Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [41]
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.
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