Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  Even if Rand didn’t always initiate what insiders called “denunciations,” she established the atmosphere in which they took place and participated. Her daily conferences with her protégé became more fractious as her moods darkened during 1958. After Rothbard’s expulsion, she tightened the rules of admission to their philosophical clubhouse. “She was very controversial and feared that others would use the actions of her acolytes to discredit her,” recalled Hessen. As a result, she decreed that only she, Nathaniel, and Barbara could call themselves “Objectivists.” Everyone else had to refer to himself as a “student of Objectivism.” NBI enrollees were not only required to read Atlas Shrugged but also to declare their agreement with the major tenets of John Galt’s speech, according to a reporter from the Saturday Evening Post. Prospective participants were invited to pay for and attend a single introductory lecture but could not ask questions, in part because the crowds at these preliminary events overwhelmed the ability of the principals to answer. (“I went to a [lecture] once and raised my hand,” said Bertha Krantz, Rand’s copy editor at Random House. “I was told very bluntly, very coldly, ‘You don’t question.’ I got up and left.”) In any case, Rand was likely to explode in anger if questions suggested doubt or disagreement.

  As NBI expanded, Barbara gave up her job as a junior editor at St. Martin’s Press to supervise its daily operations. Seen as a kind of Aphrodite to Rand’s imperial Hera and Branden’s Apollo, she, too, was an object of awe and admiration among the lesser lights. “If one considers that Ayn was God and Nathan was Jesus Christ, that left me as the Virgin Mary,” she once said wryly. Students referred to her as “the most beautiful woman in the world” or as “the Ice Queen,” both tributes to her cool, pale, increasingly aloof aura of good looks and regal bearing. “I learned repression, as so many of [Ayn’s] young friends did,” she later wrote about this period. By stifling unacceptable thoughts, perceptions, and facts—her literary enthusiasms, her mentor’s moods, her husband’s ongoing affair with the ideology’s great parental figure—”I encased myself in a sheet of ice,” she wrote.

  Years later, Nathaniel bitterly described the program of conformity he implemented on Rand’s behalf during the 1960s. The implicit premises the inner circle accepted and that he “transmitted to our students at NBI” included:

  Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived.

  Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world.

  Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter in any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral, or appropriate to man’s life on earth.

  Once one is acquainted with Ayn Rand and her work, the measure of one’s virtue is intrinsically tied to the position that one takes regarding her and her work.

  No one who does not admire what Ayn Rand admires and condemn what Ayn Rand condemns can be a good Objectivist. No one who disagrees with Ayn Rand on any fundamental issue can be a fully consistent individualist.

  Because Ayn Rand has designated Nathaniel Branden as her “intellectual heir” and has repeatedly proclaimed him to be an ideal exponent of her philosophy, he is to be accorded only marginally less reverence than Ayn Rand herself.

  It is best not to say most of these things explicitly (excepting, perhaps, the first two items). One must always maintain that one arrives at one’s beliefs solely by reason.

  To Rand’s credit, it must be remembered that she never actively sought this kind of reverence, at least outside the circle of her original loyalists, and, at first, was not overly impressed with the students who flocked to NBI. Most struck her as well meaning, perhaps, but lacking in intellectual depth and quickness. “The lectures attracted a lot of not particularly intellectual people, such as dentists and engineers,” recalled Joan Kennedy Taylor. “They loved her vision of a technologically advancing, logical world. But this was the first time many of them had dealt with ideas. They thought that Ayn Rand had invented laissez-faire capitalism.” After the Rothbard incident, “I saw her change,” Taylor added. “In the beginning she was genuinely collecting data and trying to figure out what people’s motives were. She came to the point where she had gathered enough evidence and thought she knew what certain attitudes or questions meant.” Having made a judgment, she “wouldn’t look closely [at individuals] again.” During the first years of NBI, Rand said, “I thought that my fans disappointed and depressed me worse than my enemies.”

  By the fall of 1958, she was drifting into a clinical depression. At first, no one noticed the intensity of her moods. Sales of Atlas were going strong. Fan letters arrived by the hundreds every week. Largely due to the Brandens’ efforts, her growing reputation as an abstract thinker and a charismatic speaker was attracting new readers and generating lecture invitations from all over the United States. She was relatively rich. She had a beautiful, kind husband and a bright young lover. And yet she was profoundly unhappy. She began to speak to her friends of the bitter revulsion she felt for the culture. To Frank and the Brandens, she said she could not understand why she and her masterpiece had been vilified, belittled, and willfully misconstrued to mean the opposite of what she had written. She cursed the literary Tooheys and Keatings who she believed were trying to destroy her book. Where were the “raves that raved about the right things”? Where were the men of ability, whom she had always championed? Why didn’t the nation’s scientists and businessmen stand up for her? Why wasn’t there at least one intellectual giant who had the courage publicly to declare the meaning and revolutionary value of her work, as the young people around her did?

  Filled with despair and in dread of appearing less than fully in control, she began to refuse social invitations and to stay in her apartment. Again, she complained of physical tension. Gradually, the Brandens realized that her condition went well beyond postpublication letdown. During their visits and on the phone, she lamented and raged against the mediocrity, cynicism, timidity, and malice she saw rewarded everywhere, and, as the months wore on, she wept almost daily out of frustration and grief.

