Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [126]
Before leaving Washington, she tried to see J. Edgar Hoover, who turned her down. What she wanted from him is not known. En route to California, she and O’Connor stopped for a few days in New York, where she focused on collecting background material for the railroad scenes in Atlas Shrugged. She toured Grand Central Terminal (the inspiration for the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad Terminal) and interviewed half a dozen executives of the New York Central Railroad, including the male vice-president in charge of operations, the real-life equivalent of Dagny Taggart. She showed Archibald Ogden the first six chapters of the novel and met with editors of Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest, and Life, presumably about assignments. She finally met Rose Wilder Lane, and she and O’Connor treated Marna Papurt, then twenty years old and back in Rand’s good graces, to an expensive dinner at the Essex House, where the O’Connors were staying. In their hotel room after dinner, she, Marna, and Frank acted out scenes from her script for House of Mist. She spent her final evening in New York with Paterson. Albert Mannheimer, who was also in New York and was present on that evening, recalled that Paterson told her, “I love you.” Mannheimer murmured, “I love you, too,” but the following day, he bolstered his statement in a letter: “You are the ultimate in human beings I have known: free emotionally, with a full natural ability to love and hate (and to be loved).” He added that the abundance of her love of life was an enduring inspiration to him. This is a rare spontaneous tribute to a personal warmth and charm that Rand most assuredly possessed but that few people described in writing.
Mimi Sutton also visited her uncle and aunt by marriage in their room at the Essex House and witnessed an argument about money. O’Connor, always a stylish dresser, had been out shopping, and Rand objected to something he had bought. He told her, “Goddamn it, I will not account for anything I spend, buy, or do!” “She shut up,” said Mimi. “I think it was because I was there. She had embarrassed him.” In fact, she often backed down when Frank got angry. “She was afraid that she would lose him,” Mimi said.
Back in Hollywood, she put the best face on the hearings. The studios moved immediately to conciliate the powerful committee, excising so-called un-American and overtly egalitarian content from their films and firing screenwriters whose loyalty to the country had been questioned. She took a measure of credit for these developments. “The ‘Screen Guide for Americans’ did it,” she told friends. Two weeks after the hearings ended, the guide was published in a conservative magazine called Plain Talk, whose editor Rand had met while in New York. The Sunday New York Times picked up the story and reprinted the guide’s itemized recommendations. Requests for reprints began pouring into the MPA from studios. Because of HUAC, she said in 1961, “all the points I made in [the guide], particularly about the attacks on businessmen as villains, disappeared” from Hollywood movies. “Watch old movies on TV [and] you’ll see.”
Another immediate outcome of HUAC was that producers began looking for pro-capitalist, anti-Communist screen material. She and her Hollywood agent, Bert Allenberg, seized the opportunity to bring her 1936 novel We the Living to executives’ attention. She preferred to sell screen rights outright, Allenberg told trade reporters, but was willing to strike a deal with an American studio to distribute a two-part, six-hour Italian film version that had been made in Rome in 1942, at