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By Root 1659 0

you earned fifty thousand dollars.” That evening, the two celebrated with dinner at a local cafeteria where they had eaten many times before. As they studied the menu’s right-hand column, where the forty-five-cent meals were listed, it suddenly occurred to them that they were no longer poor. They could afford to order whatever they wanted from the sixty-five-cent side of the menu, and so they did. That meal made real the issue of her wealth, she later said. They stayed awake all night, “gloating” together, until the sun rose over 139 East Thirty-fifth Street.

A few weeks later, on their way home from signing the official Warner Bros. contract, they stopped for a champagne cocktail at the Roosevelt Hotel. They were as happy as they had ever been. The hard work, the single focus, and the courage not to compromise had all paid off. To reflect on the money she had earned was exhilarating. To experience the momentary assurance of a sought-after success was deeply satisfying. She did not regret the past. If she had achieved financial success and recognition in a gentle upward line, over time, she and O’Connor told each other, this moment would not have been as sweet. She had become a capitalist overnight, she jested to her friend the economist and writer Ruth Alexander.

Of all her hard-won accomplishments, why did this one finally touch her? She had no more respect for the judgment of Hollywood than for the New York publishing world; indeed, she had less. And she most emphatically did not believe that wealth alone signals worth. A clue may be found in the dazzling speech she would later write for Francisco d’Anconia, one of three capitalist heroes in Atlas Shrugged. “Money is the root of all good,” Francisco famously announces to a group of hypocritical politicians and professional humanitarians assembled at a wedding party. “Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.” Francisco goes on to deliver a virtuoso defense of the profit motive; in all of history, he tells his listeners, the free exchange of money has been the only nonviolent, orderly, and socially transparent means of calibrating the value men place upon one another’s work. Without money, and particularly money backed by gold, force decides, Rand argued.* Perhaps it was natural, then, that after many disappointing encounters with politicians, businessmen, theatrical producers, and literary rainmakers, money pleased her more resoundingly than praise. At best, praise could be marred by errors of understanding; even the admirable Lorine Pruette had tarnished an otherwise perfect review by comparing The Fountainhead to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a novel Rand considered both ponderous and ludicrously mystical. Most important, money gave Ayn Rand the time and the freedom to write.

In her ebullience, the thirty-eight-year-old author must sometimes have turned her thoughts to her parents and sisters, from whom she had heard nothing in six long years. From the 1920s on, the Rosenbaums had lived primarily to applaud their eldest child’s achievements in America; now that she had what for her was real wealth, she must have wished that she could share it with them and relieve their hardship. But communication with Russia was still impossible. Even if Stalin had permitted mail to flow freely from the West, Europe’s transportation infrastructure was in tatters. Absent the power to contact them or even find out if they were alive, she may simply have avoided dwelling on thoughts of them. She did not mention them in letters or in published working journals. She did, however, send a signed copy of The Fountainhead to her mother’s cousin Minna Goldberg in Chicago. Minna’s daughter Fern Brown remembered the book, and also remembered her mother’s caustic asides about the fact that their celebrated young relative did not then or later repay the money she had borrowed from the family in 1926. She most certainly did not send Minna a mink coat—an oversight that was not forgotten by the Goldbergs, Stones, and Liptons.

Surprisingly, Ayn Rand did purchase a mink coat for herself.