Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 48

  Although the whispered phone calls and emergencies didn’t escape the notice of NBI staffers or their friends and fellow students, there were still no rumors—not any, as far as surviving followers remember—about the romantic entanglement between Rand and Branden. Her preoccupation with Branden rendered her contact with other followers less frequent in 1967 and 1968, and when she did encounter them, she was edgy and suspicious. Her behavior during question-and-answer sessions at NBI was at times so censorious and even abusive that Branden asked students to write down their questions so that he could screen them in advance. When that failed, he and Barbara discouraged her from coming. In May 1967, during a heavily promoted public debate between Branden and the well-known, irrepressibly opinionated psychologist Albert Ellis, she threw an especially dramatic tantrum. The topic of debate was the merits of Ellis’s rational emotive behavioral therapy, which emphasized self-acceptance, versus the merits of Objectivist therapy, which aimed at correcting wrong or evil mental premises, though both approaches held that emotions flow from thought. Eleven hundred people had packed a ballroom in the New Yorker Hotel on West Thirty-fourth Street and heard Ellis declare from the podium that Miss Rand’s fictional heroes were destructive to the average person’s self-esteem because they were “unreal” and “utterly impossible.” Enraged, she stood up from the audience and shouted at Ellis, “Am I unreal? Am I a character who can’t possibly exist?” The crowd, mostly Rand’s partisans, shouted and booed. It took some time for the moderator, Lee Shulman, to calm them, and the debate ended on a sour note. Ellis, himself a notorious hothead, later described Rand as a full-blown narcissist and a manic-depressive, as well as “a fucking baby” and a fanatical bigot with Nazi leanings. A year after the debate he published a short book intended to prove that Objectivism was a classic religious cult, with Rand playing the role of God.

  She and Branden had a reflexive explanation for her anger. They called it “the excess of a virtue” or “the fault of a virtue,” meaning that her commitment to a black-and-white moral universe excused, or even required, outsized passion. But the more pressing problem may have been that she was tired of lying, frightened of being lied to, and aware of more than she was willing to admit about the secret of Nathaniel’s deeply un-Galtish inner conflicts.

  Spring 1968 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Fountainhead, “one of the most astonishing phenomena in publishing history,” as Nora Ephron wrote in a satirical essay in The New York Times. (Like the novel’s early critics, Ephron had at first missed its deeper point and had spent freshman year in college “hoping I would meet a gaunt, orange-haired architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect,” she wrote.) The publisher Bobbs-Merrill boasted that two and a half million copies of the novel had been sold, in hardback and paperback. It issued a deluxe anniversary edition, with a new introduction by the author and with Frank O’Connor’s painting of a cityscape at dawn, Man Also Rises, as the cover illustration. Rand’s anniversary introduction touched on the hardships she had faced when trying to publish the book, including the legendary twelve rejections by publishers. She emphasized her continuing commitment to the novel’s theme of man worship and chastised all collectivists, religionists, and positivists who still denied man’s grandeur. And in four seemingly heartfelt paragraphs, she thanked O’Connor for his years of dedication to her and her work. “He gave me, in the hours of my own days, the reality of that sense of life which created The Fountainhead,” she wrote, repeating a phrase from Kay Gonda’s theatrical cry of longing in Ideal, and added, “The essence of the bond between us is the fact that neither of us has ever wanted or been tempted to settle for anything less than the world presented in The Fountainhead. We never will.” Again, it is impossible to know what Frank thought.

  The first shoe fell in early summer. On July 3, Branden telephoned Barbara in her office and asked her to come to his apartment. When she arrived, he handed her a long letter, or “paper,” addressed to his patroness and mentor, explaining that the difference in their ages had become a barrier to his sexual response. With an oddly endearing neo-Victorian flourish, he called his loss of sexual desire for her “physical alienation.” The letter itself appears to have since been lost, but as Branden recalled its contents, it offered an apology for not telling her the truth, thanked her for all the years of support, affection, and instruction she had given him, and expressed his hope that they would remain good friends. Barbara thought it was as diplomatic as such a devastating document could be. Rand was due for dinner in Branden’s apartment at eight o’clock that evening. He planned to hand her the letter, give her time to read it, and then stand by to discuss it with her at whatever length and in whatever way she wanted.

  She didn’t read the letter. She skimmed the first two pages and construed the rest. Her reaction was manic and alarming. “You bastard!” she shrieked, according to Branden’s 1989 account. “You bastard, you bastard! You nothing! You fraud! You contemptible swine!” She ran to the telephone to summon Barbara. “Come down at once,” she said, “and see what this monster has done!” When the younger woman entered, Rand handed her the sheets of paper, trembling with rage, and went on hurling accusations. “Face twisted in hatred,” Branden wrote, she shouted, “‘Everything that you have ever professed to be is a lie! Everything was stolen from me! When did you ever have an idea of your own?’” Bitterly, she lamented, “Everyone else profits from my ideas, but I am punished for them, punished for bringing happiness to others, for initiating and living up to those ideas.” His paper was the worst and most depraved instance in a lifetime of being penalized for her virtues, she cried. The best mind she had ever known had rejected her as a person, and there was nothing left to live for.

