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By Root 1602 0

to say that they had been reading parts of the book to one another as a way of bolstering morale. Many readers thanked her for giving them the courage and inspiration to flout the stultifying expectations of their families and communities and to act according to their hopes and dreams; or they asked her advice on how to become more like Howard Roark; or they timidly inquired who Ayn Rand was, anyway. A Hungarian-American musician named Erwin Nyiregyházi, whose performances Rand had enjoyed in the mid-1930s, thanked her for her “great and exceptional” stand on the importance of the individual ego and called her the greatest satirist since Oscar Wilde. Most of the writers were men. Roark, a passionate woman’s erotic rendition of a rugged male hero, spoke to American men. Rand tried to answer every letter, assuring worried readers that if they understood and liked The Fountainhead they weren’t second-handers and politely declining the occasional “compliment” of being addressed as “Mr. Rand.” Much later, she said of these early admirers that she mistakenly assumed that their enthusiasm for Roark implied their agreement with her philosophy, since her ideas followed so meticulously from the novel’s characters and action, and since her mind was so quick to grasp implications. She hadn’t counted on the number of logical contradictions most people could sustain at any given time, she said. In the meantime, the passionate public response to the novel’s themes was earning her a reputation as a kind of novelist-guru.

She was famous now. Ely Jacques Kahn boasted to colleagues and the press that he had helped her; he invited her to speak before gatherings of architects in New York and California. (In her New York speech, in 1943, she told the group of architects that her book was not about the structure of buildings but about the structure of man—the girders and supports, the rotten beams and shoddy foundations of man’s spirit.) Gossip columnists reported on the progress of her movie and employment deals, and her presence in Hollywood produced a flurry of social invitations. Even after The Fountainhead had been delayed, actors and actresses were vying for the parts of Dominique and Roark. Joan Crawford gave a dinner party for her in which she dressed as Dominique, in a flowing white gown decorated with green-blue aquamarines. Barbara Stanwyck, a political conservative and the godmother of Warner Bros.’s purchase of The Fountainhead, befriended Rand and lobbied Blanke for the part. Making reference to Dominique’s helmet of pale-blond hair, Veronica Lake let it be known that the part had been written for her. Rand preferred Garbo. As to Roark, she had always pictured Gary Cooper in the part but read in the gossip columns that Alan Ladd and Humphrey Bogart hoped to be considered. Clark Gable, then a volunteer lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, was rumored to have read The Fountainhead on a transcontinental train heading east and to have hopped off during a stop to call MGM, his employer, and demand that the studio secure the part for him; MGM reportedly responded by offering Warner Bros. $425,000 for the movie rights, vindicating Rand’s prediction that the book would be worth more than she was paid for it. (She did not forget to call Alan Collins to tell him about the offer.) When she signed on with Hal Wallis—“the big man in Hollywood,” as she called him in a letter to Ogden—Hedda Hopper and The New York Times covered the event, and Cecil B. DeMille, now heading his own independent production company at Paramount, tried to pry her away from Wallis, though nothing seems to have come of it.

She was even invited to spend an evening with the elusive Frank Lloyd Wright at the home of his son Lloyd, in Santa Monica. The two paragons of American self-reliance spoke cordially of individualism, integrity, and, in relation to creativity, their own personal suffering. Wright expressed the courtly opinion that she was too young to have suffered. She told him wryly that she had certainly suffered over his 1938 letter to her ridiculing Roark. He had