Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  As their friendship entered its second year, Hospers noticed that she lost patience with him quickly. This was especially true after he politely refused to issue a public condemnation of his friend and colleague Sidney Hook. For her, this was disloyalty; she saw the realm of ideas as a battlefield, he observed, where people must continually put their lives and livelihoods at risk. He knew he was supposed to want to join the ranks of the converted; the more time she expended on a person, the more agreement and allegiance she expected. “Any hint of thinking as one formerly had, any suggestion that one had backtracked, was treated with indignation,” Hospers later wrote. Even mild criticism—say, about the philosophical imprecision with which she sometimes used important words like “must” and “will”—could send her “to the stratosphere in anger.”

  The breaking point came at an academic conference held at Harvard University, at which Hospers arranged for her to speak. She had frequently complained to him that university philosophers paid no attention to her; the annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, of which he was the program chair, seemed a perfect occasion on which to begin to remedy the situation. She agreed to speak on the condition that Hospers be the person appointed to deliver comments on her presentation afterward, in the academic manner. She gave a formal twenty-minute paper titled “Art as Sense of Life,” which was an interesting meditation on the sources of art in the creator’s subconscious evaluation of the nature of man and his place in the universe. When she sat down, he rose to perform his part, which was to point out strengths and weaknesses in her argument. According to Barbara, who was present, some of his comments were sarcastic, “probably out of nervousness at [having to criticize] her publicly, while she sat listening.” To his horror and his colleagues’ outrage, she responded to his remarks by lashing out with a coarsely worded personal attack on Hospers. In an especially severe instance of cultural tone deafness, perhaps, she assumed that her friend had deliberately ambushed and betrayed her. She and her retinue of followers swept out of the room and went off to a planned party at her hotel. Hospers had been invited, too, but when he arrived no one would speak to him. He had been excommunicated, just like that. He had seen it happen to others, but never so swiftly, silently, or crushingly, he thought. He left the hotel and never saw her again. But he mourned her loss for many years. Three and a half decades after their parting, he remembered his evenings with her as among the most intellectually exhilarating of his life. The memory of her early-morning send-off, “Good premises!” brought him close to tears every time he thought of it.

  She was far from finished with discarding friends. In late September 1963, she returned in style to Chicago, the city that had introduced her to American life. A fan named Ed Nash, who managed the Chicago NBI tape-transcription business, rented a hall at McCormick Place, then the world’s largest exposition center, as the forum for a speech called “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business.” On a cool, cloudy Sunday evening she spoke to twenty-five hundred fans, many of whom had traveled hundreds of miles to hear her. Mimi Sutton and her sister Marna were there, along with Frank, representing the O’Connor clan. On Rand’s mother’s side, Fern Brown, Fern’s parents Sam and Minna Goldberg, Rand’s second cousin Burt Stone and his wife, daughter, and granddaughter were also present, at Rand’s invitation. Shortly after she began to speak, there was a bomb scare. Luckily, it was a hoax. But during intermission in the dressing room, she had a moment of panic. Barbara and Nathaniel were busy in an adjacent hallway, and Frank was elsewhere, so Mimi and Marna were soothing her when the Chicago relatives came in. In the hubbub, Burt Stone’s granddaughter noticed that Rand’s black dress was on inside out, seams and label showing through a sheer chiffon overdress. She wondered if she ought to mention it. But there was no time. Rand greeted Fern, the Goldbergs, and the Stones by holding out her hand: “It was polite but formal, and not warm,” Mimi recalled. “She was like a queen on a throne,” said Fern. She returned to the stage to a roar of applause and went on to inveigh against political interference in business, specifically the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act and other antitrust laws. Afterward she, Frank, Frank’s nieces, and the Brandens left for a small reception given by Ed Nash and NBI. Although her Chicago relatives disapproved of her philosophy by then, Minna Goldberg still felt slighted at not being asked to the reception. When Burt Stone died two years later and Rand didn’t come to the funeral, family communication ceased. Rand never again saw her mother Anna’s American cousins.

