Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (4 page)

Onboard the
de Grasse
Alisa was flattened by seasickness. But as she lay pinned to her berth by the motion of the sea she began refashioning herself. In Russia she had experimented with using a different surname, Rand, an abbreviation of Rosenbaum. Now she jettisoned Alisa for a given name inspired by a Finnish writer.
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Like a Hollywood star she wanted a new, streamlined name that would be memorable on the marquee. The one she ultimately chose, Ayn Rand, freed her from her gender, her religion, her past. It was the perfect name for a child of destiny.

The rat-tat-tat of Ayn’s typewriter drove her Chicago relatives crazy. She wrote every night, sometimes all night. In America nothing was going to stand in her way. Whenever possible she went to the Lipskis’ cinema, watching films repeatedly, soaking in the details of the filming, the acting, the story, the plot. In the six months she spent in Chicago she saw 135 movies. Her English was still poor, and matching the subtitles to the action helped her learn.

Completely focused on her own concerns, Rand had little time for chit-chat with her relatives. Asked about family affairs in Russia she gave curt answers or launched into long tirades about the murderous Bolsheviks. The many generations of Portnoys were baffled by their strange new relative. They began trading her back and forth, for no household could long stand her eccentricities. By the end of the summer their patience was exhausted.

Rand was eager to leave Chicago anyway. She was particularly discomfited by the exclusively Jewish social world in which her relatives lived. Since her arrival in New York, nearly everyone she had met was Jewish. This was not, she thought, the real America. She longed to break
out of the stifling ethnic enclave of her extended family and experience the country she had imagined so vividly in Russia. The Portnoys bought her train ticket to Hollywood and gave her a hundred dollars to start out. Rand promised them a Rolls Royce in return.
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In Russia Rand had imagined Hollywood as a microcosm of the globe: “You will meet representatives of every nationality, people from every social class. Elegant Europeans, energetic, businesslike Americans, benevolent Negroes, quiet Chinese, savages from colonies. Professors from the best schools, farmers, and aristocrats of all types and ages descend on the Hollywood studios in a greedy crowd.”
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Despite its international image, Hollywood itself was little more than a glorified cow town that could not compare to the glitz of its productions. When Rand arrived in 1926 the major studios were just setting up shop, drawn by the social freedoms of California and the warm climate, which meant films could be shot year-round. Roads were haphazard and might dead-end suddenly into a thicket of brush; chaparral covered the rolling hills to the east, where rattlesnakes and mountain lions sheltered. Besides movies, the main exports were the oranges and lemons that grew in groves at the edge of town. Near the studios a surreal mix of costumed extras wandered the streets. “A mining town in lotus land” is the way the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described early Hollywood. More negative was the verdict of his contemporary Nathanael West, who called the city “a dream dump.”
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But Rand had little exposure to the movie industry’s dark side.

Instead, arriving in Hollywood was like stepping into one of the fantasy tales she wrote as a child. Her timing was fortuitous. The industry was still young and relatively fluid; moreover, the mid-1920s were the last years of the silent pictures, so even though Rand had barely mastered English she could still hope to author screenplays. Movie dialogue, which appeared in subtitles at the bottom of the screen, was necessarily brief and basic. The action in movies was driven instead by popular piano music, which Rand loved. In Chicago she had written several more screenplays in her broken English.

Her first stop was the De Mille Studio, home of her favorite director. None of De Mille’s religious films had been released in Russia, where he was famous for “society glamour, sex, and adventure,” as Rand recalled.
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She had a formulaic letter of introduction from the Portnoys
and a sheaf of her work in hand. A secretary listened politely to her tale before shunting her out the door. And then she saw him, Cecil B. De Mille himself. By the gates of the studio De Mille was idling his automobile, engrossed in conversation. She stared and stared. De Mille, used to adulation, was struck by the intensity of her gaze and called out to her from his open roadster. Rand stammered back in her guttural accent, telling him she had just arrived from Russia. De Mille knew a good story when he heard it and impulsively invited Rand into his car. He drove her through the streets of Hollywood, dropped famous names, pointed out noteworthy places, and invited her to the set of
King of Kings
the next day. When it was all over Rand had a nickname, “Caviar,” and steady work as an extra.

