Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  By Thanksgiving: BBTBI. Again, this is what AR told BB in 1960–61. In a letter written on November 28, 1943, to one of IP’s editors at G. P. Putnam’s Sons, she estimated sales of TF at 25,000. Either she was underestimating her early sales to BB or she exaggerated them to the editor at Putnam, perhaps to support the argument that more money should be invested in promoting IP’s The God of the Machine.

  he proposed a deal: BBTBI.

  bold new full-page ads: Letter to IP, October 10, 1943 (LOAR, p. 174).

  $25,000 for The Glass Key: Figures courtesy of Greg Walsh at the Margaret Herrick Library.

  made a hefty profit: In 1934, Universal Studios, which paid AR $700 for Red Pawn, traded it to Paramount Pictures in exchange for an E. Phillips Oppenheimer story that had cost Paramount $20,000 (TPOAR, p. 106). In 1938 or 1939, MGM sold The Night of January 16th to RKO for $10,000, significantly more than it had paid AR in 1934. A year later, MGM resold the rights to Paramount for $35,000 (Paramount Production Records); Paramount released a film under that name in 1941 (American Film Institute archives).

  made the hoped-for offer: Contracts negotiated on AR’s behalf by Alan Collins of Curtis Brown, Ltd., are on file in the Curtis Brown Archives at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I was denied access to those files by the ARI. This account was relayed by AR to BB in 1960–61.

  They stayed awake all night: BBTBI.

  moment would not have been as sweet: BBTBI.

  she jested to her friend: Letter to Ruth Alexander, October 22, 1943 (LOAR, p. 99).

  “Money is the root of all good”: AS, pp. 380–85.

  considered both ponderous and ludicrouslymystical: TPOAR, p. 101.

  send a signed copy of The Foun-tainhead: Author interview with FB, March 18, 2004.

  an oversight that was not forgotten: Author interview with FB, June 21, 2004.

  Now I can pay: BBTBI.

  That notion quickly gave way: BBTBI.

  “You can choose any kind of coat”: TPOAR, p. 184.

  modeled the coat: The Woman and the Dynamo, p. 289, based on Cox’s interview with IP’s assistant Gertrude Vogt.

  “I couldn’t find any purpose”: AS, pp. 346–47.

  EIGHT: FAME: 1943–1946

  “I decided to become a writer”: “To the Readers of The Fountainhead,” 1945 (LOAR, 669).

  Warner Bros. had sent them to Chicago: Letter to Archibald Ogden, December 18, 1943 (LOAR, p. 105).

  “The only advantage of poverty”: TPOAR, p. 184.

  Tartalia, Russian for “Turtle Cat”: Interview with Thaddeus Ashby, June 20, 2005.

  not far from Hollywood Boulevard: Howard Koch, As Time Goes By (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979), p. 90.

  “Only my wife”: BBTBI.

  “mink-coat” conditions: Letter to Archibald Ogden, December 18, 1943 (LOAR, p. 105).

  “I didn’t know you were this way”: As Time Goes By, p. 90.

  her new boss, Henry Blanke: BBTBI.

  “It’s magnificent”: TPOAR, p. 184.

  By early February, she had completed: United Artists Collection, Series 1.2, Warner Bros. Scripts, the Wisconsin Historical Society, box 138, folder 4. JB, on p. 68 of AR, mistakenly reports that the first script was 283 pages long; that was the length of the second script, dated February 25, 1947, according to studio records. In taped biographical interviews from 1961, AR recalled that the first screenplay had been 380-some-odd pages long (BBTBI).

  preserved all the novel’s major characters: BBTBI.

  her impassioned love scenes and her styled dialogue: Letter to Archibald Ogden, December 18, (LOAR, p. 105).

  put The Fountainhead on hold: Letter to Nick Carter, October 5, (LOAR, p. 166).

  keep the dark-eyed beauty’s dialogue: BBTBI.

  co-invented and patented: Joseph Carr, The Technician’s Radio Receiver Handbook (Oxford, UK: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2001), p. 233.

  hated Hollywood as both shabby and vicious: Letter from IP quoting a letter from AR, December 15, 1943, Isabel Paterson Papers, Herbert Hoover Memorial Presidential Library, box 4.

  “Frank says what I love is not the real city”: Letter to Archibald Ogden, December 18, 1943 (LOAR, p. 105). On her assumed return to New York, AR intended to go back to work on weekends for Richard Meland at Paramount, in spite of her new wealth (letter from IP, March 21, 1944, Isabel Paterson Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, box 4).

  invited Rand to join him as his first employee: BBTBI.

  second was Lillian Hellman: Letter to Archibald Ogden, July 19, 1944 (LOAR, p. 148).

