Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [87]
Rand, in turn, had come to doubt Watkins’s reliability. She had not forgotten the debacle of We the Living at Macmillan, nor the time spent on projects her agent had encouraged her to write but couldn’t sell. As for The Fountainhead, at first Watkins had been enthusiastic—so much so that before the Knopf contract came along she had gaily promised that she could get an advance on the book anytime Rand ran out of money. That promise had turned out to be unfounded. Now Rand conjectured that Watkins was embarrassed by it and wanted to find someone else to blame for her inability to fulfill it—namely, Rand. She also guessed that the agent was talking about her behind her back, secretly criticizing her to others.
The showdown came one day when Watkins mused aloud that there was simply something wrong with the novel. She didn’t know what. Name it, Rand demanded. Watkins couldn’t name it and, furthermore, was fed up with being asked to give reasons for things she knew by instinct to be true. She added that Rand’s inflexibility about the book was making it impossible to sell. At this point, the women hung up on each other and the relationship was severed, either because Watkins resigned in protest, as Rand suggested in a letter, or because Rand abruptly broke off with her, which is what Rand later told a friend. The letter, written to the agent on the afternoon of the dispute, was conciliatory but not apologetic. “Even instincts have reasons behind them,” she pleaded. “Words, thoughts, reasons—if we drop them we will have nothing left. … If you really meant what you said, ‘Let us try to clear up [our differences]’—let’s try to do that,” she concluded. Watkins didn’t respond by letter, and it’s not clear whether she responded at all. Although she continued to handle business transactions concerning The Night of January 16th and We the Living, Rand had lost a champion and a friend as well as her sales representative for The Fountainhead. She had no publisher, no agent, no money.
In truth, there weren’t many business transactions for an agent to handle. Royalties from The Night of January 16th had slowed to a trickle. We the Living was out of print. Even with a cheaper apartment and pared-down expenses, Rand urgently needed money. Before the rupture, Watkins had sent the completed chapters of The Fountainhead to Richard Mealand, the head of the New York office of Paramount Pictures, who sometimes bought unpublished stories for the screen. Mealand couldn’t persuade his Hollywood bosses to buy the novel in progress, but he was electrified by what he read, according to Rand. In the late spring of 1941, she went to see him. Still unable to find screen-writing assignments, she asked for work as a freelance reader. He hired her on the spot. Her job was to evaluate the film potential of about-to-be-published books and stories—the same work she had done during her early months with Cecil B. DeMille. Her pay ranged from six dollars for a short evaluation to twenty-five dollars for a long one. She was a slow reader and worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, to earn as much as she could. Mealand and his assistant, Frances Hazlitt, wife of the distinguished free-market economist and journalist Henry Hazlitt, were touched to see that she was not in the least above her job but was unusually conscientious and hardworking. They took her