Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [104]
Rand’s self-confidence as a writer was at a peak. From her office in Paramount’s Art Deco—style studio lot in Hollywood, Hal Wallis became her affectionately nicknamed “Boss” and she his jocular “loyal wage-slave.” She worked for him uncomplainingly on a series of B movies that the Oscar-nominated director now, for some reason, chose to produce in the company that bore his name. During her first work term, extending from summer 1944 until late spring 1945, she wrote three screenplays. The best known is Love Letters, adapted from a novel by British writer Christopher Massie. Rand’s lifelong fondness for Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac came in handy here; the plot features an American soldier who writes a second soldier’s love letters and eventually marries the woman to whom they are addressed (although she is an amnesiac and possibly a murderess). The movie starred Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones and was a box-office hit but a critical failure. She also co-wrote You Came Along in collaboration with its original author Robert Smith. A wafer-thin wartime romantic comedy, the script is interesting for its characterization of a government agent as a “wet nurse” (a term she later deployed as Hank Rearden’s nickname for a heart-warming minor character in Atlas Shrugged) and for the four distinctly different endings that Smith supplied and Rand polished and presented to Wallis, demonstrating the plotting proficiency and by-the-yard ingenuity of writers for the movie industry that would come in handy in the composition of her most celebrated work. She drafted a third screenplay, based on a novel called The Crying Sisters by mystery-crime writer Mabel Seeley, which she had read on the recommendation of her old friends, the attorney Pincus Berner and his wife, and brought to Wallis. The movie was not produced. She also tried unsuccessfully to interest Wallis in acquiring her 1932 screenplay Red Pawn, still owned by Paramount. She and Wallis worked well together and even flirted mildly now and then.
She entered her initial sabbatical period in June of 1945. The first thing she did was to buy the collected works of Aristotle, which she had wanted to read since her university years, and three new outfits by Adrian, the former DeMille wardrobe assistant who, upon her 1926 arrival in Hollywood, dressed her for a walk-on role in the movie King of Kings. He was now a modish dress designer and her nearest neighbor at the ranch. Then she scrambled to finish a short nonfiction book she had promised to Bobbs-Merrill. Called The Moral Basis of lndividualism, it was an attempt at a brief, orderly explanation of the ethics of The Fountainhead, exactly the kind of book that Isabel Paterson had urged her to write in 1943. In notes, she explained the moral necessity of Howard Roark’s defiantly independent stance and contempt for the opinions of others. Among man’s inalienable rights, she noted, the right to life is the most fundamental. Yet an individual can survive only through the use of his rational ability. To prove that reason is man’s only tool of survival in a world he cannot understand instinctively, she began to elaborate the nature of human existence itself, as she wrote to Paterson. In her notes, she described what she knew for sure: that humans exist; that the world around them is real; and that the faculty of “rational consciousness” is the only way for humans to know and control