Rand was heartbroken, and obsessed. As with Lev Bekkerman four years earlier, she daydreamed about him, watched for him everywhere, wept over him in her room at the Studio Club, and talked guardedly about him to the young women she lived with there. Although she had spoken with him only twice, “it was an absolute that this was the man I wanted,” she declared. Some of her housemates offered to help her find him, but Rand wouldn’t disclose his name. Like Cyrus, he was hers; like The Fountainhead’s heroine, Dominique Francon, she wasn’t about to taint the purity of her feeling for him—or, perhaps, give someone else the chance to find him first—by speaking his name aloud. She was terrified that he had gone for good. She was certain she would find him.
She saw him again in the Hollywood branch of the public library, in May 1927. She was visiting a nearby construction site as research for her adaptation of The Skyscraper and had an hour to fill before meeting with a building foreman. O’Connor was sitting at a table, reading a book. He saw her, remembered her, greeted her. Later, he confided to her that he had told his brothers all about the “very interesting and funny” Russian girl he had met on the set of King of Kings, including the amusing fact that he couldn’t understand a word she said. That afternoon in the payroll office had been his final day with DeMille; the crowd scenes in which he figured were finished.
Ayn and Frank walked out of the public library reading room together and began to see each other in the evenings and on weekends. He picked her up at the Studio Club—where eighty-odd young women took note of his good looks—and accompanied her to the movies, on walks, and to inexpensive meals with his brothers, Joe, also an aspiring actor, and Harry, who called himself Nick Carter and found occasional work as a newspaper reporter. Perhaps for the first time in her life, Rand was transparently, completely happy. She had earlier shunned the dances and amateur theatricals at the club—for the most part, she appeared “grim and remote,” one of her housemates recalled—but now she joined in, banging pots and pans to produce sound effects, participating in civic-minded field trips, and giving the general, incongruous impression of an excited child on her birthday. At one point, having received an unexpected windfall from a Studio Club donor, she bought black silk lingerie, an extravagance she would later confer on Kira Argounova in We the Living, as a gift from Andrei Taganov. O’Connor probably gave her her first kiss; he was her first and, for a long time, only lover. She was an ardent, hungry lover in return.
By early 1928, however, her professional momentum was slowing. Of the half-dozen scenarios she had written for DeMille in 1927, none had been used as the basis for a final working script, and by spring, the studio had stopped providing her with full-time work. At the same time, the introduction of talking pictures was causing frantic realignments in the industry. Partly in response, DeMille closed his studio in August 1928 and joined the better-financed, technically more proficient Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He didn’t take Rand with him, and she was left without a job. Although in years to come she would again earn a comfortable living as a screenwriter—and be well known, even notorious, among her peers in 1940s Hollywood—she was never entirely successful at writing for the movies. Persuasive screen characters were not her strong suit, and Hollywood did not know what to do with the increasingly iconoclastic themes and highly stylized characters that were.
From mid-1928 until the summer of 1929—the last summer of the nation’s long, carefree era of prosperity before the Great Depression—the girl with the sign of a crown on her forehead worked as a waitress, a department-store clerk, and a door-to-door saleswoman. It was an embarrassing and probably a frightening time for her. At age twenty-two, she was without dependable employment in what was still to her a foreign country. She had half-jokingly boasted to family and friends that she would be famous within a year of reaching Hollywood, but for the moment she stood outside the golden circle of that city’s opportunities. She had to borrow small sums from her Chicago relatives, and, according to unpublished letters from her parents, depended for a time on a twenty-five-dollar monthly subsidy from them, in order to pay her Studio Club rent. Worst of all, her legal standing in the United States was in jeopardy. While she had been working for DeMille, the director presumably sponsored visa extensions for her with the immigration service, as was the custom in the movie industry. Without a permanent job or a powerful sponsor, she had reason to fear that her time in the United States was running out. At one point, things looked so bleak that Anna actually urged her to come back to Russia, or at least to return to her relatives in Chicago. Rand, of course, refused.
