Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  She also mentioned Branden, whom she identified as “my best intellectual heir, the psychologist.” She shyly but proudly confided that his lecture series was becoming very successful. In the previous month of January 1959 alone, Mr. Branden had received six hundred letters of inquiry about his lectures.

  Afterward, the show received unprecedented amounts of mail from viewers, much of it positive. But journalists in general were dumbfounded that Wallace had devoted half an hour of airtime to a woman whom they thought of as a reactionary crackpot. In 1959, when there were no Oprahs and Edward R. Murrow still set the standard for news and interviews, Rand was considered beyond the pale. “It is hard to imagine the hostility directed at her,” said Wallace’s producer Al Ramrus. “Most of the media treated her like a leper or the Antichrist.” Yet Wallace himself, a lifelong liberal, enjoyed the interview and admired her courage, swiftness of mind, and flair, even if he considered her ideas marginal and her style eccentric. (“I remember with amusement her haircut,” he told an interviewer in 1998, “which [was] a little like the one that I wore when I was four or five years old—a Dutch cut.”) In the mode of William F. Buckley, Jr., and Bennett Cerf, he went out of his way to become her friend. For the next twenty years, he and she dined together, along with Frank and Wallace’s wife, every eight or ten months and occasionally attended each other’s parties and celebrations. He invited her to appear on his next show, P.M. East, this time in tandem with her improbable new literary flame, Mickey Spillane. Again like Cerf, however, Wallace had dwindling patience with Nathaniel Branden (whom he once called a “creature who sat on her shoulder”) and some of her “slavish followers,” as he called them. Apparently, this didn’t include Efron and Ramrus, both of whom continued to work for him for years, or Barbara, to whom he was courtly. He maintained a warm friendship with Ramrus until he was in his nineties.

  For the most part, the shy philosopher stayed out of public view during the most difficult months of her depression, but she made a few new friends in addition to Wallace. One was an elderly composer and music critic named Deems Taylor, the father of Rand’s friend Joan Kennedy Taylor. The younger Taylor had met Rand a few weeks before the publication of Atlas Shrugged, when her mood was still buoyant. A publicity assistant for Alfred A. Knopf, Taylor received an advance copy of the novel and, like Rothbard, wrote a complimentary letter. At Rand’s suggestion they met for lunch. Taylor was flattered but also surprised. “Why did you want to see me?” she asked. “Atlantis,” Rand mysteriously replied. Taylor, later a writer and editor, guessed that the novelist was auditioning people for her own version of Galt’s Gulch; if so, her disordered state of mind soon put an end to the plan. Through Taylor she met Deems, who at seventy-five had largely outlived his fame as the composer of the 1927 opera The King’s Henchman and as the host of Walt Disney’s 1940 masterpiece Fantasia. Rand very likely knew his speaking voice, since in the late 1930s and early 1940s he had been the announcer for weekly radio broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic. At a time “when the whole world wanted her attention, she made the time to visit my father and listen to every single piece of music he had written,” Taylor said, adding, “I think she was kinder to people who were not students. She didn’t expect as much from them.” Besides, “she respected creative people.”

  Naturally, she asked Deems what he had thought of her fictional character, the composer and striker Richard Halley. He must have answered favorably, because she asked him to write an operatic rendition of Anthem, using romantic themes to identify the heroes and atonal music to represent the authoritarian social order. Although flattered, the elderly man didn’t want to compose atonal music. No opera of Anthem was ever created, but Rand befriended Deems until he died in 1966.

  In one of the stranger literary love matches of the period, she also developed a professional crush on crime novelist Mickey Spillane, the tough-guy author of I, the Jury and other novels featuring Mike Hammer, private eye. Spillane’s publisher, New American Library, had bought the paperback rights to Atlas Shrugged, and the editors arranged for a lunch meeting between the firm’s two best-selling authors. They talked late into the afternoon, until the restaurant closed its doors to prepare for the evening rush, but instead of asking the pair to leave, the staff pulled up chairs and listened to their conversation. Rand loved the fact that Spillane’s potboiling plots and gun-toting heroes were dedicated to separating good from evil in a black-and-white world. (“Grays don’t interest me,” she said, apropos of his work.) She later befriended the rough-edged author publicly, praising his bawdy and often bloody tales of good guys and bad guys in a syndicated column she wrote for the Los Angeles Times and in other forums. Spillane, then at the critical nadir of his career, rewarded her with love and loyalty. At a Westinghouse-sponsored party following their joint appearance on Mike Wallace’s P.M. East in the fall of 1961, he arrived escorting an aging ex—burlesque queen but excused himself at the door and headed straight to Rand. Grinning mischievously, he told her that, if their lives had been different, he would have wanted her to be his lady friend. She threw back her head and laughed; she loved flirtatious behavior and didn’t get enough of it. They formed a mutual admiration society that pleased them both. After she died, he said, “Ayn Rand and I, we don’t have to shrug. We can carry that weight,” and, “We were friends. That’s the biggest thing I can say.”

