Footnote to the train wreck

[Reidy]

Since the wreck brought Chatsworth back into the news, I thought this audience would be interested in the fact that Rand once lived there. Here are some photos of her house:

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/archite...lideshow_072001

The color photo shows the living room, where the first Rand / Branden meetings happened, and the flowers are presumably the ones her husband grew. Josef von Sternberg, the first owner, was at one time signed up to direct her Red Pawn. This was a few years before he built it and more than a decade before Rand and her husband bought it.

Edited September 15, 2008 by Reidy

[Chris Grieb]

Reidy; Thanks for the link.

These look like different pictures of the Chatsworth home. Can you tell me what magazine those pictures appeared.

[Selene]

Reidy:

Thank you so much.

What a remarkable woman. I love that moat effect and the image of her thinking under the stars of a glorious paragraph in one of her novels or other works.

Adam

[Reidy]

This particular collection appeared in Architectural Digest in 2001. The first publication I know of was in House & Garden in 1949, and many times in beween, including one in Barbara Branden's biography.

I suspect the house was her inspiration for Ellis Wyatt's. A few years ago I went on a house tour in the LA area that featured a Neutra from 1935, a year before this one. The owner had done it up in high period style, with chrome, aluminum paint, venetian blinds, etc. This one was up against some steep hillsides that could have passed for Colorado. The Wyatt house came to mind, and then her Neutra connection.

She mentions him in one of her 60s essays, "Collectivized 'Rights'" or something from that period, as the distinguished architect who had big plans for Puerto Rico and not a care in the world as to who would pay for it.

[Dragonfly]

Fascinating! How can anyone leave such a house for an apartment in New York? Poor Frank!

[Barbara Branden]

Peter, thank you for the link to the photographs of Rand's California house,. As you said, I included some black-and-white photos of the house in The Passion of Ayn Rand (courtesy of the photographer, Julius Shulman) but I didn't have the color photo of the living room. I was startled -- and delighted -- to see the livng room after so many years, its colors undimmed by time, looking almost as it looked when I first visited Ayn and Frank.

Yes, this was the room where Nathaniel and I met Ayn and Frank, and where we spent so many afternoons and evenings talking, learning, and reading the manuscript of Atlas Shrugged as it was being written. And the outside terrace was where we sometimes sat in the warm late evenings of California, and where I often thought that the stars shone less brightly than the ideas we were hearing from Ayn. I'm sorry a photograph of the grounds was not included,; it was where I often walked with Ayn on Sunday afternoons while she collected the colored stones she loved to organize. Those were the golden days of our years with Ayn.

The arrangement of the living room furniture was somewhat different when we visited there. The couch was agains the back wall, with a large coffee table in front of it -- the table where Frank brought us coffee and sweets late in the evening, and where Ayn's blue-green ashtrays gradually filled as the hours passed. When we all moved to New York, Ayn and Frank gave us that large over-stuffed chair, and we kept it through several re-coverings, finally giving it to Leonard Peikoff. One could camp out for a day in that chair, and I often did, perching snacks, coffee, and a book comfortably on its wide arms.

Your're correct that the flowers in the living room were grown by Frank. One could see his imaginativeness in the beauty of the arrangements he created, and in the giant plants spilling down fronm the second floor gallery.

I can't tell you how shocked I was when, a number of years later, I drove again to 10.000 Tampa Ave to see the house once more -- and found, where a work of art and my memories had stood, several uninspired and uninspiring apartment buildings. The house had been torn down. If I had not understood Howard Roark's desire to dynamite the corruption he found where his great work should have stood, I understood it then.

Barbara

[Barbara Branden]

Dragonfly: "How can anyone leave such a house for an apartment in New York?"

They left because Ayn was painfully homesick for New York, the city she loved, and because Nathaniel and I had moved to New York. She had intended staying in California until Atlas was finished, but she had by then realized that it was a much more ambitious undertaking and would take much longer than she had originally anticipated. And in certain respects, the house wa a mixed blessing; Neutra was a great designer, but considerably less than ideally practical. For instance, among other practical problems, most of the electrical wiring was inside the steel of the walls, and electricians had to all but chop down walls to get to it when something went wrong. And it was far from the location of Ayn's studio work, both when she was writing the movie script of The Fountainhead and when she worked for Hal Wallis. In those days, most of the roads between Chatsworth and Los Angeles were gravel, there were no freeways, and the drive at best took an hour and more each way. Ayn, who did not drive, felt isolated and dependent so far in the country.

Barbara

[Dragonfly]

They left because Ayn was painfully homesick for New York, the city she loved, and because Nathaniel and I had moved to New York.

Yes I know, I've read your book many times... It was a rhetorical question, it just wouldn't be my choice.

