[dramatic music]
(female narrator) "if a life can have a theme song,
"and I believe every worthwhile one has,
"mine is a religion, an obsession, or a mania,
"or all of these expressed in one word...
"individualism.
"l was born with that obsession,
"and I've never seen and do not know now a cause more worthy,
"more misunderstood, more seemingly hopeless,
and more tragically needed."
Ayn Rand, novelist and philosopher,
wrote these words in 1936.
"Call it fate or irony," she wrote,
"but I was born, of all countries on earth,
"in the one lease suitable for a fanatic of individualism,
"Russia
"l decided to be a writer at the age of nine,
"and everything I have done was integrated to that purpose.
"l am an American by choice and conviction.
"l was born in Europe, but I came to America
"because this was the country where one could be
fully free to write."
Ayn Rand developed the theory that everyone has
a subconscious view of the universe
and of man's place in it.
It is a person's most personal emotional response to existence,
and what she termed a "sense of life."
And now to our story.
Down through history, various political
and philosophical movements have sprung up,
but most of them died.
Some, however, like democracy or communism
take hold and affect the entire world.
Here in the United States, perhaps the most challenging
and unusual new philosophy
has been forged by a novelist, Ayn Rand.
IVls. Rand's point of view is still comparatively unknown
in America, but if it ever did take hold,
it would revolutionize ourhves.
And Ayn, to begin with, I wonder if I can ask you to capsulize
I know this is difficult can I ask you to capsulize
your philosophy? What is Randism?
First of all, I do not call it "Randism,"
and I don't like that name.
I call it objectivism.
All right.
Meaning a philosophy based on objective reality.
Let me explain it as briefly as I can.
First, my philosophy is based on the concept
that reality exists as an objective absolute,
that man's mind, reason, is his means of perceiving it,
and that man needs a rational morality.
I am primarily the creator of a new code of morality
which has so far been believed impossible.
Namely, a morality not based on "face"
- On faith? - Not on faith,
not on arbitrary whim,
not on emotion, not on arbitrary edicts,
mystical or social, but on reason
a morality which can be proved by means of logic,
which can be demonstrated to be true and necessary.
(narrator) February 2nd, 1905,
St. Petersburg, Russia.
Alisa Rosenbaum came into world
wrought with revolution and oppression.
It was a country on the brink of war
not a war between nations,
but a war against the individual,
a war that would make way for a form of collectivism
history was never to forget.
Even at an early age,
Ayn Rand did not believe in God or in destiny,
but she did hold the conviction
that there was a battle she must fight,
a battle in the name of a truth
that was as clear to her as the red flags
and bloodstained streets of her native St. Petersburg,
a battle to hold an individual spirit
above the dark, murderous horde that was enveloping her country.
"l had to get out of Russia," she later wrote,
"if I wanted a chance ever to be alive."
Ayn Rand did get out of Russia.
She escaped to America and became
one of the most controversial thinkers of the 20th century.
Her philosophy gained a worldwide audience,
and her ideas are now a part of university textbooks
and curricula.
Her novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,
sell over 200,000 copies each year,
and according to a joint survey by the Library of Congress
and the Book of the Month club in 1991,
Atlas Shrugged was named
the second most influential book for Americans,
following the Bible.
Ayn's father was a self-made man who ran his own pharmacy.
He created a middle class lifestyle for his wife, for Ayn,
and her two younger sisters, Natasha and Nora.
Mr. Rosenbaum was conscientious about his work,
and was proud of his success.
Ayn saw him as a principled man of unbending character.
Ayn's mother saw herself as an intellectual,
attending lectures, French theater,
and holding salons in her home.
Prone to fits of anger,
Mrs. Rosenbaum would often comment to Ayn
that raising children was a hateful duty.
Ayn, however, didn't take her mother literally,
since her mother showed a great deal of concern
for the family's health and welfare.
Ayn Rand talked very little about Russia
or her past in Russia. As I understand,
she felt closer to her father than to her mother.
She felt that she and her father
had an intellectual understanding,
whereas she and her mother were completely at odds.
She always would preface any statement against her mother
by her consciousness of how indebted she was to her mother,
'cause mother was the one who helped her leave Russia
and insisted that Ayn would die if she had to stay in Russia.
(narrator) Natasha, 21/2 years younger than Ayn,
was very feminine
and preoccupied with boys and clothes.
Nora shared with Ayn a common interest in books,
movies, and movie actors.
She wanted to be an artist, and drew voraciously
on any piece of paper she could find.
Full of color and glamour, Nora's imaginative paintings
expressed Ayn's sense of what the world
outside the dreary Russian boundaries could be.
But unlike her sisters, more than anything,
Ayn longed to be an adult entity.
Not particularly outgoing in a social setting,
she would become violently aroused when discussing ideas.
She had no interest in approval or acceptance
from her parents or others, consciously aware
that anything she valued had to come from within herself.
This remarkable independence was to be the benchmark
of her own distinctive outlook on life.
[ragtime piano music]
In the summers of her youth,
Ayn and her family traveled beyond the borders of Russia
to resorts in Switzerland and Finland.
Days were spent on the beach or in parks,
where military bands often played.
This was Ayn's introduction
to what was to become her favorite music,
which she later referred to as "tiddlywink music."
(Leonard) Tiddlywink music was basically
turn-of-the-century popular music,
of which there's no equivalent today.
Completely joyful,
but unserious, unheavy, lighthearted, fast rhythms.
There was an old song she liked called Get Out and Get Under
to crank your model T Ford.
That was her top favorite sense of life music.
(narrator) It was the shimmering notes of the tiddlywink music
that transported the young Ayn Rand
to a world of light and air,
a world she could now only imagine, a world abroad.
Noticing that Ayn didn't enjoy reading
the dark, Russian fairytales or children's stories
that her sisters liked,
Ayn's mother subscribed to a French boys' magazine.
The Mysterious Valley was a Rudyard Kipling-like serial.
It was the story of English officers in India
who were being attacked by huge, trained tigers
and carried off into the jungle.
An illustration of the hero, Cyrus Paltons,
who does not appear until well into the story,
mesmerized Ayn.
She told me several times that that was the book
that she read at nine The Mysterious Valley
and that Cyrus, the British hero of that story,
was her first real concept of a hero,
that she was in love with him
so far as you could be at the age of nine,
and that all of her later heroes for developments from that.
This is why when she got to We The Living,
and she did not yet feel ready to write a novel
about man, the hero, she gave the character
the lead character, the woman, the name Kira,
which is the female of "Cyrus" in Russian.
(narrator) One scene in the story
depicts the English prisoners being carried
through the streets in a cage.
They're all on the floor of the cage, cringing
Only Cyrus stands, gripping the bars.
Self-confident and defiant, he swears at the evil Raja
that he will get even no matter how much torture
he must go through.
"He's not afraid of anything, and he has a purpose,"
Ayn thought. "Intelligence, independence,
"courage" the heroic man
this is what's important in life."
Cyrus was the projection of purposefulness and strength
that now became the masculine qualities
at the core of Ayn's romantic and literary desires.
(Harry) She thought of herself as a woman,
enjoyed being a woman,
but she was the opposite of a feminist.
Man worship was very important to her,
and her idea of femininity was that it was
a woman's admiration for masculine qualities.
(narrator) Now that Ayn had discovered
the kind story and hero she could admire,
she made the conscious decision to become a writer.
Her mother took her to see her first movie,
and Ayn quickly developed a passion
for writing movie scenarios.
Then, one day, from her house on the big public square
in St. Petersburg, she saw red flags
rise up on the streets.
Armed Cossacks appeared,
and one man descended from a horse.
He walked into the crowd, raised his sword,
and then brought it down.
The year was 1917. A revolution had begun.
Called the Bloodless Revolution,
it was led by Alexander Kerensky against the czar.
A great orator, Kerensky inspired
an atmosphere of hope in the people of Russia.
Amidst an unbridled exchange of ideas,
he promised freedom from oppression,
and became the head of a provisional government.
To the 12-year-old Ayn, it seemed as if
he was speaking up for her and for individualism,
but in October of that same year,
another revolution took place.
Ayn watched helplessly as the Bolsheviks marched in
and closed her father's business.
Placing a red seal over the door,
the family was now officially expected to starve.
Spurred on by the revolution,
Ayn soon formed the conviction that communism,
the idea that man should live for the state,
was an abhorrent concept.
She read newspapers and political pamphlets,
and made many anti-communist entries in her diary.
She continued to write stories,
but her manner of thinking had changed.
Since her interest in politics
had intensified during the revolution,
she wanted to create much more serious plots
and important themes.
Aspiring to the same caliber of writing as Dostoyevsky,
she was inspired on an intensely personal level
by the books her mother would read to her grandmother,
the books of Victor Hugo.
"Hugo gives me the feeling of entering a cathedral,"
she once wrote.
For Ayn, discovering such books
as The Man Who Laughs and Les Misérables
was tantamount to stepping into Atlantis.
Although she disagreed with Hugo's explicit philosophy,
she became consciously aware that she wanted to write
with the same literary grandeur and heroic scale.
She thought, "This was how one should view life."
Not willing to accept any idea on faith,
at the age of 12,
Ayn Rand seriously weighed the concept of God.
"if God represented the highest possible to man,"
she reasoned, "then man, by nature, is inferior to God,
and can never reach that ideal."
Considering this a degrading and unfounded claim,
she simply made an entry in her diary.
"Today, I have decided to be an atheist."
The Orthodox Russian religion that permeated the country
was never a serious concern for her.
She knew that those around her were not
representative of mankind.
Someday, she would find her kind of people
rational, purposeful, happy people,
and that a proper life would begin beyond the border.
Ayn, in general, hated Russia,
pre-communist and post-communist.
She thought it was a mystical, backward, uncivilized country,
that it was perfectly logical that the czarist regime
should give rise to communism,
and that the only thing to do is get
as far from it as she could.
It is the ugliest, and incidentally,
most mystical country on Earth.
But they're the ones that decry atheism.
They're singing yoursong
Oh, no.
I'm sorry, decry Christianity I'm sorry.
"Decry religion" is what I meant to say.
They really don't. They have
a materialistic mysticism of their own,
because if the mystics, the religious people,
tell you the mind it
well, they don't speak of the mind, but usually
the soul is the only thing of value about you.
The body is evil, and the Russians will say,
"No, there isn't such a thing as a soul or a mind.
There's only your body." it's materialism.
They believe that you are not a man,
but a collection of... atoms.
And give that body to the state
for the collective effort of the
That's right, for the good of the whole,
and sacrifice to the state,
and whoever says it is or wants to be the state.
(narrator) In 1918, Mr. Rosenbaum moved
his family out of St. Petersburg to escape the communists.
Thinking the Bolsheviks would not remain in power for long,
he was optimistic that the family would return
to reclaim his business and his property.
Almost killed by bandits near Odessa,
they finally made it to the Crimean Peninsula,
where he opened an apothecary.
The country was riddled with black markets
and food shortages.
It wasn't long before his new business was nationalized.
In 1921, Ayn graduated from high school,
while the Red Army now also occupied the Crimea.
Mr. Rosenbaum, still hoping to regain
his rightful belongings, decided to move the family
back to St. Petersburg, which was now called Petrograd.
