Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [59]
Whatever their merits, the reviews ended Ayn Rand’s expectations of receiving literary “justice,” she later said. We the Living sold about two thousand copies, a respectable sale for the time, and appeared on a few regional best-seller lists. But Macmillan didn’t support the book with advertising or promotion, which wasn’t unusual for the time but which surprised and angered the first-time novelist. Still, even after the publicity storm stirred up by Gone with the Wind had carried off most of the book-buying public, readers quietly continued to buy and read We the Living.
And she was earning money. In a decade when average American incomes were well under $1,500 a year, The Night of January 16th was bringing her royalties of between $200 and $1,200 a week. By the time the play had closed on April 4, 1936, three days before the publication of her novel, theatrical rights had been sold to producers in London, Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, Switzerland, Poland, and elsewhere. A return engagement was already filling seats in the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, and a road show was about to open in Chicago. Somewhat ironically, Watkins had negotiated a contract with Franklin Roosevelt’s new federal Works Progress Administration to bring performances of the play to local theaters across the country. Although by 1936 Rand strongly disapproved of Roosevelt and his New Deal programs, the WPA provided her with royalties of ten dollars per performance, a small fortune, throughout the later 1930s. And because the play’s single courtroom setting made for easy staging, it also became a favorite of privately run summer-stock companies, generating a sometimes larger, sometimes smaller stream of income until her death. Meanwhile, We the Living was experiencing an afterlife: British publisher Cassell & Company planned to distribute a U.K. edition in the fall of 1936, and Rand and Jerome Mayer, a theatrical producer and director, opened discussions about taking the novel to Broadway as a play.
Financially prudent, Rand decided to earn extra money by returning to her old trade, screenwriting, and working as a contract writer based either in New York or Hollywood. Well established as a novelist and playwright, she took it for granted that the film industry would now offer her good-quality writing projects and more money; with this in mind, Watkins got in touch with a Hollywood associate, who contacted executives at the major movie studios. None of them would hire her. Rand was certain that she was being ostracized because of her anti-Soviet stance, both in We the Living and in public speeches and print and radio interviews, and the Hollywood associate apparently confirmed her suspicions. “She talks too much about Soviet Russia,” the associate told Watkins. She saw this as retaliation—as, in effect, blacklisting by the Hollywood intellectual Left. Later, she said, “This [blacklisting] lasted until The Fountainhead.” She began to take the American Communist threat very seriously indeed.
It’s hard not to conclude that Ayn Rand sometimes lacked good judgment, or at least good timing.
She called herself shy, and she was shy in social situations, but when speaking before an audience, teaching, or discussing serious ideas, she was animated, inspiring, and charismatic. In the spring and summer of 1936, after the publication of We the Living, she was in demand as an anti-Soviet speaker. She lectured at the then-famous New