  That weekend, Mimi met the Brandens for the first time. “He was very rude,” she said. From her aunt’s manner when she spoke about him, Mimi thought she detected a hint that Branden had become “a slave—something she would like,” Mimi recalled, without malice, shortly after her aunt’s death.

  After the following week, Rand did not see Ruth Beebe Hill again, either. The author and the Brandens left Chicago by plane for Portland, Oregon—Rand’s first flight. They led two days of campus-wide discussions of her novels at Lewis and Clark College, which was celebrating her work by awarding her an honorary doctorate of arts and letters. Then they headed south to San Francisco and Los Angeles, where Branden was set to deliver the opening lecture of “The Basic Principles of Objectivism” series. His frequent out-of-town appearances were always popular events, but when students learned that Rand was joining him for a question-and-answer session, the response was overwhelming. In Los Angeles, seats in the five-hundred-person lecture hall sold out quickly, and an hour or so before the start of the event another six hundred people tried to push their way into the lobby. The place was so crammed that a janitor called the fire department; the chief, instead of dispersing the crowd, created aisles and kept order, on the condition that he could meet Ayn Rand after the event. The commemoration of her work in Portland, the reverence and raw emotion of the crowds in Chicago and California—these were heady experiences, even for an author accustomed to a following.

  A day or two later, she, Frank, and the Brandens drove northwest to the Chatsworth ranch, which none of them had seen since 1951. Their visit was unannounced. Ruth Hill, puttering on the second floor of the Neutra house, heard Frank’s voice through an open window, talking to her husband, Buzzy. She rushed downstairs. “Is that really you, Frank? Happiest day!” she called to O’Connor. “Is Ayn with you?” O’Connor looked pained as he said, “Yes. She’s coming now.” Hill ran to embrace her old friend and burbled, “Are you half as happy to see me as I am to see you, Ayn?” To her surprise, Rand answered stiffly, with her thick Russian accent, “Why should I be?” The problem, it turned out, was that Hill was guilty of an unintended slight. Months earlier, Branden had asked her to become the NBI representative in the San Fernando Valley. Instead of saying yes immediately, she had asked to hear a sample tape. She had not heard Branden lecture, and she didn’t believe in asking her acquaintances to pay for something she couldn’t personally recommend. Rand viewed this as a betrayal. “You turned down Nathaniel,” she shouted at Hill. “You turned down the tapes. You turned me down!” She and her companions walked into the house and remained there while Buzzy talked to Frank about the fields and flowers. By this time, it had long been clear to everyone that the O’Connors were not coming back to live at the ranch. The Hills continued to mail their monthly rent checks to New York, but the friendship was at an end. Hill stuck to her guns: “To this day,” she said, forty years later, “I would not sell something I had not sampled.” Yet for the rest of her life the spirited ethnographer, writer, and mountain climber missed her friend. Well into her nineties, she continued to give copies of Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged as holiday gifts to people she especially liked.

  Rand also broke with Bennett Cerf. She had regarded his public defense of Atlas Shrugged as weak, at best, and for years had been displeased by reports that he didn’t always take her side in private conversations. As a result, she considered him “a chicken and unloyal,” recalled Perry Knowlton, an associate of her agent Alan Collins.
When Cerf suggested publishing a second collection of her essays in October 1963, timed to stimulate discussion and book sales during the 1964 election season, she assembled a dozen articles from The Objectivist Newsletter along with some of her major speeches and handed in a manuscript. Cerf was thrilled. Apparently, he hadn’t read it yet. When his editors read it, they hit the roof over an essay that was intended to give the book its title, an inflammatory critique of the Kennedy administration called “The Fascist New Frontier.” Outrageous by the standards of the day, it likened the economic policies of Kennedy—for example, increasing the minimum wage and funding public housing—to Fascism in the 1930s, and Kennedy to Hitler. Her purpose was to remind Americans of the distinction between socialism (government ownership of industry, capital, and property), of which she thought the electorate might approve, and Fascism (government control of industry and private property for the benefit of favored groups), which she saw as a hallmark of the New Frontier. Cerf’s editors demanded that Random House refuse to print the essay. Three weeks after heralding the arrival of the manuscript, Cerf dejectedly told Rand and Perry Knowlton that the author would have to remove the essay and change the title of the book.

