Other than Nathaniel and Barbara, the O’Connors most often saw Ruth Beebe Hill and her husband, Buzzy, who were transplanted mid-westerners and avid Fountainhead enthusiasts. Buzzy, a medical doctor, conducted cancer research at the new Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance. Ruth, a crisp, high-spirited woman of thirty-six, was an ethnographer, a mountain climber, and yet another person who had memorized long passages from The Fountainhead. Because she loved its celebration of creativity and independence, she asked a college friend—Rand’s then-current typist, Jean Elliott—to arrange an introduction. Rand agreed and invited the two women to visit her one evening in late summer 1949.
What happened next reveals Rand’s mixed reaction to her fans in the 1940s. After introductions and a few eager exchanges about The Fountainhead, Hill disclosed that she had not only memorized The Fountainhead but had also memorized Anthem, and that she liked to give dramatic recitations from the novels to garden clubs and civic groups. Rand was astounded. “What else have you memorized?” she asked. “Plato,” Hill answered, dishonestly, and then realized that she had made a big mistake. The author narrowed her eyes and asked, “Plato? The father of Communism?” In truth, Hill had only wanted to impress her hostess and had racked her brain for the loftiest writer she knew. O’Connor broke the menacing silence. He said, “What Ruth probably means, Ayn, is that she was required to memorize passages from Plato and other philosophers in college.” Then he walked over to Hill, who was sitting on the floor, took her hand, drew her to her feet, and led her to a chair near the fire.
Rand accepted this explanation, and the two women quickly hit it off. Since Hill had grown up near Lorain, Ohio, and her husband, Buzzy, loved to garden almost as much as Frank did, the Hills and O’Connors became friends. During the next two years, until October 1951, the transplants often drove seventy-five miles from their house in Newport Beach to Chatsworth to dine and converse with the O’Connors.
Ruth Hill glimpsed Rand in moods and postures few others did. Rand rarely dressed up, but when Hill invited Ayn and Frank to dinner shortly after the couples met, Ayn wore a black silk evening gown designed by Adrian, embossed with planets, moon, and stars and trailing a twelve-inch fan-shaped train. Over cocktails she twirled and posed, laughed and showed off, as she had done with her new mink coat at the Herald Tribune. Hill sometimes spotted a radiant little girl inside the formidable writer—when she found Rand listening to her “tiddlywink” music, for example, and once, during a conversation Hill no longer recalled, when Rand made such a sweet remark that Hill rose and patted the novelist on the head. One night Rand spilled salt on a restaurant table and surprised the Hills by throwing a pinch of it over her left shoulder, an ancient rite to blind the devil. Most uncharacteristically, Hill also observed her in the role of witness to a UFO. One Saturday afternoon, Rand greeted the Hills by beckoning Ruth upstairs, into the immense master bedroom, where tall glass windows lined a wall to the left of the bed. “Do you see those junipers?” she asked, pointing to a row of twelve-foot bushes about half an acre from the house. “A UFO came by there last night.” Stunned, Hill asked for details. “It was hovering just above the junipers and then flying in slow motion,” she said. It was round and its outer edges were lighted, she continued, and it made no sound. By the time she woke Frank and led him to the window, it had moved out of sight. “Did you really see this?” Hill asked. “I saw it,” said Rand. The story seems to demonstrate her confidence in the ability of her mind to interpret the evidence of her senses. As the years went by, this particular confidence would not always serve her well.
Then, suddenly, Barbara and Nathaniel were leaving. The philosophy major earned her bachelor’s degree in the spring of 1951 and enrolled in the master’s degree program at New York University. Nathaniel, about to be a college junior, decided to go with her and study psychology at NYU. In later years, he could hardly reconstruct his reasoning, so astonished was he at his readiness to leave the most significant relationship of his life. But with Rand’s encouragement, Barbara and he had become lovers again and were committed to making it work.
In late June, the two stood in the O’Connors’ driveway and told their older friends good-bye. Everyone promised to call and write. Ayn, her arm entwined in her husband’s, vowed that when Atlas was completed she and Frank would join “the children” in New York. As the young couple waved and drove away, she was surprised to find herself crying. She had not anticipated the emptiness she felt when they were gone, she said, or just how much they had come to mean to her.
