Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  Frank was out on the evening Rand and Barbara set aside to talk about Barbara’s relationship with Nathaniel. Oddly, Branden was present, too, sitting in an armchair on the opposite side of the living room, letting his mind drift, he later wrote, while Barbara and Rand murmured to each other. When Rand inquired about a second boy whom Barbara had told Branden she liked but hadn’t slept with during the summer in Winnipeg, Barbara responded vaguely and let the subject lapse. A few minutes later, Rand asked again, her tone clipped and purposeful. This brought Branden to attention across the room. When Barbara admitted that, yes, she had had a brief affair with the young man, Branden experienced a “pain that … was excruciating.” Rand’s manner grew gentle, he recalled, as she probed Barbara’s motives and offered reassurance. “Given the moral ruthlessness that was more typical of Ayn,” he wrote in his memoir, Judgment Day, “this was unusual.” “Everything is going to be all right,” she told Barbara soothingly. “We’re going to solve this, once and for all.”

  Barbara remembered Rand’s manner differently, as probing and harsh, especially considering that she was not married to Nathaniel and had no obligation to be faithful to him. She felt humiliated. Yet, as the apparently guilty party, she decided she couldn’t ask the man who had by now become her “moral mentor” and, “worst of all,” her psychological counselor to refrain from seeking his mentor’s advice again. As for Branden, looking back he thought that he and Barbara should have ended their relationship that night, in the late fall of 1951. Instead, with Rand’s encouragement he became her unofficial psychotherapist. “He was going to help me reach the exalted state where I would be fully in love with him,” Barbara told an interviewer in 1990. “Confessing to a man who flayed me alive each time I confessed was supposedly in the interest of my self-esteem.” They hardened their resolve and became engaged in the summer of 1952. Six months later, they were married.

  In the intervening period, they introduced a dozen of their brightest relatives and friends to Rand. Wishing to “expand our circle,” Branden wrote, he deliberately set out to convert those close to him to Rand’s ethos of radical individualism in a conformist world. During the summers of 1950 and 1951, he persuaded his three older sisters, Florence, Elayne, and Reva, to read or reread The Fountainhead and share his enthusiasm for it. He patiently proselytized his first cousin, Allan Blumenthal, an intelligent, soft-spoken young medical student and pianist. Barbara introduced her college roommate and best friend since childhood (and Dr. Blumenthal’s future wife), NYU graduate art student Joan Mitchell. Joan, in turn, brought along a friend, Mary Ann Sures, and the future chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan. (In 1953, Joan and Greenspan were briefly married. They remained on excellent terms after dissolving their marriage in 1954. Joan married Allan Blumenthal in 1957.) Barbara also enlisted her bright, bespectacled seventeen-year-old first cousin Leonard Peikoff, young for his age, who shortly after meeting Rand dropped out of a Canadian pre-med program and, to his parents’ horror, enrolled at NYU to study philosophy. This familial group formed the core of Rand’s later band of followers, with no one more devoted to her than Peikoff.

  Ayn Rand, age four, and her extended family in St. Petersburg, Russia, 1909. Center row, from left: Rand’s parents, Zinovy and Anna Rosenbaum; Rand’s maternal grandmother, Rozalia Kaplan; Rand’s cousin Nina Guzarchik, Rand’s maternal grandfather, Berko Kaplan; and Rand, leaning against her grandfather’s knee.

  Rand’s Russian passport photograph, dated October 29, 1925, when Rand was twenty years old.

  Rand, fourth from left, with other Studio Club residents during “Cleanup Week” in Hollywood May 1927.

  An original illustration of Cyrus, the hero of The Mysterious Valley by Maurice Champagne and Rene Giffey, first published in serial form in 1914. Cyrus was Rand’s “exclusive love” from ages nine to twelve.

  Rand’s husband, Frank O’Connor, circa 1920. “It was an absolute that this was the man I wanted.”

  Nick Carter, Frank O’Connor’s brother. “Ayn and Frank could not have happened nor have lasted without him.”

