Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (19 page)

Despite his new independence Frank remained an attentive and much needed consort for Rand. She did not drive, so he chauffeured her into Hollywood whenever business called. More important was his role as peacekeeper and social mediator. The O’Connors invited friends to their home on a regular basis. When the conversations stretched all night Frank retired midway through the evening, and when Rand hosted the Hollywood conservatives he remained on the sidelines, a gracious yet opinion-free host. But when social occasions became fraught or tense, Frank stepped in to manage the situation. One memorable afternoon Rosalie Wilson was visiting with her mother, Millie. As a child Rosalie had briefly lived with the O’Connors in Hollywood while her parents were divorcing. During a spirited political discussion Millie shocked the others by opining, “I don’t think much of Hitler, but I’ll have to agree with him he should have incinerated all those Jews.” Rosalie remembered a silence that stretched to eternity. Then Rand said in a beautifully modulated tone, “Well, Millie, I guess you’ve never known, but I am Jewish.” The silence continued as Frank walked the Wilsons to their car. Leaning through the window with tears on his face he squeezed Rosalie’s shoulder one last time.
²³

Sometimes Frank was able to salvage relationships on the brink. Ruth Beebe Hill, a new acquaintance of the O’Connors, incurred Rand’s wrath by mentioning that she had memorized Plato’s
Republic
as part of a stage act. Hill did not know that Rand considered Plato the godfather of Communism (an opinion also held by Isabel Paterson). She could tell that she had said something wrong, though, for “the room became cold air, frigid, as if the room had frozen.” Frank quickly came to Hill’s rescue. He scooped her up off the floor where she had been sitting and resettled her in an armchair with a blanket tucked around her. “Ruth was just thinking back to college days, when she probably was required to memorize these different things,” he told Ayn. “How about some coffee?” To Hill the incident was both a warning of Rand’s capricious temperament and an important illumination of the O’Connor
marriage. Although he seemed a passive adjunct to his more vibrant wife, Hill saw Frank as Ayn’s rock, “the anchor to windward.” Frank’s cool collection was a vital counterbalance to Rand’s uneven moods and fiery temperament.
²⁴

To others Rand seemed to be chafing at the bonds of marriage. Jack Bungay, an assistant to Hal Wallis, saw a sensuality in Rand that seemed barely contained. “There was a lot of sex in her face,” he remembered, “beautiful eyes, black hair and very beautiful lips, very prominent lips, a lovely face, not especially big, but a beautiful smile.” Although she was never fully comfortable with her looks, Rand had learned how to present herself to best advantage. The Benzedrine helped her shed excess weight, and she began wearing platform heels that boosted her height. She stepped out in dramatic clothing by Adrian, a designer favored by Hollywood stars. Rand enjoyed a close, flirtatious rapport with her boss Wallis, teasing and joking with him as they reviewed her scripts. Bungay, who spent a few months lodging with the O’Connors when he was between apartments, observed her fondness for a host of younger men who sought her counsel. Most prominent among these was Albert Mannheimer, an aspiring screenwriter whom Bungay believed to be Rand’s heir after Frank.
²⁵

Troubled and intense, Mannheimer was a frequent visitor to the O’Connor household. He was reeling from the dramatic suicide of a former girlfriend, who killed herself in his apartment after a heated quarrel. Overcome by guilt at her death, Mannheimer clung to Rand’s insistence that he bore no fault. The two grew noticeably close. She nicknamed him “Fuzzy” and he brought her extravagant gifts, including an enormous bottle of Chanel perfume. At times Mannheimer’s feelings for her grew intense. “I love you Ayn, in a way I have never before loved anyone and never shall again,” he told her in an impromptu letter written after one of their visits. He groped for images to describe their relationship, comparing her to the open country, the way a scientist feels “having discovered something new; or a writer loves the feeling of having created a beautiful phrase.” It was impossible to feel depressed around her, he wrote, calling her “the ultimate in human beings I have known.” Although she did not discourage such outpourings, Rand’s letters to him were full of advice rather than suppressed passion. The two eventually drifted apart in the early 1950s.
²⁶