It was on this trip
that the 16-year-old Ayn caught her first sight of Moscow.
She was suddenly struck by the thought
of how many people there were in the world.
She felt a door opening,
and the nature of her ambition took shape
to communicate through her writing
that life had a profound and special meaning.
(Ayn) Every argument for the existence of God
is incomplete, improper, and has been refuted,
and people go on and on because they want to believe.
Well, I regard it as evil to place your emotions,
your desire above the evidence of what your mind knows.
Okay, and I regard it as intellectually lazy
to look at the universe and to suggest,
as you seem to be doing, that this is all some accident.
I didn't say that.
Well, how in the world did we get all this order?
Aren't you impressed with that?
No, because order is only, in good cases,
in the minds of your scientists,
who are able to understand some part of it,
but there isn't an artificial order in the universe,
and it's not chance.
What would be the alternative? Nature.
So the universe
and remember, the universe is everything that exists--
has always been here,
but you cannot discuss or know anything
about what was here before anything existed.
That's what you're doing with the idea of God,
- speaking philosophically. - True.
You say you need someone to explain the order,
but what will you then have to explain God?
(narrator) At 16, Ayn entered
the University of Leningrad is history major.
Although teacher after teacher bored her,
it was the discovery of great philosophers,
such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas,
that intensely aroused her.
For Ayn, Aristotle's belief that there is only one reality,
the one the man perceives,
and that his mind is his only tool of knowledge,
became the core of her own philosophic thought.
It also conflicted with the dominant philosophic view,
originated by Plato, that there is
a supernatural realm beyond the world we see.
When she was a college student at the University of Leningrad
at age 19 or 20,
she took a course in ancient philosophy
from Professor Lossky, who was a distinguished expert
in the field of ancient philosophy.
When it came time for her to take her final exam,
he asked her questions almost exclusively about Plato,
and none about Aristotle.
Of course she despised Plato even then.
(Leonard) And he said to her,
"You don't seem to agree with Plato,"
implying, "Well, what are your views?"
And her answer was, "My views are not yet
"part of the history of philosophy,
but they will be."
So that was another example both of her objectivity--
that she didn't want to argue with a Platonist
about the merits of Plato and Aristotle
being just a student, her independence--
that it didn't bother her that he disagreed,
and she wasn't out to sell him on her views,
and of her ability to counter the male prejudice that existed
in that Victorian society against women intellectuals.
(narrator) Under the communist regime,
life had degenerated into a new level of hell.
Hunger had engulfed the nation,
and there were deadly epidemics of typhus, the disease of dirt.
Very outspoken at first,
Ayn was reckless in making anti-Soviet remarks
at the university.
She witnessed many purges that resulted in students
and their families being sent to Siberia ata moment's notice.
Realizing she was placing her entire family in danger,
she became more cautious while expressing her point of view.
But amidst the drudgery,
Ayn found something to look forward to.
She discovered the world of operettas.
[classical music]
She walked to school instead of taking the tram
so she could afford to buy tickets.
She waited four hours in the cold to be first in line
to see The Gypsy Princess by Kélméln,
Lehélr's Where The Lark Sings,
or Mill6cker's The Beggar Student.
Here, she saw a world of top hats and ballrooms.
Sometimes, the stage would display
lighted streets of a foreign city,
and she would later think,
"it was the world into which I had to grow up someday,
the world I had to reach."
But it was the flicker of projectors
and the images on movie screens that truly enraptured her.
She and her sister Nora
loved the glamorous, plot-driven films
of Cecil B. DeMille,
and the expressionistic Siegfried
by her favorite German director, Fritz Lang,
became a glowing source of inspiration to her.
[dramatic music]
Movies like The Mark of Zorro, The Oyster Princess,
The Indian Tomb, and The Isle of Lost Ships
had a sense of adventure
with self-reliant heroes accomplishing great feats.
After graduating from college in the fall of 1924,
she entered a school for Screenwriters,
called the Cinema Institute.
The first year at the Institute was focused on acting,
and Ayn diligently studied the art of performing
for the silent screen.
With an insatiable appetite for anything abroad,
Ayn would sit through two shows of a movie
just to catch a glimpse
of the New York skyline in a scene.
Like a shot in the arm and a life-saving transfusion,
and it was wiping Russia as a world
out of her consciousness
and inciting her to write stories of her own--
stories completely untouched by the misery
of the life she was desperate to escape.
The Russian sense of life was mystical, hopeless,
authoritarian, obedient, malevolent,
and the American sense of life was optimistic, can-do,
achievement-oriented, benevolent.
They were exact opposites. The Americans wanted
the world to make sense. They believed in common sense.
The Russians were deep in this incredible mysticism
of either the communist dialectic process
or holy mother Russia from the religious side,
so the two countries were diametric opposites,
and she had the misfortune or fortune to be born
a thorough American in her soul
in the heart of this Russian religion turning into communism.
So it was antipathy from day one.
(narrator) While still attending the Cinema Institute in 1925,
Ayn also worked at a meaningless job
as a museum guide guide,
but she went through her days with only one thought--
to go abroad.
Sympathetic to Ayn's goal,
Mrs. Rosenbaum wrote to relatives in Chicago
and asked if Ayn could visit them in America.
In the fall of 1925,
Ayn received a foreign passport that was valid for six months.
In order to secure a first-class cabin
on a boat to America, Mrs. Rosenbaum sold her jewelry.
At a small going-away party,
Ayn could sense her impending freedom.
But it was an acquaintance
speaking in a hushed, hopeless voice that moved her.
He said, "if they ask you in America,
"tell them that Russia is a huge cemetery,
and that we are all slowly dying."
A short time later, Ayn watched that cemetery recede
past her train window.
She'd promised to tell them in America,
but now, like a heart skipping beats in anticipation,
she made her way across Europe.
Stopping in Berlin, she visited a relative
and celebrated her 21st birthday.
Finally, from the deck of her ship
as it set to sea from Le Havre,
it struck her that she would not be back.
This is what she would later call an overture--
the turning point that she'd been waiting for.
[romantic music]
(narrator) In February, 1926,
Ayn's boat arrived in New York Harbor,
where a heavy fog had settled in.
Immigrants were asked to wait in a salon on the ship
while officials checked their papers.
When Ayn finally reached the deck,
she was crushed to find out that the boat had already docked.
She had missed the Statue of Liberty
and the New York skyline.
But then, as she descended from the boat,
a light snow began to fall.
She later described the experience.
"it was dark by then.
"It was kind of early evening, I think--about 7:00 or so,
"and seeing the first lighted skyscrapers,
"it was snowing very faintly, and I think I began to cry,
"because I remember feeling the snowflakes
and the tears sort of together."
Staying with relatives, she spent a few days in New York
and saw Broadway at night for the first time.
Stunned by the neon signs,
she also saw her first movie in America.
She then went on to Chicago,
anxious to start her career as a screenwriter
and get out on her own.
Not yet able to write very well in English,
she thought she could at least write for silent films,
which don't rely on dialogue.
One of her relatives in Chicago owned a movie theater,
and Ayn went to the movies daily.
This helped her master the English language
enough to write four movie originals
over a period of six months.
One was called The Skyscraper,
which was a wild, exaggerated story
about a noble crook who jumps from skyscraper to skyscraper
with the aid of the parachute.
Aware of Ayn's passion for becoming a screenwriter,
her relatives in Chicago were able,
through a movie distributor they knew, to secure
a letter of recommendation to the DeMille Studios.
Borrowing $100,
Ayn set off by train for Hollywood in August of 1926.
Upon her arrival,
she found residence at the Hollywood Studio Club,
a home created especially for young women
seeking a start in the movie business.
It housed other young hopefuls
who later became Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, and Kim Novak.
Wanting to adopt a new professional name,
she chose Ayn.
Using a Finnish, feminine name,
pronounced, "Ain-a," she dropped the final A, and got Ayn.
Keeping the R from Rosenbaum, she chose Rand for her surname.
She also hoped that her new name would protect her family
from the anti-Soviet remarks
she was bound to make in America.
The next day, with letter of recommendation in hand,
she set out for the DeMille Studios.
Arriving at the gate, she went to the publicity department,
where she was interviewed for a junior screenwriting position.
After being told there were no jobs,
she walked back to the gate.
Suddenly, she was stunned to see DeMille himself
sitting in an open roadster.
As he drove past the girl with the large eyes
staring at him, he stopped and asked where she was from.
When she explained that she had just arrived from Russia,
and that he was her favorite director,
he invited her to accompany him.
Despite her shock at riding with DeMille,
she told him that she wanted to be a screenwriter.
Driving through the back lot of the studio,
they arrived at the set of DeMille's current picture,
The King of Kings.
DeMille explained that if Ayn wanted to work in pictures,
she should learn by watching.
She spent the day observing the film company at work.
She breathlessly watched as they set up shots
and DeMille directed the actors.
She was invited to join the cast and crew for lunch,
but politely declined despite her hunger pangs.
The at the end of the day, DeMille located her
and gave her a personally signed pass
to return to set the next day.
For several days, DeMille continued to give Ayn
personal passes to the set.
He would approach her between shots,
and explain the process of filmmaking.
He found Ayn's background exotic,
and he nicknamed her Caviar.
When he discovered her precarious financial situation,
he immediately offered her a job as an extra.
All right, now, you people-- you townspeople,
over beyond the gates there,
come on, now, work yourselves into--
into the emotion of such a scene.
Don't be extras. Be a nation.
[regal music]
[Handel's Messiah]
(narrator) She finally wrote to her family
and informed them of her new name,
and that she was officially in the movies.
(Michael) I would say that Ayn Rand's life
was a focal point for their concern as a family in Russia.
They would receive a letter from her,
and the whole family from St. Petersburg
would come over--the aunts, the uncles, the cousins--
and there would be a reading of a letter from her.
Her sister, Nora, with whom Ayn Rand shared
a tremendous interest in movies,
would draw little pictures at the bottom of the letters
showing "Ayn Rand" in lights.
So Ayn Rand getting into the movies was a goal,
and the most exciting thing that ever happened.
When she finally told them about her meeting
with Cecil B. DeMille in 1926,
it must have been like an earthquake to her family,
and her father, who is not very expressive,
wrote that he could not sleep all night.
(narrator) As an extra, Ayn was making $7.50 a day.
For several months,
DeMille would call her in to work
whenever possible.
She slowly warmed up to the cast,
which included H.B. Warner as Christ
and Joseph Schildkraut as Judas.
Schildkraut even took her out to lunch, flirted with her,
and then gave her an autographed picture.
Two days after securing a job with Del\/lille,
she was riding the Streetcar to the studio,
and spotted a tall, handsome man across the aisle from her.
She thought, "This is my ideal face."
It was a face she later sketched from memory--
a memory that was actually love at first sight.
To her surprise, not only did this man
get off the Streetcar at the same stop,
he entered the DeMille studio gate as well.
[dramatic music]
Frank O'Connor was born in Lorain, Ohio in 1897,
one of seven children.
After his mother's early death, he worked his way to New York,
hoping to make it in the movies.
