Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [166]
This time, in vivid contrast to 1943, the publishing world tripped over itself to court her. More than a dozen companies phoned or wrote, to Collins or to her, some sending flowers or invitations to a lavish meal. She and her agent analyzed her many options, and if they experienced a pleasant sense of vindication at having finally bested conventional wisdom, they had earned it.
She made a chart, and she and Collins narrowed the field to four firms. Since Archibald Ogden was now a consultant for Viking Press and would be her editor should Viking buy the book, Viking was placed on the list. So was McGraw-Hill, for its superior promotional resources, and Knopf, where Blanche and her husband, Alfred, were gradually turning the business over to their son, whom she had met and liked. Last, she considered Random House. That’s where Hiram Haydn, a well-respected and personable editor who had earlier replaced Ogden at Bobbs-Merrill, had recently signed on as editor-in-chief. She phoned him, gently chided him for being out of touch, and explained that she was wavering about including Random House in her final list because she had heard that the firm’s directors, the celebrated Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, were Communists.
Haydn laughed. One of his assignments at Bobbs-Merrill in the middle 1950s had been to take Rand out to lunch every few months, with the goal of gradually restoring her good opinion of Bobbs-Merrill. He failed, but he enjoyed the lunches and the office visits. In his memoir, Words & Faces, he remembered Rand as short and square, with a Dutch bob and a tricorne hat, “the exact replica of the one in the famous Bonaparte portrait—the sulky [portrait] in which he pokes around in his waistcoat with his fingers.” In cool weather she donned her hallmark short black cape, he recalled, which flowed dramatically in the breeze and which she wore, he remembered that she once confided to him, in imitation of Supergirl. But he had been even more astonished by her style of arguing than by her style of dress. Like Rothbard, he recalled that she would zero in on any inconsistency in her companion’s case, exploiting weaknesses with Socratic questions and airtight arguments. Eventually, she always “emerged victorious, whether because her partner finally capitulated or because he lost by default through exhaustion.” She was “dialectically invincible.” He grew to enjoy watching his peers innocently attempt to argue with her. Invariably they ended up among “the corpses on the Randian battlefield,” he wrote. He appreciated her, and she tolerated him.
Haydn pointed out that Random House had published Whittaker Chambers’s Witness, a fascinating book-length confession by a right-wing former Communist spy who had fingered Alger Hiss as a Russian agent in a series of congressional hearings and a trial. For once, Haydn wrote, he won an argument with the logician. She agreed that she and her agent would attend a lunch with Haydn, Cerf, and Klopfer a week later.
The lunch took place in the Trianon Room at the old Ambassador Hotel, on Park Avenue at Fifty-first Street, just around the corner from the Random House offices in a magnificent neo-Gothic mansion neighboring on and belonging to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Over eggs Benedict, she asked Haydn, Cerf, and Klopfer “an infinite number” of questions about their approach to publishing and their attitude toward her work. Haydn recalled that Cerf, a wily entrepreneur as well as a best-selling humor anthologist and a popular guest on the television game show What’s My Line?, answered her question, “What are your premises?” with a bold declaration