Ayn Rand and the World She Made Read online

  The second shoe fell on August 23, a warm Friday evening in New York. Frank answered the door of the apartment to Barbara and Blumenthal, ushered them into the living room, and took a seat in an armchair for the last scene in the drama of Nathaniel Branden. Barbara informed Rand that she and her ex-husband had both been lying about Patrecia. Nathaniel had been involved in a sexual affair with the actress for four and a half years. Barbara said she had known about the affair, but not about its duration, for two years. Rand’s face remained impassive as Barbara measured out the truth and falsity in each of Branden’s serial explanations for postponing sex with Ayn: the aftershock of the breakup of his marriage, his distress about the triangle with Frank, a loss of desire resulting from Rand’s early and increasing demands for emotional intimacy, posited on morality—all were partly responsible for his retreat. Age was another barrier, though not the crucial one. He had felt genuinely baffled by his growing love for Patrecia, worried about Rand, and was ashamed of the pain he was causing everyone. He had struggled to find a way to make her happy. But he had not been impotent.

  “Get him down here,” Rand said quietly and menacingly.

  Blumenthal tried to intervene. Nathaniel couldn’t handle a confrontation right now, he told her, and was already filled with horror and remorse.

  “Get that bastard down here or I’ll drag him here myself!” she hissed.

  Branden had been waiting in his apartment. He rode the elevator to six. Rand met him at the front door and pointed to a straight chair in the foyer. “Sit there,” she told him. She did not want him to enter the living room. He slouched in the chair, appearing numb and exhausted. She launched into a tirade of indignation and abuse that was almost unintelligible at times, so thick and rasping did her Russian accent suddenly become. She seemed not always to know that it was 1968 and that “it was Nathaniel she was denouncing,” Barbara recalled in 1986. “She was in Russia, she was a girl again, and she was damning [all] those who had inflicted upon her a lifetime of rejection.” “You have rejected me?” she shouted. “You have dared to reject me? Me, your highest value, you said, the woman you couldn’t live without, the woman you had dreamed of but never hoped to find!” Did he even begin to grasp what he had thrown away? Did he understand the magnitude of the prize that she had offered him—her love and her name, which she had wrested out of the opposition of a jealous world? Did he realize that he had abandoned the universe of Atlas Shrugged? And for what? For a social metaphysician’s backstairs romance, sealed by a winking familiarity with each other’s weaknesses and flaws! If Nathaniel were the man he pretended to be, he would have been blind to all other women on earth and would feel sexual desire for her “even if I were eighty years old and in a wheelchair!” she railed at him, in grief and rage, according to both Brandens.

  As she spoke, her eyes were glaring. Her mouth was loose and wide. She didn’t speak about Patrecia. With her gift for translating twists of plot and character into a tapestry of ideas, she chose not to address the blunt fact of sex between her protégé and her beautiful young rival. Patrecia physically resembled Dominique and Dagny and possessed the kind of Nordic glamour Rand had always celebrated and could never have. But she was the one who controlled her fictional fair-haired heroines; she maneuvered them into position with her mind and awarded them their dashing lovers based on their allegiance to her values. She had even managed to steer the courtship and marriage of Barbara and Nathaniel. Somehow, Patrecia had escaped from the world of symbols and abstractions, of “Patrecia or some equivalent,” and now taunted the novelist from beyond the covers of her books. Her loss was immense. Branden had been her “reward for everything—my life, my work” and the only man who had ever really made “visible” and touched the hot-blooded woman in Ayn Rand. His lying and apparent intellectual looting enraged her. Again, she did not admit to sexual jealousy. Yet when she cried that he had hurt her more effectively than her enemies ever could, she was speaking for that wounded stranger, pain, who was absorbing a mortal blow.

  She had created Branden and she would destroy him, she thundered. When she got through with him he wouldn’t have a career or money or prestige. “You’ll have nothing!” she shouted. She would stop the publication of his book, The Psychology of Self-Esteem. She would remove his name from the dedication page of future editions of Atlas Shrugged. She would denounce and pauperize him.

