Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [245]
Barbara Weiss resigned. Over the course of fifteen years, Weiss had looked on as dozens of hapless followers had endured interrogation and humiliation. At first, she had attributed her employer’s anger to a blind, passionate, highly charged moral temperament. Later, “I saw how repressed she was, and I knew [her anger] had to come from fear,” Weiss said, echoing an observation made two decades earlier by Random House copy editor Bertha Krantz. “I decided she was possibly the most fearful person I had ever met.” After the Blumenthals’ departure, Weiss decided that Rand was not, after all, unconscious of the turbulence and pain she had caused in the lives of people who had cared for her, including Frank. “She just robbed him of everything,” the secretary said. “I [came to] look on her as a killer of people.”
Thus Peikoff became the sole heir to her copyrights, manuscripts, and savings and, except for Eloise Huggins, often her sole companion. He had grown anxiously possessive of her, a wound-up version of an attentive son. Her enemies were his, of course, and as she became more isolated he supplemented his own visits with visits from his friends, including his first wife, Susan Ludel, and his second wife, Cynthia Pastor, both of whom served, successively, as Rand’s secretaries. Two decades after her death, married for the third time, he was still pursuing her vendettas, mounting acrimonious attacks on heretics, prosecuting legal threats against outsiders, and demanding loyalty oaths from a second generation of Rand disciples. While she lived, he was the only acolyte who remained close to her, and—whether she knew it or not—he had to further stifle his spirit. “Leonard was destroyed,” said an acquaintance. “He was a robot at the end.”
Amid illnesses and a diminished social life, Rand pursued two major preoccupations in the years before her death. One was to see Atlas Shrugged brought to a wider audience by means of a movie or television production. Because she believed that she had been betrayed by the makers of The Fountainhead, she was determined to exert control over every aspect of any adaptation of her masterpiece, including approval of the cast. For years, no producer would agree to her requirements. Then, in May 1972, her agent introduced her to Albert Ruddy, an independent Paramount producer who had just released The Godfather and who accepted all her terms. They held a press conference at the “21” Club. But when Rand demanded veto rights over film editing, the deal dissolved.
It was during the Ruddy negotiations that Daryn Kent, the actress whom Branden had berated as an Ellsworth Toohey in the 1950s, was acutely disillusioned. She asked Rand to allow her to audition for the part of Dagny. Rand, whom Kent had heard say, “You should aim high and have a right to aim high,” answered, pragmatically, “Don’t aim too high, Daryn.” Three decades later, Kent could recall the intensity of her surprise and distress. But she never lost her love and admiration for the author who she felt had identified monumentally important principles “for man to live by. I still want that world” that Ayn Rand envisioned half a century ago, she said in 2008.
In 1976 or 1977, producers Henry Jaffe and his son, Michael, approached Rand with a proposal to turn Atlas Shrugged into an eight-hour miniseries for NBC. With support from network executives, they reached an agreement giving her broad decision-making power. They hired Stirling Silliphant, who had won an Academy Award for his screenplay for In the Heat of the Night, to adapt the novel for television. Rand and the writer worked together well, and she enjoyed the Jaffes’ attention and solicitude. For years, she had made a game of casting the characters of Atlas Shrugged; now she decided that she wanted Raquel Welch or Farrah Fawcett-Majors as Dagny, Clint Eastwood as Rearden, and (at the Jaffes’ suggestion) the French actor Alain Delon as Francisco d’Anconia. “She never had [an actor to play] Galt,” Susan Ludel recalled.
Silliphant finished an outline sometime in 1978. He and Rand had begun