The tutoring she’d had in English allowed her to read and sometimes even think in her new language. But her speaking and writing skills were undeveloped. She made remarkably swift progress, but she also picked up period words and phrases like “lazy bum” and “bootlegger’s joint” and employed them in her first professional writing efforts. In fact, she would always retain an idiosyncratic, sometimes jarring habit of mixing elevated diction with somewhat tin-toned 1920s slang, both at least partly attributable to movies.
She stayed in Chicago for six months. Just before she left, she recorded her impressions of America in a letter, written in Russian, to her unrequited love Lev Bekkerman. “I am so Americanized that I can walk in the streets without raising my head to look at the skyscrapers,” she told him. “I sit in a restaurant on very high chairs like in futuristic movie sets and use a straw to sip ‘fruit cocktails.’ “Americans joke a lot and take almost nothing seriously, she observed gaily, but her own sense of purpose was fixed. “The only thing that remains for me is to rise,” she wrote, “which I am doing with my characteristic straight-line decisiveness.” She hoped that Lev would find a way out of Russia and come to visit her someday; she promised to meet him at the station “even if you arrive in 1947; even if I am by then the greatest star in Hollywood.” It is not known if she received an answer to her letter.
Meanwhile, before she left for California, the Stones and Goldbergs were able to arrange for a six-month extension of her visa, and good-natured Sarah Lipton inveigled a film distributor who did business with her, and also with Cecil B. DeMille, to supply Rand with a letter of introduction to someone in the glamorous DeMille organization. The family put together one hundred dollars (“a lot of money in those days,” said Fern Brown) to cover Rand’s train fare and initial living expenses in Hollywood. By late August 1926, she was ready to go. Tucking four completed scenarios into the suitcase her grandmother had given her, and carrying her typewriter in its case and a score of other ideas in her mind, she bade her relatives good-bye and began the three-day railway journey west.
One of the scenarios she carried was called The Skyscraper, a kind of distant, whimsical forerunner of The Fountainhead. Its hero is “a noble crook” who jumps from skyscraper to skyscraper by means of a parachute, enacting some of the familiar antics of her Russian science fiction stories. But here, for the first time, she traded the dashing heroes of her childhood for the figure of a persecuted outsider. Rock-ribbed defiers of law and convention and solitary geniuses would now populate the foreground of many of her stories, from an unpublished 1928 novella called The Little Street all the way to The Fountainhead. From haughty crooks to Howard Roark, her new protagonists display qualities of ambition, audacity, arrogance, ability, pride, and passionate self-esteem against the “heavy, hopeless stupidity” and mediocrity of most people, whose lives, she wrote in 1928, are “a rotten swamp, a sewer.” Her heroes are offspring of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, with his buoyant superiority to the herd of men.
When Rand left Chicago, she left mixed feelings behind her. On one hand, the Portnoy women felt familial pride in their cousin’s daughter’s brilliant mind, intrepid spirit, and determination to make something of herself. Like Zinovy and Anna, they believed she would be famous, because she believed it. Yet their guest had behaved in a manner so manic, incurious, and seemingly inconsiderate that tart stories were still being told about her seventy-five years after her stay. She wrote to them regularly until the middle 1930s and afterward sent copies of her books and tickets to her lectures. Minna and Anna Stone assumed, probably mistakenly, that the success of her first play, The Night of January 16th, lifted her sense of self-importance above family ties. According to Minna Goldberg, Fern Brown, and others, she also failed to repay—or even to offer to repay—small amounts of money she borrowed during her first difficult years in Hollywood. Minna recalled Rand’s telling her, “I’ll never forget you. I’ll get you a Rolls-Royce and a mink coat.” “I didn’t get five cents,” said Minna. On return visits—one in 1949 and one or two in the 1960s—she struck them almost as a stranger. By that time, the general impression among her relatives was that she was closer to members of her husband Frank O’Connor’s family than to her own. When she died in 1982, her remaining acolytes told newspapers that she had no family in America.
