Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [131]
Paterson arrived on May 28. Irascible by nature, she was in an especially irritable mood, according to her biographer Stephen Cox. She had not enjoyed the flight and regarded the entire fund-raising expedition as a tedious necessity. At sixty-two, she was battle-weary. She was also probably aware that Irita Van Doren and her other ideological adversaries at the Herald Tribune were on a campaign to have her fired. The following January, she would lose the job she had held for twenty-seven years. She would never really work again. Rand, too, was under pressure; one of her more minor complaints about Paterson’s visit was that her guest’s constant chatter made it hard for her to write.
Rand behaved generously in her role as fixer, staging a series of parties with wealthy conservatives. The first hint of trouble came at the end of a small party attended by Rand’s friend the playwright Morrie Ryskind and his wife. After Ryskind left, Paterson apparently said to Rand, “I don’t like Jewish intellectuals.” Paterson’s biographer Cox surmises that this was merely an awkward joke, an attempt to disguise her boredom and discomfort with many of Rand’s friends, who were by no means New York—style literary intellectuals. Naturally, it struck Rand as an insult. In another example of her response to anti-Semitism, she asked, “Then why do you like me?” and answered herself sarcastically, “Of course! I’m not an intellectual.” Paterson apologized.
The next incident took place at a large gathering of members of the Motion Picture Alliance. There, a peevish Paterson spoke rudely to one of Rand’s colleagues at Warner Bros., a screenwriter named Gordon Chase, and he and his wife walked out. A night or two later she told six or so anti-Communist luminaries, seated around the dinner table at the home of Rand’s neighbor and friend Adrian Greenberg and his wife, the actress Janet Gaynor, that they knew nothing, nothing, about politics. (Years later, a repentant Paterson told a friend that Gaynor had said that night, “[That woman] ought to be kept out of sight and produced only on special occasions.” Paterson admitted that she had to agree.) Finally, during a party at the ranch, hosted by Rand in honor of the man she called her best conservative ally, William Mullendore, the sexagenarian had a public temper tantrum. When Adrian suggested producing a promotional dummy issue of the new magazine, with real articles by Paterson, she went into a fit. Hadn’t she worked hard enough in her lifetime? she shouted. Why should she write without pay? Why didn’t someone else do something for a change? Turning to Mullendore, who could have been helpful to her, she cried, “None of the businessmen do anything! None of them!” In other circumstances, with a businessman other than Mullendore, Rand might have agreed. Now she attempted to quiet Paterson, but the tirade continued. Mullendore left. That was it for Rand, she later told a friend.
Paterson behaved badly, but the trouble between them was older and more personal than that. In addition to their dispute over who had taught what to whom, and who had received proper credit, Rand suspected that Paterson had not really liked The Fountainhead. For five years, Rand had resented the fact that Paterson had not openly praised the novel in the Herald Tribune or publicly defended her against the Left’s attacks. Of the many references Paterson had made to the book in print, most were gossipy or anecdotal, she complained. One day during the visit, Paterson, probably inadvertently, revealed that she was the mystery woman who had refused to review the novel for the Herald Tribune in 1943. According to Rand’s later account—the only one there is—when the novelist demanded to know why, Paterson gave an evasive answer. She didn’t agree with everything in the book, she muttered vaguely. She didn’t like the sex and was particularly uncomfortable with the fact that Dominique didn’t bathe after the “rape” by Roark because she wanted to keep his scent on her skin. She hadn’t wanted to attack her