Inaccurate, presumptuous bio which ignores much evidence against its thesis, though some subjects given careful attention
"Ayn Rand and the World She Made" by Anne C. Heller is a birth-to-death biography of Ayn Rand that draws from multiple sources, but that doesn't prevent the book from being marred by the author's specious judgments, remarks based on incomplete research, and alleged facts attributed in citations to sources that don't contain the claimed information. I'm especially sensitive to the last flaw because a web site of mine is given as the source for information that was never stated there. Imagine my surprise when I read that the movie "Arrowsmith" contains an appearance by Ayn Rand's husband, Frank O'Connor (pg. 75), and then to find that my web site is the purported source for this (pg. 446). As the only person who has ever written for this site, the only person who has programmed code for the site, the only person who has ever uploaded content to the site (and the only person who has ever had the passwords), I can declare that my web site has never listed "Arrowsmith" as a Frank O'Connor movie.
On the positive side, author Heller sifted information from multiple sources on several of the key events of Ayn Rand's life and came up with credible accounts. (Less-significant events are not given such diligence.) Describing Rand's growing dissension with and eventual break from the Brandens, Heller culls from several sources, including information that demonstrates the limitations of the several single-source accounts that have appeared previously. Not content to do as others have done by allowing the 1986 biography by Barbara Branden to establish the arc for chronicling the permutations in relations among Ayn Rand and the two Brandens, author Heller intersperses material from Nathaniel Branden's 1989 memoir where he admits to lying to and manipulating Ayn Rand, that he "gave her the answer he thought she wanted" (Heller, pg. 347). Better still, Heller draws from James Valliant's 2005 book containing most of Ayn Rand's private journals on this relationship, and thus quotes private writings by Ayn Rand wherein Rand mulls evidence that Branden is deceiving her. Upon quoting one such evaluation, Heller concedes its "proving she was more observant than those around her gave her credit for." (pg. 368) However, Heller discounts what she regards as these "shrewd, if painfully myopic journal entries" (pg. 367), and thus there remains room for another author's re-evaluations of the various accounts, despite Heller's having sifted through multiple accounts to produce an account that respects (to some extent) and scrutinizes multiple sources.
Heller is not so careful on other matters. She offers two different accounts, at different points in the book, about the succession of sales of movie rights to the Ayn Rand play known both as "Penthouse Legend" and "Night of January 16th." Reports on pages 77, 457 and 469 (the two latter in endnotes for pgs. 105 and 157) differ. Here are the correct facts: MGM was the first studio to attempt a movie version. Heller notes that MGM had an option, but fails to consider that options expire, after which the studio could not resell the property. RKO bought movie rights from Ayn Rand (not from MGM, as Heller says on pg. 469, doing so despite citing on pg. 457 the contract whose parties were RKO, Rand, and theatrical producer Woods) on July 13, 1938 (Heller says "In 1938 or 1939" on pg. 469, but in an endnote for pg. 105 on pg. 457 does cite the exact date she learned from the contract). Later, Paramount bought the rights from RKO (not MGM, as Heller says on pg. 469) on July 20, 1939 (Heller says nothing more specific than "A year later" than the RKO purchase). A side note related to this: Heller mentions Rand's play "Night of January 16th" at least a dozen times in the book, and always states the title having "The" as its first word, although this is not in the title of any of its book editions, not in the Longmans editions (the ones prepared from others' edited versions without Rand's approval) nor in the World Publishing and Signet editions (both authorized by Ayn Rand). The word "The" was part of the title of the 1941 Paramount movie, but this unfaithfulness to the source was only the first to appear onscreen of a vast number of changes for that movie.