  Suddenly, she paused. She moved ominously closer to his chair. Had he told Patrecia about his relationship with her? she asked.

  Yes. He’d had to, he answered.

  Enraged by this final betrayal, she raised her hand and brought it down, once, twice, three times across his face. “God damn you!” she spat as red marks appeared on his cheek. “Now get out of here.” He rose to go, murmuring, “I’m sorry,” but she had one more thing to say. “If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health,” she said, “you’ll be impotent for the next twenty years.” And if by some chance he were not impotent, she added, any sexual pleasure he found would be a further sign of immorality.

  Before leaving, Branden looked at Frank. The older man’s eyes were open but vacant as he sat half swallowed by his armchair. Gazing at Ayn one last time, Branden was struck by an insight all pervasive in Atlas Shrugged. If she was hoping to injure him with her recriminations, he reflected, she must still believe he was a moral man; otherwise, she would know that he couldn’t be hurt by her malice. Ironically, it was she who was now depending on the sanction of the victim (himself), he thought, and closed the door behind him.

  Much has been made by Rand aficionados of her parting curse against her lover, first described in Barbara Branden’s The Passion of Ayn Rand. Such harsh invective proves that she was behaving as a woman scorned, said some. The incident didn’t happen, or it was the outcome of her love of justice, insisted others. In fact, it was fully consistent with her evolving appraisal of Branden’s character over the preceding months. One day after he handed her his “age” paper, when she still assumed that he was impotent, she wrote in her journal, “I believe that he has been attempting to cure himself by the primitive, concrete-bound notion of watching his emotions and waiting for some woman to arouse his sexual response somehow. … And if, by some accident of random factors and evasion, he succeeds in desiring some woman and in sleeping with her—it will not and cannot last; he will lose his sex power again, only with a stronger feeling of hopelessness and despair.” This had always been her credo: “To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’” Branden desired “Patrecia or the equivalent” out of weakness, inadequacy to reach his utmost values, including her, and an erosion of self-esteem, Rand suggested in her journal, stating, “The horrible truth is that he ha[s] no self to assert. “If her final malediction against Branden was rage dressed as philosophy, or delusion refusing to pay homage to reality, it was also a reflection of half a century of reasoning and concentrated imaginative power. It was Rand’s world, her creation, and it was closing down.

  The deterioration of her lover from a young Howard Roark into a self-destructive Leo Kovalensky, Kira’s gifted young lover who becomes a gigolo in We the Living, was complete. It was almost as though Rand had created Branden and then clung to what he might have been, just as Kira did with Leo. This time there would be no second chances. Ayn Rand never saw her protégé of nineteen years again.

  There are many who remember the period that followed. During the dog days of that explosive summer of 1968—pivotal for the protest- and riot-torn nation as well as for Rand—she notified key contacts that she had severed her relationship with Branden; she told them only that she had discovered immoral actions on his part. She gave no hint of her sexual history with him, then or ever. Not until after her death did Leonard Peikoff, her final heir and lone remaining full-time follower, uncover evidence of the fourteen-year affair. When, on August 24, she met with her attorney and “legal bodyguard,” Hank Holzer, she told him curtly, “I have broken with Na
than,” and explained that he had lied to her. Holzer and his wife, Erika, were as shocked “as if she had said that the sun wasn’t coming up tomorrow morning,” but they asked no probing questions. She told them that she had also become suspicious of Branden’s business conduct, and Holzer agreed to review the books of The Objectivist. It wasn’t long before he found the $25,000 loan made by The Objectivist to the diminished accounts of NBI. In the nine months since then, there had been no payments on the loan, except for a series of monthly rental credits to the magazine, whose offices were now also in the Empire State Building as a subtenant of NBI.

