• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1611 0

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