She spent her time in movie theaters, especially in the South Side theater owned by Sarah Lipton, called the New Lyric. She saw 138 movies between late February and August 1926, largely thanks to passes furnished by Sarah. Sitting in red-plush seats, watching her then-favorite film director Cecil B. DeMille’s The Road to Yesterday and The Volga Boatman (ranked five and five plus, respectively, in her journal), Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera (“not even zero”), King Vidor’s La Bohème (only three), and dozens of other now famous classics of the silent screen, she was learning the American vernacular from the films’ title and dialogue boxes and absorbing film vocabulary and style.
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.