Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  After the move, the writer liked to visit her husband’s fourth-floor art studio and sit quietly and watch him paint. His dedication to his work elicited her deep admiration, remembered Barbara. Yet she tended to have fixed ideas about drawing and painting, as about other things; some were apparently inherited from an art class she had taken as a teenager in Russia. Once, for example, she told NBI students that all curved lines should be drawn not as freehand swoops but as the intersecting planes of the straight lines that define the curve. Sometimes, while watching Frank, she made suggestions. She might point out that his colors were running together or that the perspective in a painting was off. When worried about his progress, she phoned her favorite painter, José Manuel Capuletti, and then relayed to Frank what Capuletti recommended, or she asked knowledgeable friends to buy books for him on aspects of technique. He took pleasure in her pride in him and was typically good-natured about her advice. Once, when she whispered to a guest, “He is a tiger at the easel,” he replied, “Well, just don’t grab me by the tail.” Occasionally, however, he reacted with anger. One evening, while he was making a study of a model’s face, she put a hand on his shoulder and pointed out that one of the eyes was lower than the other in the painting. He brushed her hand away and muttered, “Leave me alone.” “It was the only time I ever saw him lose his temper,” said another artist who happened to be present. Rand apologized profusely, but she didn’t change her behavior. “Smoke used to come out of my ears,” recalled Joan Blumenthal, who over the years became convinced that Rand’s interference in her husband’s artwork was partly motivated by fear. “You’ve heard about the issue of a ‘malevolent universe premise’?” she asked. “That was Rand’s term for not really believing that happiness is possible on earth. That’s what she was concerned about: that some sadness or malevolence would show.” She had reason to worry. In a 1961 portrait O’Connor painted of her (a strong likeness that demonstrates his ability to communicate in paint), the huge eyes are not only slightly out of alignment with each other but also radiate different messages: anger, sexuality, and power on the left and wariness and sorrow on the right. It’s a striking image. Although she forbade him to sell his paintings while he lived—she said she could not bear to part with them—she was discovered throwing this one in a trash bin after his death in 1979. None of her inner circle had ever seen it.

  At first, Rand’s hints to Branden about resuming their affair were muted. “I’m coming back to life,” she told him, adding, “Can you imagine what these past years would have been like if you did not exist?” or, “You saved my life.” Her grateful remarks rattled Branden; he thought they hinted at continued dependency and a new set of expectations. She often asked whether he still loved her, and at one point she stammered, “Do you think …?” He understood her meaning and answered yes—yes, they would go back to being lovers. He later wrote, “It was the only answer [I could give] that would not have precipitated an immediate crisis, the end point of which would have been the annihilation of our relationship.” This statement of Branden’s has been a subject of disagreement among Rand’s surviving disciples; those who later turned against him claimed that he wasn’t worried about excommunication as much as about being demoted from his glamorous and gainful role at The Objectivist and NBI. Those who took his side pointed out that he had dedicated himself to her and her ideas from his freshman year in college, was intensely protective of her self-image, and was naturally frightened of her volcanic temper and allegiance to a black-and-white moral universe. In any case, he later admitted that he didn’t love her, not in the romantic sense she meant, and hadn’t since before the publication of Atlas Shrugged. If she appeared to forget her original horror of being “an old woman pursuing a younger man” and was maneuvering to get what she wanted, he was procrastinating. He also told her something that was true: that she was the most important person in the world to him. He said he needed time to work out the problems in his ten-year marriage to Barbara before resuming a romantic relationship with her. During that early conversation she replied, sighing, “I don’t feel fully ready yet, either. I was just testing your attitude for the future.” She offered to counsel the unhappy couple. He accepted. For the moment, he was off the hook.