  “lost no opportunity to run down”: Patricia Neal, quoted in Stephen Michael Shearer, Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006), p. 66. Neal knew both AR and Hellman. In 1946, she played Regina Hubbard in Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest and in 1949 starred in the movie TF.

  caricatured her as an anti-Communist puppet: Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1976), pp. 3–5.

  scheduled to begin in July: Unpublished letter from agent Bert Allenberg to Hal Wallis, dated April 8, 1944, and “Multiple Picture Contract with Ayn Rand,” dated July 5, 1944, both from the Hal Wallis Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, box 95.

  “pictures [I write] would be done my way”: Letter to IP, July 26, 1945 (LOAR, p. 178).

  “the mind on strike”: TPOAR, p. 218.

  bought a 1936 Packard car: Unpublished letter to Richard Meland, February 20, 1944, courtesy of JB.

  wavering between 5 and 7 percent: “Historical CPI [Consumer Price Index],” 1943–44, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  arranged to buy an astoundingly Roarkian house: TPOAR, pp. 186–87.

  fantastic sum of $24,000: TPOAR, p. 186.

  asked Frank’s brother: BBTBI.

  “chronically and permanently happy”: Letter to Nick Carter, October 5, 1944 (LOAR, p. 164).

  she confided to a few friends: Interviews with RBH and with June Kurisu, May 19 and December 31, 2004.

  spell of active tuberculosis: Letter to Nick Carter, October 5, 1944 (LOAR, p. 164).

  was buried on Long Island: Gravesite locator, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

  Tuberculosis had weakened his heart: Taped interview with Millicent Patton, conducted by BB, December 5, 1982.

  sent him a long, affectionate letter: Letter to Nick Carter, October 5, 1944 (LOAR, pp. 164–68).

  By Christmas 1944: Harry Hanson, “The Fountainhead Enjoys a Fresh Wave of Popularity,” December 24, 1944, p. 19.

  Every two or three weeks: In the 1940s, The New York Times published regional lists, showing which novels and nonfiction books were best-sellers in Detroit, Cleveland, New Orleans, Los Angeles, New York, etc.

  This occurred twenty-s ix times: “A Strange Kind of Simplicity,” p. 8.

  Fan mail was pouring in to Bobbs-Merrill: The Bobbs-Merrill Collection, courtesy of the Lilly Library.

  a way of bolstering morale: NB, “The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand,” lecture given at the University of California, San Diego, May 25, 1982.

  “great and exceptional” stand: Kevin Bazzana, Lost Genius: the Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007), pp. 200–201.

  “compliment” of being addressed as “Mr. Rand”: Letter to Sylvia Bailey, July 5, 1943 (LOAR, p. 79).

  the number of logical contradictions: BBTBI.

  invited her to speak: BBTBI. In 1943 she spoke before the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects (“Books—Authors,” NYT, June 23, 1943, p. 19); in 1945 she spoke before the Southern California chapter of the same group (“Ayn Rand as a Public Speaker”).

  told the group of architects: From her speech to the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, June 1943; “Ayn Rand as a Public Speaker.”

  Joan Crawford gave a dinner party: BBTBI.

  preferred Garbo: Letter to Gerald Loeb, April 23, 1944 (LOA
R, p. 132).

  MGM reportedly responded: Erskine Johnson, “This is Hollywood,” syndicated in the Zanesville [Ohio] Times Recorder, March 21, 1957, p. 4.

  “the big man in Hollywood”: Letter to Archibald Ogden, July 19, 1944 (LOAR, p. 148).

  Hedda Hopper and The New York Times:Hedda Hopper, “Looking at Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1944, p. A7; “Screen News,” NYT, June 26, 1944, p. 21.

  tried to pry her away from Wallis: Unpublished letter from IP, November 1944 (Isabel Paterson Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, box 4); “Paramount Studio Tour.”

  suffered over his 1938 letter to her: TPOAR, pp. 189–90.

  “Your thesis is the great one”: Letter from FLW, April 23, 1944 (LOAR, p. 112); thanks to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation for authentication.

  should have had a mane of white hair: TPOAR, p. 190.

  Loeb demurred: Letter to Gerald Loeb (and footnote), August 5, 1944 (LOAR, p. 162).

  his houses were an expression: Letter to FLW (LOAR, p. 113).

  “I think I am made of asbestos”: Letter to FLW (LOAR, p. 113).

  eager to get Wright to design: Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 497.

  demand for prior approval: BBTBI.

  reminiscent of his 1935 masterpiece, Fallingwater: Roderick Grant, “Wright and Rand,” Journal of the Taliesin Fellows, Spring 1997 (iss. 27), pp. 19–24.

  he told her the price, $35,000: Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 497.

