City of Nets (80 page)

The most peculiar of all the anti-Communist movies also starred Gary Cooper and also was intended as a paean to individualism, an attack on not only communism but all forms of collectivism, egalitarianism, and even altruism. Its creator, Ayn Rand, was a most peculiar woman even by Hollywood standards of peculiarity. She was rather impressive, though, in the zeal with which she argued her beliefs.

She had been born Alice Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg in 1905, so she was just twelve when the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace. Her father was a merchant, and both her parents were nonpracticing Jews. They fled from the Red capital to the White-held Crimea, but the end of the civil war drove them back north again. Ayn studied history at the University of Petrograd, discovered Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky and the film epics being produced in Berlin, Lubitsch's
Madame Du Barry,
Lang's
Siegfried.
When she graduated at nineteen, the only job she could find in the bleak and hunger-ridden Soviet capital was as a guide in a historical museum. This was one of those intermittent periods of renewed contacts between Russia and the West. There came a letter from half-forgotten relatives who had emigrated to Chicago, and Ayn's mother wrote back to see whether Ayn could come for a visit. Granted a temporary passport, Ayn celebrated her twenty-first birthday in Berlin. A few weeks later, she landed in New York with fifty dollars in her pocketbook and ideas for a dozen plays and movies.

Ayn Rand was, of course, an Ayn Rand character. She sat in her relatives' apartment in Chicago and wrote out four original film scenarios. She didn't even know English very well yet, but this was still the age of silent movies. That summer of 1926, she got a Chicago movie distributor to write her a letter of introduction to some official at the Cecil B. DeMille studio, then borrowed a hundred dollars and set off for Hollywood. The day after she arrived, she took a bus to the DeMille studio, presented her letter to the official, and was told there were no jobs available. As she was walking out, she saw an open roadster parked near the studio gate, and in it sat Cecil B. DeMille. She stopped and stared at the great man, then walked on. The roadster promptly followed her.

“Why were you looking at me?” asked Cecil B. DeMille.

Miss Rand explained that she had just come from Russia, and that she had admired his films. DeMille opened the car door and said, “Get in.”

As they drove to the set where DeMille was shooting
The King of Kings,
Miss Rand told him about her ambitions to write movies. He invited her to stay and watch how films were actually made. She came every day, watching intensely. At the end of a week, DeMille offered her a job as an extra. She was hardly pretty, with her short hair and piercing eyes, but she had a certain electricity.

She submitted her four scenarios to DeMille, and he rejected all of them. She wrote a fifth, which he liked but also rejected. But he hired her as a junior writer, assigned to produce brief outlines of stories that had already been bought. He paid her twenty-five dollars a week. She considered herself rich. She was an Ayn Rand character, who had come to a land where anything was possible. Unfortunately, the possibilities also included ruin. When DeMille closed his studio and moved to M-G-M, Miss Rand was out on the street. She sold subscriptions to
The Hollywood Reporter,
she worked as a waitress, and finally she got back into the movie business as a filing clerk in the wardrobe department at RKO. She married an actor she had met on the set of
The King of Kings,
Frank O'Connor, and he now worked regularly enough for her to go back to writing.

In 1930, she began a novel about the Soviet Union,
We, the Living,
which she described as “a novel about Man against the State.” To finance that, she wrote a movie script set in a Siberian prison camp, “Red Pawn,” and after a few rejections, she sold it to Universal for fifteen hundred dollars. She quit her job in the wardrobe department. She wrote a play,
The Night of January 16th,
in which the outcome of a trial was decided by a jury drawn from the audience, different each night. A Broadway producer invited her to New York to help with rehearsals, but when the producer ran out of money, she had to scramble for piecework as a free-lance reader for RKO. When the producer finally began rehearsals, he and Miss Rand quarreled fiercely about revisions. The resulting compromise ran seven months on Broadway but left Miss Rand frustrated and angry. In 1936, her novel finally appeared and received poor reviews, many of them criticizing her anti-Soviet views.

