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.