There are many instances of Heller not heeding the significance of her sources, often contradicting her own reports for no reason other than having consulted multiple sources, using different sources at different stages of her writing, then not unifying each mention of the subject to express the account most likely correct. Discussing the myth that Ayn Rand chose the name which would replace her given name of Alisa Rosenbaum, Heller mentions the disproven theory that the name "Rand" on the faceplate of a typewriter was her inspiration, then correctly states that the "Remington Rand ... story ... can't be true; for one thing, Remington Rand was not yet on the market in 1926. For another, her family seems to have been aware of her new surname before she wrote to them from America." (pg. 55) Yet, Heller argues otherwise seven pages later: "Thus comfortably settled, and employed by DeMille, she wrote to her parents for the first time and told them her new name." (pg. 62) Rand's parents couldn't have FIRST learned of the new name both BEFORE and AFTER the trip to America, yet Heller's shifting accounts make it seem they did.
The purpose of the book seems to be one suggested in the last half of Heller's title, the idea that Ayn Rand created a mental world of her own and imposed upon readers "notion[s] that could have meaning only inside the moral world of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged." (pg. 336-337) Thus, we read that "she would construct a universe of moral principles built largely on the scaffolding of some of these defensive childhood virtues" (pg. 8) and that "her reasoning made sense if you accepted her assumptions" (pg. 151). Heller accuses Rand and her "Fountainhead" character Dominique of "contrariness" yet Heller often exhibits this, making an argument against Rand's position where the specific details don't warrant one. One instance of this begins where Heller accurately remarks that Ayn Rand liked mankind's exploration of outer space but disapproved of the U.S. Government financing it for purposes other than military ones. (pg. 389) Heller then argues that "Rand seems to have forgotten, or overlooked, the fact that NASA had been formed by an act of Congress in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union's successful, and, to Americans, shocking, launching of Sputnik I and II into space and the consequent fear that America had fallen behind its technological battle with Russia." (pg. 523 endnote for pg. 389) The events that Heller uses to support her position are aspects of America's outward public appearance, not military matters; the American effort to be first to the moon (even when called a "technological battle") was not part of an effort to achieve military advantage.
Just as indefensibly argumentative, but more part of the tradition of left-wing attacks upon critics of the left, Heller argues, "It is debatable what influence the New Deal's economic policies have on any trend toward socialism in America; they may have helped to save capitalism from its hungry dependents, its doubters, and its organized adversaries by compromising with a mild form of collectivism. (Rand apparently never considered that one of Roosevelt's accomplishments may have been to stave off a Russian-style insurrection.)" (pg. 131) This idea that "Rand apparently never considered" is debunked by an item in one of the periodicals Rand edited: specifically, the December 1962 issue of "The Objectivist Newsletter" in its review of a book entitled "The Roosevelt Myth." It's hard to contend that "Rand apparently never considered" something which not only did get her attention, but which went through the level of consideration necessary for Rand to decide that the debunking of the idea deserved space on pages she published.
Likewise, Heller argues that Alan Greenspan, after years during which he "often said that Ayn Rand put the moral basis under capitalism for him," in 2008 gave Congress "testimony [that] constituted his retraction of assertions he'd made in a 1963 essay he published in Rand's The Objectivist Newsletter," because he'd supposedly only now seen evidence that profit-seeking could harm consumers. (pg. 275-276, including footnote appearing on the same page as the asterisk indicating that footnote—the only page of the book where Heller apparently regarded her footnote as significant enough not to be shoved to the back of the book.) Here, Heller shows she's misread that article; in his piece, Greenspan wrote that consumers are better-served evaluating service-providers rather than trusting government standards to eliminate potential problems, among the reasons being: "A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public." Had Heller not noticed, she might have realized this follows from lessons of "Atlas Shrugged." The novel depicts both honorable and dishonorable business proprietors, and demonstrates that a country's form of government determines which type predominates. Heller makes no mention here that the U.S. Government of our CRA/SarbOx/GSE/TARP-era has so manipulated the markets that honest executives of lending companies faced vast constrictions on exercising their rational judgment, and that the government-market combination now encouraged the type of dishonest businessmen which "Atlas Shrugged" depicted in its Orren Boyles. The financial disasters which played out in 2008 news were anticipated by the 1963 Greenspan article and "Atlas Shrugged." Not surprisingly, Heller shows elsewhere a poor grasp of "Atlas Shrugged," as when she writes, "As the novel opens, the nation's industrial titans have been vanishing slowly for twelve years." (pg. 191) Not so. This number of years is the number to have elapsed by the time the hero can finish what the first disappearance has led to, but the novel opens midway into that effort, and the novel dramatizes several years of events before reaching the scene where the hero can look back upon it having been twelve years since the course of industry began to change.