Most important to the Goldbergs, Liptons, and Stones, they thought in retrospect that she did not adequately communicate to them the calamitous circumstances her parents and sisters were confronting in St. Petersburg. “She never talked about her family or the things that were going on in Russia,” recalled Minna Goldberg. Said Anna Stone’s great-granddaughter, “The [extended] family had enough money. They could have saved [her parents’] lives if they had known. She didn’t tell them.” She was in her own world, thinking of what she was going to do and be.
There is a famous story about Ayn Rand’s first meeting with the great film director Cecil B. DeMille. On her second day in Hollywood, the story goes, she was standing forlornly in the sunbaked parking lot of the DeMille Studios, having just been turned down for a job, in spite of the letter of introduction that she carried in her purse. Suddenly, a long, low, open-topped touring car pulled to a stop beside her, driven by DeMille. He asked her who she was. When she answered that she was a recent Russian immigrant looking for a job, he told her to get in. She did, and the two drove off to the Culver City set of King of Kings, DeMille’s epic drama of the life and death of Christ. There, over the next few weeks, he instructed her in the fundamentals of filmmaking technique—the proper angle of the camera, the dramatic focus of a set—while employing her as an extra in the teeming Palm Sunday and crucifixion scenes. Within days, she had picked out a toga-clad Roman legionnaire who looked uncannily like Cyrus and whom she made up her mind to marry.
There are several versions of this story. In one, the Russian girl accepted a ride with the great director without knowing who he was, and found out only when, on the road, she worked up the nerve to ask his name. In another, she saw him before he saw her; she recognized him from publicity photographs she had seen in movie magazines in Russia and stared at him in wonder until he pulled up in his car and offered her a ride. People who knew her imagine that the episode may have unfolded in yet another way. “She stalked him,” Fern Brown exclaimed, only half in jest, adding, “She never left a thing to chance.” “That would be like her,” said an acquaintance from the 1960s.
In any case, during her first few weeks in Hollywood she met with exceptional good fortune, both through her encounter with DeMille and in other ways. Her Chicago relatives had suggested she stay at the YWCA, and on the day of her arrival she rode a streetcar to the Los Angeles branch. When she explained to the duty clerk that she had come all the way from Russia to be a screenwriter, she later said, he steered her to the much more proper and delightful Hollywood Studio Club—an inexpensive Y-sponsored residence created specifically to shelter aspiring actresses and other young women away from home for the first time. Regularly oversubscribed, the club had recently moved into brand-new quarters on Lodi Place, in the heart of Hollywood. There, residents had use of a well-stocked library, a small rehearsal theater, a gymnasium, and a beautifully planted courtyard for the Tuesday evening tea dances that were a club tradition. Even in its new, larger quarters, however, there was typically a waiting list. Since Mrs. Cecil B. DeMille sat on the board of directors and had led the five-year building drive, it’s possible that DeMille helped Rand secure a room a day or two after they met, as he later claimed he did, although why she would want to obscure this fact, if true, isn’t apparent. The Studio Club, a palace of safety and ease compared to her family’s cramped rooms in St. Petersburg, became a haven. She remained there for two and a half years, paying ten dollars a week for her room, with breakfast and dinner included.
Thus comfortably settled, and employed by DeMille, she wrote to her parents for the first time and told them her new first name. The family was immensely pleased to hear of her
progress. Her mother wrote back to say that she had read Rand’s letter describing her remarkable meeting with Cecil B. DeMille aloud to gathered relatives and got a standing ovation. She and the younger girls were practicing English at home, in preparation for someday joining Ayn. Nora sent a separate letter, rejoicing in her belief that Rand’s new name would one day be “the embodiment of the world’s glory and glamour.”
