Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [43]
By early 1928, however, her professional momentum was slowing. Of the half-dozen scenarios she had written for DeMille in 1927, none had been used as the basis for a final working script, and by spring, the studio had stopped providing her with full-time work. At the same time, the introduction of talking pictures was causing frantic realignments in the industry. Partly in response, DeMille closed his studio in August 1928 and joined the better-financed, technically more proficient Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He didn’t take Rand with him, and she was left without a job. Although in years to come she would again earn a comfortable living as a screenwriter—and be well known, even notorious, among her peers in 1940s Hollywood—she was never entirely successful at writing for the movies. Persuasive screen characters were not her strong suit, and Hollywood did not know what to do with the increasingly iconoclastic themes and highly stylized characters that were.
From mid-1928 until the summer of 1929—the last summer of the nation’s long, carefree era of prosperity before the Great Depression—the girl with the sign of a crown on her forehead worked as a waitress, a department-store clerk, and a door-to-door saleswoman. It was an embarrassing and probably a frightening time for her. At age twenty-two, she was without dependable employment in what was still to her a foreign country. She had half-jokingly boasted to family and friends that she would be famous within a year of reaching Hollywood, but for the moment she stood outside the golden circle of that city’s opportunities. She had to borrow small sums from her Chicago relatives, and, according to unpublished letters from her parents, depended for a time on a twenty-five-dollar monthly subsidy from them, in order to pay her Studio Club rent. Worst of all, her legal standing in the United States was in jeopardy. While she had been working for DeMille, the director presumably sponsored visa extensions for her with the immigration service, as was the custom in the movie industry. Without a permanent job or a powerful sponsor, she had reason to fear that her time in the United States was running out. At one point, things looked so bleak that Anna actually urged her to come back to Russia, or at least to return to her relatives in Chicago. Rand, of course, refused.
Pride was not a defect of character in Ayn Rand’s universe. She concealed her menial jobs from industry acquaintances by working in the suburbs, and she disguised her dire financial condition from O’Connor, who was making ends meet by working in a restaurant alongside Nick and Joe. She wanted her suitor to see her at her best—that is, to see the woman in Ayn Rand. She already believed, as she would later write, that romance should never be mixed with suffering or pity. Echoing her mother’s Victorian maxims, she also thought that a woman should avoid cooking or cleaning in the presence of her lover and steer clear of becoming her lover’s pal. O’Connor had materialized as “an answering voice, an answering hymn, an echo” of her inner world and deepest longings. Surely, her vocation as a writer would also materialize if she could learn to conquer the problem that constrained her. It was her old problem: the world did not yet understand or appreciate Ayn Rand.
She looked to herself for solutions. At night, in the mornings, and on weekends, she practiced her new language in journal entries and in letters to her parents and sisters. When she was discouraged, Anna and Zinovy tried to cheer her up. In one letter, Anna reminded her that, even as a child, she had considered bad things to be unimportant. She was a true child of her father, Anna remarked, because both he and she “put so much weight on success and so little on failure.” Zinovy wrote to say that everyone in the family “worshiped” her drive, purposefulness, and unfaltering march toward her goal, which was to write