Ruth and Buzzy were on hand to witness some of the phone calls that took place during that summer and fall of 1951. “It’s the kids!” O’Connor would call, and Rand would hurry to the phone. Always a phone enthusiast, she talked to Branden for hours at a time—about New York, about his classes and the relatively advanced intellectual atmosphere at NYU, about her day’s work on the novel. They discussed Barbara; Branden reported that during a summer trip to Canada Barbara had again been involved with an old boyfriend. She seemed to be full of confusion about her behavior, he said, but didn’t add, and perhaps didn’t need to add, that he was frustrated, humiliated, and enraged by it. Rand and he also exchanged letters. The aspiring psychologist wrote to the thinker that he looked at her photograph on his mantel every day, and every day he found her more attractive. “I don’t know whether it’s love or what,” he wrote. To Frank, he joked, “My offer is still open to trade the picture for the real thing. What do you say?” He recalled thinking that his letters were funny. He wasn’t aware that he was behaving seductively, he later wrote.
It had to be obvious to O’Connor that his wife and Branden were flirting, and had been for months, although she, too, professed not to know it at the time. “I suppose it was a kind of suppression or repression or something,” she later told Branden. “I was so cautious in the beginning. And yet, wasn’t I already feeling … almost everything?” Barbara, too, claimed that none of them was conscious of what was rising to the surface. “If Ayn had designs on Nathaniel,” she said, “it wasn’t Nathaniel at age nineteen. He was [only] a kid.” To a retrospective observer, it appears likely that she did.
In late September 1951, Rand completed the twenty-first chapter of Atlas Shrugged, the first chapter of what would become the third and final part of the novel. It was called “Atlantis.” In it, 640 pages into the book, Dagny meets Rand’s ultimate hero, John Galt. “The shape of his mouth was pride,” Rand writes of Galt. Like Leo Kovalensky’s face in We the Living, Galt’s is ruthless and certain; like Nathaniel Branden’s, it is “a face with no fear of being seen or of seeing.” For Dagny, and for Rand, “This was her world … this was the way men were meant to be.” Although in the next chapter the heroine turns back to the world to try to save it, the author, elated by her days and nights in company with the “real people” of Galt’s Gulch, decided to pursue her own Atlantis, now.
On the evening after she finished “Atlantis,” she phoned Branden and announced that she and Frank were moving to New York. “I can’t stand California any longer, darling!” she cried, breathless with excitement. She repeated a comment O’Connor had made, as though it were a joke: “He says … I can’t live without you!” Frank felt the same way she did about leaving California, she assured him; Frank, too, couldn’t wait to arrive in New York. Pincus Berner, her old friend and lawyer, was searching for a suitable apartment. They would pack, drive across the country, and arrive within three weeks.
On the long drive in Frank’s new Cadillac convertible, they stopped for a day or two in Ouray, Colorado, an old gold-mining town a few miles east of Telluride, whose surroundings contributed to the topography of Galt’s Gulch. As they continued east, they may have passed the former site of Nikola Tesla’s scientific laboratory, which had stood on a mountaintop near Colorado Springs in the early 1900s; the experiments the eccentric genius had made in harnessing electricity from the atmosphere and transmitting it wirelessly through earth and air may have provided a model
for the revolutionary new motor invented by Galt. (Tesla also invented a fantastical but possibly workable “death ray” that Rand may have borrowed, in part, for Dr. Stadler’s terrifying weapon, Project X.) Along with Edison, Tesla became one of Rand’s models for her hero. She and O’Connor stopped in Cleveland, where they took Frank’s sister Agnes Papurt and her youngest daughter, Connie, out to dinner. Connie recalled that her exotic aunt by marriage wore a modish blue sharkskin pantsuit, its glamour undercut by brown ankle socks in black pumps, and puffed on a cigarette holder that seemed “as long as my arm.” Rand explained that Uncle Frank was in charge of safeguarding the manuscript of Atlas Shrugged, which he took with him to the delicatessen where they ate. It was in a case attached by a chain to his wrist, like a handcuff, Connie recalled. “He uncuffed it for dinner, I think with a key. We ate. They paid. He locked it to his wrist again, and left.”
