Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [73]
She decided to go to work for Ely Jacques Kahn, a well-known Art Deco architect and an admirer of Swiss modernist Le Corbusier. Kahn had a successful New York commercial practice. He instantly understood what she was after, and was intrigued by her description of her novel in progress as a vindication of modern architecture. He hired her, incognito, as a clerk in his office at Park Avenue and Thirty-third Street. He proved immensely useful to her. She studied his drafting techniques and the pecking order in his workmen’s rooms. He brought her along to professional seminars and parties. She pumped him for gossip and stories, and he complied. She assiduously collected background information about his colleagues, whom she later turned into a gallery of roguish minor characters. He even helped to engineer her introduction to Frank Lloyd Wright at Wright’s National Association of Real Estate Boards lecture. He contributed his own traits to the figure of Guy Francon, Peter Keating’s socially connected mentor and partner. Francon is portrayed as the most successful and least industrious architect in New York—the last part definitely not an attribute of Kahn’s.
Here and elsewhere she picked up and deployed the finer points of well-known New York buildings and 1930s personalities, which makes The Fountainhead an amusing parody as well as a juggernaut of romantic ideas. The inspiration for Henry Cameron’s landmark Dana Building, for example, was probably Louis Sullivan’s gemlike Bayard-Condict Building, the only Sullivan structure in Manhattan, and its name seems to have been chosen in honor of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana House in Springfield, Illinois. Peter Keating’s winning entry for the Cosmo-Slotnick competition closely resembles the 1926 Paramount Building; it, too, was built as the result of a public competition, which was won by a firm called Rapp & Rapp. A real architect named Gordon Bunshaft, a pioneer of the boxy International Style, provided the model for the pompous, tweedy Gordon Prescott, and the famous architect Cass Gilbert served as inspiration for the Renaissance-loving character of Ralston Halcombe. In creating the novelist and Toohey protégé Lois Cook, Rand parodied Gertrude Stein and added a Russian touch; not only is Cook an American cubist, like Stein, but she is also an early 1920s Russian futurist who, in the words of Russian historian Bernice Rosenthal, “valorizes [that group’s] cacophony, disharmony, and even a kind of crudeness” in her home and work. The debauched old Banner theater critic, Jules Fougler, may well be Brooks Atkinson, the reviewer who so brashly condemned The Night of January 16th as “hokum.” Toohey’s millionaire patron Mitchell Layton seems to have been based on the department-store magnate Marshall Field III, and his nonsense-playwright sidekick, Ike the Genius, on William Saroyan, a client of Pincus Berner’s. When at the end of The Fountainhead, newspaper mogul Gail Wynand commissions Roark to build a skyscraper in Hell’s Kitchen, he is completing a dream announced by William Randolph Hearst in 1921.
Most important, Kahn gave Rand the key to the novel’s climax. Chatting with him one day, she asked what was the biggest problem in architecture at the time. “Low-cost housing,” he answered and went on to explain how lack of adequate funding limited the quality of public construction for the poor. At lunchtime, she rushed downstairs, sat at the counter at Schrafft’s, and furiously scribbled notes. With a flash of irony, she imagined Roark designing a star-shaped public housing project that