Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [47]
Most strikingly, Red Pawn’s characters form exactly the kind of romantic triad that Rand was now elaborating at length in her novel We the Living, which she had begun to outline soon after her marriage in 1929. In fact, Red Pawn is the first example of Rand’s famously overheated, sometimes roughed-up sexual triangles, in which a man-worshipping woman juggles two or more male lovers, typically in service of a high ideal. Once she and O’Connor were married, such triangles were never far from her mind, her work, or her life.
With the help of a well-connected neighbor in her North Gower Street apartment building—a young woman named Marcella Bannert, who would later provide a model for the character of Peter Keating in The Fountainhead—Rand sent Red Pawn to an agent who worked for the powerful Myron Selznick agency. The agent, coincidentally named Nick Carter, submitted the scenario to the story department at RKO, to Universal Pictures, to Marlene Dietrich, and to Paramount Pictures, which had Dietrich under contract. According to the author, the sultry thirty-one-year-old German star liked the screenplay, but her director and handler, Josef von Sternberg, turned it down. At the same time, Rand dispatched a carbon copy to Gouverneur Morris, a well-known politically conservative short story and screenplay writer who was on staff at Universal. He later said, “In all my life, [Red Pawn] was the first script sent me by an unknown youngster which showed positive genius.” Morris became her advocate at Universal. In September 1932, the studio paid her seven hundred dollars for the story and hired her for a fee of eight hundred dollars more to turn the scenario into a working screenplay for the studio’s new Austrian star, Tala Birell. Rand was “burning with ambition, just burning,” said Marcella Bannert. “From that point on, you couldn’t stop her.”
All the studios “were interested in Russian stories,” Rand wrote to Sarah Lipton that November, “but have had trouble finding any, so that helped me.” The subject also helped her to attract press attention. In one newspaper interview about Red Pawn, headlined “Russian Girl Jeers at Depression Complaint,” she belittlingly compared the hardships of the American Depression with the unending drudgery of life in Communist Russia. “The high-priced executive in Russia does not have the physical comforts of the laborer in America,” she sniffed. The lump-sum payment and the script-writing contract established her as a writer. When she finished the screenplay, Universal hired her to rewrite an unrelated project. Red Pawn was never produced, as it turned out, but its sale helped her to make a small name for herself and let her escape the RKO wardrobe department and write full-time. She and O’Connor moved into the stately new Trianon Apartments, designed by Leland Bryant.
O’Connor, too, was doing relatively well. He had resumed work as an actor, at first sporadically and then with greater regularity. He was landing small parts in early talking pictures: Shadow of the Law (1930), Cimarron (1931), Ladies’ Man (1931), Arrowsmith (1931), Three on a Match (1932), and Handle with Care (1932). He was earning enough to buy his young wife her first portable American typewriter, a radio, and a beautiful made-to-order walnut desk. He presented her with a brand-new copy of Webster’s Daily Use Dictionary, inscribed with a love poem he wrote, based on the letters of the alphabet: “Ayn; adorable; angel; / Beloved; / Cupid; / Darling; / Everything; / Friend,” until he got to “Zenith.” Together, they purchased their first car: a used Nash, bought on time, which Rand would never learn to drive. He decorated their new apartment, giving his wife another glimpse of his artistic talent. They were happy.
While working on We the Living, “a real big novel … about Russia,” she also drafted her first stage play, a stylized murder mystery that was eventually known as The Night of January 16th. (Rand originally called it Penthouse Legend but changed