  Later that day, Rand met with Barbara and, in effect, forgave her for protecting Branden. Where there were divided loyalties, she said, it was understandable that a man-worshipping woman would stand by the man she had married. She embraced the younger woman as her heir apparent and offered her a salary to assume Branden’s former position as co-editor of The Objectivist. She also either encouraged Barbara to draft a plan to continue operations at NBI or reluctantly agreed to let her do so. She sent Barbara to inform her disgraced heir of certain nonnegotiable demands: that he cede his half interest in The Objectivist to Rand, without compensation; that he transfer ownership of NBI to Barbara; that he inform the staff and all associates that he was relinquishing participation in Rand-related enterprises; and that he limit himself to saying only that he was guilty of immoral behavior of such severity that Rand had broken with him. If he did not comply with these demands, Rand would create a public scandal. If he did comply, she would write a short paragraph for The Objectivist explaining that, because of certain improprieties, he no longer spoke for Objectivism or for her.

  The designated guilty party agreed to give up The Objectivist, but only if Rand conveyed copyrights to him on dozens of essays he had published over the years. The essays formed the spine of his partly finished book. She agreed but refused to commit her promise to writing.

  On August 28, Branden held an NBI staff meeting and formally resigned from both the magazine and the institute. According to his nephew, Jonathan Hirschfeld, who attended the meeting with Branden’s sister Florence, his presentation was brief and anguished. He had done something “unforgivable” and had “betrayed the principles of Objectivism,” he announced, and Ayn had therefore required him to withdraw from NBI. Since he didn’t explain what he had done, he “left everybody completely mystified,” recalled Hirschfeld. “But you could see that he was [a] broken [man], and that he was confessing to something real.” The volunteers and secretaries were shocked and frightened, both for their mission and their jobs. Then, beginning the next day, hundreds of followers began to phone or arrive at the office, crying and begging to be told what had come between their two icons. Said Branden later, “We were like mother and father figures” to thousands of young members of the movement. Rumors “spread like wildfire,” he wrote in 1989: he was a drug addict, a drinker, a thief, and a child molester. In his years of lecturing, prescribing, and sometimes posturing or bullying from his position of authority, he had made few friends, and some associates were not unhappy to see him go.

  The issue of NBI became moot. Barbara and Wilfred Schwartz, the business manager, drafted a plan for a scaled-down but potentially still-profitable lecture organization. By the time they and Hank Holzer, who had approved the plan, presented it to Rand, she had decided against continuing NBI. She was weary of the risks and obligations she bore as the figurehead of a crusade that was often in the news. NBI had been central in adding “philosopher” to her designation as a novelist, a development she had appreciated and enjoyed—and then adding “cult leader” to her reputation as a thinker. “I am not a teacher by professional and personal inclination,” she wrote some weeks later. “My way of spreading ideas is by the written, not the spoken word.” To Barbara, she said, “I won’t hand my endorsement and reputation to anyone, for any reason! I can’t run a business and I can’t let anyone else run it when it carries my name!” She spoke with such vehemence that Barbara didn’t argue; indeed, Barbara remembered, it was with a sense of liberation that she agreed to close the doors of NBI. But she was angered by Rand’s escalating accusations and threats against Nathaniel, which the older woman shouted out in bursts of anger mixed with grief and fear. She swore that she would not merely write a paragraph in The Objectivist—she would expose him to the world. She would deny his book a chance at publication and create a public scandal that would deprive him of a license to practice psychology, which he had recently applied for in New Jersey.

  Ironically, Rand made her decision to close NBI on September 2, exactly twenty-two years to the day after she had written, “Who is John Galt?” at the head of a blank sheet of paper. No doubt, she was relieved to be rid of a set of duties she did not enjoy. “I never wanted and do not now want to be the leader of a ‘movement,’” she wrote in The Objectivist. A philosophical and cultural movement had been Branden’s idea and his accomplishment. Now that her brilliant star, as she once called him, had faded in the light of day, his business ventures and the organized following he had built held little interest for her.