Helping a driver change a flat tire
on a Griffith Studios truck,
Frank asked to be taken to the studio as payment.
A great fan of D.W_ Griffith,
soon he had his first movie job in Orphans of the Storm,
starring Lillian and Dorothy Gish.
Grih'ith's success with Orphans of the Storm
was to be his last, and the studio
eventually moved to California.
At the age of 28, Frank worked as a steward
on a freighter through the Panama Canal
to join his brothers Joe and Nick in Hollywood.
The first job he got when he arrived
was on The King of Kings.
Now, quietly milling about the set,
waiting for the next setup, Frank kept to himself.
At a distance, Ayn followed him like a camera
and desperately tried to think of a way to meet him.
A few days later, during a scene where Christ carries the cross
through the city of Jerusalem, Ayn watched carefully
as Frank hit his marks on the first take.
On the second take, she maneuvered herself
to get in his way.
He stepped on her foot and apologized.
From that moment on, they didn't stop talking.
Frank later commented to his brother Nick,
"Today, I met a very interesting and funny Russian on the set.
I couldn't understand a word she said."
Since it was Frank's last day of work on the film
and they hadn't exchanged numbers,
Ayn feared she would never see him again.
Although the casting office would not give out
Frank's number, she did not give up hope.
She felt a benevolent inevitability
that they would meet again.
Eventually, Ayn gave her four scenarios
to DeMille to read.
However, the woman in charge of his scenario department
disliked Ayn on sight
and gave the stories a very bad report,
calling them improbable, far-fetched,
and not human enough.
Despite this report, DeMille hired Ayn
as a junior screenwriter at $25 a week.
This meant that she would do treatments
and synopsize already-purchased properties.
Because DeMille considered a construction site
an interesting backdrop for a film,
a novel called The Skyscraper was the first project
Ayn was assigned to.
Required to do research,
Ayn made an appointment to visit the construction site
of the Broadway department store
at the corner of Hollywood and Vine.
Informed that her appointment was delayed,
she walked around the corner
to the library on Ivar Street to wait.
She entered the building,
and amidst the hush of turning pages,
she saw Frank O'Connor reading a book.
Turned out that he too was waiting for an appointment.
He looked up at her and smiled in recognition.
They went outside to talk,
and their courtship officially began.
Ayn was 22 and Frank was 29.
With the Depression approaching,
DeMille closed his studio in 1928,
and Ayn could only find odd jobs.
She was now surviving on 30 cents a day
and living on very little food.
Although she had previously been sending her family money,
they were now sending some to her.
She continued to write with fierce persistence
and made notes to discipline herself.
"From now on," she wrote, "no thought whatever
"about yourself, only about your work.
"You don't exist. You're only a writing engine.
"Don't stop until you really and honestly know
"that you cannot go on.
Stop admiring yourself. You are nothing yet."
During this period, Ayn didn't want Frank to know
she was struggling or think she needed help.
But he was struggling as well,
because acting jobs had become scarce.
Dating for them consisted of going for walks,
visits to the beach, and an occasional movie.
After several extensions,
Ayn only had one month left before her visa was to expire.
Although Frank's brother Nick joked that he would
marry her to keep her in America,
there was no need to discuss the matter.
On April 15th, 1929,
the same month her visa was to expire,
Ayn and Frank were married by a judge.
They then drove through the desert to I\/Iexicali
and spent a sleepless night in the heat.
The next day, Ayn drove back into the country
as the wife of an American.
(James) How does the-- the concept of love--
love for one another-- fit into this philosophy?
You fall in love with a person
because you regard him or her as a value,
and because they contribute to your personal happiness.
Now, you couldn't fall in love with a person by saying,
"You mean nothing to me.
"I don't care whether you live or die,
but you need me, and therefore, I'm in love with you."
If someone offered love of that kind,
everyone would regard that as a deadly insult.
That isn't love.
Therefore, romantic love is a selfish emotion.
It is the choice of a person as a great value,
and what you fall in love with is the same values
which you choose embodied in another person.
She regarded love as an extremely selfish emotion.
It was a response to your greatest values
in the personal character of another person.
So you had to know them well,
and they had to in all essentials be
exactly what you wanted from another human being.
If so, it was one of the greatest of all values,
but it was not the top value.
She regarded career as the top value,
because she felt, if you tried the base a life
exclusively on your relation to another person,
however wonderful or however much in love,
it's gonna end up being a relationship of dependence.
Each person has to have their own creative goal,
and they must be like two individuals,
traveling on the same journey,
but happen to find that they're going
on the same journey together, and then love is
a fantastic supplement to their individual creativity.
(narrator) With Frank O'Connor by her side,
Ayn continued her struggle to write
and make ends meet in Hollywood.
In 1929, she took a job as a filing clerk
at the RKO wardrobe department for $20 a week.
Although she hated the job,
it was a financial oasis in the depression.
In six months, she earned a raise,
and within a year, became head of the department.
Soon Ayn and Frank were able to buy their first car.
Since Frank was also working,
he presented Ayn with a made-to-order desk,
a radio, and her first portable typewriter.
Despite her long hours in the wardrobe department,
she wrote in every spare moment she could find.
Even though she officially made notes for her first novel,
writing for the movies was still an important goal for her.
She was a tremendous movie fan in her early years
and kept a diary, which we found,
of seemingly every movie she attended
from 1922 until early 1929.
There were 433 entries,
and she kept a detailed record of every one,
underlining the actors she liked the best,
and grading the movie.
The actors and actresses that she liked,
she would give one underline, that she liked a lot,
she would give two underlines--
she really loved, she would give three underlines.
In the back of the movie diary,
I found a little piece of paper
in which she had listed her favorite actors
and actresses.
Many of these actors and actresses
that she loved in the 1920s when she was in Russia
were really her window into civilization,
which is the West she later met.
One of the interesting things in this list that she kept
of her favorite movie actors and actresses,
is to find Gary Cooper up in number two.
Originally, he hadn't been on the list at all,
but she saw him in movies,
I think, in probably 1928,
and pushed him up into number two,
right below Conrad Veidt, and then she changed the numbers
on everyone below Gary Cooper, and then, of course,
almost 20 years later, there's Gary Cooper
playing Howard Roark in her own movie.
(narrator) Continuing her struggle to master English,
she wrote a variety of short stories and plays.
One such play, called Ideal,
embraced her passion for the movies and admiration
for her favorite actress, Greta Garbo.
The story, set in Hollywood, 1934,
follows a fictitious movie star, named Kay Gonda, on her quest
to find one man of integrity among her fans.
In this scene, we get a glimpse at an early formulation
of Ayn Rand's ideal man.
I saw a man once, when I was very young.
He stood on a rock, high in the mountains.
His arms were spread out, and his body bent backward,
and I could see him as an arc against the sky.
He stood still and tense, like a string trembling
to a note of ecstasy no man had ever heard.
I've never known who he was.
I know only that this was what life should be.
And?
And I came home, and my mother was sewing supper,
and she was happy because the roast had a thick gravy,
and she gave a prayer of thanks to God for it.
Don't listen to me.
Don't look at me like that.
I tried to renounce it.
I thought I must close my eyes and bear anything,
and learn to live like the others,
to make me as they were-- to make me forget.
But I can't forget the man on the rock.
I can't.
(narrator) While still working at RKO,
Ayn wrote two scenarios about Russia in her spare time,
Red Pawn and Treason.
In 1932, Red Pawn, a story about the evil of dictatorship,
was bought by Universal for the sum of $1,500.
Eventually, Red Pawn was traded to Paramount
as a vehicle for Marlene Dietrich,
but not wanting to do another story set in Russia,
Dietrich's director, Joseph von Sternberg,
decided against the project, and the film was never made.
It was her first sale, and it really established herself
as a professional writer.
Now, some years later,
she sent a copy of Red Pawn to Cecil B. DeMille,
and she said, "l have always hoped
"that I would not drop out of sight entirely,
"that the day would come when I would be successful enough
"to show you that you had not wasted the attention
"you have given me at my start in Hollywood.
"I cannot say that I've accomplished a great deal yet,
"but at least I am a writer, and I feel
"that I can now thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Sincerely, Ayn Rand."
And then, she put in parentheses,
"Caviar, if you remember."
(narrator) The sale of Red Pawn enabled Ayn
to quit her job at RKO and write full-time.
She was finally free to finish her first novel, We The Living.
While working on the novel, she happened to see a play
called The Trial of Mary Dugan, which took place in a courtroom.
She had also read newspaper articles
on the Swedish match king Ivar Kreuger
who had committed suicide
and whose financial empire had fallen.
She was interested in the fact that he was being denounced,
not for his dishonesty and fraud,
but for the fact that he had been successful.
She devised a play that centered on the trial
of a woman accused of murdering an infamous industrialist,
titled Penthouse Legend.
She created an unprecedented dramatic device,
which required members of the audience
to be selected for each performance
to serve on the jury.
She conceived the play with two endings,
one for a verdict of not guilty, and one for guilty.
She thought that the jury gimmick would be best
if she had done it in conjunction
with some hotly controversial issue, like trial marriages,
or abortion, or whatever, but she couldn't
write about an issue of that narrow a scope,
so she had to combine it with a sense of life concern,
and therefore it's the jury making their final decision
on balanced evidence, according to their sense of life.
(narrator) "if this play's sense of life were to be verbalized,"
she later wrote, "it would say, in effect,
"your life, your achievement, your happiness,
"your person are of paramount importance.
"Live up to your highest vision of yourself, no matter what
"the circumstances you might encounter.
"An exalted view of self-esteem
is man's most admirable quality."
Rejected by many producers who feared the gimmick
would destroy the theatrical illusion,
E.E. Clive, a character actor who ran the Hollywood Playhouse,
finally produced Penthouse Legend.
Opening as Woman on Trial in the spring of 1934,
it starred Barbara Bedford, a silent film actress,
as Karen Andre.
Although Clive was a good director
and the play got rave reviews,
hearing her words uttered by actors
who didn't understand their meaning
was a profound disappointment to Ayn.
It was only the spectacle of her name on the marquee
for the first time that thrilled her.
Her sister Nora's image of success in America
had now become a reality for Ayn.
After the run in Hollywood,
producer AI Woods optioned the play for Broadway
under the title Night of Januaw 16th.
['30s-style light orchestration]
Meanwhile, Frank had been acting steadily,
appearing in such films as Cimarron
and Three On a Match.
But it was a variety of comedic roles
that were to kill his ambition to work as an actor.
Romantic roles that suited him were not to be found.
He began to consider another career
while Ayn continued to write.
A year later, Night of January 1 6th
when into rehearsals,
and Ayn was thrust into a torturous process
of constantly protecting her script from changes.
When the play opened on Broadway in September, 1935,
she was emotionally spent.
Not able to watch what the play had become,
she sat in the back row and yawned.
Despite the mixed reviews,
it was a moderately successful show
that paid her royalties of up to $1,200 a week.
The show ran for seven months, and night after night,
celebrities such as Jack Dempsey and Helen Keller
sat in the jury box.
The stars, Doris Nolan and Walter Pidgeon,
fared well as the lead characters.
Ayn had suggested Pidgeon for the role
of gangster "Guts" Reagan, and it ultimately led
to an MGM movie contract for him.