Pride was not a defect of character in Ayn Rand’s universe. She concealed her menial jobs from industry acquaintances by working in the suburbs, and she disguised her dire financial condition from O’Connor, who was making ends meet by working in a restaurant alongside Nick and Joe. She wanted her suitor to see her at her best—that is, to see the woman in Ayn Rand. She already believed, as she would later write, that romance should never be mixed with suffering or pity. Echoing her mother’s Victorian maxims, she also thought that a woman should avoid cooking or cleaning in the presence of her lover and steer clear of becoming her lover’s pal. O’Connor had materialized as “an answering voice, an answering hymn, an echo” of her inner world and deepest longings. Surely, her vocation as a writer would also materialize if she could learn to conquer the problem that constrained her. It was her old problem: the world did not yet understand or appreciate Ayn Rand.
She looked to herself for solutions. At night, in the mornings, and on weekends, she practiced her new language in journal entries and in letters to her parents and sisters. When she was discouraged, Anna and Zinovy tried to cheer her up. In one letter, Anna reminded her that, even as a child, she had considered bad things to be unimportant. She was a true child of her father, Anna remarked, because both he and she “put so much weight on success and so little on failure.” Zinovy wrote to say that everyone in the family “worshiped” her drive, purposefulness, and unfaltering march toward her goal, which was to write novels that would be important to the world. In an echo of a phrase Rand later used when offering high praise, he called her “my kind of person.”
Some of the stories she was writing were practice drills, imitating what she was reading: Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Babbitt, and Elmer Gantry, detective stories (“for the plots”), and short stories by her new favorite writer, O. Henry. (She even signed two unpublished stories from that period “O. O. Lyons.”) She was also absorbing the civil-libertarian iconoclasm of H. L. Mencken, Albert J. Nock, Gouverneur Morris, and, perhaps, Saturday Evening Post columnist and novelist Garet Garrett. She read and reread a charming turn-of-the-century novel of engineering prowess and conventional anti-unionism called Calumet “K,” which DeMille gave her as a present and which became her lifelong favorite novel. She was careful to make note of books she didn’t like: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (“mushy, morbid”) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (“pointless conversations about the meaning of life”). There was no use in looking for heroes there.
The topics and narrative strategies she chose in these early stories cast long shadows; she would visit them again and again. In “The Husband I Bought” (circa 1926), she dramatized something she would later call “man worship,” which involves a woman’s placing a heroic male lover above everything else in her life. Sometimes, man worship results in a female character’s having to renounce the man she loves in service of an ideal version of her love. In “The Husband I Bought,” for example, a wife leaves a “beautiful, too beautiful” husband so that he may guiltlessly marry another woman with whom he has fallen in love; the wife, now a pariah in her town, prefers to deify the “maddest, wildest” joy of her husband’s early love for her than save her reputation and her humdrum marriage. Interestingly, the story attempts to turn the tables on the old fictional formula of a wife’s self-sacrifice; this wife, far from giving up her own happiness in favor of her husband’s, claims to be preserving wha
t she values most: her memories, her fantasies, her inner world. Written before Rand found O’Connor again, it reads like an exercise in grieving for Lev Bekkerman.
Other stories reveal surprisingly critical views of American life and character. Rand seemed to be encountering the same essential envy, conformity, and mediocrity in Americans that she had seen and loathed in Russians. In unfinished notes for a stunningly harsh and antisocial novella called The Little Street (1928), based on the actual trial of a notorious killer named William Hickman, she took a page from Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis and presented a cast of small-town jurors and spectators who were fat, stupid, and placid: “human herds … who have but one aim: to ruin all individuals and individuality.”
