aluminum alloy, with a soaring two-story living room, an immense master bedroom lined with floor-to-ceiling windows, a large and airy study opening into a walled garden, a rooftop pool, and a moat encircling the house. It cost them the fantastic sum of $24,0
00. They asked Frank’s brother Nick to pack and ship their New York furniture and moved into 10000 Tampa Avenue in July, a week before she started work for Wallis.
O’Connor, a born landholder, it seemed, fell in love with the San Fernando Valley ranch. He tended its fruit trees, gardens, and meadows; he experimented with raising peacocks, chickens, and rabbits and grew gladioli and alfalfa as a paying business. With her salary, they could now afford to hire a cook, a maid, and a handyman. She was pleased that her husband had become “chronically and permanently happy” in his outdoor life and she liked the roominess of the ranch. But she confided to a few friends that she still missed her spiritual home base in New York.
Frank persuaded Nick to visit them in the fall of 1944 and, with fresh air and oranges, nursed him through a serious spell of active tuberculosis. Nick went back to New York in late fall. He died in January on an operating table in a veterans’ hospital, and was buried on Long Island. Tuberculosis had weakened his heart, and his heart had stopped under anesthesia. A few weeks earlier, Rand had sent him a long, affectionate letter from the ranch. She must have mourned his death but didn’t refer to it in any of her published notes or letters.
Meanwhile, sales of The Fountainhead continued to be brisk. By Christmas 1944, fifty thousand copies had been sold. Every two or three weeks, for no apparent reason, it climbed to the top of a handful of regional best-seller lists and then fell back again. This occurred twenty-six times through the end of 1945. Fan mail was pouring in to Bobbs-Merrill, coming from lawyers, teachers, librarians, bookstore owners, chemists, engineers, housewives, active-duty military personnel, artists, and musicians. The letters would continue to come for as long as she lived. Soldiers wrote from battle zones to say that they had been reading parts of the book to one another as a way of bolstering morale. Many readers thanked her for giving them the courage and inspiration to flout the stultifying expectations of their families and communities and to act according to their hopes and dreams; or they asked her advice on how to become more like Howard Roark; or they timidly inquired who Ayn Rand was, anyway. A Hungarian-American musician named Erwin Nyiregyházi, whose performances Rand had enjoyed in the mid-1930s, thanked her for her “great and exceptional” stand on the importance of the individual ego and called her the greatest satirist since Oscar Wilde. Most of the writers were men. Roark, a passionate woman’s erotic rendition of a rugged male hero, spoke to American men. Rand tried to answer every letter, assuring worried readers that if they understood and liked The Fountainhead they weren’t second-handers and politely declining the occasional “compliment” of being addressed as “Mr. Rand.” Much later, she said of these early admirers that she mistakenly assumed that their enthusiasm for Roark implied their agreement with her philosophy, since her ideas followed so meticulously from the novel’s characters and action, and since her mind was so quick to grasp implications. She hadn’t counted on the number of logical contradictions most people could sustain at any given time, she said. In the meantime, the passionate public response to the novel’s themes was earning her a reputation as a kind of novelist-guru.
She was famous now. Ely Jacques Kahn boasted to colleagues and the press that he had helped her; he invited her to speak before gatherings of architects in New York and California. (In her New York speech, in 1943, she told the group of architects that her book was not about the structure of buildings but about the structure of man—the girders and supports, the rotten beams and shoddy foundations of man’s spirit.) Gossip columnists reported on the progress of her movie and employment deals, and her presence in Hollywood produced a flurry of social invitations. Even after The Fountainhead had been delayed, actors and actresses were vying for the parts of Dominique and Roark. Joan Crawford gave a dinner party for her in which she dressed as Dominique, in a flowing white gown decorated with green-blue aquamarines. Barbara Stanwyck, a political conservative and the godmother of Warner Bros.’s purchase of The Fountainhead, befriended Rand and lobbied Blanke for the part. Making reference to Dominique’s helmet of pale-blond hair, Veronica Lake let it be known that the part had been written for her. Rand preferred Garbo. As to Roark, she had always pictured Gary Cooper in the part but read in the gossip columns that Alan Ladd and Humphrey Bogart hoped to be considered. Clark Gable, then a volunteer lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, was rumored to have read The Fountainhead on a transcontinental train heading east and to have hopped off during a stop to call MGM, his employer, and demand that the studio secure the part for him; MGM reportedly responded by offering Warner Bros. $425,000 for the movie rights, vindicating Rand’s prediction that the book would be worth more than she was paid for it. (She did not forget to call Alan Collins to tell him about the offer.) When she signed on with Hal Wallis—“the big man in Hollywood,” as she called him in a letter to Ogden—Hedda Hopper and The New York Times covered the event, and Cecil B. DeMille, now heading his own independent production company at Paramount, tried to pry her away from Wallis, though nothing seems to have come of it.