  Barbara, too, was quickly pulled into the gravitational field of Rand’s anger. On September 3, she confided to two close friends that she was concerned about the woman’s deteriorating mental condition and increasingly “reckless” behavior. Predictably, one of them told Rand, and that evening Rand summoned Barbara to a meeting to explain her comments in front of Rand and the group. Barbara knew the script and refused to go. In absentia, her friends found her guilty of making false and immoral statements; and after nineteen years of almost daily contact with the writer and visionary she had loved, she was summarily dismissed. Without much evidence, the great woman and generations of her disciples linked Barbara’s apparent “sudden switch” of attitude toward Rand to the loss of NBI, casting her along with Nathaniel as the successfully wily looter of an aging naïf. In this, Rand’s supporters draw an erroneously unflattering picture of their idol. Rand was not unobservant, and was not easily surprised. She was worn out with anger. She and Barbara would see each other only once again, shortly before the older woman’s death.

  It didn’t end there. Rand made good on her threat to damage Branden, or protect herself, or both. She contacted her agent Perry Knowlton at Curtis Brown, Ltd., and her editors at NAL and asked them to block publication of Branden’s book. The literary agency declined to participate, but when Branden missed his deadline, NAL’s affiliate World Publishing canceled his contract. She also refused to return his copyrights to him—that is, unless he and Barbara agreed in writing never to discuss the nature of Nathaniel’s relationship with her or answer any public accusations she might make against them. “I knew that this was plain, undiluted evil,” Branden wrote somewhat hyperbolically in 1989. “What happened to property rights?” he scornfully asked Holzer, and refused to sign. A year later, Ed Nash, a savvy marketer, launched a small company to publish The Psychology of Self-Esteem—without copyrights, and without any trouble from Rand. This was followed by Breaking Free in 1970, The Disowned Self in 1971, and many other books on aspects of self-esteem. Thus did Branden become known as the father of the self-esteem movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Rand also kept her threat to thwart Branden’s efforts to get a license, but despite her intervention he was certified by New Jersey in 1969.

  Now the Brandens went on the defensive. “You’ve got to understand,” Branden recalled Barbara telling him. “Ayn wants you dead!” The novelist’s allies began to hear reports that the Brandens had been screaming hysterical insults and threats against Rand in front of staffers who were being laid off and were packing to go. “The substance of [the Brandens’] accusations was that I had been unjust to them,” she mildly wrote in the October issue of The Objectivist; by then she had ordered the magazine moved into a new office, on East Thirty-fourth Street. In fact, as she knew, they had gone further in their comments in an effort to safeguard themselves against the damage they were aware was being
done to them.

  One afternoon, Holzer recalled, Branden’s sister and longtime office manager, Elayne Kalberman, called and asked him to come to NBI. According to Holzer’s recollection, he entered the half-emptied office to find staffers milling about, while Elayne, her husband, Harry, Barbara, and Nathaniel stood conferring in low voices. “Tell him. Tell him,” he recalled Nathaniel urging Barbara when he joined them. Barbara took Holzer into her private office, closed the door, and nervously informed him that Ayn and Nathaniel had been having an affair. Holzer didn’t believe it. “Nathan had so much to lose—he had built this whole empire,” Holzer said in an interview in 2006. “I thought he would say anything [including making up an affair] to keep it going.” Agitated himself, the attorney hurried home to his apartment (located across the street from Rand’s) and phoned his star client, whom he perceived to be an innocent victim of Branden’s lies. Rand listened as he repeated what he had been told, then asked calmly, “What do you think?” He answered, “It’s unthinkable,” and added a comment to the effect that the very possibility was too disgusting to consider. She said mildly, “Oh, yes, I see.” But “from then on, I think my days were numbered,” Holzer recalled. Eighteen months later, in early 1970, she gave him and his wife their walking papers, on the pretext that they had repeated an item of gossip that wasn’t true. “I carried through everything to do with the breakup,” he remarked, “and then she [found] a reason to get rid of me.” It wasn’t until many years later that he was persuaded of the truth of the affair, and then he understood that his expression of disgust had deeply angered and offended her.