Other young men orbited around Rand during this time, including Thaddeus Ashby, a Harvard dropout and later an editor at the libertarian magazine
Faith and Freedom
. Like Mannheimer, Ashby enjoyed Rand’s favor for several months. She offered him advice about his writing career, argued with him in long philosophical conversations, and offered him lodging at the ranch on several occasions. Eventually the O’Connors discovered that Ashby had fabricated details of his past and they cut him off. Although his friendship with Rand was platonic, he felt a distinct current of sexuality running beneath the surface of their interactions. Another young man who did editorial work for Rand, Evan Wright, reported a similar dynamic.
²⁷

Frank was both indispensible to Rand’s happiness and unable to satisfy her completely. His unwillingness to engage her intellectually made their relationship possible, for she would never have tolerated dissent from her husband. Yet Frank’s distaste for dispute and argument left a void that Rand sought to fill with others. Later she would confess to friends that during their years in California she had considered divorce. Frank, on the other hand, had found a comfortable accommodation with their differences. When Rand proclaimed to friends that Frank was the power behind the throne, he joked back, “Sometimes I think I am the throne, the way I get sat on.”
²⁸
Frank was well aware of the trade-offs he had made. Rand’s wealth enabled him to work the land with little worry about finances. In return he did whatever was needed to keep her happy. On the surface he was dependent on her. But like Ruth Hill, Frank understood that Ayn needed him too.

As much as Rand despised California, these were intellectually rich years for her. When her first real break from screenwriting came in June 1945 she leapt at the opportunity to finally pursue her own intellectual interests. Early in the year she had mapped out her first notes for “The Strike,” later to become
Atlas Shrugged
, but now her interest returned to nonfiction.
²⁹
On the day of her last story conference with Wallis she lingered in Hollywood to buy five evening gowns and an enormous volume of Aristotle. The new purchase reflected her expanding plans for “The Moral Basis of Individualism.” As she told Paterson, she had “realized the book must be much, much more than merely a restatement of
my theme in
The Fountainhead
. It has to start further back—with the first axioms of existence.” She confessed to Paterson that the effort was much harder than she had anticipated.
³⁰

Rand’s turn to Aristotle reflected her sense that individualism as a political philosophy needed to be reconstituted from the ground up. The rise of Communism and fascism had convinced her that nineteenth-century liberalism, as she noted in the margins of
The Road to Serfdom
, “had failed.” This sense that established ideologies were bankrupt was widely shared. Indeed the rise of totalitarianism had triggered a crisis in liberal political theory, for it called into question long held assumptions about human progress and rationality. As tensions between the United States and Russia grew, intellectuals across the political spectrum sought foundations that could bolster and support American democracy in its battle with Soviet Communism. The sudden popularity of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who emphasized the innate sinfulness of mankind, reflected the urgent search for meaning that characterized the postwar era. Others looked to Aristotle, who appealed to many religious as well as secular thinkers. Catholics had long touted the wisdom of Thomist philosophy, proposing it as an alternative to relativism and naturalism, which they blamed for the collapse of the West. They had a high-profile convert in University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins, who a decade earlier had discovered in Aristotle a resource for the development of sound political ideas.
³¹
Rand too would embrace ancient philosophy as the antidote to modern political ills.

As she began to educate herself about philosophy Rand turned to Paterson for a durable frame of reference. In New York Paterson had ranted against Kant, Hegel, and Marx, quoting instead Aristotle and the dictum “A is A.”
³²
Now, as she read Aristotle and Plato, Rand told Paterson, “I think of you all the time—of what you used to say about them,” and her first notes for the project were filled with allusions to Paterson’s ideas and opinions. Both Paterson and Rand rejected the idea that man, like an animal, was controlled by instincts and subconscious drives. Instead they envisioned human nature as rational, voluntary, and defined by free will. “Man does not act to its kind by the pure instinct of species, as other animals generally do,” Paterson wrote in one of her letters to Rand. She also asserted that any philosophical defense of liberty
must be grounded in man’s life. Speaking of others who had written on liberty she commented, “The issue is usually confused by a failure or refusal to recognize that one must begin with the simple fact of physical existence and the necessary conditions of physical existence on this earth.”33
³³
As she returned to nonfiction Rand similarly criticized the idea of instincts and argued that morality must, above all, be practical.

