Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [51]
They arrived in New York City during the first days of December. Almost immediately, her new producer, A. H. Woods, put her to work preparing The Night of January 16th for its Broadway premiere. Woods was hoping for an early January opening, and while she trimmed lines and polished scenes, he laid out his ambitious production plans, whose intricacy and scale Hollywood could never match, he told her. Rand was naturally elated. The producer was wonderfully easy to work with, she wrote to her former Hollywood agent Mary Inloes, and so far had sought few changes. She also got on well with her new theatrical agent, Sidney Satenstein, who struck her as an able businessman.
Almost as soon as she handed in the hastily revised script, in mid-December, and while she and her husband were still arranging their belongings in a one-room furnished apartment they had rented at 56 East Sixty-sixth Street, Woods informed her that the play would not open in January after all. His funding had fallen through. New funding was needed. Casting and rehearsals would have to wait.
Rand accepted the bad news with unusual equanimity. Still, she needed money. Her cash advance against the play’s New York box office royalties had been $250, plus $100 traveling expenses; this was enough to get her to New York and let her live for a few weeks, but not enough to weather a delay, even in the cut-rate fifth year of the Great Depression. Fees from her recent screenwriting projects had apparently been spent, perhaps partly in support of her parents. Yet with her small but growing reputation, she was in a good position to get whatever contract work there was. Her theatrical agent, Satenstein, found her a freelance job as an East Coast reader for RKO, her former Hollywood employer, although she complained in a letter to Mary Inloes that her hours were long and her pay small, on average about ten dollars a week. To help keep her household going until the play opened, she borrowed money from her Hollywood friend Millicent Patton, who had relocated to New York. “She was very direct,” said Patton. “She said, ‘I’m going to [produce] this play and make some money, and then I’m going to write what I please.’ “Patton and her husband made the loan, and Rand repaid it. But she never acknowledged that Patton’s help had made a difference to her. “I don’t think it entered her mind,” Patton said years later. “It was just a matter of what she had to do” to survive and reach her goals.
She and O’Connor had to economize on everything, including the food they heated on a hot plate in their room. She didn’t like the hardship, but she was resolute and hopeful. She lived in the greatest city in the world. Her play might eventually attract the kind of sophisticated intellectual attention she craved. And her new East Coast literary agent, a woman named Jean Wick, was circulating the completed manuscript of We the Living to some of New York’s most prestigious publishing houses.
She had been introduced to Wick by her Hollywood admirer Gouverneur Morris, who, like Ivan Lebedeff and a few others who took the time to read her work and talk to her, was deeply impressed by her personal history, the quality of her mind, and her passionate intellectual commitment to individual achievement. After reading a draft of We the Living (“the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Soviet Russia,” he called it), he sent sections to the famous libertarian newspaperman H. L. Mencken. Mencken, an avid defender of American civil liberties, pronounced the work “excellent” but warned that its anti-Communist message might hurt it with publishers. Whatever