  “He made his decision not to publish without even consulting me,” Rand complained to Barbara Branden. One day in mid-October, she marched into his office and reminded him of his promise not to be political, never to censor her, and to publish anything she wrote. He had been talking about fiction, he pleaded, and asked her, at a minimum, to remove the passages from Hitler’s speeches and change the title of the essay to something not implicating Kennedy, such as “America’s Drift Toward Fascism.” She was adamant in her refusal; her whole point was to show that the Kennedy Administration’s ideology wasn’t socialistic, as people might think, but fascistic.

  As he recalled a few years later, she followed him down to the street from his office, arguing with him while he hailed a taxicab to take him home to change for dinner. As he climbed into the taxi, she cried, “You’re going to print every word I’ve written, or I won’t let you publish the book!” He called back, unhappily, “That’s that. Get yourself another publisher.”

  She did.

  She liked New American Library’s spirited founder and editor-in-chief, Victor Weybright, who, in addition to being her paperback publisher, had contracted to pay an astonishing quarter of a million dollars for the right to publish To Lorne Dieterling, the new “unrequited love story” she had begun to outline in late 1957, without ever seeing a proposal or her scanty notes. He agreed to publish the collection. A year later, in December 1964, he released it as an original paperback with a new, almost equally provocative title, The Virtue of Selfishness. It sold well, and in 1965 he reissued it in hardback. The firm became Rand’s primary publisher and went on to publish and republish her nonfiction collections, the paperback editions of her novels, and her plays until industry mergers finally put an end to the NAL imprint. Until then, year in and year out, from the 1960s to the 1980s, the huge sales of Rand’s books paid many of the bills at NAL.

  In spite of her friendship with Weybright, NAL wasn’t in the same publishing league with Random House, and after Weybright’s death in 1974, things went rapidly downhill for Rand. Perry Knowlton had to nag and coax the editors into paying proper attention to her books. His best leverage was the unwritten To Lorne Dieterling; because of this and her financial clout, an NAL staffer was, at minimum, always “delegated to Ayn Rand duty,” as one editor recalled. “That meant that every nine months to a year you’d have lunch with her—let her know how important she was and listen to her drone on.” A second editor added, “She asked me at lunch if I’d be interested in being cast” in a planned TV miniseries of Atlas Shrugged. “I thought, ‘She’s pretty old to be flirting,’ but I said, ‘That sounds great.’” A senior editor who grew extremely fond of her recalled his anger when a group of his colleagues, including the president of NAL, told him about their having gone together to a dinner party in her apartment without having bothered to read any of her books. When she asked them which of her books they liked best, the president tried to fake it, with predictable success. “That’s not funny,” the editor told his colleagues. “You’ve been living off the woman for years!”

  By its title alone, The Virtue of Selfishness summarized a lifetime of original thinking on the subject of “what I want.” It included five essays by Nathaniel Branden as well as fourteen essays and speeches by Rand, of varying degrees of insight and common sense. She had formed the habit of quoting John Galt as an independent authority who proved her points, and she opened and closed her most important essay, “The Objectivist Ethics,” which was based on her Wisconsin speech, with his words. In half a dozen other pieces she set out to establish such self-consistent but eccentric ideas as that “there are no conflicts of interest among rational men,” a notion that could have meaning only inside the moral world of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

  Ironically, The Virtue of Selfishness did not include “The Fascist New Frontier.” On November, 22, 1963, five weeks after her climactic meeting with Bennett Cerf, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Her critique of his administration was instantly obsolete. A few days after the assassination, as the entire nation grappled with its shock and grief, Cerf wrote to her, imploringly, “I hope you will agree with me that the appalling events of the last week make all our previous discussions academic.” She didn’t agree. “She said the assassination had nothing to do with what she had to say,” Cerf recalled. “It didn’t change her opinion one iota.” Yet he, too, often thought of her fondly. “I think you are one of the most wonderful people I have ever met in my life,” he wrote to her in 1965, “and this decision of yours [not to publish any future books with Random House] will not change my feeling in that respect in the least degree.” She also wished him well, assuring him that she would always give him credit for publishing Atlas Shrugged.

