Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  Neither could Rand. When she later spoke of Paterson—infrequently, according to acquaintances—her comments were derisive. Close friends had no idea that Paterson had once been Rand’s most intimate friend, let alone her mentor. By 1959, the novelist seemed to have forgotten that Paterson had taught her anything or helped her in any significant way. As time went on, “she could not say that she had been crucially helped by anybody,” said a close friend from the 1950s and 1960s. She was grateful to her parents for freeing her from Russia, but she never mentioned the hundreds of supportive letters she had received from them in the 1920s and early 1930s or the gifts and loans extended by her mother’s relatives in Chicago. When she spoke of her neighbor Marcella Bannert, she recalled her as the social-climbing paradigm for Peter Keating, not as the woman who had helped her to find a home for Red Pawn. “No one helped me, nor did I think at any time that it was anyone’s duty to help me,” she would write in her author’s note in Atlas Shrugged.

  However decidedly Paterson was to blame for the final falling-out between the two women, Rand’s demotion of her friend to the status of a minor player in her life was a template for broken relationships to come. In large measure, her partings from people were based on principled complaints about those people’s premises (philosophical beliefs) and behavior, but once banished, they had as little reality for her as Ellsworth Toohey had for Howard Roark. “If she didn’t love it,” or still love it, “it couldn’t be great,” said a friend. “She was not interested in process,” said another, mildly. Yet she never stopped recommending the books she loved, including Paterson’s The God of the Machine.

  The price of being her friend went up. From these years onward, she required at least fundamental agreement with a system of political and moral ideas that would finally enter the world at large with Atlas Shrugged.

  TEN

  THE MEANS AND THE END

  1950–1953

  “I have nothing to sell. But myself. And no one wants that,” said Leo Kovalensky.

  “I might,” said Kira Argounova.

  The scornful arc [of his eyebrow] rose slowly. “Want to reverse our positions? Well, what price have you to offer?”

  [Kira] raised her face to a ray of light.

  “Look into my eyes,” she said very seriously. “What do you see there?”

  He bent close to her. “They’re beautiful.”

  “I have no other mirror to offer you.” She asked again: “What do you see there?”

  “My own reflection.”

  “That’s the price I’ll offer you.”

  —From the first draft of We the Living,

  written in April 1933

  By the time the movie of The Fountainhead opened in July 1949, to moderate box-office success in theaters across the country, Warner Bros. was boasting that ten million Americans had read the novel. “Monumental Best-Seller! Towering Screen Triumph! The Love Fire That Blazed on Every Page of the Novel!” shouted the display posters. As the movie arrived in theaters in New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Dubuque, Detroit, Gulfport, and Galveston, the Bobbs-Merrill Company had ample books waiting in local bookstores. In three weeks, fifty thousand copies were sold. Notwithstanding the movie, in years to come The Fountainhead would continue to be promoted primarily by excited readers, and it gradually became a publishing legend. “It was the greatest word-of-mouth book I’ve ever been connected with,” said a Bobbs-Merrill sales manager named William Finneran in 1968, on the novel’s twenty-fifth anniversary. That year, total sales reached two and a half million copies. By the mid-2000s, the audience for the book was expanding again at a rate of 150,000 readers a year, with six million copies circulating. Although three generations of critics could hardly believe it, Ayn Rand’s newly patented fictional formula of “metaphysics, morality, politics, economics and sex,” as she described her novel in progress to an interviewer in 1948, clearly worked with readers.

  Of all the readers and viewers of The Fountainhead, however, only one had personal meaning for her, she later said. This was a nineteen-year-old college freshman named Nathan Blumenthal. A few years after meeting her, he would legally change his name to Nathaniel Branden.

