Brief Ayn Rand Biopage 2
Bands of Red soldiers settled in Crimea and began to spread terror among the population, stealing everything of value and shooting and killing whomever they wanted. Ongoing battles between Red and White Russian revolutionaries left massive collateral damage on the population in their temporary refuge. The Rosenbaums took a train back to St. Petersburg (Petrograd) in 1921 to try to resume their former manner of life, but now under Communist rule. Her father’s pharmacy business was again confiscated by the Communist government, and to show his refusal to be exploited, Zinovy refused to work, which made Anna’s teaching much more a necessity if they hoped to support their family.
Ayn attended Petrograd State University, tuition free, though she privately despised the Bolshevik regime that allowed all workers a free education, and found Marxism offensive. She focused on her writing at college, became an ardent fan of Aristotle and detractor of Plato, saw great value in Nietzsche’s concept of a Superman, and discounted Christianity and all mysticism. Famines, disease, suspended employment, and purges of students and politically-based arrests of professors at the state universities under Lenin’s rule had made life harsh, but Ayn graduated and soon attended a performing arts school, the State Institute for Cinematography, where she learned script writing and developed an obsession for film.
An immigrant in the United States, having taken a train through Berlin and Paris and an ocean liner to New York, Rand was enthusiastic to experience the New York skyline she’d seen in silent movies that had made their way to Petrograd. While traveling by train from New York to Chicago, she decided to change her name to Ayn, probably derived from her father’s endearment of “Ayinotchka” for her—bright, or bold hypnotizing eyes. She got her first American job just after her 21st birthday at a Southside Chicago theater, the New Lyric, working and living with a cousin who’d sponsored her on a 6-month work affidavit, which the Russian government issued based on the lie that Ayn would study American film and bring her knowledge back to Russia to produce propaganda films extolling the Communist system (Burns, p. 18). She wrote drafts of screenplays and paid attention as her cousin translated her words into English. Though a quick language study, later when writing her novels, Rand frequently sought help polishing the dialogue of her characters.
After months of work on four movie scenarios, Rand traveled to Hollywood, where she had the quick good fortune to meet film director Cecil B. DeMille, whose wife put her up in a YMCA-sponsored residence called The Studio Club. Though he never produced her scenarios, DeMille hired Rand as a junior scriptwriter and cast her as an extra in his movie King of Kings, where she met and stalked her future husband Frank O’Connor, budding actor and Ohioan son of a devout Catholic father.
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