  “My dear lady”: TPOAR, p. 191.

  compared them to medieval serfs: TPOAR, p. 190.

  the charge that she required hero worship: In “Born Eccentric” in Newsweek of March 27, 1961, and “The Curious Cult of Ayn Rand” in The Saturday Evening Post of November 11, 1961.

  was disappointed by the visit: Oral history of William Wesley Peters, recorded on September 24, 1989, courtesy of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives.

  need for admiration, strong tendency to moralize: Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 497.

  reportedly grabbed her cigarette: Ada Louise Huxtable, Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 227. Secrest tells this story somewhat differently, reporting that Wright walked out rather than expelling AR, p. 497.

  “I deny the paternity”: Huxtable, Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 226.

  nicknamed “Boss”: Unpublished letter to Hal Wallis, June 18, 1945 (Hal Wallis Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, box 95).

  a critical failure: See, for example, Bosley Crowther, “The Screen,” NYT, August 27, 1945, p. 22.

  “wet nurse”: Thanks to David Hayes in “Ayn Rand vs. Hollywood Censorship, Part 3,” footnote 3, Axiomatic, December 2005, for making this observation.

  four distinctly different endings: Dates courtesy of project-specific file cards archived in the Hal Wallis Collection, box 95, and the Paramount Script Collection, box 57, housed at the Margaret Herrick Library.

  which she had read on the recommendation: Letter to Pincus Berner, February 3, 1945 (LOAR, p. 220).

  tried unsuccessfully to interest Wallis: Letter to Barbara Stanwyck, September 7, 1946 (LOAR, p. 318). AR tried to interest Paramount in Red Pawn one more time, in 1963, when she asked screenwriter Al Ramrus to write a new screenplay and enlisted Robert Stack to play Commandant Kareyev. Paramount expressed no interest, and the film was never made (100 Voices, Al Ramrus, pp. 160–61).

  flirted mildly: About a photograph of himself Hal Wallis gave her, she wrote, “That’s the way I like to see you look—hard and ruthless (except in relation to my scripts);” letter to Hal Wallis, June 18, 1945 (LOAR, p. 227).

  to buy the collected works of Aristotle: Richard McKeon’s Basic Works of Aristotle, containing selections from the complete works (100 Voices, Allan Gotthelf, p. 345).

  three new outfits by Adrian: TPOAR, p. 192.

  the nature of human existence: Letter to IP, July 26, 1945 (LOAR, p. 179).

  the faculty of “rational consciousness”: July 30, 1945 (JOAR, p. 300).

  Keating and Toohey are examples: September 18 and 30, 1943 (JOAR, p. 259).

  “You have been the one encounter in my life”: TF, p. 684.

  echoed Roark’s mixed sympathies: Thanks to Stephen Cox for pointing this out in The Woman and the Dynamo, p. 304.

  thought that the Christian morality would one day: The Woman and the Dynamo, p. 306.

  “The best possible kindergarten of communism”: December 4, 1935 (JOAR, p. 80).

  “an omniscient being”: Letter to IP, August 4, 1945 (LOAR, p. 184).

  Rand trusted deductive reasoning too much: Unpublished letter from IP to AR, July 30, 1945 (Isabel Paterson Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, box 4). Thanks to Stephen Cox for his patient explanations of the nature of IP’s intellectual differences with AR.

  “the fiat of revelation”: Letter to IP, August 4, 1945 (LOAR, p. 184).

  reminding Paterson: Letter to IP, July 26, 1945 (LOAR, pp. 179–80).

  “sometimes I [think]”: Unpublished letter from IP to AR, July 30, 1945 (Isabel Paterson Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, box 4).

  “Stop taking that benzedrine”: Unpublished letter from IP to AR, January 19, 1944 (Isabel Paterson Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, box 4).

  Rand’s reply is missing: This letter, if it exists, was excluded from the published LOAR, and a copy was not provided by ARI to the Isabel Paterson Papers at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, although copies of other letters appear to be on file there.

  “I am seriously vexed”: Unpublished letter from IP, November 1944 (Isabel Paterson Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, box 4).

  “If you take any more of that benzedrine”: Unpublished letter from IP, June 7, 1944 (Isabel Paterson Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, box 4).

  She looked forward to seeing Paterson: Letter to IP, August 28, 1945 (LOAR, pp. 186–87).

  but the two women must have argued: There are no surviving letters between AR and IP from August 28, 1945, to February 7, 1948, following another trip by AR from California to New York.

  He was a mere zero: BBTBI.