  Like Thaddeus Ashby, Nathaniel Branden sent his favorite author a youthful fan letter. That was in the summer of 1949, the summer before he entered college. He was living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, twelve hundred miles from his home city of Toronto, and was working as a clerk in his uncle’s jewelry store while taking a year off between high school and college. He was trying to write a novel. The first time he had read The Fountainhead he had been fourteen. He had read the book forty times since then, and parts of it a hundred times. Hearing a sentence from any section, he could summarize, if not quote verbatim, the sentence that came before and the sentence that came after. With its lofty view of life’s possibilities, its elevation of independence and creative work, and its rejection of dreary conventionality, it had inspired him and given him a program for living. Its author had become the heroine of his teenaged years. He was planning to start college in California in the fall. He was writing to Rand to say that he would like to know more about her political and philosophical opinions, and particularly whether or not she believed in capitalism. Like Thaddeus Ashby, he received no answer.

  In the late fall of 1949, near the end of his first semester at the University of California at Los Angeles, he tried again. This time, in reply to a question he asked, she mailed him a note listing her three published novels. Awestruck and hopeful, he sent another letter, a long one, praising The Fountainhead, posing questions about atheism, socialism, and free will, and pointing out what he thought might be inconsistencies in We the Living. Instead of being offended by this, she was so favorably impressed by his intelligence that she answered at length. She ended her letter with a short reading list on the strengths of capitalism. Although just starting a difficult chapter of Atlas Shrugged and ducking new social obligations, she asked for his telephone number and hinted that they might arrange a meeting. Looking back on the series of events that led to their first encounter, she always said that it was Frank O’Connor who encouraged her to answer Branden’s letters and to call.

  She phoned the Hollywood apartment the young man was sharing with his older sister Elayne, a nurse, one night in February 1950, waking him from an early sleep. A week or so later, on March 2, he drove out to the ranch at her invitation and they met. Dapper, genial O’Connor answered the door and escorted him into the double-height living room, where he watched as the forty-five-year-old novelist crossed the room to greet him. She was wearing a plain skirt and blouse, her dark-brown hair arranged in her usual 1920s forward-slanting bob. Branden, well scrubbed, with sharp, strong features and on his best behavior, was good-looking. He was immensely in awe of her, though, as he recalled, not intimidated by the aura of power she most definitely projected. She took his hand in greeting. Before they spoke, she gazed into his eyes. He later described the sensation as one of standing in the direct path of the beam of a searchlight. He liked being the object of such scrutiny, and she saw he liked it. She interpreted his lack of fear as a sign of strength of character—and a mark of the arrogance that was a stamp of heroes.

  Once they had introduced themselves and taken seats, he noticed that the room was peacock blue and filled with objects in green-blue, Dominique’s favorite color in The Fountainhead. (Although he didn’t know it then, it was also the color of Hank Rearden’s miracle alloy, Rearden Metal, and Ayn Rand’s favorite color.) He saw that his literary idol was shorter, stockier, and less poised than he had expected, given her descriptions of Dominique and the glamorous photograph that appeared on the back cover of his favorite book. She smoked heavily through a cigarette holder and spoke with a surprisingly thick Russian accent. Still, he felt that he had entered the ennobling world of The Fountainhead. She sensed that she had made a discovery and that this young man would be a significant person in her life.

  Many years later, Branden remembe
red what they talked about. She inquired politely about his background, and he explained that he had grown up as the only son of immigrants in a family of six in Toronto. His Russian-Jewish parents had never fully assimilated themselves into life in Canada, and he, too, had always felt out of place, unpopular, and awkward. For guidance and companionship, he had turned to characters in books, especially to Howard Roark. Was that weak? he asked. “Oh, foolish child!” she answered. “We all need that fuel. That’s what art’s for.” She mentioned Aristotle’s distinction between history and fiction: history represents things as they are, whereas fiction presents things as they might be and ought to be. That’s the reason people turn to novels for inspiration, she told him. Her agreement with Aristotle was why she called her form of writing “romantic realism.” By “realism” she meant that her plot and characters were not fantasy but a projection of what might be, and by “romantic” she meant that she infused her writing with a moral vision of what ought to be and wasn’t yet. In Roark, she had created an ideal man in a stylized version of the world. Her view of man as the achiever of heroic deeds through the use of his own judgment in creative work and in life—this was what she had brought to life in Howard Roark. This was what Branden loved about the novel.

