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By Root 1796 0

citizen. Her loathing for the mob was partly literary, based on Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, and partly a memory she carried with her: of rioters and lynch mobs during the revolution and, perhaps, of generations of anti-Semitic peasants and priests who had led pogroms against undefended Russian Jews. “All the crimes in history have always been perpetrated by the mob,” she wrote to a friend in 1936. As a Russian Jew, she would have had to be wary of a single-minded crowd or even a political majority. That her remedy was not to understand “the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people” suggests a powerful defensiveness. “Psychologically, she never acknowledged that she experienced fear or self-doubt,” said a former friend, the psychiatrist Allan Blumenthal. “She hated being afraid.” Not Hickman, not even The Fountainhead’s Roark, but she herself would become strong enough to trample—intellectually, in any argument—the mob that might have wished to trample her.

In any case, the novella, intended to revolve around a trial, is so unrelenting in its fury that it produces a slightly comical effect; it is as if H. L. Mencken were guiding Nietzsche along Main Street. Yet it also discloses how deeply alienated and undervalued Rand must have felt in the late 1920s—and how desperate she was to gain the recognition she wanted. At the end of her notes on The Little Street, she added a personal resolution: “From now on, [you will permit] no thought about yourself, only your work. You don’t exist. You are only a writing engine.” The “secret of life,” she added, is that “you must be nothing but will. [You must] know what you want and do it. … All will and all control. Send everything else to hell.”

Ayn Rand and Frank O’Connor were married in the Los Angeles City Hall of Justice on April 15, 1929, either just before or just after Alice Rosenbaum’s visa officially expired. Two weeks later, she and her husband took a borrowed car to Mexicali, Mexico, and re-entered the United States at Calexico, California. She recrossed the border with a new name, Mrs. Charles Francis O’Connor, and a new legal status as the wife of an American citizen. As such, she was entitled to a rapid evaluation to become a permanent resident, and, eventually, a citizen. By June, having proved that she wasn’t wanted for crimes in Soviet Russia, she received a permanent visa, the equivalent of a green card. With only one exception, she never left the United States again.

Her wedding was “a shotgun wedding, with Uncle Sam holding the gun,” she later said, humorously. For weeks beforehand, O’Connor and his brother Nick Carter had joked about which of them would marry her and rescue her from deportation. But there was no real question about who would be her husband. Months earlier she had moved out of the Studio Club and into a furnished room, so that she and O’Connor could become lovers; given the conventions of the time and O’Connor’s natural gallantry and early Catholic training, he would have felt obliged to marry her even if her immigration status hadn’t made the issue urgent. As for Nick, his and O’Connor’s niece Mimi Sutton, née Papurt, would later say, “He loved Ayn better than [he loved] any woman. Ayn and Frank could not have happened nor have lasted without him. He wrote the script, directed it, and chose the cast. He fed them their lines and told them how they were to view each other. What he did lasted forever.”

The newlyweds settled into a small apartment at 823 North Gower Street in Hollywood, not far from the famous intersection of Hollywood and Vine. From the beginning of their marriage, she was jealous of Frank’s attention. “Ayn didn’t allow too much closeness between Frank and anyone else, even Nick. Frank was all hers,” recalled Hollywood friend Millicent Patton. “Just after the wedding, Ayn said, ‘I married Frank because he is so beautiful.’ Frank went along with her. He respected her.”

With no more possibility of hiding their financial difficulties from each other, they took odd jobs and worked together to make ends meet. Then, in July 1929,