[Chris Grieb]

Dragonfly: "How can anyone leave such a house for an apartment in New York?"

They left because Ayn was painfully homesick for New York, the city she loved, and because Nathaniel and I had moved to New York. She had intended staying in California until Atlas was finished, but she had by then realized that it was a much more ambitious undertaking and would take much longer than she had originally anticipated. And in certain respects, the house wa a mixed blessing; Neutra was a great designer, but considerably less than ideally practical. For instance, among other practical problems, most of the electrical wiring was inside the steel of the walls, and electricians had to all but chop down walls to get to it when something went wrong. And it was far from the location of Ayn's studio work, both when she was writing the movie script of The Fountainhead and when she worked for Hal Wallis. In those days, most of the roads between Chatsworth and Los Angeles were gravel, there were no freeways, and the drive at best took an hour and more each way. Ayn, who did not drive, felt isolated and dependent so far in the country.

Barbara

Barbara; Your comment about the house being hard to work on is something I have heard about modern architecture including complaints about some of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.

It is still interesting to recall that Chatsworth was considered far in the country.

[Nicholas Dykes]

Since the wreck brought Chatsworth back into the news, I thought this audience would be interested in the fact that Rand once lived there. Here are some photos of her house:

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/archite...lideshow_072001

The color photo shows the living room, where the first Rand / Branden meetings happened, and the flowers are presumably the ones her husband grew. Josef von Sternberg, the first owner, was at one time signed up to direct her Red Pawn. This was a few years before he built it and more than a decade before Rand and her husband bought it.

Thanks very much for drawing our attention to the Rand house photos, and hence inspiring Barbara's recollections. Does anyone know who the other people are with Ayn and Frank? Nicholas

[Reidy]

The man is Neutra. Hines says the woman is a magazine editor, but she may be Neutra's wife. Some of Shulman's photos, not in this collection, show Janet Gaynor, the movie star, and her husband Adrian, the designer, at the house. They were the "neighbors," a mile away. He did most of Garbo's onscreen oufits and, after going into business for himself, pretty much invented the 1940s look. If you've seen the photos of Rand's HUAC testimony, she was wearing his clothes. (No smart remarks. You know what I mean.)

Neutra's most famous house, for the Lovells, was in LA Confidential several years ago, as the villain's home.

Edited September 16, 2008 by Reidy

[Chris Grieb]

Didn't Adrian dress many of the MGM women.

I thought the house in LA Confidential was Frank Lloyd Wright's.

[Nicholas Dykes]

The man is Neutra. Hines says the woman is a magazine editor, but she may be Neutra's wife. Some of Shulman's photos, not in this collection, show Janet Gaynor, the movie star, and her husband Adrian, the designer, at the house. They were the "neighbors," a mile away. He did most of Garbo's onscreen oufits and, after going into business for himself, pretty much invented the 1940s look. If you've seen the photos of Rand's HUAC testimony, she was wearing his clothes. (No smart remarks. You know what I mean.)

Neutra's most famous house, for the Lovells, was in LA Confidential several years ago, as the villain's home.

Thanks. How come you're so knowledgeable about this? Sounds like a lot of research time has been invested. Are you involved in architecture/design? It struck me because when I was researching my article "Ayn Rand in England" for JARS (2004, 5/2) the only obituary I could find was in a relatively minor architectural journal, ~Building Design~.

Here's what I wrote:

Buried inside on the bottom right-hand corner of page 9, next to an advertisement for plumbing and drainage systems, the piece is very typical of British ambivalence about Rand: honest enough to admit she created something special, yet reluctant to accept her radical stance, and therefore scoffing at a philosophy, and at an art form, that the unnamed writer plainly does not understand.

After noting the fact of her death, the piece acknowledges that The Fountainhead is “probably the most famous example of the architect as hero.” It also confirms that most students of architecture in the US have read it and that some chose their profession due to its influence.

The piece continues: “The brave and beautiful purity of the hero Howard Roark as he struggles against the overwhelming tide of traditional architecture to a land where a new architecture will rise uncompromisingly is indeed stirring.

“Rand’s philosophy was called objectivism, which was a simplistic version of romanticism; ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’.” (Sometimes one clenches one’s fists while doing this kind of research).

It is most unfortunate that Wright did not do the buildings for the movie, because the writer, not knowing the troubled history of the drawings, is able to sneer at the film’s sets: “What a master of style.” Commenting on the blowing up of Cortland, the sneering goes up a notch: “What a hero, what a superman, and of course in the end he gets to build the world’s tallest building, a temple in the Palumbo tradition.

“Objectivism had a certain vogue, especially among the far right anti-liberal faction. The glorified self-determination was all that mattered and the implication that without it you are nothing makes her philosophy unpalatable.

