Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  Rand saw a lot of Jack Bungay, who sometimes joined the male trio and their intellectual guiding light in all-night philosophical discussions. For a period of months in 1946, he, too, lived at the ranch. In the evenings, he and O’Connor enjoyed watching her perform a little two-step, with a cane, to radio music, à la Marlene Dietrich. “She was a very sensual woman,” Bungay recalled. “Beautiful eyes, black hair, and very beautiful lips, very prominent lips.” She encouraged him, as she did the others, to write. “You must, you must, you must,” she told him. He didn’t, but he and the others adored her and during that period were her only regular visitors, she later told a confidante.

  Her fondness for young men was apparent to her friends. Geologist and ethnographer Ruth Beebe Hill, who, with her husband, a biochemist named Dr. Borroughs (“Buzzy”) Hill, became close to the O’Connors in the late 1940s, witnessed one of the writer’s mild flirtations. At a formal Books and Authors Club luncheon in the Beverly Hills Hotel, featuring Rand as a speaker, Hill noticed a striking young blond man approach her to request an autograph on his copy of the recently reissued Anthem. In the car on the way home, “she said, ‘I’d like to meet him,’” Hill remembered. So Hill gave a party and invited the young man, whose patter quickly bored the brilliant writer. “The whole attraction was his looks,” said Rand’s friend. “He looked like John Galt,” the ultimate hero-to-be of Atlas Shrugged. “He looked like Frank O’Connor.”

  Young men were aware of her sexuality, too, perhaps for the first time in her life. Bungay recalled observing “a lot of sex in her face.” Evan Wright, a young ex-marine whom she hired to proofread her typescripts in 1951, said that she once stood silently by his side while he worked, exuding a powerful sexual magnetism that was far from disagreeable. She stood there for a long time. “I don’t know what would have happened if I had looked up,” he said. “Yes, perhaps I do know.” He was young and shy and didn’t look up, and she walked on.

  At the same Books and Authors Club luncheon, Rand uttered one of her occasional uproarious, and revealing, bon mots. During a question-and-answer period, a white-gloved matron asked where all those wonderful sex scenes in The Fountainhead had come from. Were they based on Rand’s own experience? Hill, knowing well that her friend could be prickly, winced, but Rand responded with perfect poise. “Wishful thinking,” she said, and smiled. Hilarity ensued among the audience of mostly wealthy women.

  At this early juncture, she was just beginning to set conditions for public appearances, in order to screen out disputatious hosts and potentially hostile audiences. “She will not speak with liberals,” Hill remembered warning the club’s president, a Mrs. Helen Guervin. Mrs. Guervin was required to call on Rand in Chatsworth before the author would commit herself to speaking to the group. The club president passed the test, as Hill herself had done before being welcomed into the circle of Rand’s acquaintances.

  There were additional, more-or-less permanent houseguests who came to stay at the ranch in the middle 1940s. She provided sanctuary to at least two European refugees fleeing the postwar Soviet occupation of central Europe. The first was a woman who, Ashby recalled, developed a paranoid fixation on him and eventually was evicted. The second was Marie von Strachow, Rand’s long-lost former English tutor from St. Petersburg. Von Strachow had been a close friend of Rand’s mother and, in 1925, had helped to prepare the young émigré for life in the United States. She seems to have fled Russia for Western Europe before the onset of the Stalin Terror. In early 1946, she managed to locate Rand through the American delegation to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees in Austria, where she was living as a displaced person. She wrote to tell her former pupil of the elder Rosenbaums’ deaths. Zinovy had succumbed to heart disease in 1939, she reported. Anna had perished from cancer during the siege of Leningrad, in November 1941. Rand later learned that her sister Natasha and her childhood friend and cousin Nina Guzarchik also had died, Natasha during a Nazi air raid and Nina on a ship in the Caspian Sea that was bombed. A year or two later, she discovered that Nina’s sister Vera was alive and had made her way from Berlin, where Rand had last seen her in 1926, to Paris to take a medical position at the Pasteur Institute. Vera had married and given birth to a daughter, Lisette, then moved to Lyon. Rand sent Vera’s family packages of food and clothing. No one knew what had happened to Rand’s lively and much beloved youngest sister, Nora.