  He knew, if she didn’t, that it was far too late to begin again. During the years of her depression, he had behaved toward her as a good son behaves to an ailing mother, except that they occasionally slept together. Yet he had also distanced himself from her. He had discovered an interest in hypnosis, a therapeutic technique that she categorically rejected. In this respect and others, he resented what he later characterized as her narrow-mindedness, intellectual rigidity, and “appalling moralism.” Yet he largely hid his resentment from her and continued to moralize prodigiously himself. In The Objectivist Newsletter, he stressed that holding any idea that contradicted any other was to “kill one’s capacity to be certain of anything.” In the department of rendering judgments, said Barbara, “Ayn sometimes seemed like a pussycat in comparison” to him.

  He was an unmistakably gifted (if occasionally “droning”) speaker, displaying a seductive mixture of self-assurance, poise, and wit, as well as a tone of moral seriousness and a hint of moral threat. Like Sinclair Lewis’s famous two-fisted evangelist, he “was so strong on purity and the virtue of womanhood,” so to speak, that disagreeing with him was tantamount to admitting one’s own moral weakness. He even had an Elmer Gantry—like maxim to describe his speaking technique: “Omnisciate and inflamminate,” he used to call it, meaning, “Act as if you know everything, and stir up the emotions of the audience.” He dressed the part of an impresario, in good suits and monogrammed shirts. His business style was manic, adrenaline filled, abrupt. To relieve stress, “he would go off on shopping sprees,” remembered Robert Hessen, who pinch-hit as NBI’s bookkeeper in the 1960s. “He came in one day and [showed me] a bill for five hundred dollars worth of Sulka ties.” In general, he treated staffers brusquely. “Nathan had a theory about ‘men as tools,’” recalled a secretary who worked for both him and Rand. “These were [people] who weren’t particularly worthy but could aid in the cause in certain limited ways. That was his view of the staff.” Rand agreed with this theory and deemed it “brilliant,” according to Barbara, but in spite of this her secretaries and typists found her exceptionally fair, scrupulous, and considerate. “She didn’t know how he’d been treating us,” the secretary recalled in 1983. To the contrary, she knew more than anyone thought she did.

  In New York’s East Thirties, where many young adherents lived and others milled about before and after NBI events, Branden and Rand were celebrities. Whether from shyness or a fear of being buttonholed, the novelist tended to shrink from unexpected public recognition. Shelly Reuben, a typist for The Objectivist Newsletter in 1965, remembered seeing her in the street one day, flagging down a taxi. As Reuben approached, Rand frowned, but when she explained that she just wanted to say hello, Rand “broke out into the most beautiful smile.” Wow, thought Reuben, she thinks people always want something from her.

  More difficult, perhaps, from her point of view, was that people often wanted the same things. She was a remarkable teacher, but after six or seven years of answering questions at NBI and at college lectures she could become bored and frustrated when required to repeat herself. Asked for the umpteenth time during an NBI question-and-answer session how she expected people to be rational in an irrational society, she shouted, “I did it myself! No one taught me how to think!” Her steadfast follower and one of her attorneys, Hank Holzer, typically spent hours a week fending off possible copyright and intellectual property violations by fans who wrote to announce, say, the founding of a John Galt line of curtains; so when an ingenuous NBI student from Texas asked, “Miss Rand, would it be an infringement of your rights if I painted a picture of my ideal man and called it John Galt?” she exploded, perhaps with some justification in view of the fact that the woman didn’t have enough imagination to create a hero of h
er own. To some degree, then, she found herself in the same position as Kay Gonda and Gail Wynand, dependent for admiration and support on people she didn’t respect. Because she now tended to see everything as a moral issue, she sometimes lost her patience in public as well as in private and harangued a naïve or dim-witted stranger about his motives and his moral condition. “She had a huge number of young people hanging on her every word,” reflected Joan Kennedy Taylor. “It was almost as if she developed what she thought was a psychological analysis of certain questions and then applied it to everybody who asked.” When displeased, she had a habit of beginning to speak in an angry tone, then pulling out a cigarette and her Zippo lighter, inserting the cigarette into a holder, flipping open the lighter’s metal lid, and producing a huge flame to light the cigarette before continuing. “The expression on her face was something not to be believed,” said an admirer—”nostrils flaring, the anger and the flame [making] her look like a dragon. The image was unforgettable.” Students were finding her unpredictable and “frightening, really frightening,” said one.

