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By Root 1769 0

On learning of the Warner Bros. deal, her first thought was, Now I can pay for my own extended ad campaign. That notion quickly gave way to an anxious resolve to save every penny so that she would never again have to work when she needed time to write. But she didn’t foresee a friendly conspiracy to add a touch of glamour to her wardrobe. With Paterson’s encouragement, Frank persuaded her to go with him to Saks Fifth Avenue, on a jaunt to replace her worn-out winter coat. Once inside the store he told her sternly, “You can choose any kind of coat you want—as long as it’s a mink.” He led her to the fur salon. The coat she chose cost $2,400. Later that day, she went up to Paterson’s office to show her friend her prize; Paterson wasn’t there, so she modeled the coat for the secretaries and assistants and passed it around for them to try on. Her pleasure in it was later captured in a speech by Hank Rearden, the self-made steel magnate in Atlas Shrugged. Rearden tells his lover Dagny Taggart, to whom he’s just presented a fur coat, that he had never before paused from his work to enjoy his wealth. “I couldn’t find any purpose for it,” he says. “I’ve found it now,” in the realization that “it’s I who produced that wealth, and it’s I who am going to let it buy for me every pleasure I want.” Rand had become a proud, conscious producer of wealth—a capitalist—and she would never be poor again.

*Rand’s views on money, which influenced her disciple Alan Greenspan, are particularly interesting in light of the 2008 financial meltdown. Francisco’s speech continues: “Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’”

EIGHT

FAME

1943–1946

I decided to become a writer—not in order to save the world, nor to serve my fellow men—but for the simple, personal, selfish, egoistical happiness of creating the kind of men and events I could like, respect, and admire. I can bear to look around me levelly. I cannot bear to look down. I wanted to look up.

—“To the Readers of The Fountainhead,” 1945

The weeks she expected to spend in Hollywood turned into months and then years.

The O’Connors arrived in high style in early December 1943. Warner Bros. had sent them to Chicago aboard the New York Central Railroad’s luxurious Twentieth Century Limited, where they slept in a paneled private compartment and ordered two impossible-to-get government-rationed steaks in the formal dining car. They continued on to Hollywood aboard the streamlined Santa Fe Super Chief, world famous for its elaborate meals and celebrity passengers. The fact that they had earned this modish treatment was what made it seem so marvelous, Rand said, adding, “The only advantage of poverty is that you can get out of it. The contrast is wonderful.”

Apartments were hard to come by in wartime Hollywood, and the cat the O’Connors had brought with them on the train didn’t help in the hunt. After a few days’ search, they smuggled Tartalia, Russian for “Turtle Cat,” into a furnished flat not far from Hollywood Boulevard. (When the landlady inquired if they had any pets, Frank charmingly answered, “Only my wife.”) In the meantime, she reported to work at Warner Bros. studio in Burbank and was astonished to be given an office the size of a living room, with an outer vestibule occupied by two personal secretaries—one hers and the other assigned to a writer named Howard Koch, who worked in an adjacent office. To her delight, her secretary announced visitors and screened