Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (23 page)

Her changed estimate of Paterson changed Rand’s own understanding of herself. If Paterson had not been so brilliant after all, then Rand had done most of her thinking alone. Erasing Paterson’s contribution made Rand into the completely autonomous heroine of her own personal narrative. She would come to believe that her individual effort had solely shaped her ideas and driven her work, excluding her participation in the intellectual world that Paterson represented.

Personal relationships had always been troublesome for Rand. As she confessed to Paterson shortly after arriving in California, “I get furiously nervous every time I have to go out and meet somebody.” Part of the problem was simply communicating her views to others. Rand found it difficult to be understood, no matter how long the letters she wrote. “I strongly suspect that we are not discussing the same theory or the same problem,” she told Paterson as their relationship unraveled. The same gap in understanding had plagued her correspondence with Lane and shaped her reactions to Hayek, Friedman, and Read.
⁸⁶

The hope of building meaningful political alliances had compelled Rand to overcome her natural shyness and reach out to others. But after years of effort she began to wonder if it was all worth it. She had first been drawn to libertarianism because it broadened her perspective on the individualist themes that powered her writing. Her contact with Paterson and others had helped her move beyond the narrow Nietzscheanism that defined her early work. Now, more confident in her ideas, Rand was no longer looking for teachers, but for students.

CHAPTER FIVE
A Round Universe

SPOTLIGHTS CRISSCROSSED THE
sky as Ayn and Frank drove toward Hollywood for the long-awaited debut of the movie
The Fountainhead
in June 1949. While it was being shot Rand had been on the set almost daily, making sure the script she wrote was not altered. She paid special attention to Roark’s courtroom speech. When King Vidor, the director, tried to shoot an abridged version of the six-minute speech, the longest in film history, she threatened to denounce the movie. Jack Warner joked later that he was afraid she would blow up his studio, and he told Vidor to shoot it as written. Rand also successfully battled film censors in the conservative Hays Office, who objected as much to her individualistic rhetoric as the movie’s racy sexuality. But even Ayn Rand was no match for the Hollywood hit machine. At the movie’s star-studded premiere she was devastated to discover the film had been cut, eliminating Howard Roark’s climactic declaration, “I wish to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.”
¹

The movie’s debut fueled a general disillusionment with her life in California. Now in her forties, Rand struggled with her weight, her moodiness, her habitual fatigue. The differences between her and Frank, once the source of fruitful balance in their relationship, had translated into a widening gap between them. Frank spent most of his days out in the garden while Rand worked in her study. At dinner they often had little to say to one another. Adding to her weariness was a contentious lawsuit against an anti-Communist colleague, Lela Rogers (mother of the dancer Ginger). Rand had coached Rogers before a political radio debate and was named party to a subsequent slander suit, then forced to answer court summons and consult with her lawyers.
²

Salvation came from an unexpected quarter. Since the publication of
The Fountainhead
Rand had fielded thousands of fan letters. She had
created a form response letter with brief biographical information to cope with the inundation. Occasionally, however, a letter impressed her enough that she would reach out to the writer. The first missives that Rand received from Nathaniel Blumenthal, a Canadian high school student, went unanswered. Blumenthal sounded like a confused socialist, and Rand had little time to tutor the ignorant. After entering UCLA as a college freshman, Blumenthal wrote again. His interest in Rand had not abated. This letter and his persistence impressed Rand, so she requested his phone number. After a brief phone conversation, in March 1950 she invited him to Chatsworth. It was the start of an eighteen-year relationship that would transform Rand’s life and career.

When she first met Nathaniel Blumenthal, Rand had made a good start on her third novel. In contrast to
The Fountainhead
, she planned
Atlas Shrugged
rapidly, laying out the essentials of the plot and characters in six months during 1946, when she had a break from screenwriting. From there it was simply a matter of filling in the details of the scenes she had sketched out in a sentence or two. Regular cross-country trips helped her visualize the book’s American setting. While driving back from New York, she and Frank visited Ouray, Colorado, a small town tucked in a seam of mountains. Right away Rand knew Ouray would be the model for her capitalist Shangri-la, the valley where her strikers would create their own utopian society.