But in spite of the play's eventual popularity,
Ayn was never to forget watching
the integrity of her script destroyed.
However, she was now ready to focus
entirely on the work she had complete control over,
the final chapters of We The Living.
"We The Living is not a novel about Soviet Russia.
It is a novel about man against the state,"
Ayn wrote.
"Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life.
"it is a story of a dictatorship--
"any dictatorship, anywhere, at any time,
"whether it be Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany,
or a socialist America."
The heroine of the story, Kira Argounova,
wants to be an engineer.
An aluminum suspension bridge
is the shimmering spectacle of achievement she aspires to.
An individualist, caught in the same revolutionary Russia
that Ayn Rand had survived, Kira asks, "Don't you know
"that there are things in the best of us
"which no outside hand should dare to touch--
"things sacred because-- and only because--
"one can say, 'this is mine"?
"Don't you know that there is something in us
"which must not be touched by any state, any collective--
by any number of millions'?"
In a foreword to the novel in 1958,
Ayn wrote that, "We The Living is as near to an autobiography
"as I will ever write.
"It is not an autobiography in the literal,
"but only in the intellectual sense.
The plot is invented. The background is not."
Although Ayn was pleased with her characterizations
in We The Living,
she felt she hadn't yet fully achieved
her style in the English language.
She knew that was to come with practice.
But when the manuscript was submitted by her agent,
Ann Watkins, it was the fact
that the story depicted the reality of Soviet Russia,
a reality American intellectuals refused to believe,
that resulted in it being rejected
by one publisher after another.
By 1936, with the New Deal in full swing,
We The Living was finally sold to Macmillan.
IVlacmillan's editors had been divided
on whether to buy the book due to its anti-Soviet theme.
When it was published, the company was not
totally behind it, placing only two ads.
Reviews claimed the author simply didn't understand
the great Soviet experiment.
Despite this, the novel was slowly building an audience.
"I wrote the book feeling that I was, in some measure,
"in the only manner possible to me,
"repaying my adopted country for the freedom
and the opportunity it has given me,"
Ayn wrote at the time.
"How much good the book will accomplish,
"I cannot say, and it is not up to me,
"but if it can make a few people pause
"and doubt the glories of communism,
I shall feel satisfied."
At this time, producer Jerome Mayer approached Ayn
to adapt We The Living for the stage.
(Leonard) She did not think We The Living
was suitable to be performed as a play on Broadway.
There was a tremendous amount of opposition
from Hollywood stars who would profess to her--
Bette Davis is one example--
that they would be honored to do the part,
they would love to do Kira,
and suddenly, two weeks or two months later,
they would say, "I'm sorry.
My agent tells me that it will destroy my career,"
because it was Hollwvood in the '30s.
It was the Red Decade, and to appear on the stage
in an anti-Communist play in that stage
would--meant to be boycotted entirely
by the leftists who owned Hollywood.
(narrator) Renamed The Unconquered,
the renowned producer/director George Abbott
eventually took on the project,
and the play went into production.
Abbott was mainly a comedy director,
and tried to mold the characters into the "folks next door."
He constantly asked Ayn to change
her austerely romantic dialogue to naturalistic approximations.
Arguing with Abbott thoroughly disgusted her,
and by the time the play opened,
she had lost all interest in the production.
The reviews were uniformly bad,
and the play lasted only five performances.
This was to be Ayn's last theatrical venture,
and it closed an unfulfilling but illuminating chapter
in her career. As a writer,
she had witnessed what could happen to her words
at the hands of others.
[dramatic music]
A few years later,
Ayn met the Italian actress Alida Valli in Hollywood.
Valli told Ayn that she had been instrumental
in getting the film version of We The Living
made in Italy in 1942.
Without Ayn's knowledge,
the film had been released and was very successful,
but it wasn't long before Mussolini's government
realized the story was an indictment
of not only communism, but fascism as well.
The film was pulled and placed in a vault.
It was finally uncovered in the 19605,
and restored with Ayn's approval.
In the Hollywood of the 1940s,
Valli tried to persuade David O. Selznick
to remake We The Living,
but the Red Decade had a stronghold on American culture,
and Ayn's plea to alert the world
about the horrors of communism went unheard.
She had underestimated the influence of altruism
on American intellectuals.
You don't like altruists.
I disapprove of them. I regard them as evil.
Okay, but what's--so what's bad about the person
who wants to help other people?
Well, to begin with, that's the big mistake.
People can want to help other people
properly and with very good reasons,
but that isn't altruism.
Altruism doesn't mean merely helping people.
It means sacrificing yourself for others,
placing the interests of others above your own.
It's the self-sacrificing person who is an altruist.
And what's wrong with that?
What's wrong with committing suicide?
What's wrong with giving up life?
And why is the happiness of another person
important and good but not your own?
To sacrifice for your loved one
is, in many cases then, a misnomer.
If you love your husband or wife,
and you have to, let us say,
select between spending money for your spouse if he's ill
or going to a nightclub,
it's not a sacrifice to spend money for your spouse
if he or she is your value.
That is what you want to do.
I SSG.
But if you let, for instance,
your husband die in order to save
the neighbor's husband or your wife,
that would be altruism.
I'm still not quite sure why you're so harsh
on those who would sacrifice for other people.
They don't hesitate to sacrifice whole nations.
Look at Russia.
Communism is based on altruism.
Look at Nazi Germany.
The Nazis were more explicit
than even the Russians in preaching
self-sacrifice and altruism,
and self-sacrifice for the state,
for the folk-- the people.
Every dictatorship is based on altruism.
Now, you can't fight it
by merely saying it's a difference of opinion.
It's a difference of life and death.
(Rand) it's the founding fathers who established
in the United States of America
the first and only free society in history,
and the economic system which was the corollary
of the American political system,
was capitalism, the system of total, unregulated,
Iaissez-faire capitalism.
This was the basic principle of the American way of life
or the American political system.
However, in practice, it has never yet been practiced.
A total separation of government and economics
had not been established from the first.
It was implied in principle,
but certain loopholes or contradictions
were still allowed into the American setup
and into the American Constitution,
which permitted collectivist influences
to undermine the American way of life, and today,
it is practically collapsing.
Only, I want to make something clear.
I'm not a conservative.
I think that today's conservatives
are worse than today's liberals.
I think they are--
if anyone destroys this country,
it will be the conservatives,
because they do not know how to preach capitalism,
to explain it to the people--
because they do nothing except apologize,
and because they're all altruists.
They are all based on religious altruism,
and on that combination of ideas,
you cannot save this country.
(narrator) In spite of the pro-Soviet sentiment
that surrounded the early history of We The Living,
Ayn Rand had told America about the Soviet cemetery.
It was also against this backdrop
that she had been trying desperately to get her family
out of Russia.
Beginning shortly after Ayn Rand
came to the United States in early 1926,
her family began making plans
to come to the United States themselves--to emigrate.
Not just to visit, but actually to emigrate.
And they first tried to get Nora, her youngest sister,
to come here, and then
they began making plans for all of them to come here.
They were learning English.
They said in their letters
that they were speaking English at home,
trying to get more used to the language.
Ayn Rand herself began in the early '30s
the process of bringing her family here,
after she became a citizen and was steadily employed,
which was very important.
She began making contact with U.S. government officials
and the immigration office and the like.
Unfortunately, under Stalin,
it became virtually impossible for people to get out of Russia,
so they were put in jeopardy
just by corresponding with people in the West,
so her family stopped writing to her--they had to,
and simultaneously, she stopped writing to them.
At that time, the U.S. government
was putting up notices in the post offices
telling people they can endanger their families and friends
just by sending them letters in Russia.
The way I came across the file about her parents,
I could tell that it meant a lot to her,
that she tried to get them.
She wanted very much to bring them over and save them,
because they both had medical problems
that couldn't be taken care of in Russia.
I think it must've been very crushing for her
to have lost them like that.
(narrator) In 1937, Ayn and Frank were spending a summer in Connecticut
while Frank appeared in a stock version of Night of January 16th
at the Stony Creek Theater.
In an intense struggle to work on her next novel,
The Fountainhead,
Ayn used the solitude of the Country to write.
Literally tearing her hair out over the plot,
she took a break to complete a novelette called Anthem.
Originally a play she conceived in Russia,
Anthem was a futuristic account of a world
where individualism had been obliterated,
and the word "l" had been replaced with the word "we."
It was her hymn to man's ego, to man's absolute self,
and an account of what she believed
were the true implications of all forms of collectivism.
Written in the form of a diaw,
the story culminates with the protagonist
rediscovering the concept of individualism.
"At first, man was enslaved by the gods,
"but he broke their chains.
"Then, he was enslaved by the kings.
"But he broke their chains.
"He was enslaved by his birth,
"by his kin,
"by his race.
"But he broke their chains.
"He declared to all his brothers
"that a man has rights which neither God,
"nor king, nor other men can take away from him,
"no matter what their number,
"for his is the right of man,
and there is no right on earth above this right."
[orchestral music]
Ever since she first saw the image of an American city
in a Russian movie theater at age 16,
Ayn Rand wanted to write a story
that would glorify the skyscraper
as a symbol of achievement and of life on earth.
Finally understanding American life,
and fully an adult, she was ready to create her ideal man.
Now, a question puzzled her.
She had known an ambitious secretary at RKO
who was real Hollywood climber.
She, like Ayn, took her career very seriously,
but Ayn disliked everything about her,
and one day asked her what she wanted to achieve.
The girl told her, "Here's what I want out of life.
"if nobody had an automobile, I would not want one.
"if automobiles exist and some people don't have them,
"l want an automobile.
"If some people have two automobiles,
I want two automobiles."
It was a shock to Ayn that a person
would base their goals in life on other people's standards.
As if in a flash,
two opposing characters of her next novel were formed,
Howard Roark, the individualistic architect,
and Peter Keating, the conventional second-hander
of The Fountainhead were born.
I could not understand whether the hero of The Fountainhead
Howard Roark, was an idealist or was practical.
My father had always brought me up to believe that
you have two choices in life, idealism or practicality,
and that you cannot be both,
and I could not classify Roark as either,
because obviously, he was an idealist.
He wouldn't compromise.
He was a man of iron integrity,
and yet, at the same time, it was shown
by the logic of the events that he was the one
that would make a practical success of his career,
whereas his opponent, like Keating and Toohey,
are doomed to fail.
And I read The Fountainhead, and it hit me
like a ton of bricks, because I found out
what it meant to be an individualist,
and in the character of Howard Roark,
there he was, not explained as in a philosophic treatise,
but dramatized, and concretized,
so that's the--kind of the glory of Ayn Rand's fiction.
You can see what the philosophy means.
You can see a character and that this is what it means
to act on a philosophy.
(narrator) For the heroine of the novel,
Ayn created Dominique,
the aristocratic woman who first fights against Roark,
but then stands by him in the end.
She described Dominique as herself in a bad mood.
It was an emotional state that never lasted
for more than a full day for Ayn,
but one that the character of Dominique
takes years to overcome.
To research The Fountainhead, Ayn took a job as a typist
for the architect Ely Jacques Kahn, in New York.
