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By Root 1486 0

the height of the war, without Rand’s permission and without payment. When she was finally able to get hold of a print of the film and saw it, she loved its stark, old-fashioned beauty and was especially pleased by Italian actress Alida Valli’s superb performance as Kira. From Valli, now in Hollywood and under contract to David O. Selznick, she claimed to have learned a detail about the film’s Italian release that struck her as wonderful in itself and as excellent publicity. Two months after the movie opened to packed theaters, Valli told her, Mussolini ordered the film to be withdrawn and prints and negatives destroyed, on the grounds that it was anti-Fascist as well as anti-Communist. This proved the kinship of Communism and Fascism, “which even Mussolini recognized,” she wrote to her attorney. Luckily, an Italian producer had managed to preserve the master negative, and a print had been smuggled out of Rome by Rossano Brazzi, the actor who played Leo and who was also now in Hollywood. In February 1948, while post-HUAC fever still ran high, Rand contacted Jack Warner and offered to screen the print for him. Warner—perhaps still smarting over her planned testimony against Mission to Moscow—told her no. In the early 1950s, the Italian government paid her $35,000 in compensation for the unauthorized use of We the Living. Still angry at the theft, she was pleased with the payment and used part of the money to buy a new mink coat. It was not until 1972 that an artful splicing together of the film segments, Noi Viva and Addio, Kira!, with English subtitles, became available to art-house audiences, thanks to the efforts of three of her admirers. An American movie of We the Living has never been made.

Jack Warner was on her mind for another reason. In January or February 1948, she came upon an item in a Hollywood gossip column announcing that The Fountainhead was about to go into production, with Gary Cooper as its star and King Vidor as director. The hiring of Cooper was welcome news, of course. But that the producer, Henry Blanke, had notified a gossip columnist and not Ayn Rand about the project was not good news—and was angering because, at the time the studio had suspended production of The Fountainhead, Blanke had promised to keep her informed. With no assurance that she would be hired to write the final script, she fired her Hollywood agent Bert Allenberg and took to phoning Blanke directly. Awaiting word, she “went through hell.” Then she remembered that one of the dozen businessmen at Leonard Read’s 1944 dinner party was employed as the studio’s chief legal counsel. She called him to report that someone (she thought Vidor, the director) was trying to keep her off the movie. Two days later Blanke phoned and offered her the job. The front office didn’t dare to hire someone else, she later told a friend. It didn’t understand the book’s popularity and was scared to death that it would blunder and inadvertently offend the fans.

By March, she was back in a Warner Bros. office, with a secretary, and was working on the screenplay. Blanke and director Vidor were casting the remaining roles, and competition intensified for the part of Dominique. Hedda Hopper hinted that Lauren Bacall had accepted the part; Margaret Sullavan said she wanted it; Vidor had his eye on Jennifer Jones. Rand, who lobbied for the forty-three-year-old “Swedish Sphinx” Greta Garbo, was ordered by Blanke to tell their long-suffering mutual friend Barbara Stanwyck that the studio thought she was too old at forty. In early June, a month before the filming started, Vidor hired Patricia Neal, a twenty-two-year-old ingenue who had only once before appeared on screen. When Rand heard Neal’s Kentucky-bred voice on a screen test, she was horrified. So, the story goes, was Gary Cooper. He swore he’d have her fired; then, over dinner with Vidor, he met her and they fell in love. “They went for each other right away,” the director told one of Cooper’s biographers. “After dinner we never saw the two of them again except when we were shooting.” The love affair between