She was even invited to spend an evening with the elusive Frank Lloyd Wright at the home of his son Lloyd, in Santa Monica. The two paragons of American self-reliance spoke cordially of individualism, integrity, and, in relation to creativity, their own personal suffering. Wright expressed the courtly opinion that she was too young to have suffered. She told him wryly that she had certainly suffered over his 1938 letter to her ridiculing Roark. He had forgotten the letter and hadn’t yet read the published book. She sent him a copy. He read it and professed to be an admirer. “Your thesis is the great one,” he wrote. “The Individual is the Fountainhead of any Society worthwhile.” He hailed her for her portrait of Ellsworth Toohey but didn’t mention her hero, except to say that Howard Roark should have had a mane of white hair, like his own. Hoping to learn more, she wrote to Gerald Loeb, a mutual friend, begging him to tell her “everything that Wright said to you about The Fountainhead and about me.” Loeb demurred, taking the stance that Wright’s comments to him were confidential. Still, she was gratified by the famous architect’s apparent approval. His letter was “like the closing of a circle for me,” she wrote to him. As for his single serious criticism of her book—that it “sensationalized” the quest for truth—she suggested that his own buildings were equally sensational. They were not made for homey living or “flopping around in bedroom slippers,” she wrote, but for heroic individuals who stood up straight and made every minute count. Like her book, his houses were an expression of life as it should be lived, not as it was. When Wright wryly remarked that he supposed she would now be “set up in the marketplace and burned for a witch” for writing in praise of individual conscience, she replied, “I think I am made of asbestos.”
She and Henry Blanke were both eager to get Wright to design the sets for The Fountainhead, whenever it should be scheduled for production. The novelist and the architect would tussle over this issue until 1948, when his demand for prior approval of the costumes, sets, and script and a fee amounting to 10 percent of the budget of the movie ruled him out. At some point, she also asked him to design a house for her, on land that she eventually hoped to buy in the suburbs north of New York City. He enlarged a set of plans created for one of his never-built 1937 All-Steel Houses and converted it into a flowing four-tiered concrete-and-stone mansion featuring a large fountain, in honor of The Fountainhead, and a rooftop study. Altogether, it was reminiscent of his 1935 masterpiece, Fallingwater. When he told her the price, $35,000, she winced. “My dear lady,” he reportedly remarked, “that’s no problem. Go out and make more money.” The land was not bought and the house was not built, but Wright’s sketches remain in his library at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Wright, in turn, invited her and O’Connor to visit his legendary summer residence, school, and architectural studio at Taliesin East, in Spring Green, Wisconsin. They went in 1945 and were horrified by what they saw. The beautiful 1911 buildings were in a state of disrepair. (“He had
a theoretical mind with no concern for how one would actually live,” she remarked, amusingly anticipating what cultural commentators would say of her.) She long remembered her indignation over the attitude of hero worship and servitude that Wright was famous for instilling in his “Fellowship,” made up of tuition-paying students. They cooked, served meals, and cleaned. They ate at tables set a step or two below the dais on which Wright and his guests and family dined, and they consumed a plainer diet. Their drawings, she noted, were undistinguished and imitative of Wright. “What was tragic was that he didn’t want any of that,” Rand told a friend in 1961. “He was trying to get intellectual independence [out of] them during the general discussions, but he didn’t get anything except ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir’ and recitals of formulas from his writing.” She compared them to medieval serfs. At the time she made these comments, in the early 1960s, the charge that she required hero worship from her young followers was swirling around her in newspaper and magazine accounts.
For some reason Wright, who had warmed to her after their meeting in Santa Monica, was disappointed by the visit, his son-in-law recalled. Wright’s biographer, Meryle Secrest, speculates that prolonged exposure to her dogmatism would almost certainly have irritated him, especially since he was sympathetic to socialism, a fact that Rand was unaware of. So would her need for admiration, strong tendency to moralize, imperiousness, and inability to find any fault with herself, which the two powerful personalities had in common. On this trip or another, she smoked so heavily that the curmudgeonly old architect reportedly grabbed her cigarette, threw it in the fireplace, and ordered her to leave the lodge; afterward, he imposed a permanent smoking ban at Taliesin. When later asked if he was the model for Howard Roark, he answered, “I deny the paternity and refuse to marry the mother.”