Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [107]
One of Paterson’s earlier letters had mentioned the successful novelist’s bloom in middle age. “You can knock the world for a loop now,” Paterson declared. And there is no doubt that Rand was glamorous. At the age of forty, she wore expensive, elaborately tailored suits and gowns by Adrian. She chain-smoked through a long cigarette holder, wore her dark hair short and straight in 1920s flapper mode, and carried her fame regally, like Catherine’s invisible crown. She was conscious of her power and achievement and loved to hear her writing praised, but—apart from basking in a compliment when especially well dressed—was largely without conventional vanity. Ruth Ohman, the daughter of Morrie Ryskind, a Pulitzer Prize—winning playwright, remembered, as a little girl, watching Rand at parties in her parents’ living room. All the men in the room would cluster around her, listening, rapt, as she discoursed on politics and economics. The other women hung back, talking among themselves. “I admired her. She gave me confidence and hope,” said Ohman. Rand had not yet learned, and never would learn, the despised art of small talk and got “furiously nervous” before every social occasion. To Paterson, she had written, “I am becoming more antisocial than I was—and the reason is the same as yours. I can’t stand the sort of things people talk about.” Her conversation about political trends in Hollywood and the importance of individual rights, however, was more scintillating, brainier, and more original than ever. Men, especially young men, noticed, and were attracted.
She began to collect the most interesting young men she could find, those who appealed to her for reasons of merit or like-mindedness. An early example was Thaddeus Ashby, who came to live on the ranch in the spring of 1945. An irrepressible twenty-one-year-old fan, he had written to her from New York, calling her the most important philosopher living and suggesting that, because he understood the character of Howard Roark better than Warner Bros. ever could, she should appoint him producer of The Fountainhead. He held an entry-level job at the McCann-Erickson advertising agency on Madison Avenue and typed his letter on company stationery. Was he important? Rand and O’Connor apparently wondered. Later, Ashby discovered that they had sent Frank’s older brother Joe, who happened to be in New York, to the advertising agency to check him out. “I was just a flunky, a clerk,” Ashby said, “and I couldn’t really help her.”
Rand didn’t answer his letter. Nevertheless, he quit his job, hitchhiked to Hollywood, and phoned her through Hal Wallis’s office at Paramount. Impressed by his persistence, she invited him to lunch on the Paramount lot. The attractive young man was working on a novel and wanted to be a writer, he said, and regaled her with passages from The Fountainhead that he had learned by heart. “I could quote it the way fundamentalist Christians quote the Bible,” he remembered. That night, Rand invited Ashby to supper at the ranch. When she learned he lacked sufficient money to continue writing, she invited him to stay. He moved in the following day and remained for between five months and a year.
Rand’s friend and former neighbor in New York, Albert Mannheimer, the tall, curly-haired former Yale Drama School student and Communist apostate, was already living and working in Hollywood. He took to spending long weekends at the ranch, both during Ashby’s stay and afterward. Now a moderately successful young screenwriter, he still wanted to write for the theater and was working on a play called The Bees and the Flowers. According to Rand’s part-time secretary during those years, June Kurisu, Mannheimer looked