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By Root 1608 0

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