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.
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.