Had Heller recognized that, by arming intellectual businessmen with the moral certitude they had earned, Rand had "made" a better "world," then her title's phrase "the World She Made" would have a valid context. Instead, the author applies the idea of a "world she made" to Heller's assumptions.
Problems of this kind indicate an author who frequently misunderstood the sources she had, not an author deprived of sources. Trying to make it seem she was denied sources she would have used, Heller writes, "Because I am not an advocate for Ayn Rand's ideas, I was declined access to the Ayn Rand Papers at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California, where copies of her unpublished letters and diaries, calendars, photographs, and other documents reside." (pg. xiv) However, on October 28, 2009, at a book forum at the Cato Institute, where Heller shared the stage with another author who is not an Objectivist but who did get access to the Ayn Rand Papers (Jennifer Burns), Heller told a different story. Now acknowledging that she had earlier been told that the Ayn Rand Institute wanted the biography authorized by them to be published first, Heller had to admit that a different book proposal could have achieved different results. (Although Burns's book is considered by most reviewers to be a biography, it has also been said to be an examination of Rand's place among "the American Right" of its title.)
The author of this book seems to have wanted to float upon and wade in the waters of a vast sea of research without ever submerging into the waters to see how they impact those who live by the subject of her research.
(I have compiled further lists of errors, of citations to sources that don't contain the information attributed to them, and of Heller arguing for positions not warranted by the facts. I have placed these lists in an extended comment to this review.)
Feb 28, 2012 4:59:17 PM PST
David P. Hayes says:
ADDITIONAL ERRORS IN THE BOOK:
From the book: "Clark Gable, then a volunteer lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, was rumored to have read The Fountainhead on a transcontinental train heading east and to have hopped off during a stop to call MGM, his employer, and demand that the studio secure the part for him" (pg. 168). Why should this be considered rumor? There is an unambiguous report of this event in an interview of Gable which appeared in the "Baltimore Sun" and "Los Angeles Times" of January 26, 1947.
Hal Wallis is called "the Oscar-nominated director" (pg. 170), although (a) he was never a director, and (b) his only Academy Awards nominations were as a producer (he won Thalberg Awards outright prior to Ayn Rand working for him, but when his prior pictures had been nominated or had won, he was not the person in line to collect the statue). Later, Heller disparagingly compares the films Wallis was making at Paramount during Rand's tenure against "those he had produced for Warner Bros. in the early 1940s, where he had received twelve Oscar nominations." (pg. 201) This number relies largely on Wallis having been an executive producer whose hands were in a large percentage of Warners' feature-length productions; there being seventy films on which Wallis was a producer of some kind at Warners 1940-1944, his Warners films vastly outnumber his Paramount output of a baker's dozen 1945-1949 (thus increasing the proportion of award nomination for Warners films even where average quality may not have changed), and blurs the fact that at both studios Wallis produced a mix of modest and ambitious films.
Writing of Ayn Rand in the late 1940s, Heller says "she was living in Marlene Dietrich's former house" (pg. 180)—no, Dietrich never lived there, despite the house having been built with the intention that she would.
Quoting from the book: "In January 1962 Branden persuaded her to launch a four-page monthly bulletin called The Objectivist Newsletter ..." (pg. 321). Whoever persuaded the other to start a magazine did so before 1962: an ad in "The Washington Post" of September 24, 1961, announces that the periodical is forthcoming, and the first issue of "The Objectivist Newsletter" went to press in December 1961.