  Isabel Paterson, 1939.

  Rand at her desk at the ranch in Chatsworth, California, in 1947. The house was designed by Richard Neutra for Josef von Sternberg in 1935 and was purchased by Rand in 1944.

  Rand with friend and fellow anti-Communist activist Lela Rogers, mother of Ginger Rogers, in Hollywood, 1951.

  Ayn and Frank on the long driveway to the Chatsworth house, lined with birch trees presented to von Sternberg by Marlene Dietrich.

  Rand listening to testimony presented to the House Un-American Activities Committee, October 1947, in the marble caucus room of the Old House Office Building in Washington, D.C.

  Rand being sworn in as a friendly witness at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings.

  O’Connor and Rand, dressed in protective gear, visiting Inland Steel, in Chicago, 1947. She watched steel being poured and met with a metallurgist and a plant superintendent, as preparation for the creation of Rearden Steel in Atlas Shrugged. Unidentified Inland Steel executive at left.

  Frank O’Connor, neighbor Janet Gaynor, and Rand outside the Chatsworth house.

  On the set of The Fountainhead with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, 1948.

  In a Hollywood courtroom, 1951, as one of six defendants in a slander suit brought by Emmet Lavery. Other defendants included screenwriter Morrie Ryskind (first row, second from left) and Lela Rogers (talking to Ryskind).

  Beyond family ties, these young people had a lot in common with one another and their new leader. They were passionate about ideas and courageous enough to go against the political and religious temper of the time. Everyone but Mary Ann Sures was Jewish. With the exception of Sures and Alan Greenspan, all were the children of first- or second-generation Russian immigrants whose religion they rejected, and all were seeking an ethical system and a moral worldview to replace it. Most had grown up in Ontario or Manitoba, where they were outsiders, if not outcasts, in the prevailing Anglican culture. Greenspan, a German and Polish Jew born and raised in Manhattan, proved less susceptible than the others to the convert’s classic evangelistic fervor. “Alan had his own relationship with her, which was dignified,” recalled Erika Holzer, a lawyer who joined the circle in the early 1960s. “He kept somewhat aloof from everybody. He was older and smarter.”

  Both men and women tended to be intellectually serious, and all but one or two of the women were tall, slender, fair, beautifully groomed, and unusually good-looking. Because it was the 1950s, they dressed with care, as if for dinner or a formal office, the men’s dark suits pressed, shoes shined, the women’s dresses full and tightly cinched around the waist, hair coiffed in the manner of Grace Kelly. Since they had gravitated to Rand because of their admiration for The Fountainhead, she nicknamed them “the Class of ’43,” in honor of the novel’s year of publication. With cheerful irony, the eight or nine most intimate members—Nathaniel and Barbara, Joan Mitchell and Allan Blumenthal, Leonard Peikoff, Alan Greenspan, Mary Ann Sures, and Nathaniel’s sister Elayne and her future husband Harry Kalberman—called themselves “the Collective.”

  Rand came to like them all, to a greater or lesser degree. At first, she disapproved of Alan Greenspan, whom she found so somber and uncommunicative that she called him “the Undertaker” behind his back. Once, during a philosophical exchange with Branden, Greenspan reportedly declared that he didn’t believe that objective reality, including his own existence, could be proved. Hearing of this, she took to asking others in the group, “How’s the Undertaker? Has he decided he exists yet?” At the time, the economist was working for the National Industrial Conference Board, studying steel inventories, and so was able to shed valuable light on the economics of steel for Atlas Shrugged. As she began to appreciate his mastery of economics, not to mention his surprising keenness as a reader of her novel in progress, she gave him a new nickname, “the Sleeping Giant,” and rightly predicted that he would achieve great th
ings. Another favorite was Leonard Peikoff, who asked scores of eager questions for which she had clear and satisfying answers, a quality that still endears her to the young. (For example, “Is Roark idealistic, or is he practical?” Peikoff asked her. She answered, “If your ideals are rational, and your moral principles are based on reality, there’s no conflict. The moral is the practical,” a cornerstone of her developing ethics.) Peikoff said that in her presence he felt “total awe, as though I were on a different planet,” and she found his curiosity and boyish devotion endearing. Yet it seems unlikely that she would have entertained Leonard or many of the others for more than an evening now and then if it hadn’t been for her deepening interest in Nathaniel Branden. She confirmed this later when she said, “I’ve always seen [the Collective] as a kind of comet, with Nathan as the star and the rest as his tail.”

