AYN RAND EARLY in HOLLYWOOD : WORKING SUBSISTENCE JOBS and A ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHY

Anne C. Heller is the author.

Page 68 excerpt:  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 unpunished letters from her parents, 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 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 (her mother) 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. (His brothers.) 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.....

Excerpt Page 71 : 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 via officially expired.  Two weeks later, she and her husband took a borrowed car to Mexicali, Mexico, and re-entered the 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. 

Missy here:  Comments from Frank's relative that Frank loved Ayn more than he loved any woman, feel telling to me. She had moved from the YMCA accommodations, where virtue of the young women who stayed there, was said to be protected, into a furnished room so she and Frank could become lovers. The author suggests that because of his Catholicism this would have propelled him to marry her anyway. I wish O'Connor's sense of his religion and sexuality were better known as this comes into conflict with the reportage that, after his mother's death, at age fourteen he dropped out of Catholicism and became a strong, life long atheist like Ayn. One of the reasons is that frustration with him sexually could have propelled her into seeking what she could not get out of her marriage elsewhere.

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