Rand’s writing now reflected a new emphasis on rationality, drawn from her reading of Aristotle. As a first step she critiqued her earlier notes and realized that they must be reorganized to give more thorough coverage to reason as the determining faculty of man. The idea that reason was the most important quality of humanity, indeed the very definition of human, had been a subtheme of her first drafts. Now she wanted to bring it front and center as the first major part of her discussion. She continued to sample from her earlier material, with an important change. Where the “Manifesto of Individualism” had celebrated the creative faculty as the province of individual men, something that could not be borrowed, stolen, or coerced, now Rand made the same points about the rational faculty. By mid-July she had brought her ideas about ethics, individualism, and rationality together: “The moral faculty is
not
something independent of the rational faculty, but directly connected with it
and proceeding from it
.” In turn the moral faculty must be exercised “according to the rules its nature demands, independently.”
³⁴
By August she had written a separate piece titled “The Rational Faculty.”

Rand’s newfound emphasis on reason stirred dormant tendencies in her thought. In July she identified “another hole in altruism.” If goods were to be distributed equally in a collectivist society, it would have to be determined if everyone produced equally or if “men produce unequally.” If the latter was true, then collectivism was based on exploitation of the more productive, “and this is one of the basic reasons why people advocate altruism and collectivism—the motive of the parasite.”
³⁵
Rand tried to resist the implications of this conclusion and return to the egalitarianism of
The Fountainhead
. “The moral man is not necessarily the most intelligent, but the one who independently exercises such intelligence as he has,” she argued. To a hypothetical questioner who wondered what to make of his mediocre talents, Rand encouraged, “All men are free and equal, regardless of naturalgifts.” Still, the drift of her thought was tending back to the elitism of the early libertarians. At times old and new
mingled together, as when she wondered, if perhaps, “the rational faculty is the dominant characteristic of the better species, the Superman.” 63
³⁶

The way Rand integrated reason into her earlier ideas demonstrated her strong drive for consistency. She labored to define reason as inextricably linked to individuality, asserting, “The rational faculty is an attribute of the individual.” Men could share the result of their thinking but not the process of thought itself, she argued. And since man’s survival depended on his own thought, individuals must be left free. Rationality thus connected to laissez-faire capitalism, the only economic system that sought to maximize individual freedom.

Placing rationality at the heart of her philosophy also began to shift the grounding of Rand’s ethics. In her early work independence had been the basic criterion of value. Now she wrote, “All the actions based on, proceeding from, in accordance with man’s nature as a rational being are good. All the actions that contradict it are evil.” Rand was feeling her way toward a connection she would make explicit in later years, the equation of the moral and the rational. “In other words,” she wrote, “the intelligent man is the moral man if he acts as an intelligent man, i.e., in accordance with the nature of his rational faculty.” Even selfishness, once her primary standard of morality, was beginning to recede behind rationality.
³⁷

After several months of intense work on “The Moral Basis of Individualism” Ayn and Frank made their first trip back to New York. She was eager to visit Paterson and immerse herself once more in the world of East Coast libertarianism. Rand’s pilgrimage was part of a steady stream of traffic between conservative nodes on the East and West Coasts. Rand had finally met Henry Hazlitt, the husband of her former Paramount supervisor, Frances Hazlitt, when he paid a visit to California. Now that she was in New York Henry introduced her to Ludwig von Mises, who had recently arrived in the United States. Mises, a gentleman of the old school who did not expect women to be intellectuals, was particularly impressed by Rand’s interest in economics. He considered
The Fountainhead
an important contribution to their cause, telling Henry Hazlitt she was the most courageous man in America.”
³⁸
Unfazed by Mises’s sexism, Rand delighted in the compliment.