  Nevertheless, their devotion offered important compensations. They were an unusually talented group of students and young professionals. They provided her with a comforting sense of being understood and appreciated at a pivotal point in the writing of Atlas Shrugged, when Dagny, returned from Galt’s Gulch, begins to discover the unpleasant psychological motives of the left-wing bureaucrats who are marshaling their forces against her. When the author met with other acquaintances and colleagues—as she often did, either at gatherings of political conservatives or over drinks and dinner—the strain could cost her two or three days’ work. “When I’m writing I’m living in the world of the novel, not ‘ordinary reality,’” she explained. It was difficult for her to find her way back after an interruption. Surrounded on most Saturday nights by this group of captivated young people, she didn’t have to leave her fictional world or risk having its premises challenged. When she passed around or read aloud her week’s work, she saw not two but eight or nine rapt young faces beaming at her as they devoured the latest installment of a book they knew to be a masterpiece. She watched them, asking, “What? What is it?” when one of them smiled at a passage, raised an eyebrow, or showed confusion or excitement. They were astonished by the intricacy and originality of her work and so respectful of her that they politely raised their hands to ask a question or listened quietly as she, Nathaniel, and Barbara commented on the book, current events, politics, music, and theater late into the night. “The world we were living in wasn’t just the world of California or New York or UCLA or NYU,” recalled Branden in 2004. “It was the world of Atlas Shrugged.” The young people were her ideal readers, and she knew it.

  One snowy night in January 1953, Rand and O’Connor climbed into the backseat of a limousine and rode north to White Plains, a suburb of New York, to act as matron of honor and best man at Nathaniel and Barbara’s wedding. The ceremony took place in the home of one of Barbara’s aunts. In photographs, Frank stands beside the groom, looking thin, handsome, and paternal in a dark suit and a white boutonniere. Rand stands next to Barbara, in profile appearing glamorous and young. She wears a black-and-white gown designed by Adrian (tsked at by some of the relatives, who considered a black dress inappropriate), and on one side her dark hair is slicked back, revealing a sweet expression on her face. As she looks on, the newly married couple kisses. That night, after a reception, the Brandens returned to their new studio apartment to discover that O’Connor had filled its single room with fragrant flowers.

  That night, too, some of Nathaniel’s relatives noticed that his mother, herself a formidable woman, was jealous of Ayn Rand. Dinah Blumenthal had raised her son to be a young prince, her young prince, and wasn’t pleased when she saw firsthand his strong attachment to his best man’s wife. “She was so offended, so mad, so very jealous” of the relationship, said a family member, that she never afterward liked or approved of Rand. Even then, she knew that “he liked Ayn better than he liked her.”

  The apartment was at 165 East Thirty-fifth Street, two blocks east and one block south of the O’Connors’ apartment. In months and years to come, some members of the Collective and an assortment of other young enthusiasts would find and rent apartments in the surrounding blocks. Many would later reflect that this was the infant geography of the Ayn Rand cult.

  ELEVEN

  THE IMMOVABLE MOVER

  1953–1957

  Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.

  —Atlas Shrugged, 1957

  In the 1960s, new young acolytes would be surprised to find that Rand had few close friends of her own age or level of ability. But in the early 1950s, she was a legend in the tiny world of the New York intellectual Right. The Fountainhead had almost single-handedly renewed popular interest in the cause of individualism. Rumor spread quickly that she was finishing a massive new novel that would do the same for capitalism. Few knew her, and everyone wanted to meet her.