Bennett Cerf is quoted having told Ayn Rand that at the publishing company that Cerf headed "nobody is going to try to censor you" (pg. 273), but Heller remarks in an endnote to this, "BC later claimed that he meant he would publish anything she wrote as fiction." (pg. 495) Heller likewise claims that later Bennett Cerf told Ayn Rand that he wasn't going against his word to publish "anything she wrote" when he refused to publish "The Fascist New Frontier" because Cerf "had been talking about fiction, he pleaded" (pg. 335). In each case, Heller seems to have mistaken what the editor of Cerf's posthumously-published memoir made it seem that Cerf said. The oral history which served as the raw material for the memoir does not have Cerf making a distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Heller here cites the memoir and elsewhere cites the oral history, but failed to recognize that an alternative to the claim alleged by the edited memoir is in the oral history, the audio recording not being subject to the reshaping of the account which taints the book.
Heller mentions that essays by Nathaniel Branden joined those by Ayn Rand in anthology books "The Virtue of Selfishness" and "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" (1966), then says, "Sales of these books presumably generated royalties for Branden" (pg. 338). There should be no "presumably generated royalties" question, particularly since Heller includes among her cited sources the 1998 Butterfield & Butterfield auction catalog of "The Papers of Ayn Rand," wherein Branden's contract was among the items described, Branden's percentage of royalties stated (catalog pg. 18).
Heller discusses the last meeting between Ayn Rand and Barbara Branden in the manner written by Branden. (pg. 408) In the endnotes, Heller acknowledges, "Harry Binswanger, in an interview published in 100 Voices, says that AR gave him a different account of the meeting but does not specify the differences." (pg. 527) Despite citing "100 Voices" Heller does not mention that Cynthia Peikoff's interview in that same "100 Voices" states that the note from Barbara Branden to Ayn Rand after the meeting came much sooner after the meeting than Branden states and that Ayn Rand became suspicious by the timing that the whole purpose of the note and meeting had been to allow Barbara Branden to establish that there had been some kind of agreement where there wasn't one. (See "100 Voices," pgs. 554-555)
At one point in the book, Heller writes that Ayn Rand "was denied permission to J. Edgar Hoover twice, once in October 1947, when she made a trip to Washington, D. C., to serve as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and once in January 1966" (pgs. 456-57, in endnote to pg. 105), yet elsewhere Heller writes that Rand "asked to see Hoover again in 1957 and was again turned down" (pg. 480, endnote to pg. 206). "Thrice" is not "twice."
Heller says that the movie version of "We the Living" as edited and subtitled into English with Ayn Rand's approval, was released to American theaters in 1972. (pg. 208, bolstered by an endnote on pg. 481) This goes against every serious prior source regardless of "side" and against the experience of those of us who followed news of the impending release as that release neared. The film's re-editor states in his interview in "100 Voices" that "the first public showing of the film in the U.S.A." was "at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado in 1986" (pg. 428, Duncan Scott interview); he provides details about the state-of-readiness of the film in the years prior to 1986, and these corroborate that the film had not been ready in 1972. (Reviews of the first run of the authorized version of the film appeared in the "Los Angeles Times" 11-12-1988, "The New York Times" 11-25-1988, "Christian Science Monitor" 11-25-1988, and "The Washington Post" 02-11-1989.)
Heller claims that the "Fountainhead" movie "opened in July 1949, to moderate box-office success" (pg. 218) and in the endnotes gives as her only source, "TF press book, Warner Bros. Press Books, Series 1.4, United Artist Collection, courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research." (pg. 484) Well, I have an original copy of the press book and know full well that it contains no such information. What's more, press books are produced prior to the release of the given film, when it's unknown how well the covered film will do at the box office. If Heller had done as I did and sought rental-gross and attendance figures in "Variety" and "Box Office," she would have written that the film did better-than-average business. (Link provided below)
Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand "continued to be at odds" (pg. 490, endnote to pg. 248), according to Heller, though at "the height of Friedman's fame in 1979, they would appear on the same Phil Donahue show in May 1980." Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman did not appear on the same episode of "Donahue." The "Donahue" program in 1980 featuring Friedman was broadcast on April 16 in Chicago and on April 23 in Washington DC and Baltimore; the Ayn Rand appearance was seen April 29 in Chicago and May 6 in Washington DC and Baltimore. (Sources: "Chicago Tribune," "Washington Post," and "Baltimore Sun")
Heller has Rand's book "The Virtue of selfishness" dated 1962 (pg. 5) when in fact it was published 1964.
