FLW and Ayn Rand

In the dining room of the Plaza, under faked wooden ceiling beams
that Wright much admired, we would drink Irish whiskey, always with
the same difficulty in ordering it. Wright would tell the waiter, “Old Bush-
mill’s neat, please,” and then add, with emphasis, “That means I want no
ice.” “Of course, sir,” the waiter would reply. As the waiter went off to
the bar, Wright would lean toward me and say, “They never listen. Watch,
now. There will be ice.” Back would come the waiter with the Irish whiskey,
in a glass filled with ice cubes. Wright would pick up a spoon and, lifting
out the ice cubes one by one, proceed to flip them across the green-carpeted
floor, to the astonishment and pleasure of other patrons of the Plaza:
Foxy Grandpa on a rampage. Sometimes we would meet in the ground-
floor bar at “2l,” whose preposterous decor—its dusky low ceiling hung
with model airplanes, model buses, and the Lord knows what—was again
a source of admiring comment from Wright. One day a tiny figure whose
head was topped by a dark velvet beret waved to us from a distant banquette.
“Oh, God!” Wright exclaimed in dismay. “Ayn Rand!”
Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, published in 1943, has been one of
the leading best-sellers of all time (over four million copies have been
sold), and its hero, an architect named Howard Roark, is widely supposed
to have been based upon Wright, though Rand denied it many times and
so, with reason, did Wright. Rand was bent upon preaching the gospel of
individualism as a political and ethical ideal and denouncing the false doc-
trine of humanitarianism; to the ancient question “Am I my brother’s
keeper?” she answered with a ringing “No!” She decided to use the profes-
sion of architecture as a vehicle for dramatizing her then generally unpopu-
lar right-wing, anti-altruistic principles. As it happened, she knew little or
nothing about either architecture or Wright when she began writing her
trashy classic, but through friends she was able to persuade the distinguished
New York City architect Ely jacques Kahn to provide her with a “cover”
job in his office while she boned up on the nuts and bolts of the profession.
(According to Rand’s biographer, Barbara Branden, it was Kahn who gave
Rand the idea of using a housing project as a major factor in the plot of
The Fountainhead.) Kahn arranged for Rand to meet Wright at a banquet
held in New York. Rand told Wright that she was writing a novel about
an architect and would like to interview him; to her disappointment, Wright
 begged off with some vague words about the uncertainty of his future plans
P _ Rand sent Wright the first three chapters of the novel and he wrote
to her saying that he liked nothing about them. After the publication of
The Fountainhead, she met Wright in Los Angeles, at the home of his son
Lloyd, and on that occasion they got on well. He had not yet read the
novel, but he recalled that among the things he had disliked in the first
three chapters was the fact that Roark had been described as being tall
and with red hair, and he had wanted him to be short, with white hair.
Lloyd Wright laughed and said, “Oh, Father, Miss Rand wasn’t writing
your biography!” Subsequently, Wright read the novel and praised it to
Rand but refused to issue a public endorsement of it. He invited Rand
and her husband to visit Taliesin North; the shabby condition of the house
and the social conditions under which the Fellowship operated were, it
appears, a shock to Rand. Individualism as a theory was one thing, but
the benign tyranny practiced at Taliesin was quite another. Nevertheless,
she commissioned a house from Wright and was delighted with the designs
he furnished her; it remained only a project in part because she wasn’t
sure where she wished to build it and in part because she couldn’t afford
it. As usual, Wright found these reasons unacceptable. He assured her
that with minor changes the house could be built in Connecticut, Texas,
Arizona, or Florida. As for affording it, “My dear lady,” he said, “that’s
no problem at all. Go out and make more money