Over time Rand had developed ingenious methods to combat the squirms. A visiting cousin was surprised to see Rand pricking her thumb with a pin, drawing dots of blood. “It keeps my thoughts sharp,” she explained. At other times Rand would roam the Chatsworth grounds, picking up small stones along the way. Back in her study she sorted them according to color and size, filling the room with more than a hundred small boxes of them.
³
Perhaps her most effective method was writing to music. She tied specific melodies to different characters, using the music to set the proper mood as she wrote their starring scenes. Rand selected mostly dramatic classical pieces, so that as the plot thickened the music would reach a crescendo. Sometimes she found herself crying as she wrote.

At first Rand thought of the book as a “stunt novel” that would simply recapitulate the themes of
The Fountainhead
, but before long she
widened its scope significantly. It remained an adventure story, with her heroes refusing to participate in an economy dominated by the welfare state. The main plotline drew from Rand’s own biography, particularly her father’s reaction to the Russian Revolution. Originally she thought “it would merely show that capitalism and the proper economics rest on the mind.” Her reading of Aristotle and Plato, done for the forsaken nonfiction project, had sharpened her appreciation of rational philosophy. She decided her novel should demonstrate the connection between reason and reality. As she began making this theme concrete, a series of questions arose: “First of all, why is the mind important? In what particular way, what specifically does the mind do in relationship to human existence?” Pondering these questions, Rand realized her novel would be more than just an interesting political fable. By the time she began outlining the novel seriously, she saw it as a large-scale project that was primarily metaphysical in nature.
⁴
Still, she had trouble understanding the nature of the task she had shouldered.

Throughout the late 1940s Rand insisted the book was almost done. Certainly she was making progress. By July 1947 she had written 247 pages; a year later, with the book at 150,000 words, she still thought it would be shorter than
The Fountainhead
. When the manuscript topped three inches in width and five pounds in weight, Rand finally admitted it would be “bigger in scope and scale” than the earlier novel.
⁵
Even so, she had reason to believe the book was close to completion. The plotting and planning had gone faster than she could have imagined, and she had already finished much of her research. Her heroes and heroine were easy to imagine, and secondary characters developed quickly out of “the philosophical issues involved, and the generalized nature of the plot.” In 1950 she convinced Hal Wallis to terminate her contract, freeing her to write full time. It now seemed entirely possible that she could finish in a matter of months. Rand did not yet understand that
Atlas Shrugged
had become, as she later put it, “the underestimation of my whole life.”
⁶

As Rand began writing seriously she continued to receive visitors. Ruth and Buzzy Hill visited nearly every weekend, and a small coterie from nearby Los Angeles State College were regulars. Rand had spoken to a political science class there at the invitation of the professor and invited students to visit her at home, provided they were not Communists. Their professor remembered, “She was welcoming and all
that, but there was still a certain coldness about her. It was in her personality. She had her own mind and her own opinions—and that was that.”
⁷
Rand sought, with some success, to convert students to her own point of view. One remembered, “I’d been confronted with 250 different philosophies, but it was all like a big wheel with its spokes all counter-balancing each other, and I didn’t know what I thought anymore. She began removing spoke after spoke after spoke. Finally, the wheel began to turn. And I turned definitely in her direction.”
⁸
In contrast to the mature conservatives she had met in New York and Hollywood, Rand found it easy to make converts out of the young seekers who flocked to her side.