Berner had leased them an apartment at 36 East Thirty-sixth Street, across a tree-lined street from the beautiful McKim, Mead and White-designed Pierpont Morgan Library. On October 24, they took occupancy of apartment 5-A. Their furniture had preceded them by a day, but the apartment was small, and much had been left behind in care of the Hills, who were to live at the ranch while they were away. Because they didn’t plan to drive in New York, they gave their convertible car to Branden.
The younger man later claimed that he felt nothing but pleasure on learning that this middle-aged celebrity was coming to join him in New York. Although Barbara told him that she, too, was delighted, she was aware of having reservations. She had enrolled at NYU with a desire to start a new life, on her own. First Branden had followed; now Rand. She knew that her lover had spoken to Rand about her flirtations and infidelities, and she anticipated personal pressure on Rand’s arrival—about Branden and about her inner conflicts. “Part of me wanted to be free. To find out what my own way was and to go that way. I wanted it desperately,” she said in 2006. But that was not to be.
Frank O’Connor didn’t write many letters, but when he and Rand were settled in New York he wrote to Ruth and Buzzy Hill. The letter was written in ink on lined notebook paper, Hill remembered, and was wittily titled “The Fountain Pen, by Frank O’Connor.” He asked for news of the crops, especially the gladiolus pips that had been harvested for planting in the spring. He thanked them for moving in on such short notice and asked Ruth to say hello to Aretha Fisher for him.
He was expecting to live in New York for five years, seven at most, he reminded the Hills, which was the amount of time Ayn now believed she would need to finish Atlas Shrugged. Before leaving, he had told them that her writing had been going slowly and that she was tired of country life. “She wants to write her novel in the shadows of skyscrapers,” he explained. The Hills had promised to keep everything just as it was for their friends’ return. And like good anti-altruists, they insisted on paying rent: eighty-five dollars a month.
From Rand’s first burst of enthusiasm for moving to New York, Hill thought that her beloved friend was acting rashly. She didn’t believe the explanation about writing in the shadows of the skyscrapers. It was not the skyscrapers that motivated her, Hill later said. “It was one hundred percent ‘the kids.’ They were the only reason she went to New York, and I knew it at the time.” The main attraction was Branden, she added. Barbara was a side issue, though an important one.
Hill, like Frank, was sure they would return to 10000 Tampa Avenue. “You see, Ayn had told Frank that they would be back,” she said, “and Frank had told Buzzy. I thought so, too. But I believe Ayn knew that they would not be back.” As it turned out, the Hills stayed on as tenants for twenty years, during which time Ayn and Frank visited just once, in the fall of 1963. In 1962, the O’Connors arranged for the sale of the ranch to one Katharine Houchin for a price of $175,000, a 700 percent gain on the $24,000 they had paid in 1944, confirming Frank’s prediction that real estate values in the San Fernando Valley would rise. The Hills remained as Houchin’s tenants until 1971, when they bought a house in the San Juan Islands, north of Seattle. Ayn and Frank would remain in New York for the rest of their lives.
No one who knew O’Connor believed that he willingly left the San Fernando Valley ranch. “That property was his business and his world,” said Hill. “Ayn knew it. There was no way she didn’t know how badly she was hurting Frank.” Over the years, acquaintances noticed her uneasiness with the subject of the move. Years out of California, she would talk about how much she hated the place, adding, “You feel the same way, don’t you, Frank? Don’t you?” “She said it too often,” observed Barbara. “She said it too insistently.” Hill, defending her friend, urged, “Please do stop and think who Ayn Rand was. She was the brightest and most determined person anyone had ever met. Who did she put first? Who did she advise all of us to put first? She knew what she had always known, that she would be important to the world. Frank knew it, too, and gave her what she wanted. Not because he was submissive or because she made the money, but because he recognized her talent and ability.”
He made the best of the move. Within a year or two, he found a part-time job working for an East Side florist, arranging flower displays in the lobbies of buildings. He had a business card that read, “Francisco, the Lobbyist.” A few years later, he began to paint—figures, cityscapes, and still lifes with flowers. When Buzzy visited on business in the middle 1950s, Rand showed him her husband’s paintings. “It just broke Buzzy’s heart that Frank, who had been working on acres of beautiful gladiolas—here he was in [the apartment in New York] painting the damned flowers instead of growing them,” said Hill. “I asked, ‘But what about Frank’s work itself, Buzzy?’ Buzzy hesitated. ‘It’s not that good, Ruth,’” he told her. Some others thought him gifted, though untrained.