By this time, she was already immersed in a much bigger and more complicated novel,
The Fountainhead.
“The first purpose of this book,” she wrote in one of her early notes on it, “is
a defense of egoism in its real meaning.
” Her idea had come partly from the New York skyscrapers that she had first admired in photographs she had seen in Russia. She wanted to write about the men who made them. She was more directly inspired by a woman she knew in Hollywood, an executive who kept scheming and maneuvering in pursuit of success. “Can you tell me what it is that you want?” she had asked her. “What is your goal in life?”

“I'll tell you what I want,” the woman had answered. “If nobody had an automobile, then
I
would want to have
one
automobile. If some people have
one,
then
I
want to have
two.
”

“I see,” said Miss Rand, dismayed at the pointlessness of such a goal. How different from her own view of her own ambitions, a relentless pursuit of truth, regardless of material rewards. In the spirit of the times, she turned these contrasting female dummies into contrasting male dummies. Thus were born Howard Roark, the hard, fierce, uncompromising Randian genius, and Peter Keating, the whining, untalented manipulator. And, of course, the rich and beautiful Dominique, whom Miss Rand described as “myself in a bad mood.” Dominique teased and then rejected Keating, who wanted to marry her for social reasons, but when she encountered Howard Roark in a quarry, splitting open walls of rock with his pneumatic drill, she began quivering. “She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth,” Miss Rand wrote, perhaps with a little quivering of her own, “the planes of his gaunt, hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see. . . . She felt a convulsion of anger, of protest, of resistance—and of pleasure. . . . She was wondering what he would look like naked.” She heard that some of the workmen were ex-convicts, and she wondered whether Roark was one too. “She wondered whether they whipped convicts nowadays. She hoped they did. At the thought of it, she felt a sinking gasp. . . .”

Miss Rand spent three years on planning and research (she even spent several months as an eavesdropping typist in a New York architect's office), and she spent two more years writing and rewriting her opening chapters before she reached that throbbing encounter in the quarry. Her agent urged her to submit the first third to a publisher. It apparently never occurred to her that anyone might have aesthetic objections to both her novel and her hero, whose fearlessly “modern” projects have been described by Nora Sayre as resembling “the Los Angeles airport combined with the visions of the early Uris brothers.” Some of the publishers raised political objections, though, to the Rand/Roark tirades against “the rule of the mob,” which the publishers euphemistically described as against the spirit of the times, too intellectual, too controversial.

Miss Rand decided that President Roosevelt was leading her new nation toward the same kind of “collectivism” that she had fled. She volunteered her services to the Republican presidential campaign of Wendell Willkie and spent several months writing polemics and addressing street-corner gatherings in New York. Willkie's failure to run an aggressively conservative campaign dismayed her; he lacked that Roarkian refusal to compromise. By now penniless, she returned to the drudgery of reading scripts at Paramount while she labored by night on the novel that nobody seemed to want. Into it she wrote more and more details of the artist rejected. Finally, toward the end of 1941, she found a publisher of somewhat conservative cast, Bobbs-Merrill, and after two more years of hard work, she finished her novel with a characteristically erotic scene of Dominique soaring upward in the elevator of Roark's skyscraper. At the top, she found, “there was only the ocean and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark.”

Most of the reviews were again hostile, though a woman named Lorine Pruette hailed Miss Rand in the
New York Times Book Review
as “a writer of great power . . . a subtle and ingenious mind.” Sales were slow, but after a few months they mysteriously began to climb, as though Miss Rand had tapped some political or psychological fountainhead that no one else had recognized. Warner Bros. began to inquire about movie rights. Miss Rand demanded a very ambitious $50,000. “One day, the rights to
The Fountainhead
will be worth much more than that,” she said. Warners agreed to meet her price. Two years later, when sales of the novel had reached an astonishing 100,000 copies, Paramount would offer Warners $450,000 for the movie rights, and Warners would reject the offer.

