I remember a long bike ride sometime in the summer when Jeff and I went to a giant discount department store called Schottenstein’s. We went through Linden to get there; Linden had been my neighborhood before the family moved that summer. I think it would have been about three and a half miles from my new house in Beechwold. We passed my old library in the Northern Lights Shopping Center on the way. The trip was to look for Beatle vinyl and I walked out with two LPs: Rubber Soul (out the previous christmas) and the newly-released US-only compilation called Yesterday and Today.

Like all their early albums the US versions differed from the UK versions. The US version of Rubber Soul was particularly interesting in that it turned the collection in an acoustic direction, making it more the Bob Dylan-inspired album the group had in mind in the first place. Both versions are extraordinary.

Yesterday and Today was an odd mix of songs dropped from the US Rubber Soul, songs from the upcoming Revolver album, and tunes drawn from the A and B sides of recent singles (like the smash hit Yesterday). Beatle 45s often didn’t get an LP release at all, at least not in the 60s. The Beatles had their own ideas about a track list for each album; Capitol didn't pay much attention until the release of Sgt. Pepper's when the band took control. And for a recent initiate like myself, the slapdash mix of tracks on Yesterday and Today was just fine. It was a mind-expanding mix.

This is the 1959 Signet paperback, possibly the one I read. I have no memory of the physical book, except for the red edging on the pages; I know it was a paperback. I probably picked it up at a used bookstore in downtown Columbus, a place I haunted for science-fiction paperbacks and old comic books. Maybe the paperback I took home that day was the 1959 Signet edition pictured above. I know I read it in seventh grade; I was impressed and saw no problems with what author Ayn Rand called Objectivism.

One personal epiphany I took away from Rand's book was the contrast between Objectivism and the rituals of the Catholic Mass, the one where they turn bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ and then consume the magical stuff. At one point in the new English version of the Mass—mandated by the liberal Pope John the Twenty-third and his Vatican Council—we'd say a mantra three times in succession that started with the line Oh Lord I am not worthy (accompanied by the beating of our breasts). Rand made me begin to think about that: why was I using that phrase?

This question came at the same moment that I was reading a novel by H.G. Wells; I'm not sure which book, though it wasn't one of the more foundational sci-fi novels. At some point in my reading I realized that Wells was an atheist. The near-simultaneous realizations that the Catholic ritual was something I could not believe and that my favorite author was an atheist was enough to turn me towards the light.

It was only years later that I realized the extent of Rand's influence on other people who weren't me. Kids with other sorts of backgrounds were reading her, too, and later many of them became famous Republicans. House Speaker Paul Ryan, Rand fanboy incarnate, required all his staffers to read not only The Fountainhead but also Atlas Shrugged. (I hope he paid well; Shrugged is a real slog.)

I flirted with the GOP myself in high school. I was briefly in the Teenage Young Republican Club; my dad was a Republican office-holder and it seemed like what I should do. I thought it might help me socially (i.e. meet girls). At one of the pool parties I realized I was not with people who were going to be my friends. I don't remember what triggered these feelings but I left the group and never went back. Around the same time I attended a debate at Ohio State University between two guys from the YAF (Young Americans for Freedom) and the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). The topic was mostly Vietnam, and I found myself nodding my head with every point made by the supposedly radical SDS guy. In contrast the YAF fellows weren't making a lot of sense, dressed like Mormon missionaries, and seemed bitter and angry. I began to realize what a conservative was, and to know that I wasn't one.

The really crazy kind of conservatism was everywhere in the sixties. The day Kennedy arrived in Dallas the biggest newspaper in town was calling for his assassination. I remember seeing a rabid paperback around the house called None Dare Call It Treason; I'm not sure anyone in the family ever read it. The John Birch Society was riding high; over time it morphed into the Tea Party and later the MAGA crowd. All this stuff is a hangover from the anti-commie forties and fifties, though no one has to look very hard to find earlier examples of the paranoid style in American politics.

I'd like to stress here that even though my father was a Republican office-holder he was not an ideologue. Though he served in the Korean War he thought the intervention was a mistake; he felt the Koreans didn't want the US there. It did take him a while to come around to that view on Vietnam. Once a war begins, there is tremendous pressure on citizens not to question it. Opinions that were once allowed are no longer allowed. During the insane carnage of the First World War critics were locked up, newspapers closed. Speech is free until soldiers are deployed.

My perverse pleasure in reading The Fountainhead did not come from its politics, however. I liked the overheated sado-masochistic sex and I liked radically new architecture. I was a fanboy for Frank Lloyd Wright and he is, of course, the template for Howard Roark, the architect protagonist.

Around this time I discovered there was a 1949 movie made from The Fountainhead. This was galvanizing. It seemed a very long time before it appeared on TV; the cinema revival movement did not happen in Columbus till a bit later in the decade and there was no other way to see older films. Finally it appeared on one of the local stations and immediately became one of my favorites.

Rand wrote the screenplay and it's sort of crazy and ponderous and certainly not the way humans talk. She had no gift for vernacular dialog. There's a particularly egregious courtroom speech near the end, an awkward moment in the miscast Gary Cooper’s career. It lasts ten minutes—about thirty years in movie time—and part of Rand's agreement with Warners was that not a word be eliminated. (Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky was able to make similar demands during Ken Russell's filming of Altered States. Russell made a good film from that talky script by keeping the dialogue at an amphetamine tempo.)

Fortunately the ludicrous script is only a small part of the film's charm. The look of the film is staggering. In Wynand’s office and other sequences, the production design by Ed Carrere anticipates the Ken Adams sets from Bond films and Strangelove. The matte-painted Wrightian dream house anticipates the modernist dwelling (another matte painting) near the end of North by Northwest. The quarry scene brings the hyper-charged sexuality to an absolute boil, with the off-screen romance of Cooper and Neil making fantasy all very real. Then there is the ambulance ride though Louis Sullivan's Chicago. Robert Burks is the cinematographer: Strangers On a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, The Birds. There’s never been another film quite this delirious.

And I must say something about Patricia Neal. Fountainhead gives her a dynamite leading role—her first—and Neal runs with it. She dominates the futurism as masochistic architectural critic Dominique Francon. (The idea that architectural critics are the movers and shakers in big-city politics is another of the film's charming whimsies.) Neal's face has more structure than a dozen Howard Roark buildings. I've loved her ever since The Day the Earth Stood Still and the Klaatu barada nikto sequence.

Through the years I began to think that director King Vidor was trying to subvert the book and turn it into a comedy. Sadly, that isn’t true. I'm afraid he believed in the book, proving an artist's intention is irrelevant. I admire Vidor for Duel in the Sun, Beyond the Forest, and the indelible tornado scene in Wizard of Oz, a masterpiece of practical effects that fueled my nightmares for years. I'd dream of our newly-built GI Loan suburb and see that cyclone coming right down the street.