Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [123]
On September 2, Ayn Rand wrote the first sentence of the first formal draft of Atlas Shrugged—which happens to be the date (minus the year) displayed on a lighted calendar that seems to float ominously above New York City’s skyline at the beginning of the novel. Three weeks later, she rejoined Hal Wallis for what would turn out to be her last few months of work for him.
By now, the Boss was in a slump. The films he was working on for Paramount were fewer and far less distinguished than those he had produced for Warner Bros. in the early 1940s, where he had received twelve Oscar nominations. Rand’s projects were no worse or better than the others. From September 1946 through mid-January 1947, and then again briefly in the fall of 1947, she worked on a movie called House of Mist, a tepid love story adapted from a novel by Chilean writer Maria Luisa Bombal. Like The Crying Sisters, Top Secret, and the Tchaikovsky movie, House of Mist was never filmed. But a draft found among Wallis’s papers bears distinct marks of her thinking at the time. The story’s heroine, Helga, like the developing heroine of Atlas Shrugged, “looks like a young girl who has never known any sorrow.” Orphaned and poor, Helga tells her cousin Teresa something that a younger Rand may well have said or thought. “I don’t believe in unhappiness,” says Helga. “I won’t let [unhappiness] make me bitter and ugly. I will think of things as they should be … even when they aren’t.” The film was finally shelved in October 1947. Without resigning, Rand left Wallis, never to return.
By then, she had finished seven chapters of Atlas Shrugged and was steering Dagny and Hank Rearden into their once-in-a-lifetime adventure on the John Galt Line. As the main plotlines unfolded without much difficulty, she thought that the book would be shorter and quicker to write than The Fountainhead and predicted that she would soon be finished. But when she began to consider the philosophic underpinnings of her plot and characters, she realized that she would have to probe more deeply. Asking herself, “Why is the mind important? What specifically does the mind do in relationship to human existence?” she decided that “my most important job is the formulation of a rational morality of and for man, of and for his life, of and for this earth.” It would take her a total of thirteen years to complete the intricate and sweeping web of Atlas Shrugged.
On Thursday, October 16, 1947, she and O’Connor boarded a train for the nation’s capital, where she had agreed to testify as a friendly witness before HUAC. The hearings opened on the following Monday, as into the marble caucus room of the old House Office Building strode Rand and a crowd of film celebrities, some wearing sunglasses against the glare of klieg lights. Looking for seats behind them were hundreds of newspaper reporters, photographers and cameramen, spectators, and a television crew. Outside, fans fought police for a glimpse of their favorite stars. It was the hottest show in town.
By prearrangement, the MPA supplied most of the twenty-four friendly witnesses expected to appear, including Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, Walt Disney, and Ayn Rand. The nineteen unfriendly witnesses—those suspected of Communist Party ties or sympathies—had been subpoenaed to appear against their will. Ten of them would be sentenced to prison for refusing