Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (5 page)

Rand appeared to be drawing from both her own psychology and her recent readings of Nietzsche as she mused about the case and planned her story. She modeled Renahan along explicitly Nietzschean lines, noting that “he has the true, innate psychology of a Superman.” To Rand a Superman was one who cared nothing for the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of others. Her description of Renahan as Superman echoed her own self-description as a child: “He is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness—resulting from the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand,
because he has no organ for understanding
, the necessity, meaning or importance of other people.”
³⁴

Rand’s understanding of the Superman as a strong individual who places himself above society was a popular, if crude, interpretation of Nietzsche’s
Übermensch
.
³⁵
What stands out is her emphasis on Renahan’s icy emotional alienation. Rand clearly admired her imaginary hero’s solipsism, yet she had chosen a profession that measured success by popularity. The tension between her values and her goals produced an ugly frustration. “Show that humanity is petty. That it’s small. That it’s dumb, with the heavy, hopeless stupidity of a man born feeble-minded,” she wrote.
³⁶
This anger and frustration, born from her professional struggles, was itself the greatest obstacle to Rand’s writing career.

Rand’s bitterness was undoubtedly nurtured by her interest in Nietzsche. Judging from her journals, unemployment precipitated a new round of reading his work. Her notes filled with the phrases “Nietzsche and I think” and “as Nietzsche said.” Her style also edged in his direction as she experimented with pithy aphorisms and observations. More significantly, Nietzsche’s elitism fortified her own. Like many of his readers, Rand seems never to have doubted that she was one of the creators, the artists, the potential Overmen of whom Nietzsche spoke.
³⁷

On some level Rand realized that her infatuation with Nietzsche, however inspirational, was damaging to her creativity. The idea of the Superman had lodged in her mind with problematic force. She struggled to resist: “Try to forget yourself—to forget all high ideas, ambitions, superman and so on. Try to put yourself into the psychology of ordinary people, when you think of stories.”
³⁸
Convinced of her own worth yet stymied by her low position, Rand alternated between despair and mania.

When she began writing to her family again after a long lapse, Anna was shocked at the dark tone that had crept into her letters. She sensed that Rand’s expectations were part of the problem, reminding her daughter that success would not come without a struggle: “Your talent is very clearly and firmly established. Your gift manifested itself very early in life and long ago. Your talent is so clear that eventually it will break through and spurt like a fountain.”
³⁹
As her mother intuited, Rand’s silence was due in part to her fear of disappointing her family. They had pinned their hopes on her, and after such a promising start Rand had little to report.

She did, however, have one success to share: a new husband. After a year of regular dates Rand moved out of the Studio Club into a furnished room that afforded her and Frank more privacy. Soon she began pushing for marriage, reminding Frank that after several extensions her visa was soon to expire. They were married in 1929, the year of the Great Crash. A few months later Rand applied for citizenship as Mrs. Frank O’Connor.

As it turned out, Rand’s stories about dashing heiresses and feckless suitors proved a useful meditation for her marriage to Frank. A struggling actor, he had always worked episodically and the economic depression made jobs even more difficult to find. Rand was the breadwinner from the start. Soon after their marriage she was hired as a filing clerk in the wardrobe department at RKO Radio Pictures after another Russian employed there had given her a lead on the job. Focused, organized, and desperate for work, Rand was an ideal employee. Within a year she had risen to head of the department and was earning a comfortable salary, which allowed the newlyweds to establish a stable life together. They owned a collie and an automobile and lived in an apartment large enough to accommodate long-term guests. When close friends of the
O’Connor family went through a wrenching divorce, Ayn and Frank sheltered Frank’s ten-year-old goddaughter for a summer.

Through the mundane negotiations of married life a current of exoticism kept their attraction strong. In a letter home Rand described Frank as an “Irishman with blue eyes,” and he took to wearing Russian Cossack-style shirts.
⁴⁰
Still, Rand found the rhythms of domesticity exhausting. She rose early in the morning to write and then left for RKO, where her days could stretch to sixteen hours. Each night she rushed home to cook Frank dinner, a responsibility she prized as a sign of wifely virtue. Over Frank’s protestations she insisted on boiling water to scald the dishes after every meal, having inherited her mother’s phobia about germs. After dinner and cleanup she returned to her writing.