  Her public adoption of the flamboyantly anti-intellectual Spillane—a dashing Irishman who could have doubled for Guts Regan in The Night of January 16th—was yet another instance of Rand’s combining the courageous with the contrarian. She said she wanted, and for many reasons deserved, to be taken seriously as a novelist and thinker and was surely shrewd enough to know that she did not help her cause by writing in the Los Angeles Times that Spillane was a victim of “vicious injustice on the part of the ‘intellectuals.’” Like her legend building and her combativeness toward influential critics (“moral cannibals,” she publicly called them), her support of Spillane seemed tailor-made to tempt the William F. Buckleys and the Granville Hickses to make fun of her. They rarely resisted.

  Privately, she welcomed and assisted a young woman named Lisette Glarner, who was the grown daughter of her first cousin and childhood playmate Vera Guzarchik, to whom Rand had sent food and clothing after the war. When Lisette arrived in New York from Lyon, France, to study English, the novelist dispensed cookies, tea, and small gifts, and when Vera proposed a visit, Rand paid for her hotel. Neither Vera nor Lisette was interested in philosophy, but they were deeply impressed by their American cousin’s fame, glamour, and hospitality. She enjoyed them, too. After Vera returned to France, Rand wrote that she missed her. A decade later, Rand’s youngest sister, Nora, would locate Rand and also pay a visit, with very different results. Yet until old age, Rand could be warm and gracious when she chose to be.

  At the same time, she shied away from meeting more accomplished men and women, particularly authors; her literary mission accomplished, her social reticence returned. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Joan Kennedy Taylor hosted a radio program called The World of Books on an educational radio station in New York. When Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita shocked the nation in the summer of 1958, Taylor asked Rand for advice about whether to interview the author on her program. To the younger woman’s surprise, Rand didn’t comment on Nabokov’s lurid subject matter or abstract literary style but instead said, wistfully, “Oh, Nabokov! If you do interview him, please ask him how his sister is! She was once my best friend.” It was a remarkable moment of nostalgia for the characteristically forward-looking Rand. Yet she made no effort to see Nabokov, although he was a professor of Russian at Cornell and visited New York a number of times to promote Lolita. And she never contacted his sister Olga, who was living openly in Prague. “She was very, um, cautious about being identified,” said Taylor. “She was afraid of being on some kind of [secret Soviet] list and being found.” She remained wary of Soviet surveillance well into the 1970s.

&nb
sp; A year or two after the Nabokov incident, Albert Mannheimer turned up in New York, apparently at Rand’s suggestion, for the purpose of entering into psychotherapy with Branden. In the previous dozen years, Mannheimer had largely faded from public view. He had written one screenplay (Bloodhounds of Broadway) and co-authored an unproduced play (Stalin Allee, a comedy about Soviet life). In his view—and, no doubt, Rand’s—he was a failure. His emotional troubles had become incapacitating, he confided to his estranged friend in a letter praising Atlas Shrugged. In a return letter, she recommended the therapeutic skills of Branden. Mannheimer arrived from Hollywood appearing anxious, stiff, and visibly frightened of his former mentor, and after a number of sessions with Branden he returned to Los Angeles, having seen almost nothing of Rand. He went on to write episodes of the television series Gidget and The Flying Nun. In 1972, he fatally shot himself, leaving behind a widow and three children. Rand seemed unable to grieve his death. She shook her head ruefully and said, “Too bad,” recalled Joan Blumenthal. Mannheimer had long ago ceased to live by her principles or share her point of view. As with Paterson, to her he had practically ceased to exist.