Rand's proposed 1928 novel "The Little Street" is described by Heller several times as "unpublished" (pgs. 60, 101) or as a "novella" (pgs. 70, 71) without mention of it not going beyond the note-making stage, so the word "unfinished" would be far more appropriate than "unpublished." Heller says that Rand "spends pages describing" her protagonist, although the number of pages these notes occupy in "Journals of Ayn Rand" is a mere four. The effect of Heller's distortions here is that readers are led to think that Rand spent more time thinking through a work about the mental workings of a murderer than Rand actually did spend in producing nothing more than notes, most of which are on characters other than the murderer.
Feb 28, 2012 5:00:47 PM PST
David P. Hayes says:
ADDITIONAL ERRORS IN THE BOOK (list 2):
DeMille's film "The King of Kings" is named without the "The" although DeMille's film has the four-word title. (pg. 61) If Heller was confused owing to the 1961 remake with Jeffrey Hunter—which does lack "The" is its title—it's not because she discusses the remake, as there is no mention of the remake in Heller's book (as indeed there shouldn't be).
Heller writes: "on the strength of the Wallis contract, he [Frank] began searching for a house and land to buy in the San Fernando Valley. The national inflation rate was high—wavering between 5 and 7 percent, and at that rate, he explained, the money they were saving in the bank was losing buying power." (pg. 165) My understanding was that the house was bought with the $50,000 of the original Warner Bros. purchase of the movie rights (which occurred prior to Ayn Rand being signed to write for Wallis), and a strong reason for the purchase was to let the house shield the couple from the high wartime tax rate on that windfall income.
Heller quotes Ayn Rand writing, "'I do not like to go out.'" (pg. 186) Heller left out the inner quotes around the expression "go out" (which underscore the colloquial use of those two words taken together). (See "Letters of Ayn Rand," pg. 670)
From the book: "On first meeting Phyllis [Cerf], who happened to be Lela Rogers's niece, Ginger Rogers's cousin, and a former Hollywood actress, Rand recognized her; to Phyllis's amazement, the smoky-voiced writer recalled once having dressed her for a movie role in the RKO wardrobe department." (pg. 274) What Phyllis's husband recalled Rand telling Phyllis was that Rand had at RKO handed a costume to Phyllis. Heller's choice of the word "dressed" is odd given that merely handing someone a costume is not the same thing as putting clothes on that person's body, which the term "dressed" suggests.
Heller says that the issue of "The Objectivist" where Rand discussed her side of the dispute with the Brandens was "the October issue" yet it was in fact the issue with the cover date of May 1968 despite having been published October 7, 1968. Rand's account is dated September 15, 1968, in that issue.
Heller reports that Leonard Peikoff's course "The Philosophy of Objectivism" followed his "Introduction to Logic" lecture series in January 1969 that had been the first that Peikoff offered publicly outside the Brandens's auspices. These facts are subsumed under a statement that Peikoff "did his best to replace the vaunted genius Branden as her interpreter, buffer, publicist, and enforcer" (pg. 385). What Heller's selective use of facts omits is that seven years separated the two courses, and that courses on other subjects appeared between them. Had Heller reported this, she could not have got away with the negative impression she gives that "The Philosophy of Objectivism" was a quickly-brought-to-market replacement for Nathaniel Branden's course on the same subject.