  New York was such a politically liberal city in the 1950s that Saul Bellow described it as an intellectual annex of Moscow. The Right was very small, but vibrant and unified; it hadn’t yet splintered into Old Right libertarians and cold warriors, as it would do later in the decade. Members had a few favorite gathering places, and one was the Upper West Side penthouse apartment of J. B. Matthews, a reformed Communist fellow-traveler who, by 1953, was serving as Wisconsin Republican senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s head of research and the executive director of the senator’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Among active anti-Communists, Matthews was known for his large collection of files on suspected Communist sympathizers in federal agencies and elsewhere; these were proving helpful to McCarthy as he tracked down supposed traitors in the U.S. government. When visiting New York, McCarthy often stopped in at Matthews’s, enjoying a drink with anti-New Deal newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler, Rand’s friend Eugene Lyons, William F. Buckley, Jr., Russell Kirk, and others; Rand first met McCarthy there. Buckley, a high-spirited partisan and writer then in his twenties, was leading the youthful postwar wing of hard-Right Republicans who wanted government to support traditional Christian values and actively defend those values around the world. A Catholic from a privileged Connecticut family, he had gained early fame with a controversial book called God and Man at Yale; in 1955, he would found and edit National Review, the soon-to-be oracle of conservative orthodoxy.

  Rand attended a number of Matthews’s parties, one of the few places where her 1947 HUAC testimony was regarded as a badge of honor. As in California, she was often at the center of a powerful male throng, taking on all comers, and she left an indelible and largely favorable impression. “Tell me your premises,” she would say on greeting new acquaintances, and having placed her serve would launch a volley of ideas. Contemporaries, including Buckley, remembered her as “singular.” Recalling the first time he met her, he mimicked her Russian accent as she declared, “Mr. Buckley, you arrrr too intelligent to believe in Gott!” (“That certainly is an icebreaker,” remarked Buckley’s friend Wilfrid Sheed on being told the story.) The future host of Firing Line took it in good grace, and they became friendly acquaintances—until the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, when many of her relationships changed or perished. She invited him for cocktails in her apartment, with her husband; he arrived with his mother-in-law in tow, and they all had a lively time talking about McCarthy. “She was a McCarthyite,” Buckley stated, “and so was I. I had just written a book about him.” The young man-about-town thought she possessed “an instantly communicable charm” and “glamorous hair.” For the next few years, he sent her postcards written in liturgical Latin, as a joke.

  The postwar Right tended to view McCarthy’s Senate hearings as not only necessary on their face but also as payback for earlier leftist allegations that the antiwar, pro-capitalist Old Right conservatives were Nazis and Fascists. Rand’s support for McCarthy, as for HUAC, may have had as much to do with her fragile understanding of American due process as with her principled abhorrence of Communism. But it may also have been a result of the trust she tended to accord to those who shared her vi
ews and, as she saw it, had the courage to express them against liberal opposition. Toward the end of the 1950s, soon after the senator’s death from alcoholism, an acquaintance named Joan Kennedy Taylor ran into her at a National Book Awards ceremony. “Tell me,” Taylor recalled her saying, “what did people have against McCarthy?” Taylor told her, “Well, Ayn, it’s primarily because he wasn’t truthful. He said all these things and couldn’t back them up.” And she said, “Oh, I see. The Big Lie.” In later years, she told a young friend that McCarthy’s mission had been right but that he had lacked the moral courage to pursue it into the highest reaches of government. She also supported the larger-than-life, forcibly retired army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur during his brief flirtation with presidential politics, presenting him with a copy of Anthem, admiringly inscribed, “From an author who voted for him for President of the United States in 1952—with profound respect and admiration.” Of course, this was a joke. MacArthur didn’t run in 1952—Robert Taft and Dwight D. Eisenhower competed for the Republican nomination—and Rand, disgusted with the choices, reportedly didn’t vote either then or in 1956.