Interestingly, before the Hills lost regular contact with Ayn and Frank, which—except for mailing off their monthly checks—they soon did, they discovered that both O’Connors were indifferent housekeepers, to put it mildly. At the ranch, Ruth found drawers filled with unopened fan mail, business letters, circulars, and bills. In Rand’s study, the floor was littered with railroad magazines, research material for her novel. There were more than two hundred grocer’s cartons, each divided into sections and filled to the brim with colored stones Rand had collected and sorted. In the kitchen, empty cottage cheese cartons, the remains of Frank’s favorite lunch, were heaped from countertops halfway to the ceiling. The servants evidently had been busy making their own collections; apart from whatever they may have taken with them, they had hidden jars of jams and jellies, bottles of artichoke hearts, and other delectables under chair cushions in their rooms. In the New York apartment, the trend continued. Visitors remembered that the cats sharpened their claws on the upholstered furniture, leaving tattered edges, and left a foul smell in the air; and that bill collectors sometimes showed up at the door. It was Frank’s job to pay the bills. Some saw his casual approach to these duties as a passive form of protest, but others viewed their absentmindedness in practical affairs as natural and charming.
The apartment Berner had rented for them was not only relatively small but also plain. First-time visitors, expecting Roarkian grandeur along the lines of the Neutra house, were surprised by its modesty. An entrance foyer doubled as the dining room, with a black-lacquered table, designed by O’Connor, pushed against a mirrored wall. Formal dinners were eaten there; otherwise, the table served as a work surface for a series of manuscript typists. A small kitchen opened off the foyer. The living room was small, with windows on the far wall, and was decorated by Frank with mid-century modern chairs and a black tweed sofa, glass-topped tables, and green-blue pillows and knickknacks strewn around. There was one bedroom and a tiny study facing an air shaft, from whose single window she could see the Empire State Building if she leaned out and peered west. She preferred it to her airy California study, just as she preferred her new, compact quarters to the sunshine, space, and architectural distinction of the ranch, which had been O’C
onnor’s discovery and reflected his taste. A preference for productivity over luxury: She kept this aspect of her Russian heritage.
On their very first evening in the apartment, Nathaniel and Barbara came to call, and the familiar mingling of texts and subtexts resumed. The young couple tore through the latest chapter of the novel. While O’Connor unpacked and puttered, the other three launched into a spirited discussion of John Galt, whose chief trait is that, like Roark, he lives without marked emotional conflicts. But Roark experienced pain; Galt does not. In general, this aspect of the writer’s view of heroes had remained the same since The Little Street in 1928, when she wrote that “other people do not exist [for the protagonist] and he does not understand why they should.” In the new chapter, “Atlantis,” an absence of emotion is one of the qualities Dagny prizes in John Galt’s face and manner as he gives her a tour of the beautiful and bustling valley called Galt’s Gulch.
Branden found this quality in Galt unsettling. On that first evening, he asked whether the hero might be too cold or too abstract to be compelling to readers. Rand answered succinctly, “One does not approach a god too closely,” a remark which Branden never forgot. The subject wasn’t raised again. But over the years many readers have rightly complained that the character of Galt is featureless and wooden and is thus the least compelling in the book.
Rand was diplomatic enough not to mention Nathaniel’s concerns about Barbara, and she wasn’t aware that Barbara felt anxious about her relationship with Branden. As it happened, the insecure boyfriend had been responding to Barbara’s summer flirtation by pointing out what was wrong with her and finding deep psychological flaws in her defenses. He had persuaded her to write a letter to their mentor explaining that she was a “mystic,” and instead of laughing out loud Rand had written back to tell Barbara that she must keep working with Branden to fix her errors. This was the state of affairs when, a few weeks after the O’Connors had settled in, Barbara raised the subject of their troubled romance. There ensued a mild version of a style of inquiry that would come to characterize the author’s response to followers from the middle 1950s on.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 31