  In the ordeal of her own depression, she let other people slip away. She saw little of Frances and Henry Hazlitt, partly because they remained on friendly terms with William F. Buckley, and she broke with them completely after Hazlitt published his classic book, The Foundations of Morality, in 1964. The book’s defense of utilitarian ethics—”the greatest good for the greatest number”—struck her as a betrayal of both capitalist individualism and herself. She never had a good word to say about him after that. In late 1958, she, Peikoff, and the Brandens dropped in on Ludwig von Mises’s celebrated NYU seminar; a regular student remembered the sensation she created with her wide black hat, flowing cape, and trailing entourage. She also accepted an invitation to attend Mises’s eightieth-birthday party in the fall of 1961. Otherwise, she saw little of the elderly economist and his wife. Some old friends disappointed or even horrified her: Her “best” California business conservative, William Mullendore, fell under the influence of a libertarian mystic and LSD aficionado named Gerald Heard and, along with Leonard Read, Thaddeus Ashby, and others, took psychedelics and frolicked at Bohemian Grove. (“LSD steps up our voltage and frequency,” wrote Mullendore, the electric-company president. “To use the new vision thus made available one must be able to ‘plug in.’”) Ashby, having returned to California with a degree from Harvard, was editing a quasi-religious libertarian magazine called Faith and Freedom; no doubt that sealed his fate with Rand. Yet he continued to think of her as the twentieth century’s most important philosopher. “Whenever I wrote anything” in the following decades, he said in his eighties, “I tried to slip in her name.” She never joined the influential Mont Pelerin Society, an annual free-market think tank, and she shunned the old J. B. Matthews crowd, many of whom now wrote for National Review.

  Even as old bonds loosened, however, professional good tidings continued to arrive. In the spring of 1958, Atlas Shrugged was nominated for a National Book Award, along with a dozen other distinguished novels of 1957, including James Agee’s A Death in the Family, John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle, and Nabokov’s second novel in English, Pnin, about an awkward but endearing Russian émigré professor teaching in an American college. Although she lost to Cheever, she attended the awards ceremony and enjoyed herself amid a thousand other literary guests, recalled Joan Kennedy Taylor, who was with her on that evening. In December 1958, Random House published a handsome new hardbound edition of We the Living, with an introduction by the author and her extensive revisions, which muted both her youthful Nietzscheanism and her master-slave eroticism in service of her mature image. In 1960, New American Library (NAL) published We the Living in paperback, and by 2004 her first novel had three million copies in print. The same year, NAL issued Atlas Shrugged as a triple-sized paperback, complete with a bound-in advertising reply card for NBI lectures. The book, at that time the most expensive paperback ever sold at ninety-five cents, went through seven printings in its first eighteen months. There was now no fully developed work by Ayn Rand that wasn’t in demand, and in the fall of 1961, NAL republished Anthem.

  The NBI reply cards in Atlas Shrugged worked. Requests for information about the lecture series came pouring in from all over the United States and Canada, and even from abroad. Demand reached such a pitch that in 1960 Barbara and Nathaniel launched what he called the NBI tape-transcription service, which distributed reel-to-reel recordings of the New York lectures to remote locations, beginning with Los Angeles and Chicago, then expanding to Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere. In Toronto, Branden’s sister Florence Hirschfeld ran the program from the finished basement of her home. Like other far-flung NBI tape representatives, she gathered friends and, through local newspaper ads featuring Rand’s name and the titles of her books, recruited interested strangers. Participants arrived once a week to sit in straight chairs in front of a large tape player; in Toronto as elsewhere, between thirty and one hundred people showed up to listen, each paying half the New York rate, or thirty-five dollars per course of lectures. The physical tapes and a percentage of the money went back to the New York office, at that time located in the Brandens’ apartment on East Thirty-fifth Street. NBI also published and distributed pamphlets and books, furnished speakers and material to Ayn Rand clubs, gave readings of Rand’s plays around the country, and distributed recordings of the plays. Later, Branden wrote proudly of having aided Rand’s transformation from an undervalued novelist to a systematic philosopher, adding that the repeated appearance of their names in NBI newspaper ads across the country added to her fame while initiating his. For him, and for Barbara, Objectivism became a full-time occupation as well as a personal mission.

  In the end, Rand later said, it was the buzz and growing influence of the NBI organization, along with Nathaniel’s attentions and his optimism, that fueled her recovery from depression. As little as she had believed in the value of a formal lecture service, or seen much promise in Branden’s early students, two things about NBI surprised her. First, she noticed that students, even the dull ones, were profiting from her books and Branden’s instruction to become “infinitely more rational” than they had been. Second, she saw that her protégé and his wife were creating an unexpected new avenue by which, she thought, ideas could infiltrate a corrupt culture: from the middle class upward, instead of from the intellectual class down, as in Russia and, indeed, among leftists in the United States. With NBI, she saw her philosophy taking root “in a way I did not know.” The “whole enormous response to Nathan gave me a preview of what can be done with a culture,” she said in 1961. “Seeing [him] start on a shoestring, with the whole intellectual atmosphere against him, standing totally alone and establishing an institution: that was an enormous, crucial, concrete example of what can be done.”

