Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [38]
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defiers of law and convention and solitary geniuses would now populate the foreground of many of her stories, from an unpublished 1928 novella called The Little Street all the way to The Fountainhead.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]