Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [29]
Just as she loved military marches and light Italian opera, Rand developed a passion for the elaborately staged Viennese and German operettas that, for a brief period, the Bolshevik government made available and affordable in state-run musical theaters such as the Mikhailovsky. She waited in line for hours each Saturday morning to buy cheap tickets for the back row of the fourth and highest balcony. During her first two years at the university, “I was there every Saturday,” she recalled. But soon an even more alluring opportunity arrived: to see the masterful, thrillingly melodramatic new silent films directed by D. W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Cecil B. DeMille. She and her family had been attending Russian-made movies since 1913. As a nine-or ten-year-old, she had even composed two childish film scenarios, one of them about a woman who has to choose between her husband in prison and her child; in a decision that reverberates eerily down the years, precocious young Rand’s heroine chooses the husband. (The child lived anyway, she said, so there was “a happy ending.”)
Starting in 1923, however, during the NEP period, sophisticated American and European films began making an appearance in small, inexpensive, privately run theaters on the outskirts of the city. She took full advantage of them, seeing more than one hundred movies, some three or more times, in the years before she emigrated. “It was almost as if I had a private avenue of seeing the world outside,” she later said. She loved the tangled plots, glamorously costumed stars, and exotic settings of movies like Intolerance, Lucrezia Borgia, and The Isle of Lost Ships. Her favorite film was Joe May’s 1921 melodrama The Indian Tomb, starring Conrad Veidt as Prince Ayan, a nefarious Bengali maharaja who bribes a yogi to capture and kill his wife’s lover, a British army officer played by Paul Richter. A British architect (Olaf FØnss) and his wife (Mia May) track Prince Ayan and foil his murderous scheme. The film ends with an elaborate, triumphant chase scene in the Bengal mountains. If this sounds suspiciously like the story line from Maurice Champagne’s The Mysterious Valley, Rand never noted the resemblance and perhaps was never conscious of it.
Veidt, a German Jew, became her favorite movie actor until she encountered Gary Cooper in the late 1920s. Veidt was a screen idol in Russia, and Rand’s infatuation with him brought out a trait that was present from early childhood: intellectual possessiveness. When people she didn’t know or like spoke admiringly of Veidt, she felt anger, she recalled. She had chosen him; other people weren’t worthy of him. Not for her was “a heart like a pavement, trampled by many feet.”
Rand’s introduction to American silent films was the fourth defining experience of her university years. There, she got her first glimpse of the New York skyline, which would become for her an emblem of creativity and liberty in the capitalist free world. Although Soviet government censors always added absurd subtitles to the films, she said—turning an ordinary American family dinner scene into a portrait of greed, for example, by labeling it “A capitalist eating well on profits wrung from his starving workers”—she and other Russians understood this to be nonsense, or “applesauce,” as she called it. Her enthusiasm for America was forged in movie theaters. The films she saw inspired her to picture it as “Atlantis”: the ideal existence for intelligent, purposeful, ruggedly individualistic men and, presumably, women. America, she decided, was the place on earth where she would find real people and the country in which she wanted to live and work.
Meanwhile, in spite of new cinemas and state-sponsored operettas, 1923 and 1924 saw the city under renewed political and economic siege. For the previous two years, Lenin had been preoccupied with quelling far-flung rebellions and a nationwide famine. Now, as he and his deputy Joseph Stalin focused on the cities, the repression grew harsher. Food rations were cut to one thousand calories a day. Diseases