Through this experience, she came to admire
the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Although she did not use Wright as a model
for her hero, Howard Floark,
it was the originality and daring of Wright's designs
that she wanted to capture.
[piano music]
In 1937, she first wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright
trying to get a meeting with him to talk about the book
and explain to him what she was going to do
and to get an interview with him,
and she was unsuccessful, Wright was uninterested.
She tried a couple of times and got nowhere,
but Wright eventually read The Fountainhead,
and I think it was about a year after the book was published,
wrote her a letter which began,
"Your thesis is the great one."
(narrator) Ayn Rand stated that the theme of The Fountainhead
is the issue of collectivism versus individualism,
not in politics, but in man's soul.
Rejected a total of 12 times
by publishers who claimed the book would never sell,
she refused to change one word of her manuscript.
She now faced the same dilemma as her own hero
in The Fountainhead.
In a key moment of the novel,
a prospective client demands
that Howard Roark place a classic portico
on his brilliantly original design for a modern bank.
Roark refuses, explaining
that an honest building, like an honest man,
has to be of one piece and one faith,
and that the good, the high, and the noble on earth
is only that which keeps its integrity.
It was the integrity of one man at Bobbs-Merrill,
Archibald Ogden,
that finally got The Fountainhead published.
Told by the head of the company to reject the book,
Ogden, a new editor at the time, wrote them a note.
"if this isn't the book for you,
then I'm not the editor for you."
Ayn signed a contract with Bobbs-Merrill,
and The Fountainhead appeared in bookstores in 1943.
At first, to Ayn's dismay,
the ad campaign never mentioned the issue
of individualism versus collectivism.
It focused on the love affair between Dominique and Roark.
Sales of the book started up very slowly, but by 1945,
it had reached bestseller list through word-of-mouth,
selling 100,000 copies in one year.
As The Fountainhead's sales rose,
Ayn was still back in New York, reading scripts for Paramount,
while Frank struggled in the theater.
Across the continent, Barbara Stanwyck,
who was under contract to Warner Bros.,
brought The Fountainhead to the attention
of producer Henry Blanke.
Soon, Warner Bros. had bought the movie rights for $50,000,
with Stanwyck slated to play Dominique.
Blanke believed that Ayn should adapt the book for the screen,
and she was hired to write the screenplay.
(Michael) In 1943, Ayn Fland moved back to Hollywood
to write The Fountainhead movie script.
She wrote to Archie Ogden,
her much beloved Fountainhead editor,
"As to the working Conditions of a Hollywood writer's life,
"they are exactly as one would imagine
"a Hollywood writer's life, with all the trimmings.
"I have an office the size of a living room
"with another office outside and a secretary in it.
"Nobody can come in without being announced
"by my secretary, and she answers the phone.
"The grandeur and the glamour and the pomp
"and the circumstance are simply wonderful.
"Of course I love it, for the moment,
"but I won't exchange it for the pleasure of writing
as I please. I haven't gone Hollywood yet."
(narrator) Arriving in Hollywood,
Ayn and Frank moved into a furnished apartment
that didn't allow pets.
After their beloved cat was discovered by the landlady,
they decided to buy a house.
Although hesitant of living so far from Hollywood,
they found a boldly modern
designed by Richard Neutra in Chatsworth, California.
Now, there was plenty of room for Ayn to write
and for Frank to grow flowers and vegetables,
which he turned into a commercial enterprise.
They were also able to raise peacocks
and house a few more cats.
World War ll rationing of building materials
forced The Fountainhead movie to be put on hold
due to the demands of the film's sets.
Fortunately, Ayn had met producer Hal Wallis
on the Warmers lot,
and he hired her to rewrite the love scenes
in a troubled film called The Conspirators.
She adapted two other scripts for Wallis.
One was Love Letters,
which was directed by William Dieterle,
and earned Jennifer Jones an Oscar nomination in 1945.
The other was the popular You Came Along,
starring Bob Cummings and Lizabeth Scott.
Three years into her contract with Hal Wallis,
she was asked to write a script about the making
of the atom bomb, called Top Secret.
After completing a large portion of the script,
Hal Wallis sold the project out from under her to MGM.
For Ayn, it was the end of her contract with Hal Wallis,
and the beginning of another battle to combat collectivism.
Ayn had been consistently disillusioned
with American politics.
In 1940, while volunteering
on behalf of the Wendell Willkie presidential campaign,
she saw many conservatives betray the principles
of individualism and capitalism.
In an effort to counteract the New Deal,
she stood on the stage at the Gloria Swanson Theater
in New York, through seven shows a day,
answering questions from the audience
about the evils of collectivism.
She was also voted onto the board
of the Motion Picture Alliance
for the Preservation of American Ideals,
better known as the MPA.
A conservative group formed at MGM by Louis B. Mayer,
it included such Hollywood professionals
as Walt Disney, Hedda Hopper, Gary Cooper, John Wayne,
and Lela Rogers, Ginger's mother.
Ayn was the only member to write signed articles
concerning communist propaganda in the movies.
Not intended as a government imposed regulation,
her pamphlet, entitled Screen Guide for Americans,
was a voluntary guide for filmmakers
to monitor communist propaganda in their movies.
Displeased with the MPA's fear that her ideas
in the Screen Guide were too harsh,
she resigned from the board.
In 1947, after the House Committee
on Un-American Activities had read the guide,
she was asked to testify as a friendly witness.
Along with Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, and Gary Cooper,
she appeared at the hearings in Washington to investigate
communist infiltration in the movies.
Considering the endeavor a dubious undertaking,
she agreed upon one condition--
that there would be no restrictions on her testimony.
Although she was to analyze two films,
she was ultimately only allowed to speak on one,
Song of Russia,
an absurdly inaccurate glamorization of Russia
she felt was not even worthy of scrutiny.
However, she wanted to set the record straight
about life in the Soviet Union.
(man) Don't they do things at all like Americans?
Don't they walk across town
to visit their mother-in-law or somebody?
Look, it's really hard to explain.
It's almost impossible to convey to a free people
what it's like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship.
I could tell you a lot of details.
I can never completely convince you,
because you are free,
and it's in a way good that you don't
can't even conceive of what it's like.
Certainly, they have friends and mothers-in-law.
They try to lead a human life,
but you understand that it is totally inhuman.
Now, try to imagine what it's like
if you are in constant terror from morning to night,
and at night you are waiting for a doorbell to ring.
If you are afraid of everything and everybody,
if you live in a country where human life is nothing--
less than nothing, and you know it.
You don't know who, when, is going to do what to you,
because you may have friends somewhere.
But there is no law, and no rights of any kind.
(narrator) Concerned with the flood of bad press,
the committee was not interested in the cold, hard facts
about life under communism.
Although Ayn didn't approve of the hearings,
calling them futile, she believed her testimony
could have been an effective way to make clear
what she saw as propaganda on the screen.
She tried to do what she had done in We The Living,
but still, no one wanted to listen.
Subsequently, however,
her Screen Guide was reprinted in many newspapers,
including The New York Times drama section,
and the studios began to order copies of it for distribution.
Also, The Fountainhead sales were picking up.
Many were beginning to hear what Ayn Rand had to say.
Following the war, in 1948,
Gary Cooper's wife had read The Fountainhead
and suggested he read it.
Afterwards, Cooper went to Warner Brothers
and signed a two-picture-per-year deal
on the condition they give him The Fountainhead.
During the years the film was on hold,
the book had been rising in sales and popularity.
Many stars were now interested in playing parts in the film.
Clark Gable canceled his MGM contract
when he discovered that failed to buy the book
as a vehicle for him.
For the role of Roark, Humphrey Bogart and Alan Ladd
were considered, as well as Clifton Webb and Orson Welles
for Roark's nemesis, Ellsworth Toohey.
King Vidor was signed on to direct.
Vidor, a maverick of all early filmmaking,
had done such notable films as The Big Parade and The Crowd.
Since Ayn had previously met with Barbara Stanwyck
and wanted her to the part of Dominique,
she called Stanwyck and informed her
the film was starting up again.
Having worked with Stanwyck on Stella Dallas,
Vidor thought she was too old
and not the right type for Dominique.
He didn't think she could play a lady.
He had wanted Gene Tierney or Jennifer Jones,
with whom he had just worked on Duel In The Sun.
Although Ayn had no control over the casting of the picture,
Joan Crawford hosted a dinner in Ayn's honor
to garner the role.
Attempting to imitate Dominique's character,
Crawford wore a white Adrian evening gown
smothered with aquamarine jewelry.
Veronica Lake told people that Ayn had written part for her
because she had Dominique's hairstyle.
At last, realizing that Stanwyck was out,
Ayn suggested Greta Garbo.
While initially interested,
Garbo met with Vidor and decided against taking the role.
Then, suddenly, Bette Davis,
Warner's top star, wanted the part.
Davis had gained a reputation for holding up sets,
changing scripts, and arguing with her leading men.
Vidor and Blanke were against hiring her,
and Ayn threatened to walk off the picture if they did.
However, Patricia Neal was under contract as a new starlet,
and the studio decided to give a relative unknown
the coveted role.
The studio had now officially turned its back
on Barbara Stanwyck.
When Ayn realized that no one had the courage
to phone Stanwyok, she phoned her personally
to let her know the part had been given away.
Stanwyck immediately fired oft a bitter telegram
to Jack Warner, and abruptly ended her contract.
Finally, after Ayn had met Frank Lloyd Wright,
she commissioned him to design a country home
for her and Frank.
Although the home was never built,
she was pleased that Blanke and Vidor wanted Wright
to design Roark's buildings for The Fountainhead.
When Wright demanded $250,000 and final approval
over the script, casting, costumes, and sets,
Blanke and Vidor decided against it.
Ayn then recommended Kahn and Neutra,
but the studio set designer, Edward Carrere,
ended up with the job.
Knowing that the art department was creating
structurally unsound designs for F{oark's buildings,
Ayn suggested Vidor never hold too long on them.
She knew architects would criticize the film
on this count.
Now, with the cast and crew firmly in place,
the film went into production.
She wrote to her old editor, Archie Ogden,
about the beginning of the shooting,
and she said to him,
"The Fountainhead movie goes into production on Monday.
"In fact, the company is leaving today to go on location.
"The first scene shot will be the quarry.
"They are going to shoot it in a local quarry, near Fresno.
"I've seen pictures of the place,
"and it is quite impressive.
"Funny, isn't it? I remember the time
"when that quarry was nothing but my imagination,
"and now, it is going to be made into a physical reality.
"l do feel somewhat in the position of a god,
"since something which I made out of spirit
is now going to be translated into matter."
(narrator) In working on the script with Vidor,
Ayn became engaged in another series of battles
to keep her words intact.
Neither the studio nor the censors knew
what to make of The Fountainhead,
and they were ideologically intimidated by its author.
The love scenes between Roark and Dominique,
which spilled over into the personal lives
of Cooper and Neal, were not as much of a concern
as Roark's climactic courtroom speech.
The speech was to be Roark's sole defense
for dynamiting a housing project
he had designed that was altered without his consent.
Gary Cooper's lawyer and the Johnston office censors
were concerned about the uncompromising principles
of Roark's individualism.