  By the spring of 1961, she had emerged from her depression. She began to look outward again and to see issues and causes to which she wanted to apply her knowledge and her gifts. But in some ways she never fully recovered—either her sense of purpose or her control over an unstable emotional life. “I hate bitterness,” she said to Branden, but she remained bitter. “If only I didn’t feel such loathing,” she said. “If only there was someone to respect and admire.” But there was no one, and aside from Cyrus, Victor Hugo, Cyrano de Bergerac, Frank, Branden, Aristotle, and the Founding Fathers, perhaps there never had been.

  Fifty years after Rand had quieted the ache she felt following the critical reception of Atlas Shrugged, an interviewer asked Branden whether she would have been satisfied by recognition from a group of literary and philosophical equals, as she had said she would. “I’m inclined to think, in the end, no,” he answered, reflecting. “It is inconceivable to me that I would have said this twenty or thirty years ago—I wouldn’t have said it—but to me, looking back, I think she felt too sorry for herself in certain ways.” After a silence,
he added, “I find myself thinking about certain actors and actresses who have received just about every award it’s possible to receive from the entertainment industry and who remain self-doubting and feel underappreciated. And you wonder what it would take to make them feel adequately appreciated.” In this, too, Rand predicted her own future in the character of Kay Gonda, in Ideal.

  Perhaps now not even Branden could make her feel fully “visible.” But she turned to him, certain that he could.

  FOURTEEN

  ACCOUNT OVERDRAWN

  1962–1967

  It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and

  achieve the full reality of man’s proper stature—and that the rest will

  betray it…. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me or The

  Fountainhead that they will betray: it is their own souls.

  —Introduction to the twenty-fifth-

  anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, 1968

  As her vigor returned, so did her fighting spirit. She went back on the college lecture circuit and took the Brandens with her. Speaking in opposition to most of the political and ethical ideas of the day, she became a symbol of contrarian idealism and defiance to student audiences across the country.

  In February 1960, she was invited to give the annual lecture in the Yale Law School’s prestigious Challenge series. In a car on the way to New Haven, she scribbled the final details of a slightly expanded version of “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World,” her speech for the evening. She was nervous. By chance, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra was performing elsewhere on campus, and the Yale Bulldogs hockey team was playing a home game. Since she thought of Yale as a breeding ground for liberals, she was afraid she would be speaking to an empty auditorium. To her surprise, and Yale’s, the flyer tacked to the law-school bulletin board attracted the largest audience in the history of the Yale series; the overflow was so great that the school placed loudspeakers in the building entryway and on two upper floors. During the question-and-answer period, one member of the audience shouted from the balcony, “Under your system, who will take care of the janitors?” She sang out, “Young man: the janitors!” and the hall erupted in laughter. She spoke to the students in the same encouraging tone she had taken with Nathaniel and Barbara in 1950. “Don’t give up too easily,” she told them. “Don’t sell out your life. If you make an effort to inquire on your own, you will find that it is not necessary to give up and [that] the allegedly powerful monster[s] of collectivism and convention will run like rat[s] at the first sign of a human step.” She was several times interrupted by applause and each time smiled shyly and raised her hand to wave. Time summarized her thesis but left out some of her most provocative statements (“Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences …The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving [a beggar] a dime,” she declaimed) and omitted a revealing anecdote about a fracas that broke out between Barbara Branden and a law-school student. At a ceremonial dinner before the lecture, the student, a member of the reception committee, had asked Barbara if she represented “a photographic ideal” of Atlas Shrugged, presumably implying that her slender figure and bearing were a purposeful evocation of Dagny Taggart. After the lecture, when the student asked Rand a question from the floor, Barbara jumped from her seat in the front row and publicly accused him of having insulted her at dinner, Time’s reporter noted in an unpublished draft. “The bantering back and forth was getting nowhere when the chairman of the event broke in and suggested the dispute be settled privately,” he wrote. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some of Rand’s adherents had begun to emulate her irascibility and pride.