“Her books are full of parodies of people to whom she allows only this one facet, and generally philosophy makes poor fiction. But somehow in this age of compromise, cutbacks and redundant architects, it is wonderful to read what might have been, and very interesting that she should have chosen architecture as the vehicle.”

I could dig out the piece if you are interested. Nicholas

[Reidy]

Re #13: These wishful declarations that Rand "used to be" popular were common in the US back in the 60s. I think they were over by 1982. Is it true that the original We the Living sold better in England than the US? I suppose I could read your article and find out.

Re #12: Garbo was one of those MGM women. The house in LA Confidential is by Neutra, but it's across a canyon from Wright's Ennis house, which has a showbiz / modeling career going back to The Black Cat in 1934. Also Blade Runner, House on Haunted Hill, Black Rain, Grand Canyon, at least one music video, an Ivana Trump exercise video, a Weird Al Yankovic video and a Pantene commercial among many appearances.

Ava Gardner's house in The Aviator, which many of us loved not too many years ago, is by Frank's son Lloyd.

[Chris Grieb]

Reidy; Thanks so much for all your posts. They are alway informative.

I must add as a comment that is there any information on how good friends the O'Connor's were with Janet Gaynor and Adrian. I have seen very few of Janet Gaynor's movies but my feeling is that she would not have been one of Miss Rand's favorites. Can anyone enlighten me.

[Nicholas Dykes]

Re #13: These wishful declarations that Rand "used to be" popular were common in the US back in the 60s. I think they were over by 1982. Is it true that the original We the Living sold better in England than the US? I suppose I could read your article and find out.

Re #12: Garbo was one of those MGM women. The house in LA Confidential is by Neutra, but it's across a canyon from Wright's Ennis house, which has a showbiz / modeling career going back to The Black Cat in 1934. Also Blade Runner, House on Haunted Hill, Black Rain, Grand Canyon, at least one music video, an Ivana Trump exercise video, a Weird Al Yankovic video and a Pantene commercial among many appearances.

Ava Gardner's house in The Aviator, which many of us loved not too many years ago, is by Frank's son Lloyd.

Reidy: Unfortunately, the records of the publisher were destroyed by a German bomb in 1941, and the archives of other possible sources, eg, Rand's UK agents, were inaccessible, at least to me. N

[Brant Gaede]

Re #13: These wishful declarations that Rand "used to be" popular were common in the US back in the 60s. I think they were over by 1982. Is it true that the original We the Living sold better in England than the US? I suppose I could read your article and find out.

Re #12: Garbo was one of those MGM women. The house in LA Confidential is by Neutra, but it's across a canyon from Wright's Ennis house, which has a showbiz / modeling career going back to The Black Cat in 1934. Also Blade Runner, House on Haunted Hill, Black Rain, Grand Canyon, at least one music video, an Ivana Trump exercise video, a Weird Al Yankovic video and a Pantene commercial among many appearances.

Ava Gardner's house in The Aviator, which many of us loved not too many years ago, is by Frank's son Lloyd.

You're confusing Anthem with We the Living. Anthem was first published in England.

--Brant

[Nicholas Dykes]

Re #13: These wishful declarations that Rand "used to be" popular were common in the US back in the 60s. I think they were over by 1982. Is it true that the original We the Living sold better in England than the US? I suppose I could read your article and find out.

Re #12: Garbo was one of those MGM women. The house in LA Confidential is by Neutra, but it's across a canyon from Wright's Ennis house, which has a showbiz / modeling career going back to The Black Cat in 1934. Also Blade Runner, House on Haunted Hill, Black Rain, Grand Canyon, at least one music video, an Ivana Trump exercise video, a Weird Al Yankovic video and a Pantene commercial among many appearances.

Ava Gardner's house in The Aviator, which many of us loved not too many years ago, is by Frank's son Lloyd.

You're confusing Anthem with We the Living. Anthem was first published in England.

--Brant

~We the Living~ was also published in England. Quoting from my JARS article:

The first mention in England of Ayn Rand as an author came in The Bookseller on 6 January 1937 when We The Living (WTL) was announced in their regular column “Forthcoming Books.” The novel was launched the next day by Cassell, a famous and old-established British publishing house, at the sum of eight shillings and sixpence, a fairly upmarket price in those days. Cassell seldom advertised and, as far as I could see from the periodicals I examined – including The Spectator (an intellectual weekly, usually conservative in outlook, which recently celebrated its 175th birthday), The New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian as well as the two already mentioned – Cassell did not advertise any of the three Rand books they published. They did have a rare ad for “Spring Books” in The Bookseller on 3 February 1937, but WTL is not mentioned. The company’s book sales seem rather to have been accomplished directly by publisher’s representatives or by printed flyers. However, any early records of advertising, sales and/or correspondence with Rand would have gone up in smoke on the night of 11 May 1941 when a German bomb scored a direct hit on Cassell’s offices and destroyed virtually all their files [Nowell-Smith 1958]. Records from later years went less dramatically. They were apparently thrown out when the company was taken over by Orion Publishing some years ago. Former Cassell employees now working for Orion have no knowledge of any records being retained. Modern British publishers are a pretty unsentimental lot.

