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By Root 1571 0

Eighty-ninth Street in New York. Rand’s second cousin Fern Brown, now twenty years old and in college, came to see them one evening in June of 1939, on her way home from a summer job in Pennsylvania. Fern hadn’t set eyes on her Russian cousin in thirteen years, since Rand left Chicago for Hollywood. She remembered being profoundly impressed by Rand’s literary conversation and accomplishments, her lovely apartment, and her welcoming, handsome husband. To Fern’s astonishment, O’Connor cooked and served a Russian dinner, dressed in a smoking jacket. (“The man cooking was something I’d never heard of in those days,” she said.) Rand remained at the dining-room table talking with Fern and chain-smoking through a long cigarette holder. After dinner, they attended the ballet. Fern eventually decided to become a writer herself and went on to publish more than twenty young-adult biographies and novels.

That summer, the 1939 New York World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows, Queens, to crowds from all over the nation and the world. Twenty million visitors came to New York to tour the World of Tomorrow pavilions, where they could see early prototypes of a Xerox machine, a jet-propelled airplane, RCA’s first television set, a speech synthesizer, and many other engineering triumphs in Art Deco shapes and colors. The architectural exhibition, labeled “Pacifica” for its Far Eastern theme, probably provided Rand with some details for her fictional March of the Centuries exposition in The Fountainhead, a massive project in which Roark refuses to participate because it is “architecture by committee” (a phrase coined by Frank Lloyd Wright) and of which Peter Keating then takes leadership.

Mimi, also twenty and an art student, came to stay with the O’Connors that summer, perhaps to visit the World’s Fair. She was attractive, high-spirited, and (unlike her mother and sisters) full of awed admiration for her aunt by marriage, whom she had first met and idolized while visiting her uncle Nick in December 1934. She was on hand to witness the many ups and downs of her aunt’s long summer. Rand, having missed her first Knopf deadline and with only a year left to finish The Fountainhead and meet her second deadline, had just agreed to set aside her work on the novel and concentrate on what she hoped would be a money-making proposition: a new production of her 1936 play rendition of We the Living. On the recommendation of a Russian-born actress named Eugenie Leontovich, the well-known director George Abbott had offered to produce the play after cash-strapped Jerome Mayer backed out. Abbott, who later shared a Pulitzer Prize with Jerome Weidman for the musical Fiorello!, was then best known for jovial Rodgers and Hart musicals, including the previous year’s hilarious Shakespeare spoof The Boys from Syracuse. The cast he chose was a wild assortment of types. Leontovich herself, thirty-nine years old and a veteran of the Stanislavskian Moscow Art Theatre, took the role of twenty-year-old Kira. Actor John Davis Lodge, the brother of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and a future governor of Connecticut, tried but failed to bring to life the character of Andrei Taganov; Abbott replaced him with an up-and-coming young midwesterner named Dean Jagger, later to be famous as a high-school principal in television’s Mr. Novak. Broadway hand John Emory played a lackluster version of Leo. Frank O’Connor understudied the part and also earned Actors’ Equity pay as a GPU deputy commissar. Rehearsals began in June.

This time, Rand retained script control, and she asked for and received a one-hundred-dollar-a-month stipend while rehearsals lasted. She assumed that any rewriting of the play would be quick and straightforward. She was wrong. Once the production was under way, Abbott, like A. H. Woods, wanted extended revisions.

Having once mapped out a complex plot in novel form, Rand later said, her mind rebelled against reshaping it in another genre. As a result, her stage adaptations, like some of her screenplays, tended to be literal, stiff, and nakedly melodramatic, and it