Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [48]
The Night of January 16th is an engaging, if stilted, courtroom melodrama, inspired by the public uproar over the 1932 suicide of Swedish Match King and con man Ivar Kreuger and largely modeled on a popular 1927 play called The Trial of Mary Dugan. In Rand’s play, a secretary is on trial for the murder of her ruthless boss and lover, a bankrupt Swedish financier named Bjorn Faulkner, who at first appears to have committed suicide. Evidence presented at the trial points in two other, mutually contradictory, directions: Either the secretary, Karen Andre, hurled Faulkner off a penthouse balcony in a fit of jealous rage over his recent marriage, as one eyewitness suggests, or else Miss Andre and Faulkner conspired to stage his suicide in order to give themselves a fresh start with his father-in-law’s money—a ruse that would have succeeded had the father-in-law not discovered the plot and killed the financier. The play’s chief innovation, which proved popular, was to leave the verdict to a jury chosen each night from the audience. What members of the jury had to decide, Rand said, was whether they were romantics who believed in the passionate devotion of Karen Andre to the domineering, antisocial, but fiercely attractive rascal Faulkner or whether they were predisposed to accept the mewling, self-righteous testimony of the witnesses against Andre, who portrayed her as a jealous viper and the father-in-law as an upstanding citizen. If they chose the latter, she implied, they were judging their own “sense of life” and finding it unheroic.
The Night of January 16th was the culminating expression, to this point, of her growing preoccupation with the envy and ill will she saw around her and with the nobility of Nietzschean outsiders. She later renounced her romantic fascination with criminals, explaining that characters such as Bjorn Faulkner had been her youthful symbol for the man who stood alone against conventional society. But she remained passionately attracted—at least in her imagination and her work, if not in life—to ruthless, defiant, potentially violent figures who could easily dominate not only conformists and milksops but also powerful and brilliant women like herself. It must have surprised her, and perhaps not entirely pleased her, that when the play opened in Hollywood, audience juries overwhelmingly found in favor of Karen Andre.
She wrote The Night of January 16th in a few months’ time, hoping to make money, as The Trial of Mary Dugan had lavishly done for its author, Bayard Veiller, and for a first theatrical effort, it was remarkably successful. The play opened as Woman on Trial at the Hollywood Playhouse in October 1934, in a production by sometime actor E. E. Clive and featuring former silent-screen actress Barbara Bedford. Critics and a star-studded first-night audience, including Rand’s Polish idol Pola Negri, Frank Capra, Jesse Lasky, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, three members of the White Russian aristocratic diaspora, and Rand’s friend Ivan Lebedeff, among other film celebrities, praised the plot and were beguiled by the volunteer jury.
Afterward, at a party Lebedeff threw for the young writer and her handsome husband at a stylish Hollywood café called the Russian Eagle, the stars toasted her literary debut. Ever shy, she later told a friend that she had felt uncomfortable at the party. The public attention and critical acclaim didn’t wholly please her, either, although years earlier she must have imagined that they would. When reviews appeared the next morning, she was disappointed to find that critics had missed the point of her play; diverted