Miss Rand, who had left Hollywood in 1934 as an obscure and badly paid scriptwriter, returned nine years later with a new mink coat and a Warners contract to adapt her best-selling novel for the screen. She bought a fourteen-acre ranch in the San Fernando Valley with a steel-and-glass house that might have been designed by Howard Roark but was actually by Richard Neutra. She had always been ultraconservative, of course, but in her new state of prosperity, she was appalled by the extent to which “collectivist” ideas had taken hold in wartime Hollywood. She was one of the earliest members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, the organization that Sam Wood had founded in 1944 to lobby for the view that the movie business is “dedicated to the preservation and continuance of the American scene.”

She finished her
Fountainhead
screenplay in six months, and Mervyn LeRoy hoped to film it with Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck in the lead roles, but Warners decided that this was too big a production to undertake until wartime restrictions ended. Miss Rand found other things to do. Not only did she sign a long-term contract with Warners, but she wrote for the Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals an interesting tract entitled “Screen Guide for Americans.” “The purpose of the Communists in Hollywood,” she said, “is
not
the production of movies openly advocating Communism. Their purpose is
to corrupt our moral premises by corrupting nonpolitical movies
—by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories—thus making people absorb the basic principles of collectivism by indirection and implication.”

Miss Rand provided a handy set of rules for every patriotic moviemaker to follow:

“Don't Smear the Free Enterprise System.

“Don't Deify the ‘Common Man.'

“Don't Glorify Failure.

“Don't Smear Industrialists.

“Don't Smear Success.”

“All too often,” Miss Rand declared, “industrialists, bankers, and businessmen are presented on the screen as villains, crooks, chiselers, or exploiters. It is the
moral
(not just political but
moral
) duty of every decent man in the motion picture industry to throw into the ashcan, where it belongs, every story that smears industrialists as such. . . . It is the Communists' intention to think that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others and that every man has hurt somebody by becoming successful. . . . Don't let yourself be fooled when the Reds tell you that what they want to destroy are men like Hitler and Mussolini. What they want to destroy are men like Shakespeare, Chopin and Edison.”

No Communist propagandist was ever more hostile to successful businessmen than Miss Rand herself—
The Fountainhead
is full of tirades against their philistinism—but her credentials as a right-wing polemicist almost inevitably brought her before the HUAC hearings of 1947 as a “friendly” witness. And since sales of
The Fountainhead
had by now reached a prodigious 400,000 hardcover copies, Warners treated it as a “prestige” film when it finally went into production in 1948. Gary Cooper, who had just signed a six-picture contract after an unsuccessful attempt at independent production, selected
The Fountainhead
as his first choice. For Dominique, Warners picked a young actress whom it hoped to develop into a major star, Patricia Neal. As director, the studio hired King Vidor, who had worked on large-scale pictures like M-G-M's
Northwest Passage
and Selznick's
Duel in the Sun.

To Miss Rand, this was just a new battlefield on which she had to defend every line in her story. “She was under constant pressure to disguise, dilute or tone down the philosophical theme of her novel . . .” according to one of her followers, Barbara Branden. “She argued with studio executives, with the agents and lawyers of various stars, with the Johnston Office. . . . She won. Her script was shot exactly as she wrote it. In an unprecedented studio ruling, the actors were forbidden to improvise on the set.” Perhaps that accounts for the listless quality in this expensively glossy production. Veterans like Cooper and Raymond Massey looked as though they had difficulty in believing the rhetoric that Miss Rand had written for them. Her erotic imagery, however, was just as faithfully preserved. Her heroine first spied Gary Cooper forcing his pneumatic drill horizontally into a wall of rock. She, on horseback, looked scornfully down at him; he, clutching his drill, looked scornfully up at her; she lashed him across the face with her whip. And so on.