  “You can knock the world for a loop now”: Unpublished letters from IP, February 17, 1944, and July 30, 1945 (Isabel Paterson Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, box 4).

  “I admired her”: Author interview with Ruth Ohman and Allan Ryskind, August 24, 2006. Ryskind, Ohman’s brother and the owner and editor of Human Events, recalled AR more acerbically. “There were a couple of times when she was talking about anti-Communism when she was not so much attractive as a tractor. She would be making a lot of sense, and then go way over the edge,” he said.

  “furiously nervous”: Letter to Gerald Loeb, April 23, 1944 (LOAR, p. 135).

  “I am becoming more antisocial”: Letter to IP, July 26, 1945 (LOAR, p. 179).

  came to live on the ranch in the spring of 1945: Account is based on two interviews with Thaddeus Ashby, conducted for the author by Wendy de Weese in Hawaii, June 19 and July 17, 2005.

  invited him to lunch: BBTBI.

  remained for between five months and a year: In an unpublished interview conducted by BB in 1960–61, AR set his visit at five or six months; BBTBI.

  spending long weekends at the ranch: “Ayn Rand’s Family and Friends.”

  part-time secretary during those years: June Kurisu worked as AR’s secretary from June 1947 until November 1949 (100 Voices, June Kurisu, pp. 86, 89).

  intensive planning of Atlas Shrugged: April 6, 1946, to August 31, 1946 (JOAR, pp. 399–548).

  “They spent an awful lot of time in there”: Author interview with June Kurisu, December 31, 2004. In an interview with ARI oral historian Scott McConnell, Kurisu said of FO, “He always seemed like the strong one that could stand on his own and be the guard to the castle” (100 Voices, June Kurisu, p. 106).

  another young man named Walter Abbott: BBTBI.

  couldn’t raise the additional capital: BBTBI.

  at $150 a week: Project-specific
file cards archived in the Hal Wallis Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, box 95. In an example of AR’s willingness to help others who she believed deserved help, she also offered to assist June Kurisu in getting a secretarial position at Paramount (McConnell, “Recollections of Ayn Rand I,” based on his interview with Kurisu).

  Bernstein … tried out for the composer’s role: Thomas Pryor, “Young Conductor May Star in Film,” NYT, August 21, 1945, p. 17.

  Monogram announced plans for its own Tchaikovsky movie: “Two Studios to Film Tchaikovsky’s Life,” NYT, October 3, 1946, p. 38. According to this report, Abbott started writing the script in 1945.

  saw a lot of Jack Bungay: Unpublished letter from Bert Allenberg to Hal Wallis, April 12, 1944 (Hal Wallis Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, box 95).

  joined the male trio: Unpublished letter from Albert Mannheimer to IP, April 26, 1947 (Isabel Paterson Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, box 23).

  “She was a very sensual woman”: 100 Voices, Jack Bungay, pp. 59–63.

  were her only regular visitors: BBTBI.

  “He looked like Frank”: Author interview with RBH, June 8, 2005.

  “a lot of sex in her face”: 100 Voices, Jack Bungay, p. 59.

  “I don’t know what would have happened”: TPOAR, p. 250.

  developed a paranoid fixation: Interview with Thaddeus Ashby, July 17, 2005. The fact that von Strachow knew Rand’s American name is evidence that Rand’s parents and their friends also knew it.

  Marie von Strachow: Author correspondence with Michael Berliner, June 2, 2005.

  fled Russia for Western Europe: Letter to John C. Gall, AR’s attorney, January 29, 1947 (LOAR, p. 360) and author correspondence with Michael Berliner. AR told Gall that Strachow left Russia in 1918, but she must have left later, in the middle or late 1920s.

  the elder Rosenbaums’ deaths: Letter to Marie von Strachow, August 8, 1946 (LOAR, p. 301).

  perished from cancer: Archive of the Kuibyshev district of Leningrad, card 1696.

  Rand later learned: EOWTL, p. 78; 100 Voices, NR, p. 7.

  sent … packages of food and clothing: 100 Voices, Lisette Hassani, p. 257.

  Rand’s lively and much-beloved youngest sister, Nora: Author correspondence with BB, February 4, 2008 (“Ayn never told us about her parents’ deaths, nor about bringing this woman over, although the woman must have left not long before we met Ayn. I’m thinking of the also odd fact that she never said a word about experiencing anti-Semitism in Russia. And another odd fact: I would never, from what Ayn told me, have expected NR to refuse to speak to me about Ayn’s childhood because ‘we don’t speak ill of the dead’—which suggests childhood problems between the sisters and perhaps more widely than that and which Ayn never so much as hinted at. There’s a mystery here and some sort of deliberate rewriting of history that I can’t figure out”).