Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [56]
For her own play was idling. All winter and spring, Woods kept promising that casting and rehearsals would begin any day. Funding finally came through in midsummer 1935, when the hard-nosed theatrical mogul Lee Shubert agreed to underwrite the project. That should have been a cause for celebration. Almost immediately, however, pitched battles began. Woods, now reporting to Shubert, turned out to be a good deal less accommodating than he had at first appeared. He and she argued over everything: his demands that she abridge her “highfalutin” courtroom speeches (arbitrarily, she maintained); his insertion into the play of extraneous props (a gun) and characters (a floozy in furs, reportedly Shubert’s mistress); and his tirades about how ponderous ideas had no place in popular entertainment. In her view, he was rapidly dismantling the story she had carefully constructed to test theatergoers’ “sense of life” by removing elements of the motivation of her characters through cuts. When she objected to his changes, he would shout, “But this is your first play! I have forty years of experience in the theater!” Experience meant very little to her; she wanted logic. In exasperation, she reportedly told him that if an elevator operator suggested a change and could explain his reasons, she would happily consider it, but if a literary genius dropped in to propose an alteration without a valid explanation, she would reject it out of hand.
Given that her greatest gift was, perhaps, as a translator of unfamiliar and counterintuitive ideas into the vernacular of popular melodrama, she must have found Woods’s point of view particularly vexing. Their most furious quarrels, however, were reserved for his decision to hire two hack collaborators, named Hayes and Weitzenkorn, to implement script changes she refused to make—and, incidentally, to siphon off one-tenth of her royalties, set at 10 percent of box-office receipts. With the help of her friend and attorney Melville Cane (and the support of Mrs. Vincent Astor, who was appointed arbiter), she fought the royalty reduction and won. She also managed to install the incomparable actor Walter Pidgeon in the role of tough-guy gangster Guts Regan, Karen Andre’s and Bjorn Faulkner’s accessory in crime. But though she could walk away from Woods’s harangues, she could not prevent his meddling; the contract she had signed gave him the right to hire new writers, change the script, add props, and more. The experience of watching him dilute her work with commercial pap was “miserably painful,” she said. In the end, she came to hate him, her agent, Satenstein, and the adulterated play. Years later, when a friend noticed a published copy of it on her coffee table in California and asked to borrow it, Rand snatched it away and cried, “Don’t read that! I’m going to destroy it.”
Meanwhile, We the Living was being read with serious interest by some of New York’s best editors, but was also gathering rejection letters. Some turned it down because they couldn’t imagine who would buy and read a novel about 1920s Russia. Others were wary or skeptical of the anti-Soviet theme. Jean Wick didn’t always pass their comments along to Rand, and when she did, the agent seemed bewildered as to how to answer. Gradually, the author realized that her agent didn’t understand the novel, let alone how to sell it. She wrote detailed explanations for Wick to refer to when talking to editors. We the Living wasn’t merely about postrevolutionary Russia, she pointed out, although it did possess the