In spite of the novella’s hateful tone, it formulates her great theme: the exceptional individual against the mob of men. Of the protagonist in her story, a murderer, she wrote, “He doesn’t understand, because thankfully he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people. Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.” (This, by the way, is practically a diagnostic description of narcissism, and also a description of Rand herself.) As to the actual Hickman, whose highly publicized crime had been to strangle and dismember an eight-year-old Los Angeles girl, she spends pages describing his admirable qualities, including his “disdainful countenance,” “his immense, explicit egoism,” and the fact that he is, in her estimation, a “brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy,” although she does not condone his gruesome crime. In a message to herself in her notes, she observed, “A strong man can eventually trample society under his feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough.”
At the time she drafted The Little Street, she had been out of Russia for just two years—too little time to form a reasonable critique of the average American citizen. Her loathing for the mob was partly literary, based on Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, and partly a memory she carried with her: of rioters and lynch mobs during the revolution and, perhaps, of generations of anti-Semitic peasants and priests who had led pogroms against undefended Russian Jews. “All the crimes in history have always been perpetrated by the mob,” she wrote to a friend in 1936. As a Russian Jew, she would have had to be wary of a single-minded crowd or even a political majority. That her remedy was not to understand “the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people” suggests a powerful defensiveness. “Psychologically, she never acknowledged that she experienced fear or self-doubt,” said a former friend, the psychiatrist Allan Blumenthal. “She hated being afraid.” Not Hickman, not even The Fountainhead’s Roark, but she herself would become strong enough to trample—intellectually, in any argument—the mob that might have wished to trample her.
In any case, the novella, intended to revolve around a trial, is so unrelenting in its fury that it produces a slightly comical effect; it is as if H. L. Mencken were guiding Nietzsche along Main Street. Yet it also discloses how deeply alienated and undervalued Rand must have felt in the late 1920s—and how desperate she was to gain the recognition she wanted. At the end of her notes on The Little Street, she added a personal resolution: “From now on, [you will permit] no thought about yourself, only your work. You don’t exist. You are only a writing engine.” The “secret of life,” she added, is that “you must be nothing but will. [You must] know what you want and do it. … All will and all control. Send everything else to hell.”
Ayn Rand and Frank O’Connor were married in the Los Angeles City Hall of Justice on April 15, 1929, either just before or just after Alice Rosenbaum’s visa officially expired. Two weeks later, she and her husband took a borrowed car to Mexicali, Mexico, and re-entered the United States at Calexico, California. She recrossed the border with a new name, Mrs. Charles Francis O’Connor, and a new legal status as the wife of an American citizen. As such, she was entitled to a rapid evaluation to become a permanent resident, and, eventually, a citizen. By June, having proved that she wasn’t wanted for crimes in Soviet Russia, she received a permanent visa, the equivalent of a green card. With only one exception, she never left the United States again.
Her wedding was “a shotgun wedding, with Uncle Sam holding the gun,” she later said, humorously. For weeks beforehand, O’Connor and his brother Nick Carter had joked about which of them would marry her and rescue her from deportation. But there was no real question about who would be her husband. Months earlier she had moved out of the Studio Club and into a furnished room, so that she and O’Connor could become lovers; given the conventions of the time and O’Connor’s natural gallantry and early Catholic training, he would have felt obliged to marry her even if her immigration status hadn’t made the issue urgent. As for Nick, his and O’Connor’s niece Mimi Sutton, née Papurt, would later say, “He loved Ayn better than [he loved] any woman. Ayn and Frank could not have happened nor have lasted without him. He wrote the script, directed it, and chose the cast. He fed them their lines and told them how they were to view each other. What he did lasted forever.”
The newlyweds settled into a small apartment at 823 North Gower Street in Hollywood, not far from the famous intersection of Hollywood and Vine. From the beginning of their marriage, she was jealous of Frank’s attention. “Ayn didn’t allow too much closeness between Frank and anyone else, even Nick. Frank was all hers,” recalled Hollywood friend Millicent Patton. “Just after the wedding, Ayn said, ‘I married Frank because he is so beautiful.’ Frank went along with her. He respected her.”