  Branden seemed to enjoy the attention. “In those days, people worshipped the ground he walked on,” recalled an acquaintance of the time. “He ate it up. He loved it.” In the early and mid-1960s, he liked to travel, make appearances on radio and television shows, give speeches, make new friends—a constellation Rand later referred to disapprovingly as “going Hollywood” and being “a man of action.” Together with Allan Blumenthal, he conducted day-long seminars on the techniques of what had become known as “Objectivist psychotherapy,” which aimed at correcting wrong or conflicting thoughts and beliefs as a cure for emotional problems. There, too, he won disciples who adhered to his theories and prospered from his and Blumenthal’s referrals. He kept his honorary position as John Galt’s avatar (“except for a few blemishes,” Rand sometimes added wryly) in front of friends and students. He made it clear that if a woman weren’t half in love with him, and if a man weren’t half in love with the creator of Atlas Shrugged, they were suffering from a lack of self-esteem. “He was the one who made a crusade out of her theory of sex,” Barbara recalled. “She didn’t.” In this, perhaps, he was doing to others what had been done to him.

  He flirted with danger. An hour before a telephone interview with a Washington, D.C., radio station, he dialed in to change the number at which he wanted to be reached. Chatting with the production manager, an idealistic young member of the Washington Objectivist club who had booked his appearance, he mentioned that he was calling from Ayn Rand’s telephone—yes, and that right now he was lying on Ayn Rand’s bed. “This was before anyone knew about the affair,” said the woman, Lee Clifford. “But his manner was so familiar, so intimate, it was as if he were telling me. I knew. He communicated it.” When students at NBI asked whether it was really possible to be in love with more than one person at a time (apparently, a common question, given Rand’s steamy literary triads), he answered that only moral giants could possibly pull it off. (“It sounded like bullshit at the time,” recalled a member of the audience who knew him well.) Rand sometimes said much the same thing, but at other times answered, “No, but you can be half in love with two different people at the same time,” a kind of confession of her own.

  What she didn’t know was that, beginning in late 1963, Branden was juggling a new romantic triangle, or rather a parallelogram. At just about the time she decided that she was fully ready to resume sleeping with him, he fell in love with a younger woman—a willowy twenty-three-year-old fashion model and aspiring actress named Patrecia Gullison. He had first noticed Patrecia two years earlier, watching him, openly spellbound, from the third row of seats at NBI. After lectures, he and she had talked, then flirted. In the summer of 1962, the young woman, assuming that Branden was happily married and unavailable, had married a tall, good-looking advertising account executive and NBI regular named Larry Scott. Branden attended the wedding, but he continued to think about her. Before her marriage, he had encouraged one of his male students to date her as a strategy for keeping her close at hand; afterward, perhaps with a similar purpose in mind, he offered her and Larry Scott free marriage counseling when they told him they were having marital problems. When she entered his ninth-floor office, he later wrote, she behaved “as if she were entering a temple.” Inevitably, one afternoon they found themselves alone together and fell into each other’s arms. She was impish, eager, and full of life. She hadn’t gone to college but was saving her money to go, and she was attentive in his lectures. Unlike Rand and Barbara, she didn’t ask him to check his premises or overcome his flaws. Unconditional female admiration was a thrilling new experience for him, and he was starving for an extraphilosophical experience of sex. She was “what Nathan had never had in his life,” said Barbara in 2005, “someone who wasn’t trying to save his soul.”

