Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [89]
Within a week of receiving the manuscript, Ogden telephoned. He had read her chapters. He thought they were “great writing in the tradition of real literature,” he told her. He listed the things he liked most: the ambitious theme, the emblematic characterizations, the brilliant writing, the heroic sensibility. Since it was for exactly these qualities that she most wanted to be admired, she prized Ogden’s compliments for the rest of her life. He went to bat for the book with his boss, D. L. Chambers, the president of Bobbs-Merrill in Indianapolis. When Chambers wired him to reject the book, he wired back: “If this is not the book for you, then I am not the editor for you.” Chambers responded: “Far be it from me to dampen such enthusiasm. Sign the contract. But the book better be good.”
Ogden’s second congratulatory phone call came at ten o’clock one wintry morning when Rand had been up all night typing a rush report for Paramount. She listened, breathless, and hung up the phone. Then she left the apartment on East Thirty-fifth Street to deliver the report to Paramount. Mealand and Frances Hazlitt were on hand to congratulate her. Since Ogden hadn’t been able to talk his famously frugal boss into paying the full $1,200 advance she had requested to meet expenses, they also pledged their continuing support; they promised to give her weekend reading assignments until the book was finished.
At home that evening, she probably danced around the living room with Frank and Nick to one of her old-world recordings; the German march song “Marionettes at Midnight” was her favorite at the time. All her adult life, whenever she was happy, she put an old 78 rpm disc on the record player, waved her arms, and stomped about, pretending to be conducting an orchestra—typically, to the beat of a light-hearted waltz, a European operetta, or a march remembered from her childhood, recordings of which she had carried with her from St. Petersburg to Chicago, to Los Angeles, and back to New York. During celebrations she also liked to place funny hats on her pet stuffed lion cubs, Oscar and Oswald, a gift from O’Connor soon after their marriage. Friends often remarked that she seemed startlingly childish in her pleasure. But then, in many ways, she remained a demanding and entitled child.
On December 10, 1941, three days after the Japanese bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor and catapulted the nation into World War II, she signed a contract with Bobbs-Merrill. She promised to deliver The Fountainhead, two-thirds of which remained to be written, in a little more than a year’s time. She received an advance of one thousand dollars. Her new due date was January 1, 1943.
In spite of the war, now began the happiest year of Ayn Rand’s life, she later said. This time, she was determined to meet her deadline; the more vehement and explosive parts of the story were yet to be written, and she didn’t want to give her new publisher an excuse for backing out. If she did, there might not be another chance. She set to work like “a writing engine” on a tour de force that would change the American cultural landscape.
All her life, Rand displayed a mental capacity for work that few could equal. But her youthful physical inertia never left her; she avoided exercise, gained weight easily, and lacked the bodily stamina to keep pace with her penetrating mind and her ambitions. In 1942, with a pressing deadline before her, she began to take amphetamines, probably Benzedrine, which was still relatively new on the market and was easily available in