Speaking Sunday 8 with Anne C. Heller's re her comprehensive, fluent, convincing biography of the driven, sad, charismatic, overwhelming novelist Ayn Rand, who remade herself entirely in 1926 from a lonely, gifted movie fan of a Russian immigrant, named Alissa Rosenbaum, into a strident anti-Soviet spellbinder named Ayn Rand.  The delightful revelation of Alissa/Ayn is that she began and remained a sober, secretive little girl who discovered a cartoon hero named Cyrus in a magazine story, "The Mysterious Valley," when she was ten years old and remained devoted to the long-legged, fair-haired, jolly and heroic Cyrus for seventy years.  Cyrus later became her husband, her characters Howard Roark and John Galt, her beau ideal lover.  Surviving through wartime Petersburg, then revolutionary Petrograd, she finally fled Russia on a fantastic pipe dream that she would get to California and become a famous Hollywood screenwriter for Cecil B. DeMille.  In 1926, she sailed for New York, then entrained for relatives in Chicago, then borrowed $100 to go to Hollywood to stalk Cecil B. DeMille, grab at extra roles on the King of Kings set, pick out a handsome Cyrus-like amateur actor, Frank O'Connor, and then learn to speak English by writing screenplays for DeMille.  Cannot make this stuff up, and it all came true.  One of her early efforts, the Skyscraper, contains the narrative structure of both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged -- a heroic Cyrus outsider who is despised for his virtues and who finds love with a racy, forceful, overstated female figure.  Ayn Rand invented everything, resented everyone, regretted her family and past, forced all to obey her or to get out, and created in her novels a make-believe world she called individualism.  It was Alissa/Ayn, the heroine in a world of one.  Her made-up name itself represents aspects of her her romanticism, imagination, whimsy, isolation, longing.  Heller argues that Ayn was a version of Alissa's father's pet name for her, "Ayein,: short fo Ayinoshka," which means "bright eyes."  The surname "Rand" remains a mystery, thought Anne Helle presents the credible deduction that Ayn Rand chose it from the railroad schedules that for many years were printed by "Rand-McNally."