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635

Ayn Rand

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Autographs Start Price:NA Estimated At:10,000.00 - 12,000.00 USD
Ayn Rand

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Auction Date:2012 Apr 18 @ 18:00 (UTC-5 : EST/CDT)
Location:5 Rt 101A Suite 5, Amherst, New Hampshire, 03031, United States
ALS - Autograph Letter Signed
ANS - Autograph Note Signed
AQS - Autograph Quotation Signed
AMQS - Autograph Musical Quotation Signed
DS - Document Signed
FDC - First Day Cover
Inscribed - “Personalized”
ISP - Inscribed Signed Photograph
LS - Letter Signed
SP - Signed Photograph
TLS - Typed Letter Signed
Remarkable TLS signed “Ayn,” two pages, 7.25 x 10.5, October 14, 1937. Letter to David O. Selznick’s executive assistant, Marcella Bannett Rabwin. In full: “I was delighted to hear from you and to know that you haven’t forgotten me. You say that you have been in the midst of furnishing a house, and I am precisely in the same position right now. I have spent the summer in Connecticut and have just moved back to New York. We have taken an unfurnished apartment and are now driven mad with problems of furniture, of which we have two beds and a table at the present moment. But the rest is coming, and, so far, we are very pleased with our new place. It seems much nicer than the furnished apartments one can get in New York.

It looks as if we’ll stay here for some time to come. There are no immediate prospects for our return to Hollywood, and I have two plays on my hands, which, if all goes well, may be produced this season. One is a new play I finished this summer. The other—my adaptation of ‘WE THE LIVING’. You ask me about its production. Well, Jerome Mayer, who had it, has dropped his option on it recently, and for a very sad reason: he is afraid of producing an anti-Soviet play. When taking the option, he had assured me that he was not afraid of it, but he has a great many Red friends and they got the best of him. I am somewhat indignant about it, because it appears as if the Reds have established a nice little unofficial censorship of their own, and it is very hard to get ahead with anything anti-Communistic. But we shall see what we shall see. Right now, I have a very big producer [George Abbott] interested in the play and expect to hear from him definitely within the week. If the politics do not stop him, he would be much better for the play than Jerome Mayer could have been.

This, then, is an account of my activities. But how about you? You mention in your letter that you are working in the daytime, but you do not say where and how etc. I notice by the letter head that you must be back with Selznick International. What are you doing now? How do you like it? I would to know, for I am rather glad to hear that you are back at work. I have always felt that you were too good an executive to retire from the picture business. Frank joins me in sending our best regards to your husband and Mrs. Eppes [Marcella’s mother, Elena Epps]. Our love to you always.” Accompanied by the original mailing envelope, with Rand’s return address typed on the reverse, “A. O’Connor, 173 East 74th Street, New York, N.Y.” Rand was married to Frank O’Connor for 50 years, from 1929 until his death in 1979.They had met in 1926 when they were both extras during the filming of Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings. In fine condition, with a horizontal mailing fold passing through the top of first letter of signature and a few light creases.

Mrs. Marcella Bannett Rabwin met Ayn Rand about 1930 in New York where they were neighbors in a Gower Street apartment house. Rabwin worked as Selznick's secretary and her mother pushed her to help Rand, who she thought was 'brilliant.’ She gave some of Rand’s stories to her friend Nick Carter, an agent for Hollywood agent Myron Selznick. He sold two stories to Universal in 1932 for $3,000, including "Red Pawn," which was eventually dropped by Universal, but the money she received allowed Rand to quit her RKO job to write her novel, We the Living, published by Macmillan in 1936. She later described We the Living as the most autobiographical of her novels, its theme being the brutality of life under communist rule in Russia.

On July 10, 1936, an article in the New York Mirror announced “Mayer Buys Play From Girl Who Fled Soviet.” Rand immediately adapted her anti-Communist novel as a play for Jerome Mayer's production. In January 1937, Publisher’s Weekly reported that she had completed the drama. When Russian actress Eugenie Leontovich, who had appeared on Broadway in Grand Hotel, learned that a theatrical adaptation of We the Living existed she requested a script, sending the play to George Abbott, a personal friend and a major Broadway producer. He agreed to produce it with Leontovich in the title role. By fall 1939 Abbott finished casting and was preparing the play’s out-of-town tryout in Baltimore as Rand revised the script under Abbott’s supervision. About that time, she realized the project was doomed. Abbot was the wrong producer; Leontovich the wrong actress. When the play opened on Broadway with Helen Craig February 13, 1940, it was panned. Renamed “The Unconquered,” the show closed after six performances.
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