In 1926, the Hollywood film studios were still housed in ramshackle buildings scattered among sweetly scented orange groves, but they were expanding quickly. Midwestern homecoming queens, fraternity boys, former dock workers, foreign film stars, and New York writers and stage directors poured into the small city, taking jobs as actors, producers, script writers, and technicians. In this sun-struck frontier boomtown, whose most famous entrepreneurs were also Russian and Polish immigrants, a socially shy, dark, Russian-speaking child of Victorian-era Jewish parents would not have been as strange a sight as elsewhere in the country. Still, she was most certainly foreign, and she must have found the variety of manners confusing and even daunting. During her first day on the set of King of Kings, she was hungry but too shy, or proud, to take part in the lavish lunch set out for the cast and crew. Yet she was always willing to stand up for herself and was assertive when it came to reaching her objectives. When she was assigned to work as an extra, a wardrobe clerk tried to dress her in dirty sackcloth to play the part of a beggar woman in a crowd; rather than meekly do as she was told, she complained and was sent to a young wardrobe designer named Adrian Greenberg, known as Adrian, who made her a patrician. Later, Adrian became a commercial dress designer, and she wore his suits and gowns for many years. In the 1940s, he and his wife, the actress Janet Gaynor, became her neighbors, political allies, and friends.
It wasn’t long before she informed DeMille that she had brought a stack of movie scenarios with her from Chicago. The director turned her over to the head of his story department, a woman named E. K. Adams. After reading the scripts, Adams told her outright that her story lines were too far-fetched and her characters not human enough. Nothing could have been better suited to incite Rand’s anger, then or ever; as the soul mate of Cyrus and the aspiring heir of Victor Hugo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche, she was acidly scornful of stories that read “like last year’s newspaper,” as she put it, and indifferent to characters who resembled the folks next door. On the spot, she decided that the story chief was not only a hardened anti-romantic but had also taken a personal dislike to her. More than thirty years later, she told a friend, “I still hate [that woman] to this day.” Reconsidering the sound of this, she corrected herself and said, “No, I don’t hate her. I dislike her intensely.”
Later, Rand spoke of her early days in Hollywood as “grim.” By then, she had come to dislike the movie capital of America and its “barbarians.” She remembered feeling as though she were “an intruder with all the world laughing at [her] and rejecting [her] at every step,” as she wrote to the head of the Studio Club in 1936. Yet for the most part—given that she was a stranger and penniless in a culture that even then thrived on power and personal connections—she received a courteous, even a warm, reception. For five and a half months, DeMille, who appreciated her drive and was flattered by her admiration, kept her working as an extra, earning $7.50 a day—enough to pay her room and board and put something aside for future expenses. Early on, she was able to borrow from the Studio Club kitty to take shorthand classes at a secretarial school, although she never worked as a stenographer.
Once filming had ended on King of Kings, in January 1927, DeMille hired her—presumably over the objections of his story chief—as a junior screenwriter. Her initial assignment was to do background research on movies that the studio had scheduled for production. At the same time, as a test of her writing ability in English, DeMille asked her to try her hand at converting a short story the studio owned into a film scenario. She set to work on a maudlin tale called His Dog, apparently her first professional effort in English. As she rewrote it, the story describes the fortunes of an ex-convict whose affection for a wounded dog helps him to recover from a life of crime and win the hand of his childhood sweetheart. The scenario is a roughly rendered but competent set piece, with flashes of originality and just a hint or two that someone may have helped her with her word choice and spelling, and it already demonstrates a gift for tight, elaborate, fast-paced plotting, one of the hallmarks of her later work.
His Dog must have met DeMille’s minimum expectations. By May, she was earning twenty-five dollars a week to evaluate the film potential of fictional works by outside writers and to synopsize them for possible screen treatment; if her synopses proved worthy, she was told, they would be turned over to a more experienced writer for development into actual working scripts. In her first few assignments, as in His Dog, she had to set aside her dislike of sentimental stories and all-too-human characters to master the craft of typical Hollywood writing. In The Angel of Broadway, completed in midsummer 1927, she fine-tuned the character of a cynical cabaret singer who finds her better self through caring for—and praying for—a former criminal turned Salvation Army worker. In Craig’s Wife, based on a Pulitzer Prize—winning play by George Kelly, she dramatized a series of small, cowardly betrayals by a wife resulting in her innocent husband’s arrest for murder; the loving testimony of a treacly young woman saves the day. She was frustrated by the secondhandedness of the work and, no doubt, the banality of the stories. Still, in each of these early efforts it is possible to find signs of her peculiar “sense of life,” including her fascination with social outsiders and taste for twists of plot that turn on the envy of ordinary people for anything outstanding. The apotheosis of this peculiarly Nietzschean kind of envy would be, of course, The Fountainhead’s magnificent villain, Ellsworth M. Toohey.