This tendency to distort comes across also in Heller's editing (on pg. 318) when in quoting Ayn Rand, Heller quotes one-and-a-half sentences, goes to ellipses, then quotes an additional sentence. I accept that Heller omitted three sentences (comprising 57 words) at the ellipses; the tangential material cut out is not essential. What I can't accept is that the half-sentence also deleted stunts one of Miss Rand's remarks likely to be mis-read: "Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible." In removing those last six words, Heller follows earlier of Ayn Rand's critics who seek to dissuade readers from accepting Ayn Rand's beliefs by not acknowledging the real-world consequences of the alternatives.
Heller says of Leonard Peikoff that "he eventually married four times (twice to Rand's secretaries)" (pg. 266), yet at the end of the book's historical narrative writes that "Peikoff was recently divorced from his third wife, Amy Peikoff" (pg. 413), a divorce not final when Heller's book went to press, making impossible any fourth marriage having occurred by then. As only the first two wives ever met Ayn Rand, both would have had to have been Rand's secretaries for that part of Heller's statement to be true, yet first wife Susan Ludel doesn't mention having been Rand's secretary in her interview in "100 Voices," and other evidence indicates the year she met Ayn Rand she already had prominent employers unrelated to Ayn Rand; she recalled the year being also the year she began work at NBC News ("100 Voices," pgs. 384, 403).
Heller says of Leonard Peikoff's 1982 book "The Ominous Parallels" that it was a project "he had been working on since the early 1960s." (pg. 386) In fact the author spent thirteen years writing the book, ending in 1981. Thus, simple subtraction says that writing began in 1968, not "the early 1960s."
Heller writes: "David Kelley, a student of Leonard's (whom Leonard, later a philosophy professor at Vassar, excommunicated)" (pg. 405). Referents are mixed here. It was Kelley who was a professor at Vassar, not Peikoff.
Rand's periodical "The Ayn Rand Letter" is said to have lasted "until late 1974, when the Letter was discontinued." (pg. 388) Not true. "The Ayn Rand Letter" did not end publication until 1976, with its January-February 1976 issue, the publication date of which was February 11, 1976.
A citation for "Scott McConnell, 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand" gives its publication information as "Irvine, Calif.: ARI Press" (pg. 420). This may have been planned (and may have been the best information available to Heller at press time), but the only publisher this book has had is New American Library (a division of Penguin).
Heller states in a citation, "Rand admirer Fred Cookinham point out that 'O. O.' probably referred to Oscar and Oswald, stuffed lions given as a gift to Rand by O'Connor." (pg. 443, endnote to page 69, "signed two unpublished stories from the period 'O. O. Lyons'"), though she more convincingly would have made that point by citing a statement from Rand's long-time friend and heir Leonard Peikoff, who makes the same point in "The Early Ayn Rand," in his three-paragraph preface to "Escort" (pg. 71 of the hardback). (On the supplement disc for the widescreen DVD edition of "Ayn Rand: a Sense of Life," Peikoff discusses the lions in the second set of interviews, at 8 mins.) Someone else whose earned credibility should have warranted his being cited is Michael Berliner, who wrote a footnote about Oscar and Oswald on pg. 27 "Letters of Ayn Rand," which Berliner prepared while head of the Ayn Rand Institute.
In two endnotes on page 441 concerning films of the late 1920s, Heller cites an "American Film Index Catalog." Although there is such a resource, it never (as far as I can determine) published information on films made after 1920. However, the "American Film Institute Catalog" (and specifically its full-volume indexes) does cover films of the period Heller discusses, and does contain substantial numbers of the kinds of citations Heller says she located via this "Index Catalog."
Heller gives a citation for Nathaniel Branden's memoir as "My Years with Ayn Rand," dated "1990" (pg. 486, endnote to pg. 227), yet the actual titles and dates of the two versions are "Judgment Day: My Life With Ayn Rand" (1989) and "My Life With Ayn Rand" (1999). Neither version is dated 1990.
