That money, with the option payments from Woods, was what Ayn and Frank lived on for almost a year. Ayn was a promising playwright with a play about to go into production—and she was struggling to buy enough food to survive. At RKO, she earned about eleven dollars a week, at MGM about twenty dollars a week. Rent was forty dollars a month; her payments were often late. “I’d buy one lamb chop for dinner for Frank,” Ayn would recall. “I had to diet anyway, so I would do without. One day, we had fifty cents between us, and our only - food was the remains of a box of oatmeal. It was slightly Russian. . . . You see why I’m not very glamour-conscious and don’t like to live glamorously. I gave up the idea long before then, but that helped. There was no time to think of it... The tension was enormous because of our financial situation. I was plan- ning The Fountainhead at that time, but I had no peace of mind to really work, I could neither work nor not work—I was running a race with an undefined bank account.” And month by month, Ayn waited for word that Al Woods had obtained his backing.
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"That money": Ann Watkins found a job for Ayn as a free-lance reader, first at RKO and later at MGM. Her work consisted of reading books and manuscripts submitted to the studio, synopsizing them and evaluating their screen potentiality. RKO paid two dollars for a brief synopsis, and five dollars for a long one—"‘Few were long, because the material was awful. My advantage was that I could read French, Russian, and enough German to manage, so I got the foreign stuff, even Soviet plays."
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