  Rand’s reaction to the shock of her parents’ deaths was muted, but she declared herself anxious to bring her mother’s former friend to safety in the United States. Evidently, as a person carrying a Russian passport, von Strachow was in danger of being extradited to the Russian zone in Austria and from there to the Soviet Union. It took two and a half years of legal maneuvering for Rand to gain permission for “Missis,” as she called her former teacher, to travel to the United States, but in late 1948 von Strachow arrived in California and moved into the Neutra house. She lived there for six or nine months, June Kurisu recalled, until the women’s political disagreements created friction. Although Missis tried to be agreeable and avoid arguments, she “wasn’t a quiet lady,” Kurisu said appreciatively. “She would speak up at the dinner table. She would say just what she thought.” This made for an intolerable strain on Rand as she was working on a difficult and important section of Atlas Shrugged. Eventually, the writer arranged for von Strachow to live elsewhere in California and saw the woman no more.

  Assorted friends and family members also came and went. Two of Rand’s Chicago cousins stopped by to see her and were amazed that she was living in Marlene Dietrich’s former house. One of them, Jack Portnoy, the twenty-three-year-old son of Rand’s mother’s cousin Mandel Portnoy, marveled at the moat, the bright gardens, the rooftop pool, and the tree that grew straight through the foyer floor, reaching for the roof. Late in the afternoon, when Rand had finished her day’s work on Atlas Shrugged and joined Jack and his traveling companion, her favorite cousin, Burt Stone, in the living room, Jack noticed that she had a needle wrapped around her thumb; it looked like a ring, except that the point stuck up and out. What was it for? he asked. When she was writing, she answered, she sometimes pricked herself “to keep my thoughts alive.” He also noticed that O’Connor supervised the care of the house as well as the property and did the shopping for their dinner. Like other relatives, he found the arrangement odd.

  Frank’s brother Joe O’Connor, now an itinerant actor with a small theatrical troupe based in Los Angeles, visited when he was in town. As a young man in Lorain, he had hoped to marry a woman named Millie. Millie married someone else, gave birth to a daughter, got divorced, and, in the 1920s, moved to California. Joe became the godfather of Millie’s daughter, whose name was Rosalie Fitzgerald. In the late 1920s, the small girl often visited the O’Connors in their apartment on North Gower Street. Rand kindly appointed herself Rosalie’s godmother, and Rosalie was very fond of her.

  Fifteen years later, Millie and Rosalie enjoyed driving out from Los Angeles together after church on Sundays. On one such Sunday, Ayn revealed a facet of her background and character that took Rosalie and her mother by surprise. The four were talking about a newspaper article concerning a federal investigation of American Communists when Millie said, apropos of the conventional wisdom that most Communists were Jewish, that she didn’t approve of Hitler but agreed that “he should have incinerated all those Jews.” Dead silence ensued. Then Rand said quietly, in a voice that Rosalie remembered as beautifully modulated, “Well, Millie, I guess you’ve never known, but I am Jewish.” (On hearing this story, a longtime acquaintance of Rand’s commented that she didn’t believe Rand’s reportedly mild response: “I guarantee that her reaction would have been rage,” the acquaintance remarked.) Rosalie was horrified, ashamed of her mother’s bigotry, and frightened that she would lose Rand as a godmother and friend, but Millie wouldn’t apologize. “I’m sorry it has to end this way,” Frank told the women as he walked them to their car. That Sunday was one of the few times Rand disclose
d her Jewish background to anyone other than Frank, Nick, Mimi, and possibly Joe. On this day, her principled abhorrence of anti-Semitism, and, indeed, of any collective, group-based bias, trumped whatever generalized fear of humiliation or of tactical disadvantage she may have had. By then she would almost certainly have seen photographs of liberated Nazi concentration camps. A few years later she would tell a friend, “But they [the Nazis] were killing me.”