Feb 28, 2012 5:02:21 PM PST
David P. Hayes says:
MORE EXAMPLES OF HELLER ARGUMENTATIVENESS:
Page 93, concerning year 1936: "In late April, Rand told a New York Times reporter that she was proud ('as well she might be,' the reporter noted) of the fact that her first film script, her first stage play, and her first novel had all found immediate buyers. This is important to note, because later she would brood over and often exaggerate the difficulties she encountered in finding sponsors for books and plays and the injustices she met with at the hands of prejudiced or malevolent editors and others. Her followers would believe and repeat these tales of hostility and neglect as though they were true talismans of Rand's secret, superior world." The fact of the sales having occurred does not alter the fact that "We the Living" found its buyer not IMMEDIATELY but after an excruciatingly-long wait. Jeff Britting's book "Ayn Rand" reports that "We the Living" was finished in 1934, and letters on pages 4, 10, 11 and 13 of "Letters of Ayn Rand" indicate that the novel was complete some twenty-four months prior to publication. Heller's adjective "immediate" does not apply to all three works, even if it does to the play and screenplay; the adjective is wrong because it does not apply to the novel. (Heller's error on this is compounded by another statement Heller makes about "We the Living": on pg. 87, Heller writes about Rand and "We the Living" that "She finished writing it in 1935." This is plain wrong.)
An additional paragraph about changes of surnames: Isn't it odd that Heller says of "a number of followers believ[ing] that they had spotted the word 'Rand' in a slightly altered version in the first six letters of the Cyrillic spelling of 'Rosenbaum' ([the layout of the book shows the name 'Rosenbaum' as spelled in Cyrillic characters]) and the word 'Ayn' in the last three letters of the name" that "the visual evidence is flimsy" (pg. 55)—yet Heller has no trouble disputing the Brandens on the idea that the Brandens had never considered that they had selected as their chosen surname a name which incorporates the letters "B," "e," and "n" (which when put together spell "Ben," meaning "son of" in Hebrew) when they selected the name "Branden." (pg. 254) (I can go along with the assertion that the Brandens were drawn to a name which incorporates "Rand" as is the case of "Branden"—if only as a subconscious selection—because of the rhyme of "Rand" and "Branden." However, it is a stretch to think that the "B" at the beginning and the "en" at the end of "Branden" represented a choice to imply "son of" ["Ben"]. By sticking to this assertion, Heller has gall in accusing others of "flimsy" evaluations of how a pseudonym was chosen.) Is Heller's different policies of arguing against "Rand" in "Rosenbaum" but for "Ben" in "Branden" possible evidence of a "contrarian" nature—not within Rand but within Heller?
Heller writes: "In December 1958, Random House published a handsome new hardbound edition of We the Living, with an introduction by the author and her extensive revisions, which muted both her youthful Nietzscheanism and her master-slave eroticism in service of her mature image." (pg. 314) The differences between the 1936 and 1959 editions of "We the Living" have been painstakingly laid out by Robert Mayhew in an essay in Essays on Ayn Rand's "We the Living." The so-called "Nietzschean" content spoken by characters is argued from the full context of the novel to be aspects of characterization, not expressions of the novelist's own beliefs. I here write "1959" rather than repeating Heller's "December 1958" because January 5, 1959, is the publication date claimed on the copyright application.
Robert Hessen is said to have "In 1981" engaged in behavior which Rand is said to have viewed "as 'siding with her enemy,'" leading Rand to consider "withdraw[ing] her own books from the [book] service" Hessen operated. (pg. 400) Heller writes in such a way as not to indicate that the relevant books, pamphlets and bound periodicals in Hessen's catalogue were works on which Ayn Rand owned exclusive publishing rights and thus works on which she could and did bestow upon Hessen exclusive sales rights. These works were not made available to normal book channels except via Hessen. Rand had bound Hessen by contract not to sell books written by Rand's enemies, so Hessen's "rebellion" (Heller's term, despite her acknowledging that Hessen had listed a Kay Nolte Smith book in his catalogue) was not just personal conflict but violation of contract.