Neither were able to justify their objections,
and their questions only prompted Ayn
to lengthen the speech for clarity.
Increased from 41/2 to 61/2 minutes,
Cooper would now deliver thelongestspeech
in the history of film.
Although Cooper was serious and worked very hard,
he had trouble understanding and delivering the speech.
Vidor asked Ayn to coach Cooper,
but eventually decided to shoot a cut version
of the scripted speech without Ayn's knowledge.
On the day the speech was shot, Ayn happened to be on the set,
and discovered Vidor was shooting
a shorter version of the speech.
Fudous, she threatened Blanke
that she would disassociate herself from the picture
if the speech was not shot as written.
Blanke returned to the set with an edict from Jack Warner.
There were to be no changes to the script on the set.
It was truly unprecedented.
The speech and her script were filmed
without one single word being changed.
Look at history. Everything we have,
every great achievement has come
from the independent work of some independent mind.
I came here to say that I do not recognize
anyone's right to one minute of my life,
nor to any part of my energy,
nor to any achievement of mine, no matter who makes the claim.
It had to be said. The world is perishing
from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
I came here to be heard in the name
of every man of independence still left in the world.
I wanted to state my terms.
I do not care to work or live on any others.
My terms are a man's right to exist for his own sake.
She was proud of the script. She thought it was
good and honest within the framework
of their abilities, that they didn't sabotage the novel,
but it wasn't what she would consider a work of art.
(narrator) Ayn was disappointed that the film lacked
the romanticism she so loved
in the German films she had seen in her youth.
But the film was a windfall as advertising for the book.
By 1961, the hardcover edition of The Fountainhead
soared past 500,000 copies.
To this day, The Fountainhead sells 100,000 copies annually.
For a book that publishers claimed would never sell,
Ayn Rand's first story, projecting her ideal man,
was an undeniable success.
Late in 1950,
Ayn Rand received a fan letter
from a young psychology student, Nathaniel Branden.
She thought his letter was so intelligent
and his questions so astute that she invited him
to call on her in person to discuss them further.
Both Ayn and Frank were completely won over by him
after their first meeting,
and Nathaniel began seeing them more frequently.
By 1953, Ayn and Frank stood up at Nathaniel's wedding,
and in the years that followed, the Brandens and the O'Connors
formed an intimate circle.
(Leonard) Nathaniel Branden meant a great deal to Ayn Rand.
She thought he was a genius of exceptional intelligence,
that he would be an innovator in the field of psychology,
that he took ideas with passion and seriousness,
and she obviously liked him,
and by all the evidence that I have,
she had an affair with him, which she would not do
if she didn't have the highest possible opinion of him.
This she did, of course, with the knowledge
of her husband and the consent of her husband.
I don't have any really inside information of how Frank coped
with the knowledge of the affair.
I presume there had to be some jealousy,
but he was not characteristically
a jealous person, and I think he felt--
now, I'm taking my educated guess here.
I think he felt, in some way,
that she was uniquely special,
and that she needed more from a man that he could offer.
And as I see it in my own mind,
Frank had the soul that Ayn Rand needed,
but he didn't have the intellect.
He didn't have that glowing, brilliant
intellectual's type of intellect which Branden seemed to have.
It's true that she had great needs
because of her personality.
She needed both a soul mate
and a certain sense of life in a man,
but she also needed somebody
she could talk as an intellectual to.
(narrator) Nathaniel Branden created
an institute to teach a lecture series
based on Ayn Rand's philosophy.
Ayn endorsed his courses
and the articles he wrote on psychology
that appeared in magazines and books.
Eventually, however, she was to discover
that he was involved in a series
of personal and professional deoeptions.
(Leonard) In my opinion,
Nathaniel Branden was the supreme actor,
who communicated that nothing mattered more to him than ideas,
and he wanted nothing from the world but the truth,
and the revolution of the truth is all that counted.
He was an idealist, and so on,
and that was what he presented himself as originally.
He was very intelligent.
It wasn't the case of a dolt who was able to put it over.
He was actually very intelligent,
but in the course of his life, his values
obviously came to change for whatever reason--
because of his pre-existing psychology or whatever.
He had to act an increasingly onerous part
to retain Ayn's affection, namely, to pretend something
that he knew he was not and no longer wanted to be.
And finally, it just-- it became intolerable,
and one thing or another precipitated the break.
She bore it, but she finally did
get over it and go on with her life of writing
and--with her husband.
(narrator) As Ayn's writing continued,
Frank O'Connor had been steadily trying to find his niche.
Glowing with admiration, he enjoyed watching his wife,
but never tried to manage her career.
He was an independent entity,
gracefully, quietly searching for his life's work.
Frank was an amazing man.
First of all, he looked totally like an Ayn Rand hero.
He stood out in any crowd.
He was, in my view, the Howard Roark type.
(Leonard) My impression of Frank from the beginning was
that he was a very fine, very sensitive artist type.
He was not dominantly the talker, but you felt
that he was a very strong and sensitive presence with her,
and then, in later years, he looked for the career
that would give him full satisfaction
for many years, and finally, the logic of his choices
took him into painting, and that's where
he really found himself and began to do tremendous work.
What he did always had the Frank O'Connor touch to it
that she would describe as, "Like laughter
let loose in the universe."
Our founding fathers talked about the right
of the pursuit of happiness.
Do you think this is really important?
I don't know what else could be any more important.
If you attach that meaning to concepts--
The pursuit of happiness means
a man's right to set his own goals,
to choose his values, and to achieve them.
Happiness means that state of consciousness
which comes from the achievement of your values.
Now, what can be more important than happiness?
But happiness does not mean simply momentary pleasures
or any kind of mindless self-indulgence.
Happiness means a profound, guiltless, rational feeling
of self-esteem and of pride in one's own achievement.
It means the enjoyment of life,
which is possible only to a rational man
on a rational code of morality.
Because to make a success of yourself
in any line of rational activity is a great virtue.
And they--people will attack you
for exercising your ability, for hard work,
for consistency, for ambition,
and they will want to make you feel guilty of it.
In fact, people who preach that are the ones who are mawkish
about the evil people, the affairs,
the liars, the cheats-- everybody who is weak
suddenly acquires some kind of value.
But anyone who is a success
has to be attacked for his success.
And look at how you have been attacked...
- Oh, I know. - how you have been criticized.
- There are many-- - You know that?
There are many people in this country--
forgive me--in this world who think you're daft.
They don't.
They want you to think that.
(narrator) During The Fountainhead's rise to the top,
Ayn and Frank had been happy at the Chatsworth Ranch.
But Ayn had grown weary of the country
and living in California. She missed New York.
"l hate Hollywood as a place, just as I did before.
"it's overcrowded, vulgar, cheap, and sad
"in a hopeless sort of way.
"The people on the streets are all tense, eager,
"and suspicious, and look unhappy--
"The has-beens and the would-bes.
"I'm in love with New York.
"Frank says that what I love is not the real city
"but the New York I built myself.
That's true."
(Leonard) New York represented to her
the pinnacle of human achievement
in physical terms.
Aristotle would be the pinnacle of achievement intellectually.
But New York, the skyscrapers,
everything that man had traversed
from the time of the cave to the time of this glorious
and industrial civilization,
that was, to her, what life was about.
It wasn't just acquiring philosophy.
It was acquiring ideas, acquiring science,
and then remaking the earth accordingly,
and she couldn't think of a more splendid
and exciting and beautiful place than that view that you get
of the skyscrapers where you don't see
the details of each one but the mass of human ingenuity
and talent soaring for the sky.
Ayn took a studio in New York
in a very seedy, old hotel on 31 st Street,
and Ayn came to pose for me there.
There were no windows in the studio,
but there was a skylight,
and the only thing one could see from the skylight
was the top of the Empire State Building,
and Ayn was particularly smitten with that.
I subsequently moved to Greenwich Village,
and she came down there to pose as well,
and the atmosphere was a little different.
I think she wasn't quite as happy in that studio
as she was being able to see the Empire State Building
while she posed.
(narrator) In 1951, Ayn and Frank moved to New York City,
the city she had first seen as a backdrop of electric lights
in a Russian theater.
Now, as a successful American writer,
she would live in one of that city's skyscrapers,
and here, she would complete her monumental book,
Atlas Shrugged.
[train whistle blowing]
[train traveling]
When a friend insisted Ayn write
a nonfiction treatise on her philosophy
out of a duty to help people understand her ideas,
she was indignant.
She thought, "Why should I? What if I went on strike?
What of all the creative minds of the world went on strike?"
Hence, the story of men and women of the mind
who go on strike and abandon the world was formed.
Wider in scope than The Fountainhead,
Atlas Shrugged dramatized
the whole of Ayn Rand's philosophy,
allowing Ayn to express her total sense of life--
a life she knew could and should exist.
Likening the new heroes in the book
to the giant Greek god
who supported the heavens on his shoulders,
Ayn focused on three captains of industry,
a copper magnate...
A steel mill owner...
And the head of a railroad.
They were the creators, innovators,
and independent thinkers who moved the world
but decided to shrug.
She told a reporter at the time
that the story would combine metaphysics,
morality, politics, economics, and sex.
And as she had promised her professor in Russia,
the book would finally make her ideas
a part of the history of philosophy.
As the mystery story of Atlas Shrugged unfolds,
Ayn Rand erects an unprecedented argument for capitalism.
Presenting a moral defense for man's right to exist
for his own sake, to pursue the work of his choice,
and keep the rewards of his labor,
she argued that capitalism demands
the best of every man, his rationality,
and rewards him accordingly.
"it leaves every man free to choose the work he likes,
"to specialize in it,
"to trade his product for the products of others,
"and to go as far on the road of achievement
"as his ability and ambition will Carry him.
"Who is John Galt," was the burning question
that opened Atlas Shrugged.
Although Frank posed in publicity ads for the book,
Galt was a direct descendent of Cyrus
in The Mysterious Valley.
Like Cyrus, Galt was a hero
operating behind the scenes for a good portion of the story.
The heroine, Dagny Taggart,
the driving force behind Taggart Transcontinental Railroad,
was Ayn's first depiction of an ideal woman,
a character she called "the feminine Roark."
Ayn herself read manuals on railroad signal switching
and steel furnaces.
She visited the Kaiser steel mills in California,
as well as other mills in Chicago and Johnstown.
She researched all the major railroads
and eventually interviewed people
from the New York Central.
Bobbs-Merrill, the publisher of The Fountainhead,
arranged a trip for her on the 20th Century
to Albany from New York City.
A particular thrill for her was when the engineer
allowed her to drive the train herself.
The demands of writing the novel
took all of her energy and focus.
She often worked many hours at a time,
stopping only to eat or cook a meal for Frank.
Often, she would lose all track of time,
and they would end up having supper
at 10:00 or 11 :00 at night.
When she was stuck or had what she called
"the squirms," she would take a break
to play solitaire or visit with friends.
Well, there was a group of us, around 10 or 12,
who were related--either one was a friend of another
or a relative of another, and as a joke,
Ayn started to call us "the Collective."
As a joke, because we were supposed to be
all arch-individualists.
