Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [114]
“Do not underestimate the admirers of The Fountainhead,” she warned Warner Bros. producer Henry Blanke in December 1945. “[They are] becoming a kind of cult.” This was true, although she would later angrily reject the use of “cult” when it was used to describe the political and cultural movement that grew up around her in the 1960s. Although the movie was still on hold, the book’s success was attracting other keen-eyed marketers. In early 1944, a digest-sized magazine called Omnibook had condensed the novel and offered it for sale to members of the armed forces. A year later, the popular book club the Literary Guild issued its own edition as a dividend book, or bonus, to its members. Most surprisingly, beginning on Christmas Eve in 1945, the comic-strip giant King Features began syndicating a handsomely illustrated, condensed, serialized version of the novel in Hearst-owned newspapers across the country. Rand had been upset about the Omnibook publication, because Bobbs-Merrill had sold the rights without a guarantee that she could read the shortened text beforehand. This time, she read and approved every sentence of the King Features condensation and endorsed, and adored, the hand-drawn, Art Deco—style illustrations. “The artist has done a wonderful job of making Roark look like Frank,” she wrote to niece Mimi. In fact, the artist had done a wonderful job of making Roark look like Cyrus in The Mysterious Valley, right down to the rolled-up sleeves and the lock of hair that fell over his forehead. Amusingly, in one drawing Dominique is a passable replica of Rand, except that she is taller and wears shoulder-length, 1940s-style blond hair. The serial ran weekly through midsummer 1946.
Just as the serial was starting, Rand left the relative isolation of the San Fernando Valley ranch and returned to work at Hal Wallis Productions, on the Paramount lot. She found the atmosphere dramatically changed. The war was over. The larger-than-life Franklin D. Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The previous August, Harry Truman, the new president, had ordered American planes to use the world’s first two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing a Japanese surrender but also killing tens (and eventually hundreds) of thousands of civilians and setting off a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. The Cold War had begun. In Hollywood, most wartime rationing had ended and a postwar boom was under way, but exhilaration was mixed with a new anxiety. Most Americans had never imagined the existence of such a destructive weapon as the atomic bomb until it was exploded. As Time magazine put it, Americans were proud that their resourceful scientists had been able to coax tiny atoms to reveal their mighty secrets. But they were also frightened—by the power of the new weaponry, by the magnitude of the damage to Japan, and by the prospect that the Soviet Union might develop its own bomb and deploy it against the United States. Still, theoretical physicists such as Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Enrico Fermi, whose work had helped create the bomb, became new American heroes.
In this respect, popular opinion caught up with Rand, who from adolescence had loved the luminous rationality of science, engineering, and technological invention. For a few days, Wallis assigned her to a silly gangster movie called I Walk Alone. In early January 1946, however, he asked her to plan and write an original screenplay documenting the development of the atomic bomb. The assignment, coming barely five months after the war had ended, was a vote of confidence from Wallis,