Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [37]
Oddly, Fern Brown recalled, Rand didn’t take any special interest in family meals or food in general, although in middle age she would recall being constantly hungry after coming to America, where she was able to eat as much as she wanted for the first time in years. She spoke little to the adult members of the family and, most strikingly, rarely mentioned her own family or the political situation in St. Petersburg unless she was asked. Even then, she tended to answer in monosyllables, “as though the subject didn’t interest her.” This could not have been because she didn’t care about the welfare of her parents and sisters. Over the next ten years she would write to them often, sending her sister Natasha American sheet music (including period favorites, such as “Yessir, That’s My Baby”), Nora movie memorabilia and clothes, and Anna American proletarian novels to translate for extra income, including Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. She would make at least one serious attempt to bring them all to America. But when she did talk, “all she talked about was what she was going to be and going to do,” said Minna Goldberg—in other words, about her future. From the very beginning, her psychological stance toward her personal past seemed to be: Don’t look back. Later, she would say that neither her family of origin nor the country she was born in had any determinative meaning for her, because they were accidental, not chosen by her own free will. She was a “being of self-made soul,” a point of pride.
As to Chicago, it wasn’t New York or Hollywood, and she viewed it as a stopping-off place en route to the West. (“I felt I was not yet in an American city,” she remarked stiffly, years later.) She did not know that to the north and west of the city lay a scattering of iconographic Prairie houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, who would become her chief model for The Fountainhead’s protagonist, Howard Roark, or that downtown Chicago was seeded with important buildings by Louis Sullivan, a founding father of the skyscraper and, later, one of her inspirations for Roark’s mentor, the architect Henry Cameron. (Like Cameron, Louis Sullivan died in alcoholic poverty and obscurity, just two years before she arrived in Chicago.)
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