  At some point during the hours of discussion that followed, he offered to make her a gift of his half ownership of The Objectivist. She rebuffed the offer as offensive. While he stood by, she swore to Barbara that she would never see or deal with him again. Her reaction appeared to be exactly as he had feared. Although she didn’t mention his sexual rejection of her and never so much as hinted that she was wounded and perhaps frightened by it, sexual abandonment was the unspoken accelerant of her rage. She accused him of immorality, irrationality, cowardice, and unforgivable exploitation of her time and her ideas. The relationship was over.

  Except that it wasn’t. Even in the depths of her rage, Branden was far too important to her to let go of him without a final fight. And while they talked, another thought struck her and put her in a panic. If he had been underhanded enough to deceive her about his feelings toward her for months or years on end, what else might he be capable of? Would he do something terrible to embarrass her in public or discredit her ideas—this traitor whom she had publicly called her intellectual heir and to whom she had dedicated Atlas Shrugged? “I can’t predict what he’ll do, and I’m terrified of what may happen to my name and reputation!” she cried in despair. Growing tired and tearful as the night wore on, she murmured, “My life is over. He took away this earth.”

  Finally, she began to speak of giving him one last chance. She set conditions: He must do nothing other than prepare his lectures, work on his book, and write for the magazine, activities necessary to earn a living. She ordered him to cancel the planned theater production of The Fountainhead and to severely curtail his social life. He must strive to apply Objectivist principles to himself, and he must work with Allan Blumenthal to correct his disordered thinking. To ensure that he would not do anything to damage her reputation, she demanded that he continue to meet with her for help with his psychology. As for the “pretentious, presumptuous” Patrecia (“actually, she is the girl next door,” Rand had jotted in her notebook, deploying a favorite insult), she had to be ejected from Branden’s social circle; for the sake of Ayn, his therapy with Blumenthal, and Objectivism, he must not see her anymore.

  “Appalled by Ayn’s terms,” Barbara wrote in 1986, Branden nevertheless agreed to all of them. Rand expressed hope that he
would “regain his mind.” But if he didn’t, she would ruin him—presumably before he could ruin her. Their personal friendship was at an end, but if he could prove to her that he was worthy to represent her philosophy before the world, she would consider letting him remain at the helm of The Objectivist and would not withdraw her endorsement from NBI, without which it could not survive.

  Over the next few weeks, she continued to meet with him, though less frequently. They conducted business, talked about his psychological condition, and, once, reviewed a chapter of his book on self-esteem. (“NB’s mind worked excellently on the editing of the book’s chapter,” she noted afterward.) She gave Barbara the assignment of keeping him mentally on track. All the while, she was making more than one hundred pages of shrewd, if painfully myopic, journal entries about what had gone wrong between them. She did not for a minute accept that her age was the real source of the problem. “I do believe that [his] ‘paper’ represents something that he is trying to make himself believe,” she wrote on the day after their confrontation, when she had read the remainder of his letter. Still under the misimpression that he was sexually “frozen,” she added, “Thus he can claim that there is nothing seriously wrong in him. “At times, her notes expressed an austere affection for the bright young man she had met and mentored; at other times, she struggled with overwhelming revulsion against his “filthy soul.” Most often, she displayed remarkable control as she analyzed him from every point of view consistent with her characters and philosophical convictions. At times, she wept in grief. Not once, however, did she ask herself what responsibility she might bear for the harrowing end of one of the two most important alliances of her life. Nor did she attempt to inhabit Branden’s point of view—that, say, of a young man entranced and half-consciously seduced by a charismatic, authoritarian mother figure from whom he lacked the courage to break free. Such empathy for the other was outside her range.

  Basically, what she found wrong with him was something she had struggled not to believe: that he had an advanced case of social metaphysics, the wound that disfigured the souls of Peter Keating, Ellsworth Toohey, and that chaser after shopgirls, Dagny Taggart’s weak and incompetent brother James. Now she returned to the theme, making a fascinating conjecture. Looking back, she thought she could picture Branden as a fourteen-year-old boy first reading The Fountainhead and glimpsing similarities between himself and Keating: insecurity, perhaps, worldly ambition, and an appetite for admiration. Terrified, he would have stifled such comparisons and made himself into a Roark by willpower, she speculated. Unlike the architect, however, the young Branden set out in search of what he “ought” to do to be a hero. In Barbara Branden he may have believed he had found a proper Dominique. When she showed no passion for him, his self-doubts festered.