  O’Connor’s niece Mimi Papurt, now married and called Mimi Sutton, hadn’t made her way to California. But she and Rand wrote letters to each other. Mimi’s father, A. M. Papurt, the man who had once loaned the O’Connors money for an abortion, had died a few years earlier, leaving the young woman’s mother and two younger sisters impoverished—so much so that the elder of the two, Marna, had quit high school to help support them. Mimi had been badgering Marna to finish school, and in the spring of 1946 she asked Rand for help in bringing Marna to Boston, where Mimi and her husband lived, to earn her high-school diploma. She and Frank agreed to pay fifty dollars a month, plus the cost of transportation from Ohio, plus school clothes.

  The arrangement led to a misunderstanding. Marna had dropped out during the second semester of her junior year. To graduate, she had to complete three semesters. Rand was under the impression that the girl was supposed to graduate in one year. Marna re-entered school in April and finished her junior year in June. But she was forced to leave school again the following April, because Rand stopped sending money. The writer, who didn’t understand, or wouldn’t make allowances for, the traditional school-year calendar, was furious with Marna. “She said, ‘You promised me you’d finish,’” the niece recalled. Marna found a job with a traveling magician, whom she married, and eventually earned an equivalency diploma and attended college. But a strain developed on both sides.

  Readers familiar with Rand’s disapproval of institutionalized altruism often assume that she frowned on private charity. This is not so. She seems to have had a fairly conventional approach to helping others and was personally generous in the years before a cult following increased her tendency to be self-protective and suspicious. She made small gifts and loans and offered professional help and hospitality to relatives and friends whom she saw as deserving—that is, as competent, energetic, and capable of getting on their feet. But she did not see it as a moral duty, and her style of expressing her views on the subject could seem self-serving as well as immoderate and harsh. Charities focused their attention on the old and the lame, she complained in a letter to the director of the Studio Club in 1936, rehearsing a theme that she developed richly in The Fountainhead. Why didn’t anyone help the ambitious and gifted people? Who deserves help, the above average or the “subnormal”? Who is more valuable to humanity? she asked. In early notes for Atlas Shrugged, she observed, pithily, “Charity to an inferior does not include the charity of not considering him an inferior.” Years after the high-school misunderstanding, when Marna asked her why she had contributed to her education, Rand answered, “I considered it an investment.” Similarly, when discussing Thaddeus Ashby’s long residence at the ranch, she explained that she had been trying to spare a promising writer the hardships she had faced. Whatever her rationale for helping, she was often disappointed.

  If O’Connor was bothered by the dustup over aid to his niece or by the comings and goings of younger men, he didn’t show it openly. Ashby remembered him as placid, unconcerned, cheerful, and friendly. On warm afternoons when Rand had spent a productive morning writing, she would sometimes walk outside to find him in the fields and call him in for sex. “She had a certain tone of voice when she called him for sex,” Ashby recalled. O’Connor, he added, always came. The young man was aware that they were having sex because “they made a lot of noise.” But Rand wasn’t fully satisfied, he thought. “Frank was an undersexed person. He was very sexy in the sense that he was one of the most handsome men I ever knew. He could just look at you and project sex. But he never initiated anything.” Once, Ashby asked Rand if she wished O’Connor would be rougher with her in bed, and she admitted that, yes, she did.

  Ashby himself was madly in love with her, he claimed, but too timid and polite to try to seduce her. He said she gave him ample opportunity. She would lie on the divan in her study and invite him to sit beside her. They would talk about ideas deep into the night, while O’Connor slept upstairs. “We’d stop talking and stare into each other’s eyes, for sometimes a couple of hours,” he recalled in 2005, at the age of eighty. When O’Connor was away from the ranch, which wasn’t often, she would figuratively “leave the door open,” he said. “When I didn’t follow up, she would be mad at me.” She began to tease him about his shyness, even though he thought of himself not as shy but as careful. One day she told him the plot of a story she had read at the studio. As he remembered the story sixty years later, a male houseguest finds that he is attracted to his married hostess, who sleeps apart from her husband. One night, the houseguest dresses up as a Revolutionary War soldier whose ghost is rumored to haunt the house. Wearing his uniform, he enters his hostess’s bedroom. She wakes and gazes at him. He wants to make love to her but is too shy. Nothing happens. “Ayn said that I reminded her of him,” said Ashby. When the teasing became too frequent and intense, he said he moved out of the house. Like Mannheimer, Abbott, and Bungay, he took to visiting her once a week or so until he left Los Angeles to enroll in Harvard in the fall of 1946. During the 1950s and 1960s he worked for tiny libertarian magazines and became a devotee of Robert Heinlein, as well as of the effects of magic mushrooms.