In the group of students that crowded around Rand, Nathan Blumenthal stood out above all others. The connection between them was immediate. Rand liked him from the start, and Blumenthal had a simple feeling: “I’m home.”
⁹
That first evening they dove into conversation, talking until the sun rose the next morning. It was shades of Isabel Paterson all over again, but this time Rand’s counterpart was not her peer, but a handsome young man hanging on her every word. A few days later Blumenthal returned with Barbara Weidman, his future wife. Weidman too was entranced by Rand. She gazed into her luminous eyes, “which seemed to know everything, seemed to say that there were no secrets, and none necessary.”
¹⁰
The couple soon became regulars at the ranch. Although Rand was always eager to talk philosophy and politics with her newfound friends, she also listened patiently to Barbara’s personal troubles in long walks around the property. Chatsworth became a refuge for the two college students, who found their increasingly right-wing political views made them distinctly unpopular at UCLA. For her part, Rand had finally found a friendship in which she could feel comfortable. Blumenthal and Weidman didn’t demand more than Rand could give, they never challenged her authority, and their appreciation for her work was a tonic.

An impressionable teenager in search of an idol when they met, Nathan slipped immediately into Rand’s psychic world. He did not have far to go, for his basic mentality was strikingly similar to hers. Like Alisa Rosenbaum, Nathan was an alienated and angry child who felt divorced from the world around him. Where Alisa had movies, he sought refuge in drama, reading close to two thousand plays during his high school years.

By the time he met Rand he had memorized
The Fountainhead
. Told a sentence from the book, he could recite the one immediately before and immediately after. Now he began speaking to Rand on the phone several times a day and spent nearly every Saturday evening at her house. Rand was like an older, feminine version of himself—although at first, Nathan did not see her as a woman. Two months after their meeting Nathan gave her a letter to the editor he had published in the UCLA newspaper, inscribed “To My Father—Ayn Rand—the first step.”
¹¹

The letter Nathan inscribed to Rand, which also listed Barbara as an author, was a virulent attack on F. O. Matthiessen, a literary critic and Harvard professor who had committed suicide while under investigation for past Communist associations. Matthiessen’s widely publicized death was mourned by his colleagues on the left, who considered him the first scholarly martyr of the Cold War. Nathan and Barbara would have none of it. Instead they reinterpreted his death in Randian terms, attributing it to the irrationality of Communism. In his letter Blumenthal asked, “if a man places his hopes in an idea which contains an irreconcilable contradiction, and when he sees all exponents of this idea turned corrupt and fail in their aims—is there anything heroic about killing himself because an idea which can’t work is not working?” Strident and tasteless, the letter averred that people like Matthiessen “deserve no pity whatsoever; rather do they deserve to be condemned to hell.” The letter caused a bitter controversy at UCLA. It forever poisoned Barbara’s relationship with a philosophy professor who had been close to Matthiessen. Before the letter was published the professor had been attentive and welcoming to Barbara, even joining the couple for a visit to Rand in Chatsworth, after which he pronounced himself deeply impressed. Now he counterattacked in the student newspaper and began criticizing Barbara openly in class. His hostility was so intense Barbara realized she would have to leave UCLA if she wanted to continue studying philosophy on the graduate level. Blumenthal was unfazed by the upheaval. He was a crusader who had found his cause.
¹²

His allegiance now transferred to Rand, Nathan began to break free from his birth family. He picked a fight with his socialist older sister, berating her in angry letters for her immorality and inconsistency, his language taken straight from Rand. On a trip home he shouted so much he claimed, “my throat’s getting hoarse.” Rand, seeing her former self
in his intemperance, counseled him on a better approach. It seemed to work, Nathan reported a year later. Instead of anger, he tried logic: “When they raise some objection—like taxation—I could refer them back to a premise they had already accepted, like immorality of initiated force, and they always had to cede the point.”
¹³
Even if his family still persisted in their beliefs, Nathan was discovering the power of a defined and integrated philosophical system. By this time he was calling Rand “darling” in his letters. She reciprocated by elevating Nathan and Barbara above all others, letting them read early drafts of her work in progress.