  She asked him a series of philosophical questions, which she had also asked Ashby and other young admirers. What did he think of the faculty of reason? What did he think of man? Did he imagine the universe as a malevolent place where men were doomed to be defeated or a benevolent place where, by means of reason, they could accomplish whatever they set out to do? Of course he supported reason, Branden answered, hardly daring to believe that this brilliant woman was interested in what he thought. While O’Connor listened from a nearby chair or padded back and forth from the kitchen with coffee and sweets, she amplified her ideas. The basic issue in all her writing, she explained, was not so much individualism versus collectivism as reason versus mysticism—the conflict between objective thinking on the one hand and irrational subservience to a deity, a tyrant, or a group of people on the other. Capitalism was the only economic system in history to operate on the basis of independent reason; furthermore, without capitalism’s underpinnings, the right to own private property and to work for one’s own profit, no other political rights could be guaranteed. If the state could seize the wealth and property a person had acquired through hard work and the use of his own mind, why would anyone bother to invent new things? Glancing at Frank, who nodded, she revealed that she was working on a new novel that would explain all this and more.

  When Branden rose to go, it was 5:30 a.m. He and Rand had talked for nine and a half hours. She handed him her phone number so that he could call with additional questions. He drove away from the ranch at dawn, with an exhilarating conviction that the world really did make sense and that he could master it. He also had an invitation to return.

  Branden was involved in an on-again, off-again romantic relationship with a slightly older girl whom he had met while working for his uncle. She had been a sophomore at the United College in Winnipeg, where she had grown up. The two were introduced by a mutual friend who thought they would like each other because they both talked nonstop about The Fountainhead. The girl’s name was Barbara Weidman, and she, too, had read Rand’s novel in her early teens. That she happened to look like a Rand heroine was serendipitous; tall, blond, willowy, and lovely, she had delicate features and a diffidence that could easily be mistaken for cool reserve. Men found her attractive. Like Branden, she saw herself as different: for one thing, she was an intellectual; for another, in Winnipeg, where she grew up, she was the only Jewish child she knew until high school, and she was aware of anti-Semitism all around her.

  She and Branden started a sexual relationship in Winnipeg—Branden’s first. It didn’t go well. She liked him and admired him as a brilliant young thinker on philosophical and psychological subjects. But she was uncomfortable with him as a lover, and by summer’s end she was dating other boys. They both enrolled at UCLA—he as a freshman studying psychology, she as a transfer student majoring in philosophy, and they maintained a close friendship on the basis of their shared love of The Fountainhead, which at that time few students at liberal colleges admired. But Branden continued to want more.

  “Ayn Rand is fascinating,” he reported to Barbara on the morning after his visit. “She’s everything I could have expected from the writer of The Fountainhead, and more. She’s Mrs. Logic.” This brief encounter with the famous author had made him feel appreciated, understood, competent, and psychologically visible in a way that nothing else ever had, he told Barbara, and Rand had given every appearance of liking him, too. He promised to ask if he could bring the young woman along on the following Saturday evening, when he planned to visit Rand again.

  He phoned on Sunday evening, and five times more that week, and on Saturday evening at eight o’clock he and Barbara drove up the long, birch-lined driveway to the house. This time, both Frank and Ayn greeted them at the door. Although Rand wasn’t pretty “by any means,” her eyes were dark and magnetic and “seemed to be staring right down to the bottom of your soul,” Barbara would recall. Her face was square, but her mouth was sensual. Her exceptional intelligence was apparent even before she spoke. O’Connor appeared vaguely aristocratic, with a gaunt beauty and a charming grace, and was welcoming and warm.

