• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1671 0

was partly these theatrical defects that Abbott wanted to correct. Before long, he asked her to work alongside another contract writer, the respected playwright S. N. Behrman, and she agreed. She liked Behrman and was fond of Abbott but was impatient with what she thought of as their “unstylized” sense of the dramatic. Like Woods, they advised and cajoled her to soften her characters’ hard symbolic edges and, as she saw it, give Leo, Andrei, and Kira the flavor of “the folks next door.” This, of course, she could not do. If form followed function, as she believed it did in literary art as in architecture, then the special, the exalted, the highly stylized was her medium and her message. She did her best to make the play commercially viable, but The Unconquered, as Rand titled it (invoking the designation Liberty 5–3000 had given to Equality 7–2521 in Anthem), tottered woodenly toward its opening.

In many ways rehearsals that summer were a repetition of The Night of January 16th, with two important differences. One was that she made a fast, close friend of her majestic leading lady, Eugenie Leontovich, who had escaped from Russia four years before Rand. Mimi remembered being in the O’Connors’ apartment, listening as the two redoubtable expatriates chatted on the phone for hours, mixing Russian with English. Then one day, Mimi recalled, the friendship was over. The actress hadn’t been adapting well to the role of Kira or to the mixed approaches of her fellow actors. In any case, Leontovich’s husband, Gregory Ratoff, apparently convinced her that performing the lead in an overtly anti-Communist play on Broadway might hurt her nascent Hollywood career, and she quit. Rand was furious, and probably wounded and worried. Abbott replaced the Russian diva with a tepid American actress named Helen Craig, and, according to Mimi, Rand never saw or spoke to Leontovich again.

There were other ruptures with friends in the 1930s, Mimi recalled, although she never knew exactly what had caused them. When she asked about people whom she had seen and no longer saw during her visits, her uncle Frank explained that they and the O’Connors had not seen eye to eye on some subjects, so “we don’t see them so much.” These people included actor Robert Shayne, who had played a small part in The Night of January 16th, and his wife, Elizabeth, who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand Rand’s concept of selfishness; Ivan Lebedeff; and a newspaper publicist named Frank Orsini. “Almost everybody,” Mimi said.

This was an example of an emerging trend in Rand’s personality that is characteristic of both ideologues and narcissists: sudden and acrimonious breaks with friends. Leontovich may have defended her acting by criticizing the character of Kira or may have disagreed with Rand about Russian or American politics. Whatever she did, she broke the spell of consensus Rand increasingly required.

The second notable event was a romantic flirtation she carried on that summer with Dean Jagger. She was fascinated by the handsome thirty-six-year-old Jagger’s bald pate, and he went out of his way to be warm and courtly to her during rehearsals and cast gatherings. As close acquaintances pointed out, men were often drawn to Ayn Rand’s brains and intellectual conviction but almost never to her physical womanhood. Jagger was. Mimi, who attended rehearsals, noticed that her aunt’s eyes lit up whenever she and Jagger met. One day, the niece said boldly, “I bet you’d like to have an affair with him, but you’d be afraid to take a chance, because you’d be afraid of losing Frank.” Rand smiled genially and said, “You’re absolutely right.”

O’Connor was also working on the set, and it’s likely that he was aware of his wife’s mild flirtation. He may have been uneasy but may also have felt relief that she had found a source of pleasure. At home, her fear of running out of money and her growing anxiety over time spent away from The Fountainhead gave rise to changeable moods of depression and irritation. Mimi witnessed Rand’s angry outbursts at O’Connor, fast-rising storms that he weathered