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By Root 1802 0

forgotten the letter and hadn’t yet read the published book. She sent him a copy. He read it and professed to be an admirer. “Your thesis is the great one,” he wrote. “The Individual is the Fountainhead of any Society worthwhile.” He hailed her for her portrait of Ellsworth Toohey but didn’t mention her hero, except to say that Howard Roark should have had a mane of white hair, like his own. Hoping to learn more, she wrote to Gerald Loeb, a mutual friend, begging him to tell her “everything that Wright said to you about The Fountainhead and about me.” Loeb demurred, taking the stance that Wright’s comments to him were confidential. Still, she was gratified by the famous architect’s apparent approval. His letter was “like the closing of a circle for me,” she wrote to him. As for his single serious criticism of her book—that it “sensationalized” the quest for truth—she suggested that his own buildings were equally sensational. They were not made for homey living or “flopping around in bedroom slippers,” she wrote, but for heroic individuals who stood up straight and made every minute count. Like her book, his houses were an expression of life as it should be lived, not as it was. When Wright wryly remarked that he supposed she would now be “set up in the marketplace and burned for a witch” for writing in praise of individual conscience, she replied, “I think I am made of asbestos.”

She and Henry Blanke were both eager to get Wright to design the sets for The Fountainhead, whenever it should be scheduled for production. The novelist and the architect would tussle over this issue until 1948, when his demand for prior approval of the costumes, sets, and script and a fee amounting to 10 percent of the budget of the movie ruled him out. At some point, she also asked him to design a house for her, on land that she eventually hoped to buy in the suburbs north of New York City. He enlarged a set of plans created for one of his never-built 1937 All-Steel Houses and converted it into a flowing four-tiered concrete-and-stone mansion featuring a large fountain, in honor of The Fountainhead, and a rooftop study. Altogether, it was reminiscent of his 1935 masterpiece, Fallingwater. When he told her the price, $35,000, she winced. “My dear lady,” he reportedly remarked, “that’s no problem. Go out and make more money.” The land was not bought and the house was not built, but Wright’s sketches remain in his library at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Wright, in turn, invited her and O’Connor to visit his legendary summer residence, school, and architectural studio at Taliesin East, in Spring Green, Wisconsin. They went in 1945 and were horrified by what they saw. The beautiful 1911 buildings were in a state of disrepair. (“He had a theoretical mind with no concern for how one would actually live,” she remarked, amusingly anticipating what cultural commentators would say of her.) She long remembered her indignation over the attitude of hero worship and servitude that Wright was famous for instilling in his “Fellowship,” made up of tuition-paying students. They cooked, served meals, and cleaned. They ate at tables set a step or two below the dais on which Wright and his guests and family dined, and they consumed a plainer diet. Their drawings, she noted, were undistinguished and imitative of Wright. “What was tragic was that he didn’t want any of that,” Rand told a friend in 1961. “He was trying to get intellectual independence [out of] them during the general discussions, but he didn’t get anything except ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir’ and recitals of formulas from his writing.” She compared them to medieval serfs. At the time she made these comments, in the early 1960s, the charge that she required hero worship from her young followers was swirling around her in newspaper and magazine accounts.

For some reason Wright, who had warmed to her after their meeting in Santa Monica, was disappointed by the visit, his son-in-law recalled. Wright’s biographer, Meryle Secrest, speculates that prolonged exposure to her dogmatism