  Rand argued with herself about whether he had ever loved her. She concluded that he probably had loved her at first, “at least to the extent to which any love is possible to a man in his psychological predicament.” She was sure of one thing, however, “with the full power, logic, clarity and context of my mind.” She was too much for Nathaniel Branden—as, indeed, she had been too much for nearly everyone except, perhaps, her father, all her life. The result, she recorded with shocking insight, was that Branden’s sexual desire for her “began to grow dim in about a year.” Since she was also the mirror and arbiter of the heroic soul he desperately wanted to possess, he couldn’t admit this, even to himself, without risking his self-image as “a real Objectivist hero and creative genius.” At one time, she wrote, he did have the potential of becoming a hero and a genius, and if he had chosen to pursue Roark’s values of independence and integrity she would not have been too much for him, she reflected from inside her world of fantasy. “But I am too much for the role-playing imitation of that hero, which he chose to become instead,” she wrote. She didn’t pause to consider that her gaudy flattery of a near-adolescent boy had inflated both his vanity and fear, as well as his stake in the enterprise of being a Randian hero—and had also kept him by her side.

  She identified two turning points. The first was the publication of Atlas Shrugged, whose brutal reception had destroyed his hopes for both his own and her intellectual “visibility,” she thought. That’s when he had become, like Lorne Dieterling, a man of action for action’s sake—although her notes for the novel about Dieterling were made long before she consciously ascribed this trait to Branden. From 1957 or 1958 on, “our relationship became a quiet nightmare,” she wrote, with Branden retreating into his disappearing-professor act and her sense of herself as a woman receding out of reach. The second turning point came six or seven years later, during a period she called the “Patrecia-break,” meaning, perhaps, Branden’s introduction of Patrecia into her social life and her ensuing anger. It was during this period that she became aware of his “wheeling-dealing,” which she considered a cheap way of avoiding his problems, and “his peculiar, very subtle or intangible pleasure in giving orders to people,” which she called his “big-shot premise, for want of a better name.” She described this as “a combination of faint shadings of an autocrat and a show-off,” proving she was more observant than those around her gave her credit for. Under the general rubric of role-playing, she wrote that he had probably been “role-playing the part of philosopher-psychologist and [in] the relationship with me” almost from the start.

  Inexplicably, she didn’t question his claim that he felt only friendship for Patrecia, whose “notary public” soul she imagined offered him relief from the burden of Roark’s stern example. Yet she also angrily described him as a man who had forsaken his highest values because of “a sexual urge for the bodies of chorus girls!” For his own sexual “physicality” was surely one meaning of his paper on “physical alienation” and age, she wrote.

  In fact, Branden was letting her discover the truth in stages. In mid-July, after the close of a marathon twelve-hour counseling session between the two, he revealed another piece of the puzzle: he (or his acting therapist Allan Blumenthal, or both) informed her that only now had he realized that he did have romantic feelings for Patrecia. No, he hadn’t made love to the young woman, he insisted, and tried clumsily to comfort Rand, the creator of such second-best female characters as Eve Layton and Betty Pope, by adding, “I know what this must mean to you, to be rejected for a lesser value.” The comparison maddened her. “How dare you speak to me of lesser values!” she screamed. “The girl is nothing! … This situation is obscene!”

  After this confrontation, her journal entries apparently halted. So did all communication with Nathaniel Branden. Her attorney and old friend Pincus Berner had died in 1961, but she called his partner, Eugene Winick, and set a date to cut Branden out of her will. “I intend you to be my heir,” she said to Barbara, who, in a blaze of guilt and apprehension over the imminent change in Rand’s will while she, Barbara, was still withholding parts of the truth, rushed to see Nathaniel; he had only recently told her, to her horror, that his affair with Patrecia had been going on since 1964. “It’s too late for you to tell her” the whole truth, Barbara recalled saying to her former husband. “I have to do it.” After calling Allan Blumenthal and soliciting his help, she did.

  Joan Blumenthal later said that she intuitively knew about the affair between Rand and Branden but was “afraid to say it, afraid to think it.” Her husband, Allan, was aware of nothing of the kind until Barbara told him the story on the afternoon of the evening they visited Rand. The well-mannered psychiatrist at first reacted with indignation on behalf of his cousin. Even when Barbara revealed the details of Branden’s secret sexual involvement with Patrecia, he defended Branden. “How could [Ayn] have failed to know where this would lead?” he demanded. “How could she have done this to Frank and you?” He had not yet heard Rand’s side of the story. Within days, he would change his mind and switch allegiances.