The Early Ayn Rand

He read and handed the paper back to her without a word.

"Well?" she asked.

"Perhaps I shouldn't have said what I said, Miss Nash," he answered in his low, clear voice, and she could not tell whether it was perfectly polite or perfectly mocking. "But you asked for my candid opinion, and when I'm asked I usually give it."

"You still hold to that opinion?"

"Yes. Perhaps I should add I'm sorry."

She gave a little unnatural laugh which tried to be gay and friendly, but failed. "You realize that it's a rather... well, unusual opinion, Mr. Ayers, to put it gently?"

"Quite," he answered with a charming smile, "and I'm certain that it means nothing whatever."

"Quite," she was tempted to reply, but didn't. Of course, his opinion should mean nothing to Claire Nash, because she was Claire Nash. She had a palace in Beverly Hills and two Rolls-Royces, and she had immortalized the ideal of sweet maidenhood on the screen. For her, five gentlemen had committed suicide — one of them fatally — and she had had a breakfast cereal named in her honor. She was a goddess, and her shrines were scattered all over the world, little shrines of glass with a tiny window in front, through which an endless stream of coins poured night and day; and the sun never set on that golden stream. Why should she feel such anger at the insult of any single man?

But Winston Ayers had come to Hollywood, and Winston Ayers had been expected and invited and begged to come to Hollywood for more than three years. Winston Ayers was England's gift to the theaters of the world, or perhaps the theaters of the world had been a gift thrown into Winston Ayers' nonchalant, expert hands; and these hands had created without effort or notice such miracles of drama and laughter that Ayers' opening nights became riots, and from the theatrical pages of the world press there looked upon his worshiping public the face of a new playwright, a young playwright who looked bored. Winston Ayers had been offered one hundred thousand dollars for one screen story. And Winston Ayers had refused.

Claire Nash tightened the soft, luminous folds of her sky-blue negligee around her shoulders, pink as clouds of dawn over the satin sky. She bent her head wistfully to one shoulder, her head with the golden tangle of hair as a sun rising from the clouds, and she smiled the sweet smile of a helpless child which had made her famous. It had cost more sleepless nights and diplomacy than she cared to imagine for Mr. Bamburger, president of Wonder-Pictures, to arrange this interview between his great star and the man he wished to become his great scenarist. Mr. Bamburger had hoped that Claire Nash would succeed where all had failed, as she usually did, and induce the Box-Office Name to sign. "Don't stop at the price," Mr. Bamburger had instructed her, and she hadn't known whether he had meant himself or her.

But the interview did not seem to succeed. For the Box-Office Name had said a thing... a thing... well, she would not care to repeat it to Mr. Bamburger nor to anyone else.

The soft twilight of her dressing room hid the angry little flash of red on Claire's cheeks. She looked at the man who sat before her. He was tall, young, inexplicable. He had very clear, very cold eyes, and when he spoke, he narrowed his eyelids with a strange, slow movement that seemed to insult whatever he was looking at; she hated the movement, yet found herself watching eagerly to see it. "Much too handsome for a writer," she decided in her mind.

"So you think," she began bravely, "that screen actresses..." She could not force herself to finish the sentence.

"... are not worth writing for," he finished it for her courteously, just as courteously as he had said it before, in the same even, natural voice that seemed utterly unconscious of the bombshell his words set off in her mind.

“Of course..." She fumbled desperately for something brilliant and shattering to say. "Of course, I..." She failed and ended up in a furious hurry of stumbling words. "Of course I wouldn't hold myself as an example of a great screen actress, far from it, but there are others who..."

"On the contrary," he said charmingly, "on the contrary. You are the perfect example of a great screen actress, Miss Nash." And she didn't know whether she should smile gratefully or throw him out.

The pink telephone on a crystal stand by her side rang sharply. She took the receiver.

"Hello?... Yes..." She listened attentively. She wasn't yawning, but her voice sounded suddenly as if she were. "My dear, how many times do I have to say it? It was final... No... A definite no!... To the Henry Jinx Films as well... I'm sorry."

She let the receiver drop from her hand and leaned back on the pillows of her chaise longue, little sparks glittering through the mascara needles. "My manager," she explained lazily. "My contract here expires after this picture, and all the studios are hounding the poor man to death. I wish he wouldn't bother me about it."