  Before he slept with the young woman, he told her that he and his wife still had strong feelings for each other and were trying to repair their marriage. He also told her the history of his nine-year affair with the towering figure at the center of their lives. This was the primary obstacle to a love affair with her, he warned her: Ayn’s needs came first. Also, if Ayn ever discovered that the man to whom she had dedicated Atlas Shrugged had not only lost his desire for her but had also fallen in love with a beautiful young rival, it would mean the end of NBI, of The Objectivist Newsletter, and of “everything I’ve been trying to build since Ayn and I started.” He made a decision that would prove fateful. “I can’t let it go,” he told her. “I don’t want to. I love it.” Why couldn’t they be honest with Ayn? Patrecia asked. Wasn’t the older woman the very soul of reason and reality? Branden answered, “You would see an explosion such as you cannot even begin to imagine.”

  He had another strong motive to keep the affair secret. By the standards of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, the choice of this lovely, lighthearted, reflexively self-sacrificing girl in preference to Rand revealed in him an inner Peter Keating. “The man who is proudly certain of his own value will want the highest type of woman he can find,” Francisco tells Rearden in Atlas Shrugged. Nathaniel was sure that, in his and Rand’s cosmology, at least, Patrecia was not the highest type of woman. (To allay Rand’s initial suspicions about the meaning of his friendship with Patrecia, he described her as an “Eddie Willers,” i.e., an average person who has good premises but no special gifts.) Francisco’s speech continues with a kind of curse on any man who only pretends to love the highest type of woman or who tries to love her out of duty or charity. His body “will not obey him, it will not respond,” the striking copper baron warns, “it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find.” Branden evidently believed this. Aside from his indebtedness to Rand and the mission they shared, she represented his worldview. The thought of being without her was intolerable to him. He anxiously told himself that his attraction to Patrecia would pass and that his life would return to normal.

  Patrecia agreed to keep their affair concealed, even from her husband, and never to say a word about Branden’s clandestine relationship with Rand. The psychologist and Patrecia met for trysts in his office or in the Scotts’ nearby apartment, while Larry Scott was at work or traveling on business. She turned down modeling jobs to be available to him. He learned “to lie expertly,” he wrote, “as I became a master at inventing reasons to be away from the office.”

  In early 1964, he reluctantly gave his wife permission to conduct her own affair with an NBI colleague she had grown fond of. (In addition to every other complication, Branden “really cared for me,” Barbara recalled. Consenting to such an affair was “agony,” he told her.) He didn’t reveal his affair with Patrecia until three years later, when he needed her help in keeping his secret from Rand. Meanwhile, however, she noticed his giddy, almost obsessive, often public banter about Patrecia and his frequent absences from home and NBI and reached the correct but, to her, incredible conclusion that he wa
s deceiving both her and Ayn with Patrecia. She asked him outright if he and the young woman were having an affair. He denied it, assuring her that such suspicions were a symptom of her old demons: emotionalism, insecurity, and a lack of self-esteem. She took him at his word. Thus the new math of this real-life romantic triangle left one woman questioning her perceptions, another reluctantly faking reality, and a third waiting and hoping for something that would never come.

  In his affair with Patrecia, too, Branden gradually lost discretion, dancing with his young mistress at formal parties and annual balls, driving her around town in his convertible car, appearing at a Los Angeles NBI event with her and her lovely identical twin sister, Liesha, also a model, on either arm, while employees and students gaped at his glamour. No one seems to have mentioned these sightings to Rand or, at first, to Barbara. But rumors swirled, and at last “the truth was evident [to me],” Barbara later wrote. The knowledge that she was being lied to led her, in the summer of 1965, to ask Branden for a separation. He moved out, into a temporary apartment on the third floor, explaining to friends and students that he needed extra office space; after the separation became final, Barbara settled in a one-bedroom penthouse apartment on the twentieth floor. In spite of Patrecia, he was not ready to publicly end a marriage he half hoped to save and whose conflicts “operated as a shield” against his older lover’s desires and expectations. He and Barbara continued to appear together in public, and they continued to meet with Rand for the marital counseling sessions she had initiated almost as soon as he mentioned that his troubled marriage was a barrier to sex with her.