In her off-hours she completed a film scenario called
Red Pawn
, a melodramatic love story set in Soviet Russia. A well-connected neighbor passed the scenario along to an agent, and Rand used her RKO position to access unofficial channels. She sent her work to a Universal screenwriter, Gouverneur Morris, a writer of pulpy novels and magazine stories (and great-grandson of the colonial statesman). The two had never met, but Morris’s tightly plotted work had impressed Rand. Morris groaned at the request from an unknown wardrobe girl, but to his surprise he enjoyed the story. Meeting Rand he pronounced her a genius. When Universal purchased
Red Pawn
in 1932 Morris claimed full credit, and he pressed the studio to hire her on as a writer. Universal paid Rand seven hundred dollars for her story and an additional eight hundred dollars for an eight-week contract to write a screenplay and treatment.
⁴¹

Rand’s luck was beginning to turn.
Red Pawn
was never produced, but a few prominent stars showed interest in the property, sparking a brief flurry of news coverage. “Russian Girl Finds End of Rainbow in Hollywood” was the
Chicago Daily News
headline to a short article that mentioned Rand’s Chicago connections, her meeting with De Mille, and plans for the movie.
⁴²
The screenwriting job was far more lucrative than working in the wardrobe department, and by the end of the year Rand was flush enough to quit work and begin writing full time. The next two years were her most productive yet. In 1933 she completed a play,
Night of January 16th
, and the next year finished her first novel,
We the Living
.

As she began writing seriously, Rand was not shy about drawing from the work of other authors. Copying was one of the few honored traditions in Hollywood; no sooner had one studio released a popular movie than the others would rush a similar story into production. Similarly, Rand was inspired to write a play set in a courtroom after seeing
The Trial of Mary Dugan
. When her play
Night of January 16th
was first produced the
Los Angeles Times
noted uneasily, “It so closely resembles ‘The Trial of Mary Dugan’ in its broader aspects as to incorporate veritably the same plot.”
⁴³

It is safe to say, however, that the author of
Mary Dugan
was not trying to advance individualism through theater. That goal was Rand’s alone.
Night of January 16th
was Rand’s first successful marriage of entertainment and propaganda. She hoped to both entertain her audience and spread her ideas about individualism. Like “The Little Street,” the play was heavily tinctured with her interpretation of Nietzsche. She drew on yet another highly publicized criminal case to shape one of her characters, Bjorn Faulkner, who was loosely modeled on the infamous “Swedish Match King” Ivar Kreuger. In 1932 Kreuger shot himself when his financial empire, in reality a giant Ponzi scheme, collapsed in scandal.

Rand still found criminality an irresistible metaphor for individualism, with dubious results. Translated by Rand into fiction, Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values changed criminals into heroes and rape into love. Rand intended Bjorn Faulkner to embody heroic individualism, but in the play he comes off as little more than an unscrupulous businessman with a taste for rough sex. He rapes his secretary, Karen Andre, on her first day of work. Andre immediately falls in love with him and remains willingly as his mistress, secretary, and eventual business partner. When Faulkner dies under mysterious circumstances, Andre becomes the prime suspect. She goes on trial for Faulkner’s murder, and the entire play is set in a courtroom. What really made
Night of January 16th
was a crowd-pleasing gimmick: each night a different jury is selected from the audience. Rand constructed the play so that there was approximately equal evidence indicting two characters and wrote two endings to the play, to be performed according to the verdict of the audience jury.

This unusual staging attracted the attention of Al Woods, a seasoned producer who wanted to take the play to Broadway. It was the big break
she had been waiting for, but Rand was wary of Woods. As much as she wanted fame, she wanted it on her own terms.
Night of January 16th
was encoded with subtle messages about individualism and morality. The ambitious and unconventional Karen Andre was a softer version of Danny Renahan from “The Little Street.” If the audience shared Rand’s individualistic inclinations they would vote to acquit Andre of the crime. Rand feared that Woods, intent on a hit, would gut the play of its larger meaning. She turned down his offer.