  Rand remembered their falling-out very differently. In 1961, she told an interviewer that when she and Frank traveled to New York during the summer of 1945, she had left the ranch jointly in the care of Ashby and Mannheimer. Home again, she discovered that Ashby had broken his promise to remain in the house during the day while Mannheimer was at work in Hollywood. The young man had also driven, and dented, O’Connor’s Packard and then tried to cover it up, she said. In her recollection, he left the ranch that fall, having lived there fewer than five months, and sent her a long letter regretting his lies and errors and wishing he were more like Roark. Yet six weeks earlier, Rand had written lovingly about him to Isabel Paterson, calling him her adopted son and describing him as the image of herself at the same age. In search of reflected images of herself, she would say much the same about another favorite young man in 1950.

  When they were alone, Rand and Frank were again becoming impatient with each other. The admirer of skyscrapers and airplanes had never learned to drive a car; a friend later speculated that this was her way of ceding control in one small area of life to Frank. In practice, it meant that during her working months at Paramount he had to drive her back and forth to town each day, an hour each way, leaving behind his flowers, animals, and fields. Friends of the period sometimes heard him snap at her—not about her control of the household purse strings, although that sometimes bothered him, or about young men, but about her nagging him to watch out for germs, her tendency to wear snagged stockings, and occasionally her rudeness or her temper. Once, she had a tantrum because Frank was engaging in too much small talk with guests. Another time, on Thanksgiving Day in 1945, she had a public screaming fit because a Christian minister showed up unbidden at the door and, when Frank invited him in to join the small group assembled at the dinner table, began to lecture her about her heartless view of the poor. Frank, visibly angry at his wife’s vehement reaction, reminded her that it was an American custom to offer hospitality to anyone who stopped by on Thanksgiving. Few other people saw them argue in public, but O’Connor was apt to make deprecatory jokes. “Frank is the power behind the throne,” Rand sometimes told acquaintances. “Sometimes I think I am the throne, the way I get sat on,” a friend heard Frank reply. Another acquaintance recalled that Rand had once confided in her that this period was a bad one for their marriage. Exasperated by Frank’s intellectual and sexual passivity, she considered divorcing him, she said,
but decided to put it off until she finished writing Atlas Shrugged. She couldn’t bear to interrupt her work.

  In her public statements, O’Connor was still at the center of her emotional life. Passive or not, he had believed in her when she was almost without hope, and he had always put her writing first. He was “the only exception” to the rule that “nothing has ever mattered to me too much” other than creative work, she wrote in an open letter “To the Readers of The Fountainhead.” He was Howard Roark, she claimed, “or as near to it as anyone I know.”

  NINE

  THE TOP AND THE BOTTOM

  1946–1949

  The average man doesn’t have the strength to do what is right at any cost, against all men. Only the genius can do that. The genius clears the way for the average man.

  —Journals of Ayn Rand, 1946

  To the Readers of The Fountainhead” began the building of Ayn Rand’s public legend. This small pamphlet self-consciously depicted a woman who had been a prodigy from childhood, whose ideas were entirely her own, and whose primary values were intelligence, ambition, ideas, and achievement. It was here that she first confided her decision to be a writer at the age of nine. From that time forward, she declared, “I had in my mind a blinding picture of people as they could be,” suggesting that real people held little meaning for her. With memorable self-assurance, she added that her reason for creating the character of Howard Roark was not to “serve my fellow man” or to “save the world,” but to obtain the purely private pleasure of writing about a kind of man she could admire; she didn’t add: in a world she could control.