Rand’s fingerprints are especially evident on The Skyscraper, written late in 1927 and based on a story by Dudley Murphy, not on her earlier Chicago effort. Here, she transforms the original story’s hero, one of a pair of tough construction workers, into an architect named Howard Kane. Kane’s dedication to the skyscraper he is building furnishes a jealous colleague with the means to try to ruin him and steal his girlfriend, the world-famous singer Danny Day. Partly through the loyalty of his workmen, Kane foils the plot against him. Like The Fountainhead, The Skyscraper ends with a triumphant architect named Howard perched atop his tall building; his head is thrown back in joy. Rand’s journal entries on the intended theme of The Skyscraper also echo The Fountainhead. “Plotline: victory over obstacles,” she wrote. “Achievement is the aim of life,” she noted, in no-nonsense italics. “Achievement is life,” she added, to clarify the point. Sixteen years later, in The Fountainhead, her first mature hero, Howard Roark, would so perfectly embody this rigorous code of living that he would become, for millions of readers, the consummate enemy of mediocrity and the anti-Babbitt of his age.
If her screenwriting work took her far from Victor Hugo’s medieval Paris and Scott’s courts of Ivanhoe, her private world at last achieved real romance when she met and fell in love with an aspiring actor named Frank O’Connor, who was playing a Roman legionnaire in the cast of King of Kings. Born Charles Francis O’Connor in Lorain, Ohio, in 1897, the DeMille extra was one of seven children of a hard-drinking Catholic steelworker and a strong, artistically ambitious housewife, who was, in some respects, a double for Rand’s mother. Until Mary Agnes O’Connor became ill with breast cancer in 1910 or 1911, Frank had been groomed by her to rise above the laboring class. He was stunningly beautiful, as anyone who ever met him agreed: tall, slender, with a classic profile and great natural elegance. At age fourteen, after his mother’s death, he had dropped out of his Catholic high school and became a lifelong atheist. (He was “even more of an atheist than I am,” Rand once said.) Although he had little education, spelled phonetically, and possessed almost no independent curiosity about books or ideas, he was exceptionally witty, perceptive, well mannered, and kind. By 1926
, he had traveled from coast to coast, seeking a vocation. He had been a rubber worker in the tire mills at Akron, a film extra for D. W. Griffith in New York, a furniture deliveryman on Long Island, and a steward on a freighter that took him through the Panama Canal to Hollywood, where his two elder brothers had settled and where he felt he had the best chance to gain a foothold as an actor. He may also have worked as a dancer, a circumstance that, if true, he and Rand later suppressed. “Frank had some feminine tendencies,” said a friend of the time. “I think Ayn preferred not to have any of that more noticeable than it had to be.” His role in King of Kings was his first part in Hollywood.
There is no doubt that Ayn Rand did stalk Frank O’Connor. She later told the tale of their meeting and courtship. When she first saw him on the set, he was dressed in a short tunic, with sandals laced to his knees and a long scarf tied jauntily around his head. He was Cyrus’s twin brother. “What I couldn’t forget [was] the profile,” she recalled. Each day, she looked for him among the Romans and Jerusalemites, and one day she spotted the lanky twenty-nine-year-old Roman legionnaire preparing to join a crowd scene. She ambled over to his side, stuck out her foot, and tripped him. He apologized for stepping on her toes, and they exchanged names.
Later that day, she waited for him on the weekly payroll line, and they spoke to each other again. And then he disappeared for nine long months.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 9