Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [129]
What explains the disparities between her account at the time and her recollections twelve years later? For one thing, when she finally attended the movie’s gala opening night at the Warner Theatre in Hollywood in late June 1949, she discovered that one line had been cut in final editing, the sentence that summarizes Roark’s self-defense at trial: “I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.” The front office had demanded the cut, she later discovered, but no one seems to have had the courage to tell her in advance. For another, The Fountainhead was not a hit, either with film critics or at the box office. “High-priced twaddle” was the verdict of Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who, not satisfied to condemn the movie, wrote a second article reproving Warner Bros. for its role in helping to promote her doctrine of the Superman. A newspaper syndicate distributed an article facetiously headlined “Cooper in Race for Longest-Speech Oscar.” Though dramatically set and beautifully shot, the movie was stiff, and most reviewers said so.
But the larger explanation for the disparity lies within Rand’s character. She would not admit that she had written a flawed script. From adulthood, if not before, she positively refused to consider that she bore significant responsibility for any of the conflicts, failures, or disappointments in her life. “In all the years I knew her, I never heard her say anything remotely to the effect that she had acted badly, mistakenly, or unfairly,” recalled a former friend. As her fame increased and she became conscious of her own iconic stature with readers and audiences, she tended increasingly to fuse her life with the lives of her characters, whose mistakes, if any, arose from ignorance of others’ bad intentions and not from a lack of objectivity, diplomacy, or wisdom. She remembered obstacles and disappointments less as ordinary, if infuriating, setbacks than as episodes in a tug of war—like Roark’s, like Equality 7–2521’s—with evil. People and events appeared as black or white. She minimized to the vanishing point the help she had received, failed to mention thinkers who had influenced her, and presented herself as a wholly self-created soul. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in the aftermath of her final falling-out with Isabel Paterson in June 1948, while she was still trying frantically to finish the screenplay of The Fountainhead.
To some degree, Rand and Paterson seemed to have repaired their friendship during Rand’s visit to New York after the HUAC hearings in the fall of 1947. And no wonder: Paterson had taken the trouble to arrange a special treat for Rand on Rand’s way back to Los Angeles. This was a favor the younger woman was not likely to forget.
It was the trip of a lifetime, Rand wrote to Paterson in February 1948. The aging columnist, on learning that Rand wanted to ride in a locomotive to gather background details for Dagny’s triumphant run on the John Galt Line, had contacted her good pal Colonel Robert S. Henry, a railroad executive and historian, and together they made arrangements for the novelist to travel partway home in the locomotive engine room of the Twentieth Century Limited, while Frank rode in a compartment car behind. When the Limited had pulled out of the underground tunnels beneath Grand Central Terminal, Rand wrote to Paterson, “Everything I thought of as heroic about man’s technological achievements was there concretely for me to feel for the first time in my life.” At Croton-Harmon, New York, the train exchanged its coal-burning engine for a faster diesel engine, and outside of Elkhart, Indiana, she took the throttle and drove the train at eighty miles an hour. After touring Inland Steel in Chicago, she and Frank resumed their trip to Hollywood as passengers. They were treated like royalty, she wrote. But she didn’t exactly thank Paterson and afterward didn’t mention her former mentor