  With minor reprieves, she remained depressed from late 1958 until early 1961. She stopped giving lectures on college campuses; she no longer enjoyed the intellectual give-and-take. “I cannot fight lice,” she said to Branden. In physical pain from stress, tired to the bone, she spent hours playing solitaire at her desk in her dim, cramped study. The few people who saw her regularly found her short-tempered, prone to demands for praise and reassurance, susceptible to violent outbursts of entitlement and rage, and painfully aware that her attitude and conduct amounted to a mind on strike without a theme or a guaranteed victorious ending. “John Galt wouldn’t feel this,” she often said. “He would know how to handle this. I don’t know.” And, “I would hate for him to see me like this.”

  The amphetamines she took may have aggravated her condition or added to its duration. In memoirs and interviews, some former friends recalled that her amphetamine habit was confined to a steady, continuous low dose, but there is a small body of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that suggests she increased her dose at least occasionally—when she wanted to work all night or lose weight, for example. Roger Callahan, a Ph.D. therapist who joined Rand’s extended circle in the middle 1960s as one of Branden’s professional disciples, recalled seeing “someone, I won’t say who” carrying a jar of Dexedrine pills to her apartment. He inquired about them and was told, “Oh, these are for Ayn.” Libertarian gadfly Roy Childs once said in an interview that Rand’s secretary—he didn’t say which one—told him that “she’d take a couple of five-milligrams” of Dexamyl and if nothing happened after an hour, “she’d take another two, three, or four. She was taking this on top of pots of coffee.” Said Robert Hessen, “She was wired up. She subsisted on black coffee and cigarettes and very dark, sliced Russian bread and slices of Swiss cheese or white cheese,” as well as Swiss chocolates. Joan Blumenthal recalled that Rand said she needed the pills to get up in the morning. She didn’t compla
in of hallucinations, as some longtime low-dose users do. But she “always had a very elevated pulse rate,” which “is very unusual,” recalled Allan Blumenthal, a doctor, and she displayed the telltale symptoms of suspicion, panic, lack of sleep, and volatility. “The atmosphere was like that of a hospital at times,” recalled Branden, who visited the apartment two or three nights a week, often staying until dawn, and spoke to her on the phone every day, sometimes for hours. “I once made the mistake of telling her so, and she went berserk: How could I make such a statement? Didn’t I understand her at all? she shouted.” Most of the time, she was adamant that her emotional condition was a natural response to intolerable circumstances.

  Although her kindly husband had always been able to lift her spirits in moments of distress, he could not help her now. He was supportive but largely silent during these discussions, and Branden thought he appeared helpless and bleak. Gradually, he withdrew into his painting. She leaned more heavily on her heir, for aid in untangling her “premises,” some of which she sometimes conceded must be wrong, as well as for hours-long doses of emotional support. She was grateful, but also demanding. “You are my lifeline to reality,” she told him. “Without you, I would not know how to exist in this world.” She intensified her complaints about his emotional distance. She called it his “disappearing professor” act. She was quick to judge and condemn members of the inner circle for their motives and “sense of life,” and Branden, under strain, became harsher and more peremptory, too. “He had always been arrogant and judgmental in his dealings with people,” Barbara wrote in 1986. “Now, attempting to live his own life while finding for Ayn a reason to live, constantly tense … he was more coldly arrogant and demanding than ever before.”

  As to Rand’s low spirits, what O’Connor understood but Branden and the others didn’t was that her suffering was new in degree but not in kind. It was an acute and persistent instance of her old malady of disappointment at the moment of her popular triumph. In her play Ideal, the Garboesque screen idol Kay Gonda can believe in her fans’ devotion only if they are willing to risk their lives for her; the heroine cries out, “If all of you who look at me on the screen hear the things I say and worship me for them—where do I hear them? … I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of my own days, that glory I create as an illusion! I want it real!” Rand wrote those lines in 1934. Kay Gonda spoke for her creator then, and spoke for her in 1959. Branden, her book sales—these rewards were not enough.

  Whatever the catalyst, she was unable to fend off or end the pain and confusion her depression brought. She played solitaire because she couldn’t write. Except for a few pages of handwritten notes for the prospective novel To Lorne Dieterling, she wrote little. She no longer knew for whom she was writing, or why, she told the Brandens. She was paralyzed by disgust and contempt. And yet not writing was a torture. “Thinking is all I do,” she said.

  She and Nathaniel continued to say they loved each other, but she called a halt to sex. In Atlas Shrugged, she had written that “no form of claim” between lovers should ever be “motivated by pain and aimed at pity.” Relief from pain, not sex, was what she needed most and sought from him, and self-pity was one of her prevailing moods. The suspension of sex wasn’t the end of the affair, she assured him; they would be able to renew their intimacy with each other as soon as she came back to life. In the meantime, she wanted him to remain her suitor in every other way. In the following two years, she alternately complimented him on his grasp of her psychology and railed against his lack of expressed romantic and emotional interest in her. When they did sleep together, about a dozen times, their encounters were stiffer, more ritualized, and less enjoyable for Branden.