With no more possibility of hiding their financial difficulties from each other, they took odd jobs and worked together to make ends meet. Then, in July 1929, Ivan Lebedeff, a White Russian actor—at one time, an officer in the czar’s army—who had played in the production version of The Angel of Broadway, helped Rand to get a full-time clerical job in the women’s wardrobe department of the newly formed RKO Radio Pictures, where she worked for the next three years and eventually became the department boss. She started at a salary of twenty dollars a week and earned rapid raises to forty-five. Now or a little later, she began to send money to her parents, apparently telegraphing or mailing it to a semiprivate St. Petersburg store, where Anna and Zinovy used it to buy food and other necessities. This was dangerous, as the Soviet government was desperate for foreign currency and habitually arrested and extorted anyone who had access to money from abroad.
In October 1929, the stock-market crash shook the nation out of its high spirits and into what would become the longest economic depression in U.S. history. Rand’s permanent job was not only a stabilizing force in her marriage but also a precious commodity at a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans were losing their jobs. “I loathed [that job] and hated it,” she said in 1961, but “it was a godsend.” As a new wife, she also tried to keep house—“to cook, and wash dishes, and such”—at night, but she soon gave up and let Frank organize the household. He decorated their new apartment—the first sign she had seen of his ability as an artist, she said. She devoted what little spare time she had to writing. “I came to America to write, and I [have] not forgotten that. That’s something I’ll never give up,” she wrote to her mother’s cousin Sarah Lipton. With worries about her immigration status and money largely behind her, she began to compose another original movie scenario, a theatrical play, and a novel, each of which would help to put her on the map—at last.
The film scenario, called Red Pawn, gathered many of Rand’s current themes, preoccupations, and literary strategies and set them down on a remote prison island off the Siberian coast in the early 1920s. The story begins with the arrival by boat of a slender, beautiful, haughty American woman called Joan, who is secretly the wife of the prison’s most defiant inmate, a Russian engineer arrested for displaying too much “ability” while managing a Soviet factory. Joan, hoping to free her husband, has come in response to an advertisement placed by the stern Bolshevik prison warden, Commandant Kareyev, who is seeking a mistress to relieve his loneliness and boredom. Joan imm
erses herself in the job of seducing Commandant Kareyev and dazzling him with her Western clothes and values; he, in turn, falls passionately in love with her and with the brand-new idea she gives him that every person, including himself, has “a right to the joy of living.” When he discovers Joan’s identity as the inmate’s wife, the author stages a psychological coup de grâce in which neither the proud Communist nor the imprisoned rebel husband can be sure of whom Joan loves—until she betrays one of them in the story’s final moments.
There are a few notable things about Red Pawn. The prison, built on the site of a former monastery, provides Rand with her first opportunity to compare mystical Russian Orthodox Christianity with muscle-bound Communism and point out the similarities. One of these, an implicitly repugnant assumption that people have a duty to sacrifice their own interests and ambitions to those of others—others often inferior to themselves—forms the story’s core idea: that no religion or ideology may legitimately deprive a man of his absolute right to exist for his own sake, to have “what I want.” Also, in a letter explaining the finished scenario to a producer, she summarized her new method of “building a story in tiers,” starting with a plot that’s gripping enough to carry both the characters and a deeper philosophic meaning; in this way, she explained, an audience can choose to ignore the philosophic content and still enjoy the story. (That audiences and critics would actually do this—ignore her ideas—would become a sore point, but she apparently hadn’t yet thought of that.)
Most strikingly, Red Pawn’s characters form exactly the kind of romantic triad that Rand was now elaborating at length in her novel We the Living, which she had begun to outline soon after her marriage in 1929. In fact, Red Pawn is the first example of Rand’s famously overheated, sometimes roughed-up sexual triangles, in which a man-worshipping woman juggles two or more male lovers, typically in service of a high ideal. Once she and O’Connor were married, such triangles were never far from her mind, her work, or her life.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 10