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By Root 1726 0

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