  He did his best to bring her hope based on the steadily expanding popular influence of Atlas Shrugged and the rapid growth of NBI. But he was not sorry for the interval of sexual inactivity. The attraction to Rand had faded further under the weight of her sadness, anger, demands, and increasing neglect of her physical appearance. She was never fastidious, but at about this time her grooming slipped so precipitously that Branden asked Barbara to speak to Rand about bathing more regularly. In any case, he did not want “the burden of a ‘romance’ for which I no longer had genuine enthusiasm,” he wrote. “I needed all of my resources to continue functioning” as the leader of a movement and the caretaker of its faltering fountainhead.

  Thus, as the Eisenhower years ended and John F. Kennedy inaugurated an era of unparalleled American prosperity, new cultural freedoms, increased spending on social programs, and the beginnings of a distant, controversial war, Nathaniel and, to a lesser degree, Barbara established a smaller, safer sphere for their benefactor to inhabit. The proud sufferer asked her two friends not to discuss her depression with the others, so most of her followers knew little or nothing about the extremity of her moods. But they understood that she, and they, were almost universally derided as hate-mongering greed-is-good neo-Fascists and social Darwinists, when they knew themselves to be visionaries of freedom and progress. Some lost friends. Some, like Leonard Peikoff, experienced their parents’ disapproval or estrangement. “How is it possible that we can be accused of advocating, politically, the exact opposite of what we stand for?” they said among themselves after lectures and on Saturday nights. They concluded that, like Roark, they were being punished for their virtues and that the outside world hated and feared them for trumpeting the moral good. (In sectarian parlance, the “social metaphysicians” hated “the good for being the good.”) In their foreshortened frame of reference, they now incessantly compared the state of the culture to themes from Rand’s novels. As time went on and Rand and they continued to be ridiculed, they saw themselves as reflections of her heroes and attributed her villains’ evil motives to her adversaries. “It was more and more true that we were living inside the world of Atlas Shrugged,” said Branden.

  All the while, her fame increased. Edith Efron and Al Ramrus pestered Mike Wallace until, in February 1959, he invited her to appear on his half-hour TV interview show, The Mike Wallace Interview, in her first television appearance. He gave her a forceful introduction as they sat facing each other across a bare table on an empty stage. She was “the founder of a new and unusual philosophy [that] would seem to strike at the very roots of our society,” he declared, “a revolutionary creed” that had launched a national movement along the lines of “democracy or Communism.” While he spoke, the camera lingered on a small, plain woman, with uncoiffed hair, a changeable smile, and darting, dark, magnetic eyes suggestive of wariness and excitement. Employing his famous stern interrogatory method, Wallace asked, “Miss Rand, would you agree that, as Newsweek put it, you are out to destroy every edifice in the contemporary American way of life?” She blinked, then answered good-naturedly. “Yes. I am challenging the moral code at the base” of a great many institutions, and that code is altruism, she replied. Throughout the next twenty-five minutes of give-and-take, the camera caught fleeting expressions of wonder, amusement, anger, and contempt moving across her features. But she explained the workings of her great philosophic engine clearly, gracefully, and with a fiery emphasis on the sine qua non of individual freedom and individual responsibility.

  She didn’t always tell the truth in answer to his questions. When he inquired, “Whence did this philosophy of yours come?” she gave an answer that, from this point on, became her stock reply: “Out of my own mind, with the sole acknowledgment of a debt to Aristotle, who is the only philosopher who ever influenced me. I devised the rest myself.” This, of course, was not only untrue, but also highly unlikely on its face. It worked against her being taken seriously by the influential intellectuals she wanted to persuade. “You have an accent,” Wallace observed. “It’s—” “Russian,” she replied, whereupon the interviewer asked if her parents had immigrated to America with her or had died in Russia. “I came alone,” she told him, adding that she had no way of finding out if her parents were alive or dead. (She had learned of their d
eaths in 1946, through Marie von Strachow, but may have wished to protect her sister Nora, whose status and whereabouts she did not know. On the other hand, she had told the same story to both Brandens.) Was her husband a big industrialist, like the heroes of Atlas Shrugged? the interviewer wondered. Oh, no, he was an artist, she told him. The next question must have surprised her. “Is he supported by you?” Wallace asked. “No, by his own work, actually, in the past,” she stammered, adding, “By me if necessary, but it isn’t quite necessary.” This exchange took place in the context of an earlier discussion about whether only strong, independent people like John Galt and Howard Roark are worthy to be loved. (A weak man or woman “certainly does not deserve love,” Rand solemnly told Wallace. People “cannot expect the unearned, neither in love nor in money.” When the host protested that few people could meet her standard of strength or merit, she proudly admitted, “Unfortunately, very few.”) The currency in which O’Connor’s right to be loved was to be measured, she explained, was the pleasure he gave her, proving that she was not an altruist in love. For O’Connor, this must have been excruciating: to be described as though he were a mistress, on the one hand, and for Rand to deny supporting him, on the other—here was a perfect vise of undeservingness.