  When they all sat down, Nathaniel explained that he and Barbara had met because of The Fountainhead. Rand seemed charmed. “It’s a wonderful fiction event!” she cried. There the evening’s small talk ended. The thinker and her new pupil dove into a discussion of economics, religion, ethics, epistemology, and the vast potential of the human mind. Somewhat bashful, Barbara didn’t say much but was exhilarated by the rapid stream of ideas that were new to her. Here, she thought, with this woman, in this room, ideas matter, with a life-and-death importance that both she and Branden seemed to have been waiting all their lives to find. She was also impressed by Rand’s obvious regard for Nathaniel.

  Like Mannheimer and Bungay before them, they began to visit every weekend, and then, by appointment, on weekday afternoons and evenings, too. Rand and Frank were always gracious; in fact, Rand spent hundreds of hours with them over the next several months. They were astounded by her energy—she wrote all day and stayed up talking with intoxicating inventiveness all night—and by her generosity with her time. She almost always took Branden’s daily phone calls from the city; their conversation could go on for hours, explaining why the young man’s phone bills ran to a stupendous thirty or forty dollars a month. When he asked why she indulged an undergraduate who hadn’t yet accomplished anything with so much of her time, she answered, “You will!” The gap in their ages and levels of achievement mattered very little, she said, in light of their shared ability to think.

  What Nathaniel couldn’t have guessed was that, once again, Ayn Rand was lonely. She was glad to meet an intelligent young man with the time and inclination to conveniently divert her from her unsatisfactory marriage. In 1949, she had worked for days and sometimes weeks in a row without leaving the ranch or, at best, the town of Chatsworth. Her prized Hollywood conservatives, who sometimes came to visit, were loyal political allies but uninterested in philosophical ideas. Paterson had written two or three letters after her disastrous visit, but Rand had answered coolly and the letters stopped. O’Connor, although always ready to listen to her work in progress, was now fully occupied and often tired; he went about the property, looking after the alfalfa, gladioli, fruit, and farm animals, including brightly colored peacocks, peahens, and caged white pigeons, with a pleasure and satisfaction that almost amounted to self-sufficiency. He created a modestly profitable business selling flowers to Beverly Hills hotels. When a friend came upon him dipping mums into buckets of colored dye, he laughed and said, “Not the sort of thing Howard Roark would do!” He was happy.

  He had also made an independent friend. A local woman who raised flowers and sold them from the front porch
of her house, this woman was “the joy of Frank O’Connor’s life” at the time, said a mutual friend, although there appears to have been nothing sexual in their friendship. Her name was Aretha Fisher. She and her brother Bill lived about a mile from the ranch, and O’Connor got in the habit of ambling over to see her in the early afternoons. Out of earshot of the Neutra house, he chatted amiably with her about the weather and flowers and usually fell asleep in a chair on the porch until late afternoon. Aretha told their mutual friend that she would wake him at four, so that he wouldn’t be late for dinner at the ranch. More than once, she said, he sighed as he rose and headed home. Rand never met Aretha and may not have known where Frank spent his afternoons. It was another one of the many satisfactions he found in his life as a gentleman farmer.

  In any case, Nathaniel’s looks and manner reminded Rand of the dynamic and determined Howard Roark. Like Frank, the young man had her “kind of face,” she later said. She also quickly concluded that he possessed the best mind of anyone she had ever met. From his first visit, she ranked him as a genius, she told Barbara in 1961, “and I really mean genius.” To earn that title, she explained, it wasn’t enough to grasp ideas rapidly or be able to manipulate abstractions. One had to have “a creative intelligence, an initiating intelligence,” and she thought she had finally found one in the nineteen-year-old psychology student. But she was wary, wanting to be sure that this intelligent young man shared her ideas and “sense of life.” She had a horror of being fooled or disappointed again, as she believed she had been by Ashby and Abbott.