Amongst the doomed passengers on the Taggart Comet in Atlas Shrugged was the man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, who was, according to Ayn Rand,
a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.
Here Rand was dealing with an industry she knew well, although it seems that the man she described wrote for the live theatre rather than the world of film. In the Hollywood in which she worked, Rand would undoubtedly have encountered many deeply unpleasant people, and perhaps it was her experiences with them that gives her description of this particular doomed traveller a particular vehemence. However, as she must have realised, a comprehensive list of all the nastiness in the mid-20th century film industry would have included much for which capitalism rather than socialism would have to take the blame. The movie moguls may have been, to a man, thrusting, aggressive and entrepreneurial in the John Galt mould, but there was little evidence of the high moral tone that he espoused. Safer, she perhaps felt, to make her villain of the performing arts a man who might just possibly manage to make a meagre living writing for the alternative stage, but she did include two characters from the film world. The first was …
… Chalmers’ current mistress; he liked her because his predecessor had been Wesley Mouch. She was a movie actress who had forced her way from competent featured player to incompetent star, not by means of sleeping with studio executives, but by taking the long-distance short cut of sleeping with bureaucrats. She talked economics, instead of glamor, for press interviews, in the belligerently righteous style of a third-rate tabloid; her economics consisted of the assertion that “we’ve got to help the poor.”
The second was very different. While walking through Galt’s Gulch, Dagny Taggart glimpsed …
— a tall, fragile woman with pale blond hair and a face of such beauty that it seemed veiled by distance, as if the artist had been merely able to suggest it, not to make it quite real. In the next instant the woman moved her head— and Dagny realized that there were people at the tables inside the structure, that it was a cafeteria, that the woman stood behind the counter, and that she was Kay Ludlow, the movie star who, once seen, could never be forgotten; the star who had retired and vanished five years ago, to be replaced by girls of indistinguishable names and interchangeable faces. But at the shock of the realization, Dagny thought of the sort of movies that were now being made— and then she felt that the glass cafeteria was a cleaner use for Kay Ludlow’s beauty than a role in a picture glorifying the commonplace for possessing no glory.
It would have been refreshing if, just for once, a Rand hero or heroine had been ugly, or disabled, but that was clearly not to be. Further on in the book, Ludlow takes part in a performance of a play by, with and for the residents of the valley, and after it is over she explains her presence there to Dagny.
That’s why I’m here, Miss Taggart, ” said Kay Ludlow, smiling in answer to her comment, after the performance. “Whatever quality of human greatness I have the talent to portray— that was the quality the outer world sought to degrade. They let me play nothing but symbols of depravity, nothing but harlots, dissipation-chasers and home-wreckers, always to be beaten at the end by the little girl next door, personifying the virtue of mediocrity. They used my talent— for the defamation of itself. That was why I quit.
Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, and during its long gestation from its inception before the Second World War there had been many changes in the movie world, but these passed unremarked in Rand’s writing. The 1950s were the years when cinema began to feel the competition of television as a serious threat, but there is no indication of TV’s existence in the world of John Galt. And, while these were years of increasing pressure on the Hollywood studios, they are also often regarded as their ‘golden years’. Musicals were riding high. This was the era of musicals such as Singin’ in the Rain, Carmen Jones, White Christmas, Oklahoma! and Guys and Dolls, to name but a few, each very different but all representative of an industry very much alive and kicking. Hitchcock was producing his thrillers, Elia Kazan was directing On the Waterfront, Sidney Lumes had directed 12 Angry Men, Williiam Holden and Gloria Swanson were starring in Sunset Boulevard, and for lovers of the spectacular there was Ben Hur. Not a hint, anywhere, of the triumph of mediocrity. Was there really no room in this riotous cacophony for someone with the supposed beauty and talent of Kay Ludlow?
For her, a much more modest fate awaited. At almost the end of the book, with John Galt triumphant, we are granted sight through a lighted window of her and her husband, Ragnar Danneskjold, at home and at ease. As befits the man of the house, Ragnar is lying ‘stretched on a couch, reading a volume of the works of Aristotle’. Kay, meanwhile, sits in front of a mirror, ‘studying the shades of film make-up’.