  Cerf blamed her followers for having flattered her into greater dogmatism and obstinacy than was natural to her. But she abandoned old acquaintances when they crossed her not just because she was buffered by her devotees, although their adulation surely made this easier to do. A friend of John Hospers’s, trying to console him after their falling-out, explained it this way: “Well John,” the friend said, “you were a scholar. She was a revolutionary.”

  An old friend of hers put it another way: “She could be immensely empathetic if she saw things in you that were like her. But if she didn’t see herself in some aspect of you, she didn’t empathize at all. You weren’t real to her.”

  It was at about this time that Rand began to hint to Branden that she wanted to resume their sexual affair.

  She was fifty-eight. He was thirty-three. They were joined together in overlapping business and creative ventures. They collaborated on the monthly newsletter, pamphlets, promotional presentations, lecture tours, and speeches. In an expansion of NBI, Branden started a small publishing venture to reissue Rand’s favorite books, including Merwin and Webster’s turn-of-the-century novel Calumet “K” and Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs, and established a book service to sell these and other books that might interest Rand’s readers. He launched a bicoastal NBI film series called “The Romantic Screen,” sponsored NBI dances and formal-dress balls, and created NBI Art Reproductions to sell mailorder copies of Frank O’Connor’s and Joan Blumenthal’s paintings, as well as a soft-focus portrait of Rand by Ilona Royce-Smithkin, one of O’Connor’s mentors at the Art Students League. (“This is exactly how I feel about myself,” Rand said on seeing the Joan Fontaine-esque portrait for the first time.) At least twice a year, Rand delivered NBI lectures to jam-packed audiences on the aesthetics of romantic writing and on Objectivist epistemology, and she not only answered student questions at the lectern every week but also tape-recorded answers to questions sent in by off-site tape-transcription groups. Thus she aided NBI’s growth—and, presumably, sales of her books—without accepting any re
muneration from NBI, although Branden repeatedly offered to pay her. (NBI “was certainly profitable,” Barbara told an interviewer in 1990, though “nobody got rich.”) Rand backed Branden’s first published book and gave his writing on Objectivist psychology a boost by including his essays in The Virtue of Selfishness and in her third collection, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), where she also reprinted essays by Alan Greenspan. Sales of these books presumably generated royalties for Branden, fortifying his income from NBI and The Objectivist Newsletter, as well as his psychotherapeutic practice. Every month or two, they traveled together for public appearances. He had her unqualified public sanction: “You can speak for me anytime you wish, on any subject whatsoever,” she called out to him from the audience one evening at NBI. She let it be known that he, and only he, would be permitted to write the screenplay for a movie of Atlas Shrugged.

  Finally, in late 1963, they more or less moved in together. The Brandens traded their set of rooms at 165 East Thirty-fifth Street for a two-bedroom apartment in a brand-new high-rise at 120 East Thirty-fourth Street at Lexington Avenue, where they settled on the ninth floor and where Branden set up an office for writing and conducting therapy. On the second floor, Barbara transformed a studio into administrative headquarters for NBI and The Objectivist Newsletter, with a separate office for herself. She oversaw editorial and business operations, and a Canadian friend of hers named Wilfred Schwartz took charge of NBI’s financial affairs, while Branden’s sister Elayne Kalberman managed the newsletter staff. The O’Connors followed a few months later, choosing an apartment on the sixth floor. It was new and spanking clean but again ordinary, with an L-shaped living room windowed at one end, a galley kitchen, a standard-size bedroom, a bathroom, and a small separate study just large enough to hold Ayn’s desk and files. O’Connor, who had been working in a rented studio on East Twenty-eighth Street, transferred his paints and canvasses to a one-room apartment on the fourth floor. After a while, others, including Leonard Peikoff and psychologist Roger Callahan and his family, moved into the building, while rank-and-file followers continued to fill rentals in neighboring streets. An intercom joined the O’Connors’ apartment with the Brandens’. Ayn and Nathaniel spoke on the phone two or three times a day. Often, the Brandens were awakened by late-night calls from Rand to Nathaniel. Except when traveling separately, they were barely out of each other’s range of hearing.