She quickly parlayed her personal connection with De Mille into a job as a junior writer in his studio. Her own screenwriting efforts were unpolished, but Rand could tell a good movie from a bad one. By the time she arrived in Hollywood she had watched and ranked more than three hundred movies. As a junior writer she summarized properties De Mille owned and wrote suggestions for improvement. It was almost too good to be true. Less than a year after leaving Russia, Rand had realized some of her wildest dreams. She took lodgings at the new Studio Club, a charitable home for eighty aspiring actresses located in a beautiful, Mediterranean-style building designed by Julia Morgan. Founded by concerned Hollywood matrons, the Studio Club aimed to keep the starstruck “extra girl” out of trouble by providing safe, affordable, and supervised refuge. Men were not allowed into the rooms, and the residents were provided with a variety of wholesome social activities, such as weekly teas.

These aspects of the Studio Club held little attraction for Rand, who struck her fellow boarders as an oddball. In contrast to the would-be starlets who surrounded her, Rand rarely wore makeup and cut her own hair, favoring a short pageboy style. She stayed up all night to write and loved combative arguments about abstract topics. “My first impression is that this woman is a freak!” remembered a Hollywood acquaintance. Rand herself knew she was different. “Try to be calm, balanced, indifferent, normal, and not enthusiastic, passionate, excited, ecstatic, flaming, tense,” she counseled herself in her journal. “Learn to be calm, for goodness sake!”
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Even in a town of outsize ambitions Rand was extraordinarily driven. She lashed at herself in a writing diary, “Stop admiring yourself—you are nothing yet.” Her steady intellectual companion in these years was Friedrich Nietzsche, and the first book she bought in English was
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
. Nietzsche was an individualist who celebrated self-creation, which was after all what Rand was doing in America. She seemed to have been deeply affected by his emphasis on the will to power, or self-overcoming. She commanded herself, “The secret of life: you must be nothing but will. Know what you want and do it. Know what you are doing and why you are doing it, every minute of the day. All will and all control. Send everything else to hell!”
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Set on perfecting her English, she checked out British and American literature from the library. She experimented with a range of genres in her writing, creating short stories, screenplays, and scenarios. She brought her best efforts into the De Mille studio, but none were accepted.

Rand was also absorbed by the conundrums of love, sex, and men. Shortly after arriving in Chicago she had written Seriozha to end their relationship. Her mother applauded the move, telling her daughter it was “only the fact that you had been surrounded by people from the caveman days that made you devote so much time to him.” She was less understanding when Rand began to let ties to her family lapse. “You left, and it is though you divorced us,” Anna wrote accusingly when Rand did not respond to letters for several months.
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Rand was becoming increasingly wary of dependence of any kind. The prospect of romance in particular roused the pain of Lev’s rejection years earlier. To desire was to need, and Rand wanted to need nobody.

Instead she created a fictional world where beautiful, glamorous, and rich heroines dominated their suitors. Several short stories she wrote in Hollywood, but never published, dwelled on the same theme.
The Husband I Bought
stars an heiress who rescues her boyfriend from bankruptcy by marrying him. Another heiress in
Good Copy
saves the career of her newspaper boyfriend, again by marrying him, while in
Escort
a woman inadvertently purchases the services of her husband for an evening on the town. In several stories the woman not only has financial power over the man, but acts to sexually humiliate and emasculate him by having a public extramarital affair. In Rand’s imagination women were passionate yet remained firmly in control.
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Real life was not so simple. On a streetcar heading to work during her first days in Hollywood she noticed a tall and striking stranger. Frank O’Connor was exactly the type of man Rand found most attractive. To her joy, she realized they were both heading to the same destination, De Mille’s
King of Kings
set. After changing into her costume she spotted him again, attired as a Roman soldier, complete with toga and head-dress. Rand followed his every move for days. On the fourth day she deliberately tripped him as he did a scene and apologized profusely after he fell. Her words made it clear she was not American, and like De Mille before him, Frank was struck by this odd foreign woman. They chatted briefly. Nerves thickened Rand’s accent, and Frank could barely understand a word she said. Then he was distracted by someone else, and the next minute he was gone.