We came to her place on a regular basis,
starting originally on Saturday nights,
to read the manuscript of Atlas Shrugged,
and then, we would read whatever was available
or some given chapter, and then, there would be
an all-around discussion monitored by her,
and then she would serve something
around midnight or 1:00 in the morning.
Sometimes, we would stay till 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.
And at first, we got to know her best
through these weekly Saturday night sessions.
(narrator) Now her biggest challenge
was writing Gait's climactic speech,
which he delivers to a collapsing world
over radio airwaves.
Thinking it would take roughly three months
to complete Gait's speech,
Ayn ultimately spent two years perfecting it.
It encompassed her entire philosophy,
which she later called objectivism_
When she finished the speech,
she submitted the book to publishers.
With little bargaining, she signed a contract
at Random House for a $50,000 advance
to finish the book.
It was the fastest contract she ever signed.
Ever since Atlas Shrugged had been completed
in March, 1957,
Ayn felt as if she were basking in the glow of her own sun.
Standing back on the horizon,
she was happy to simply contemplate her achievement.
But when her eyes adjusted to the muted light
of the world around her,
she observed the current state of the culture...
From the war in Vietnam and student unrest,
to what she termed the anti-Industrial Revolution.
She had been so full of the sense of life
in her novels, that the world of the 1960s
now seemed like the last days of the Roman Empire.
Review after review of Atlas Shrugged
viciously attempted to discredit her and her work.
But however much the attacks in the press hurt her,
they only stoked the fire
that would bring her out into the public.
(Leonard) She did not like public speaking.
She did not regard herself as a teacher
by profession or by interest.
She thought her accent was wrong as far as public speaking,
and she'd never been able to do much with her accent,
but she would be damned if she was gonna let Atlas Shrugged
be commented on exclusively by the critics who hated it.
She got invitations, so she made up her mind that
despite all her reservations, she was gonna speak
at least enough to give it some publicity,
so she went reluctantly.
She faced, at first, very antagonistic audiences.
They booed her, they tried to out-yell her,
but of course, she was immutable.
She was herself on the lecture platform,
and I've seen audiences start booing and end up cheering.
(Harry) She had the ability to deal with anything
that could come up from an audience.
That was very impressive.
I can't tell you what a contrast it made
to the sense of life of the period.
We were just coming out of the '50s.
The Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best era,
when no one would take a stand on anything,
when making a value judgment was considered a sin,
but she was there,
making the most dramatic and passionate statements,
saying everything was simple, absolute, clear-cut.
(Sylvia) She took time to find out what you had on your mind,
and often time, in lectures at Ford Hall Forum,
where there were hundreds of people in the audience,
she would still take her time.
She'd say, "Would you care to repeat that?
"Would you care to rephrase that
so I understand what you're getting at?"
That's what impressed me most.
(Leonard) She not only answered the question,
She told you what errors you made
that led you to that question,
why you weren't able to answer it yourself,
what confusions would arise in your mind tomorrow
when you thought over her answers,
and what the answers to those were, and then,
what to read to consolidate your thinking even more clearly.
So it was like an entire course.
It wasn't just yes or no answer.
Every question was a springboard
to a total exploration of the issue
and of the proper methods of thinking.
(John) When Ayn Rand appeared annually at the Ford Hall Forum,
it attracted a very large crowd.
She would go to her room after she had given her talk.
People would line up-- very crowded, little room.
There weren't all the books available
on her philosophical thoughts to us, so needless to say,
we would build up a huge inventory
of puzzling questions
since the last time we met her,
and she would just field questions until dawn,
at which time, she was thoroughly relaxed
and she had come down from the excitement of the talk,
and she would say good-night to us,
and we would walk out so revved up that,
in one case, I couldn't go to sleep
for over two days after I had left her hotel room.
I know many of you have heard this line.
"Atlas Shrugged changed my life.
The Fountainhead changed my life."
[applause]
Here's a woman who's read by millions around the world.
She may be our most debated philosopher.
She identifies that to which she adheres
as objectivism. We'll talk about it.
We care very much about your sharing with us
your feelings about this most interesting lady,
a warm human being who has a lot to say
and comes straight at everything she says.
I am pleased to present Ayn Rand.
Ms. Rand.
[theme music]
[applause]
(Al) The first show that Ayn Rand appeared on
for us was the Mike Wallace interview,
and for all I know,
it was certainly one of the first shows
that she appeared on in the '5Os,
if not the very first show. She was not very welcome.
She was a notorious figure
in New York intellectual circles,
and it's hard now, in the '9Os,
to imagine the hostility directed at her.
Saul Bellow once said that New York at that time
was an intellectual annex of Moscow,
and if it was that for Saul Bellow,
you can imagine what it was like for Ayn Rand.
The people I work with simply wanted me
to do a piece with Ayn Rand,
and I didn't know a lot about her.
I had read Fountainhead.
And I'm not certain--
I don't remember, 'cause I read it later
whether I had yet read Atlas Shrugged,
and so I didn't meet her
until the night that she came into the studio.
This is Mike Wallace with another television portrait
from our gallery of colorful people.
Throughout the United States, small pockets of intellectuals
have become involved in a new and unusual philosophy
which would seem to strike at the very roots of our society.
The Fountainhead of this philosophy
is a novelist, Ayn Rand, whose two major works,
The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,
have been bestsellers.
We'll try to find out more about her revolutionary creed
and about Ms. Rand herself in just a moment.
Dark black, that Dutch cut,
those piercing, Russian eyes--
strange looking person, and the accent.
The first thing that struck you when you met Ayn Rand
for the first time were those eyes.
Big, black, glowing, lustrous eyes,
which radiated a tremendous energy
and penetration and focus and intensity,
and they never left you,
and it was very unnerving, at least to me at first.
You got used to it somewhat, but at first, it was unnerving,
and perhaps even a little intimidating.
And she would take any question.
She was perfectly open,
and you could see the mind at work and the spirit at work,
and she liked the joust of tough questions
and direct answers.
My morality is based on man's life
as a standard of value,
and since man's mind is his basic means of survival,
I hold that if man wants to live on earth
and to live as a human being,
he has to hold reason as an absolute,
by which I mean that he has to hold reason
as his only guide to action,
and that he must live by the independent judgment
of his own mind, that his highest moral purpose
is the achievement of his own happiness,
and that he must not force other people
nor accept their right to force him,
that each man must live as an end in himself,
and follow his own rational self-interest.
She was obviously the most unusual guest we ever had.
You just didn't get guests who could speak for a half hour
about philosophy and ideas
clearly, penetratingly, and excitingly,
and we would get enormous mail.
I would afterwards get into big arguments and fights
with my other friends in the media.
"Why did you put her on? How could you do such a thing?"
And it's very interesting. These were documentarians
and writers and newspeople, all of whom would argue
very vociferously against Ayn Rand.
None of them had ever read her works,
and to my knowledge, none of them ever have,
as if they were afraid somehow
of being stripped of their illusions.
They'd rather cling to them.
(narrator) In an outline for a new novel,
Ayn chose a dancer named Hella as her heroine.
Hella wants to create a new form of dance,
one that combines the rhythmic precision of tap
with the graceful elegance of ballet.
"The real essence of the story," Ayn wrote in notes to herself,
"is to be the universe of my tiddlywink music,
of my sense of life."
But the state of the culture made it impossible
for her to complete another novel.
She was no longer able to project her type of heroes
into the world she was now living.
By 1961, she thought that many Americans had given up
on finding solutions to their problems.
They were cynical and scared.
Despite this, she still believed in their sense of life.
She was also convinced that the young had not yet
been corrupted by her critics or the intellectuals.
As Atlas Shrugged rose in sales and on the best seller lists,
Ayn began to make more and more television appearances,
from The Merv Griffin Show
to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
By 1 963, Atlas Shrugged had sold 1 .2 million copies.
Do you consider yourself primarily a novelist
or primarily a philosopher?
I would say I am primarily both equally,
and for the same reasons.
You see, my main interest and purpose,
both in literature and in philosophy,
is to define and present the image of an ideal man--
the specific, complete image of what man can be
and ought to be, and when I started writing,
when I approached the task of literature
and began to study philosophy,
I discovered that I was in profound disagreement
with all the existing philosophies,
particularly their codes of morality.
Therefore, I had to do my own thinking.
I had to define my own philosophical system
in order to discover and present
the kind of ideas and premises
that make an ideal man possible--
in order to define what kind of convictions
would result in a character of an ideal man.
(narrator) Through conversations with Leonard Peikoft,
Ayn saw that many of her philosophic principles
were not self-evident to those around her.
She realized a more detailed elaboration
of her philosophy was needed.
Now that Howard Roark, John Galt,
and Dagny Taggart existed, she had accomplished
what she had set out to do in fiction,
and was ready to begin writing in the field of philosophy.
She wanted to solve what philosophers
traditionally called the problem of universals.
She wanted to demonstrate that abstract ideas
connect to reality,
that the concepts of freedom, justice, and truth
were definable and real.
(Harry) Leonard Peikoff once put it to me this way,
in regard to the way that she used ideas.
He said, "You know the way you or I
"hold the concept, 'chair"?
"Well, that's the way she holds
"the highest, deepest philosophical abstraction--
with that same kind of clarity and concreteness."
I think that's the secret of her method,
that her ideas were always derived from reality
for the purpose of living in reality.
That's why they were so urgently important to her.
They were not a game.
They were for the purpose of living her life
and achieving her values.
(Leonard) I asked her once, when I was much younger,
why she got so emotionally upset
at the theories of philosophers like Immanuel Kant,
and she said to me, "Because when I hear
"a philosopher say there is no reality
"and your mind is totally invalid,
"that means all of your values are nullified.
"Your husband, your love, your work,
the music you like, your freedom."
It was truly a life and death matter to her.
She thought philosophy moved to the world,
and if anybody has confusion about a philosophic issue,
that could be a peril to their soul,
their cognition, their clarity.
She hears the total destruction in the abstract statement.
IVlost people hear abstractions as simply floating abstractions,
but for her, she translated it into the actual, concrete things
that it meant, and what it would mean her own life,
and she was able to react emotionally
to broad abstractions, which very few people can do.
When did you discover or think up
or allow objectivism to become your philosophy?
From the time that I remember myself,
which is 21/2.
The first incident in my life I can remember,
I was 21/2.
And from that time on to the present,
lneverchanged my convictions.
Only at 21/2, I didn't know as much as I know now.
But the fundamental approach was the same.
I've never had to change.
Why has it worked for you?
Because it's true.
Because it corresponds to reality.
Because it is the right philosophy.
By true, I mean it corresponds to reality, therefore,
it permits me to deal with reality properly.
(narrator) Throughout the '60s and '7Os,
Ayn continued to articulate her philosophy
through various interviews and articles.
Without a border to get beyond
or an artistic purpose burning inside of her,
she now had a new reason to work
and a new forum to operate in.
Along with publishing books on epistemology,
ethics,
social philosophy,
and aesthetics,
she also launched various philosophical magazines.
She wanted to create what she described
as a readers' digest for the man of intellect and action,
and to her surprise, she enjoyed the process.
She once wrote,
"Do you know that my personal crusade in life,
"in the philosophical sense,
"is not merely to fight collectivism,
"nor to fight altruism.