Heller writes of Rand's life in Russia, "One of the films she may have seen was The Lights of New York, a 1922 Fox Film Corporation production. The brother of her second cousin Burt Stone's first wife, Sarah Stone, was a cellist in the Fox Studio Orchestra in Hollywood. According to Susan Belter, the great-granddaughter of Burt and Sarah Stone, AR knew of this cellist and saw him on screen, sitting in the orchestra pit, in at least one movie she viewed in Russia (Russian Writings on Hollywood, p. 9; author interview with Susan Belcher, October 24, 2006)." (Heller, pg. 433, endnote for page 45, "first glimpse of the New York skyline".) Whether or not Sarah Stone's brother was a cellist in the Fox Studio Orchestra, his regular employment would have been in a movie theater and not at the studio when Rand was in Russia, if he was even employed by the Corporation at this time, because orchestral soundtracks were not recorded for films until August 1926. Prior to then, music was played live in theaters, other than on a small number of shorts that preserve vaudeville acts.
Heller writes that "letters between Rand and the Rosenbaums [Rand's parents and sisters] ceased" (page 98) and elaborates in an endnote: "In 1997 or 1998, AR's youngest sister, NR, told an interviewer, 'Actually, she [AR] was the one who stopped writing to us. Probably because she did not had any use for us any longer' (100 Voices, NR, p. 18). Why NR would have assumed, bitterly, in the 1930s that her émigré sister had lost interest in the family is not clear." (pg. 454) Heller does not mention what is in the book "Ayn Rand: a Sense of Life" (a work she cites elsewhere), pg. 107, that in the late 1930s post offices in the United States had notices stating that Americans who wrote to family members in the Soviet Union put those family members in danger. (In the documentary film of the same name, this point is made at 66 mins.) Where Heller makes it seem that Ayn Rand is callous, facts that Heller leaves out demonstrate that Rand was refraining so as to ensure her family not suffer a savage government's reprisals.
Writing about the page counts of the different screenplays by Ayn Rand for the "Fountainhead" movie, Heller states that Ayn Rand's second screenplay was longer than the first, and Heller argues that Jeff Britting in his book "Ayn Rand" (Overlook Duckworth) "mistakenly reports that the first script was 283 pages long; that was the length of the second script, dated February 25, 1947, according to studio records." (pg. 469, footnote to page 163) Well, I've examined studio correspondence on this matter, too, and have seen indications that Ayn Rand's scripts became progressively shorter. Britting was limiting his comments to "Fountainhead" screenplays written by Ayn Rand, though he was certainly aware that other writers tried their hand at "Fountainhead" adaptations. (The same Jeff Britting whom Heller criticizes wrote about these other screenwriters' efforts in his essay in Robert Mayhew's collection Essays on Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead.") When one considers that Ayn Rand came to Warner Bros. to work on a "Fountainhead" screenplay in 1944, that she never worked for Warner Bros. during 1946 and 1947, and that when Warner Bros. submitted a screenplay to the Production Code Administration in March 1948 it was a screenplay by Ayn Rand dated January 20, 1945 (around which time AR began a three-year absence from WB) (the preceding facts have long been available), readers of Heller's book should wonder whether Heller's discussion of a script dated "February 25, 1947" suggests that Heller is (a) in error about the date, (b) in error about the chronology of scripts, or (c) mistaking a script written by another writer(s) for a script written by Ayn Rand.
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TO LEARN MORE:
To learn more about the box-office performance of the "Fountainhead" film in 1949, see http://www.dhwritings.com/FountainheadMovie/
To learn more about the origin of Ayn Rand's name, see http://arname.dhwritings.com and http://remingtonrand.dhwritings.com
To hear the Bennett Cerf oral history, go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/nny/cerfb/audio_transcript.html; select session 19 and forward to 37 mins.
To hear Heller backtrack on being ineligible to access the Ayn Rand Papers, go to http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=6416 and listen at 47 mins.
The book by James Valliant referred to in the main body of my review is listed on Amazon here (its title being "The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics").
This review is one of several by me originally posted on Amazon.
I reviewed several books related to Ayn Rand.
To read the others, go to this page.