Never one to doubt herself, Rand was sure it was love. Finding Frank and then losing him shattered her. Homesickness, loneliness, anxiety over her future—all her pent-up emotions poured forth as she fixated on the handsome stranger. For months she sobbed audibly in her bedroom at the Studio Club, alarming the other girls. Then she found him again, this time in a library off Hollywood Boulevard. They spoke for several hours, and he invited her to dinner. From then on their courtship was slow but steady.

Raised in a small town in Ohio, Frank was the third of seven children born to devout Catholic parents. His father was a steelworker, his mother a housewife who aspired to greater things. Overbearing and ambitious, she dominated her large brood and her passive, alcoholic husband. After his mother’s untimely death, Frank left home at age fifteen with three of his brothers. They worked their way to New York, where Frank began acting in the fledgling movie industry. A few years later he followed the studios west, arriving in Hollywood around the same time as Rand. Like her, he was entranced by the flash and sophistication of the movies.

The similarities ended there. Where Ayn was outspoken and bold, Frank was taciturn and retiring. She was mercurial, stubborn, and driven; he was even-keeled, irenic, and accommodating. Most important, Frank was used to strong women. He was intrigued by Ayn’s strong opinions and intellectual bent and was willing to let her steer the relationship. Rand was captivated, both by Frank’s gentle manner and by his good looks. She worshipped the beauties of Hollywood, but with her square
jaw and thick features she knew she could never be counted among them. Frank, however, was movie-star handsome, with a slender build, an easy grace, and a striking visage. Her neighbors at the Studio Club began to notice a new Ayn, one more relaxed, friendly, and social than before. An incident the other girls found hilarious sheds some light on her priorities. “She apparently had terrible financial problems and owed money to the club,” recounted a fellow boarder. “Anyhow, a woman was going to donate $50 to the neediest girl in the club, and Miss Williams picked out Ayn. Ayn thanked them for the money and then went right out and bought a set of black lingerie.”
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Rand’s financial problems were triggered by the advent of the talkies, which shook the movie industry to the core. In 1927 De Mille closed his studio, and with talking pictures now ascendant Rand could not find another job in the industry. Unskilled and anonymous, she had to settle for a series of odd jobs and temporary positions. She fell behind on her rent and started skipping meals. This was not the fate she had expected when she disembarked in New York years earlier. Though she accepted small loans from her family, she was unwilling to ask Frank for help, or even to reveal the extent of her problems to him. On their dates she kept up appearances, never letting him see the despair that was beginning to suffuse her life.

Under the surface Rand’s unfulfilled ambitions ate away at her. When the tabloids filled with the sensational case of William Hickman, a teen murderer who mutilated his victim and boasted maniacally of his deed when caught, Rand was sympathetic rather than horrified. To her, Hickman embodied the strong individual breaking free from the ordinary run of humanity. She imagined Hickman to be like herself, a sensitive individual ruined by misunderstanding and neglect, writing in her diary, “If he had any desires and ambitions—what was the way before him? A long, slow, soul-eating, heart-wrecking toil and struggle; the degrading, ignoble road of silent pain and loud compromises.”
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Glossing over his crime, Rand focused on his defiant refusal to express remorse or contrition.

She began to plan “The Little Street,” a story with a protagonist, Danny Renahan, modeled after Hickman. It was the first of her stories to contain an explicit abstract theme. She wanted to document and decry how society crushed exceptional individuals. In a writing notebook she explained her attraction to the scandal: “It is more exact to say that the model is not
Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me.” Still, Rand had trouble interpreting the case as anything other than an exercise in mob psychology. She wrote, “This case is not moral indignation at a terrible crime. It is the mob’s murderous desire to revenge its hurt vanity against the man who dared to be alone.” What the tabloids saw as psychopathic, Rand admired: “It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul.”
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