"These are only consequences, effects, not causes.
"l am out after the real cause, the real root of evil on earth--
the irrational."
In interviews and articles,
Ayn applied the essence of her philosophy
to a variety of topics.
Upon the death of Marilyn Monroe,
Ayn wrote that the beloved star had projected the sense
of a person born and reared in some radiant utopia,
untouched by suffering,
unable to conceive ugliness or evil,
facing life with confidence,
the benevolence, and the joyous self-flaunting
of a child or a kitten
who is happy to display its own attractiveness
as the best gift it can offer the world.
To preserve that kind of spirit on the screen,
the radiantly benevolent sense of life
which cannot be faked,
was an almost inconceivable psychological achievement
that required a heroism of the highest order.
In her book, The Virtue of Selfishness,
Ayn wrote that racism is a doctrine
of, by, and for brutes.
"It is a barnyard or stock farm version of collectivism,
"appropriate to a mentality
"that differentiates between various breeds of animals
"but not between animals and men.
"Like every form of determinism,
"racism invalidates the specific attribute
"which distinguishes man from all other living species--
his rational faculty."
In 1969,
after Ayn and Frank were invited to attend the launching
of Apollo 11, she wrote,
"One knew that this spectacle
"was not the product of an inanimate nature,
"like some aurora borealis,
"nor of chance, nor of luck--
"that it was unmistakably human,
with human, for once, meaning 'grandeur."'
Religion, or the God concept, or faith,
or worship has people--
has people thinking of life as a veil of tears
through which you will probably not get without falling.
- That's right. - You are essentially
an evil person who is bent toward--
Well, most religions do preach just that.
You don't believe it?
God, no.
[laughter]
We are here, and we should celebrate it,
use it, enjoy it, be selfish.
There's a virtue in selfishness...
Right. Right.
And we got ourselves in trouble when we started
using government to force us to be good,
because we have this notion that we had a--
a sort of bad nature.
Right.
And if we have a bad nature,
we have no self-esteem.
If we have no self-esteem, any demagogue can have us.
He can order us about,
because we wouldn't consider ourselves valuable enough
to be free.
You will be anxious to follow anyone,
because you don't trust yourself.
(narrator) The gulf between Ayn Rand and the Soviet Union
had made it impossible for her know
what had happened to her family.
After permission to bring them to America had been denied,
she had given up any hope of ever seeing them again.
In 1973, Ayn's youngest sister Nora
saw an article in Russia about the now famous author,
Ayn Rand.
She wrote to Ayn,
and they began a renewed correspondence.
Through Nora's letters, Ayn learned that her youngest sister
had become a professional set designer.
Ayn also learned that her parents
had since died of illnesses under Stalin,
and her sister Natasha had been killed in a park
during an air raid in World War II.
As difficult as it was to accept these facts,
Ayn focused on her joy at finding Nora,
and she immediately began to make arrangements
to bring her to America.
In a letter to Nora, she wrote,
"Along time has passed,
"but I was hoping that you would know or feel
"that I have not forgotten you and never will.
I have always dreamt that I would see you someday."
In anticipation of Nora's arrival,
Ayn rented an apartment in her building in New York
and decorated it with Nora's colorful paintings.
After almost 50 years between them,
Nora finally arrived, and Ayn was overjoyed.
But soon, she discovered Nora had become
a very different person.
Although Nora claimed to be an anti-communist,
she complained about the futility of life,
and indeed had long given in to that concept.
The sense of life Ayn had shared with Nora in their youth
had been suffocated.
After a few days in New York,
Nora openly declared that she didn't like America
or Ayn's novels.
Soon, the sisters were not speaking to one another.
Eventually, even though Nora's husband was seriously ill
and could not secure proper medical care in Russia,
they returned to the Soviet Union.
Ayn watched the one person to whom she had had
a meaningful bond in her childhood
walk away from her
and walk willingly into an old prison.
She herself had fought so many years to survive.
It was inconceivable for her to give in
to the tragedy of Nora's fate.
To Ayn, suffering could never be considered important.
[somber music]
(Tom) You love this country, don't you?
- Passionately. - Yeah.
Very, very much, and consciously.
I love it for its ideas.
And I've seen enough of the other side,
so I can appreciate this country.
You might even get emotional about this country, huh?
Oh, yes.
Why, do you want me to get emotional?
You might even thank God for it, huh?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
I may not literally mean a God,
but I like what that expression means.
"Thank God" or "God bless you."
It means "the highest possible," to me,
and I will certainly thank God for this country.
(narrator) By 1978,
Frank had begun to show signs of arteriosclerosis.
Soon he would have episodes of memory loss and disorientation.
Earlier, Ayn had had her own bout with illness,
a surgery to remove a cancerous lesion
from her lung had forced her to stop smoking,
yet even while convalescing,
she kept her vigil, hoping that Frank would recover.
I had the privilege of attending
her 50th anniversary party, when her husband
was still pretty much oriented and functional.
But it was one of the very last times
that he could appear in public.
It was wonderful to see them together,
and everybody made speeches about, you know,
how their love had endured 50 years.
(Leonard) The relationship between Ayn and Frank was very noticeable,
because here was this couple, married 50 years,
always holding hands.
She would always say,
when he came into the room,
"Hello, darling," with that Russian accent.
She didn't want to be away from him for a second,
and he felt the same way.
The affection was quite noticeable.
A lot of endearments--you know,
she called him Cubbyhole.
His pet name for her with Kitten Fluff.
But it was quite affectionate.
(narrator) In November of 1979,
not long after their 50th wedding anniversary,
Frank's life came to an end at the age of 82.
She was crushed.
She wouldn't show anything outwardly.
She told me once that she was like a lion
that when she was hurt,
she wanted to crawl off in solitude--
or sick--
crawl off in solitude
and not show her suffering to anyone else.
But you could see the absence of fire in her.
I think when she lost Frank,
she basically lost a will to live.
I thought that she was depressed after that.
She didn't have much energy.
She didn't really want to go places.
But she managed to keep going.
(narrator) Ayn Rand once wrote that "it is with a person's sense of life
"that one falls in love--
"with that essential sum,
"that fundamental stand or way
of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality."
Now, that personality was gone.
Does this emotional impact of this kind of pain
alter, in any way, your own feelings, philosophies?
No. It only alters my position in regards to the world.
In other words, which is that I lost my top value.
I'm not too interested in anything else.
But I'll survive it,
because I do love the world in general,
and I do love ideas,
- and I do love man. - Yes.
- But my personal is lost now. - I know.
Isn't there a temptation for you--
and I don't mean this to flip
to suggest that you're not sincere in your writings
to hope for a reunion with the person you love,
to look beyond the
I have asked myself just that, seriously,
and I thought, "if I really believed that for five minutes,
I would commit suicide immediately."
And I know that then I'd be right.
- Oh, to get to him right away. - To get to him.
Of course.
I'll tell you more.
I asked myself, "How would I feel if I think he
"is now on trial before God or St. Peter,
and I'm not with him'?"
To testify or to help him out?
Exactly. My first desire in that case
would be to run to help him and tell how good he was.
(narrator) "There are two aspects of man's existence
which are the special province and expression
of his sense of life," she wrote, "love and art."
With Frank no longer beside her,
Ayn's depression intensified,
but as with all tragedy and Ayn Rand,
it could not completely stifle her enthusiasm for living.
After several attempts to being bring Atlas Shrugged
to television and movie screens,
she decided to write
and produce her own film version of the book.
Recovering somewhat from the loss of Frank,
she had a renewed sense of purpose.
In spite of her failing health,
she gave a speech in New Orleans in 1981,
and announced her plans to make Atlas Shrugged
into a miniseries.
She gave a lecture on the natural connection
between the philosopher and businessman,
and tried to open their eyes
to the fact that--
as she did in Atlas Shrugged,
that they were, by ignoring philosophy,
financing their own demise.
Well, she agreed to speak in New Orleans,
because the, uh--Jim Blanchard,
the man who was sponsoring the conference--
National Conference on Monetary Reform, I believe--
offered her what she had always wanted, a private train.
(Blanchard) Leonard Peikoff and I escorted her from her hotel suite
back to the railroad car because she wanted to
I think they were leaving early in the morning,
and she wanted to go to sleep on the car rather than the hotel.
And that was the last time I saw her.
She was showing us the railroad car.
She had such a capacity for the delight
of all of the wonderful things that man could make.
The fact that she could travel in a railroad car
in such sumptuous comfort--
and it was just a total delight for her.
(Leonard) Unfortunately, she took ill on the train coming back,
and she realistically never recovered.
Her faculties were still good at the end.
A night or so before she died,
some new cover copy
for one of her forthcoming books came from the publisher,
and she went over it with me,
and told them what to change and so on,
and then, as was expected, she just slipped away.
I once spent part of an evening alone with Ayn Rand,
talking.
And somehow, the subject of death came up,
and I asked her if she was afraid of dying.
And she said, "No.
"Death is insignificant and unimportant.
"Eternity is important,
and eternity is now."
I'll never forget that.
I tend to think of this whole thing as ongoing.
That there is an eternity
and that we are going to be a part of that eternity,
that we aren't just corpses in graves when we die.
But we aren't corpses in graves.
We are not there.
Don't you understand that when this life is finished,
you are not there to say, "Oh, how terrible
that I am a corpse." No.
- Well, this is true. - it's finished,
and the-- what I've always thought
was a sentence from some Greek philosopher--
I don't, unfortunately,
remember who it was, that I read at 16,
and it's affected me all my life.
"l will not die.
It's the world that will end."
And that's absolutely true.
And you know, for me, now,
it should be a serious question,
because my time is fairly limited,
and I have the same feeling,
that I will enjoy life to the last moment,
and when it's the end, I don't have to worry about it.
I'm not there.
It's too bad that the world will end,
and I think that a very wonderful world
will end with me,
but I've had my time.
I can't complain.
(narrator) Ayn Rand died at her home from heart failure
on March 6th, 1982.
"l decided to be a writer
"not in order to save the world nor to serve my fellow man,
"but for the simple,
"personal, selfish, egotistical happiness
"of creating the kind of men and events
"l could like, respect,
"and admire.
"You see, I am an atheist,
"and I have only one religion--
the sublime and human nature."
[peaceful music]
"There is nothing to approach the sanctity
"of the highest type of man possible,
"and there is nothing that gives me the same reverent feeling.
"The feeling when one spirit wants to kneel, bareheaded.
"Do not call it hero worship,
"because it is more than that.
"It is a kind of strange and improbable, white heat,
"where admiration becomes religion,
"and religion becomes philosophy,
"and philosophy, the whole of one's life.
"My personal life is a postscript to my novels.
"it consists of the sentence,
"'And I mean it.'
"I've always lived by the philosophy
"l present my books,
"and it has worked for me as it works for my characters.
"The concretes differ.
The abstractions are the same."
Ayn Rand waged a lifelong battle
for reason and individualism.
Like a ferocious angel,
shefoughL
and beside her in the ranks, glowing from the tattered pages
of books that have been read over and over again,
are the men and women she created.
[triumphant music]
The characters who will forever fight
for the same principles and the same sense of life.
Fixed & Synced By MoUsTaFa ZaKi