The first public reaction to a Rand novel in England appeared in The Spectator on 15 January 1937. It was written by a gentleman called William Plomer, and was less than complimentary:

“One often wishes that writers would yield a little more to their satirical inclinations, and that goes for Miss Ayn Rand. From internal evidence one would guess her to be a middle-class White or Whitish Russian living in exile in America, and We the Living (a title of no particular significance) is so frankly counter-revolutionary that it ought to annoy readers of Red or Reddish sympathies. Writing, often graphically, of life in Leningrad in the ’twenties she seems anxious to show the corruption of those newly-raised to positions of authority. The story is simple. Kira, her bourgeoise heroine, falls in love with a surviving young man of upper-class origins and White sympathies, and in order to get money to send him to the Crimea and so save him from tuberculosis she prostitutes herself to an admirer in the GPU. The difficulties of obtaining board and lodging during the period of the story are entered into at great length and with every appearance of verisimilitude: ‘Vasili sold the mosaic table from the drawing room … fifty million roubles and four pounds of lard. I made an omelette with the egg powder we got at the cooperative.’

“Miss Rand’s account of the social upset following the Revolution is detailed and likely enough; she makes a certain amount of rather bitter fun of the workings of the new bureaucracy and of the lapses of the new orthodox into such unorthodoxies as private trading. But towards Kira, who stands for individualism and those little things like scent and lipstick which Mean So Much to a woman, Miss Rand is altogether too partial. If Kira had played the game with nice Red Andrei instead of nasty White Leo (who had ‘a slow, contemptuous smile, and a swift gait, and in his hand a lost whip he had been born to carry’) we might have liked her better. Just listen to Miss Rand on Kira’s mouth: ‘When silent, it was cold, indomitable, and men thought of a Valkyrie with lance and winged helmet in the sweep of battle. But a slight movement made a wrinkle in the corners of her lips—and men thought of an imp perched on top of a toadstool, laughing into the faces of daisies.’ What’s in a mouth? An opera, it seems, or a silly symphony.”

The novel was also reviewed, briefly, in the TLS on 27 February 1937. Given the literary temper of the times – naturalism was in and romanticism out, and T.S. Elliot and Virginia Woolf were regarded as great writers – the review is quite mild, and only mildly patronising. It is chiefly interesting for the extent to which it misses the point of the novel. The reviewer is anonymous:

“This is a long and elaborate story of Russian conditions during the period 1922-25 by a Russian woman who writes irreproachable English. It opens very promisingly with the account of a train journey, lasting a fortnight, from the Crimea to Petrograd. The opening, however, is easily the best thing in the book. Although there are occasional descriptions of a vivid and suggestive character still to come, the interest of things evidently witnessed and experienced at first hand is swamped by an inexhaustible flow of conventional romanticism. The chief source of trouble is the young heroine, Kira Argounova, who is all charm, wisdom, suffering, originality and so on. The temptation to make her as glamorous as possible was apparently hard to resist.” There follows a brief outline of the plot, including the rather quaint expression that Kira “was ready to count the world well lost” for Leo, before the all-too-brief review closes with: “The material at the author’s disposal afforded the opportunity for a more interesting and certainly more revealing story.”

It is possible that other reviews exist, but I have not found any. Nor was I able to find any solid information on how the book fared. Leonard Peikoff, in his “Introduction” to the 60th Anniversary paperback edition, presumably basing his judgment on material in the Ayn Rand Archives, says that the book achieved “great success” in England. Cassell’s themselves would seem to have agreed, for in the company’s official history, The House of Cassell, there is this comment for 1937: “Another important novel which appeared in that year was We The Living by Ayn Rand” [Nowell-Smith 1958, 221]. The sentence was probably written by the company’s then retired Chief Editor, Arthur Hayward, who wrote the bulk of the chapter on the 20th century, so the remark is doubly significant. As Chief Editor, Mr Hayward would hardly call a book “important” if he did not think it merited such an assessment and, as a publisher, he would be unlikely to remember and comment on a book published nearly 20 years before if it had not sold."

There is more in the article on ~Anthem~ and ~The Fountainhead~.

Nicholas

Edited September 17, 2008 by Nicholas Dykes