Even as literary fame lay within reach, Rand’s ambitions were racing onward. In early 1934 she began a philosophical journal. She would write in it only episodically in the next few years, accumulating about ten pages before she shifted her focus back to fiction. It was only “the vague beginnings of an amateur philosopher,” she announced modestly, but by the end of her first entry she had decided, “I want to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion.”
⁴⁴
She recorded two objections to religion: it established unrealizable, abstract ethical ideas that made men cynical when they fell short, and its emphasis on faith denied reason.

From these first deliberations Rand segued to a series of musings about the relationship between feelings and thoughts. She wondered, “Are instincts and emotions necessarily beyond the control of plain thinking? Or were they trained to be? Why is a complete harmony between mind and emotions impossible?” During her first spell of unemployment Rand had chastised herself for being too emotional. Now she seemed to be convincing herself that emotions could be controlled, if only she could think the right thoughts. Couldn’t contradictory emotions, she ventured, be considered “a form of undeveloped reason, a form of stupidity?”
⁴⁵

Over the next few months Rand’s commitment to reason deepened. Where before she had seen herself as moody and excitable, she now imagined, “my instincts and reason are so inseparably one, with the reason ruling the instincts.” Her tone alternated between grandiosity and self-doubt. “Am I trying to impose my own peculiarities as a philosophical system?” she wondered. Still she had no doubt that her musings would eventually culminate in “a logical system, proceeding from
a few axioms in a succession of logical theorems.” “The end result,” she declared, “will be my ‘mathematics of philosophy.’”
⁴⁶

She also began responding to Nietzsche’s call for a new, naturalistic morality that would transcend Christianity. The key to originality, she thought, would be to focus exclusively on the individual. “Is ethics necessarily and basically a social conception?” she asked in her journal. “Have there been systems of ethics written primarily on the basis of an individual? Can that be done?” She ended with a Nietzschean peroration: “If men are the highest of animals, isn’t
man
the next step?” Tentatively, slowly, Rand was sketching out the foundations of her later thought.
⁴⁷

In the meantime her playwriting career was beginning to take off. Rejecting Woods was an audacious move that only heightened his interest in
Night of January 16th
. After the play was successfully produced by a local Hollywood theater Woods tried again. This time he agreed to small changes in the contract that gave Rand more influence. He also requested that Rand relocate to New York immediately to assist with production of the play. Setting aside her misgivings, Rand accepted Wood’s new offer. She was more than happy to move to New York. Hollywood had never been to her liking, but the few brief days she spent in New York had left a lasting impression. There was little keeping the O’Connors in California, for Frank’s acting career had sputtered to an effective end. In November 1934 they packed up their few possessions and set out on the long drive to New York.

By the time they arrived the young couple was nearly destitute. Rand had drained her savings to write and spent the last of her money on the move. Woods was unable to find funding for the play, so for the foreseeable future Rand would receive only minimal monthly payments. A small furnished room was all they could afford. They borrowed money from a few friends, and Frank’s brother Nick, a bachelor, became a frequent dinner guest and helped contribute to their expenses.

As in Hollywood, they socialized infrequently. Rand detested small talk, often sitting mute at social gatherings. At parties Frank would surreptitiously hand her notes suggesting conversational topics and partners.
⁴⁸
She became animated only when the talk moved on to territory where she could hang an argument. At any mention of religion, morality, or ethics she would transform from a silent wallflower into a raging
tigress, eager to take all comers. Neither persona made for pleasant company. But Nick O’Connor, who had a taste for intellectual discussion, enjoyed spending time with Rand. A few other friends gravitated into the O’Connor orbit, including Albert Mannheimer, a young socialist with whom Rand loved to argue, and a few Russians Rand had met through family connections. Frank’s niece Mimi Sutton was also a frequent visitor to their home. By and large, though, Rand contented herself with the attentions of a few close friends. She and Frank, or “Cubbyhole” and “Fluff” as they now called one another, drew closer. Though he never pretended to be an intellectual, Frank cultivated a dry wit that she found hilarious. Serious and focused in her professional life, Rand could be silly and girlish with Frank. A long-haired Persian cat, Tartallia, rounded out the family.