Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [101]
She and O’Connor were still living in their cramped rental apartment. They had bought a 1936 Packard car (it was “magnificent looking—black, half-a-block long, and drips with chromium,” she gloated to Ogden), and on the strength of the Wallis contract, he began searching for a house and land to buy in the San Fernando Valley. The national inflation rate was high—wavering between 5 and 7 percent, and at that rate, he explained, the money they were saving in the bank was losing buying power. He also had a theory that proved to be correct: after the war, when gas rationing ended and people increased their driving distances, land values in the still-undeveloped valley would rise. A house would be a good investment, he told her. She was hesitant. She didn’t drive, and the San Fernando Valley was a twenty-mile commute from Hollywood. Then one day their landlady caught sight of Tartalia and issued an ultimatum: Choose the animal or the apartment. The cat was placed in a pet hostel while the O’Connors arranged to buy an astoundingly Roarkian house on thirteen acres of fertile farmland that Frank had discovered amid miles of orange groves in the rural town of Chatsworth in the valley. The four-thousand-square-foot house had been designed in 1935 for director Josef von Sternberg and his mistress Marlene Dietrich by Richard Neutra, a Viennese architect who had been an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. It was a swan-shaped structure made entirely of glass, steel, concrete, and aluminum alloy, with a soaring two-story living room, an immense master bedroom lined with floor-to-ceiling windows, a large and airy study opening into a walled garden, a rooftop pool, and a moat encircling the house. It cost them the fantastic sum of $24,000. They asked Frank’s brother Nick to pack and ship their New York furniture and moved into 10000 Tampa Avenue in July, a week before she started work for Wallis.
O’Connor, a born landholder, it seemed, fell in love with the San Fernando Valley ranch. He tended its fruit trees, gardens, and meadows; he experimented with raising peacocks, chickens, and rabbits and grew gladioli and alfalfa as a paying business. With her salary, they could now afford to hire a cook, a maid, and a handyman. She was pleased that her husband had become “chronically and permanently happy” in his outdoor life and she liked the roominess of the ranch. But she confided to a few friends that she still missed her spiritual home base in New York.
Frank persuaded Nick to visit them in the fall of 1944 and, with fresh air and oranges, nursed him through a serious spell of active tuberculosis. Nick went back to New York in late fall. He died in January on an operating table in a veterans’ hospital, and was buried on Long Island. Tuberculosis had weakened his heart, and his heart had stopped under anesthesia. A few weeks earlier, Rand had sent him a long, affectionate letter from the ranch. She must have mourned his death but didn’t refer to it in any of her published notes or letters.
Meanwhile, sales of The Fountainhead continued to be brisk. By Christmas 1944, fifty thousand copies had been sold. Every two or three weeks, for no apparent reason, it climbed to the top of a handful of regional best-seller lists and then fell back again. This occurred twenty-six times through the end of 1945. Fan mail was pouring in to Bobbs-Merrill, coming from lawyers, teachers, librarians, bookstore owners, chemists, engineers, housewives, active-duty military personnel, artists, and musicians. The letters would continue to come for as long as she lived. Soldiers wrote from battle zones