In fact, at intervals from 1964 until 1966 and later, Rand spent many hours trying to help the Brandens repair their shattered “psycho-epistemology” (method of thinking) with respect to each other and their marriage and thus free her lover to return to her. For the first few months, before the two officially announced their separation, she treated them with a kindness and tenderness “that had long seemed absent from her personality,” Barbara later wrote, and appeared to be genuinely disappointed to discover that their personal relationship had dissolved into such an angry shambles. With Patrecia waiting offstage, Branden knew from the start that Rand’s efforts had very little chance of success. Barbara, who attended the sessions under protest, nevertheless did not tell Rand about her own ongoing affair. When the couple finally informed their unofficial therapist that the marriage was irreparable, she seemed relieved. “Now, darling,” she said to Branden, “perhaps there will be a chance for us to be in love again.”
Branden stood on a precipice: Should he tell the truth, risking Rand’s anger and his own disinheritance, or take up his duties as Rand’s lover? He chose a third way, finding other real but incidental ailments to complain of: exhaustion from overwork, trauma from the end of his marriage, fragile self-esteem because of Rand’s history of rebuking him, depression, “a sense of [emotional] deadness that made it exceedingly difficult to think of resuming a romance with her,” and, somewhat astonishingly at this point, anguish over his second-fiddle status in the triangle with Frank, which had caused him pain in the past, he said, and almost surely would again. “Are you asking me to leave Frank and live with you openly?” she asked him, shocked. No, no, he hastened to answer. Still, he said, her allegiance to Frank was difficult for him. Later, when trying to explain his persistent refusal to talk about their emotional and sexual relationship, he unearthed another, deeper problem to explain his “deadness.” He told her that “if the ability to think of people [read: Rand] in relation to himself was a special sense, it feels to him as if he were born without that sense.” She was appalled by this remark—reasoning that, if it were true, he had never had an authentic romantic attachment to her—but apparently did not recognize it as an almost verbatim quote from her. Writing of the murderer-hero of The Little Street in 1928, she had noted that the real murderer, Hickman, “doesn’t understand, because thankfully he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people.” Of course, this was also a characteristic of Howard Roark—and of Ayn Rand. Even in Branden’s attempts to break away from her, he inhabited the psyches of her characters.
She asked directly, and not for the first time, “Is it my age? I could accept that.” Oh, no you couldn’t, Branden remembered thinking, and gave her the answer he thought she wanted. “You will always be a sexual being,” he told her, and, “You have no equals at any age.”
Naturally, the man’s passion for Patrecia didn’t fade; it grew stronger, bringing him “happiness of a kind I had never known before.” The way out without hurting anyone, he madly imagined, was to encourage Rand to get to know Patrecia and so discover her virtues and potential to be a good Objectivist—even if, like Eddie Willers, she didn’t meet their highest standards. Only then, he thought, might Rand recover her reason and give her blessing to a sexual union between the lovely young woman and her own intellectual son and heir, while remaining his patroness, promoter, and friend.
As daffy as this was, at first it appeared to work. The celebrated author initially liked the ingenue, especially her physical type, so similar to that of Dominique and Dagny. “She’s very American looking,” she remarked, and once, having seen Patrecia perform in a play, startled both the young actress and Branden by declaring, with her usual air of excited self-absorption, “What is magnificent is that you have taken the philosophy of Objectivism and applied it to the art of acting!” The young beauty charmed most members of the inner circle. She and her twin sister, Liesha, volunteered as artist’s models and posed for Frank, Joan Blumenthal, and other painters and sculptors in the group. She offered suggestions about clothing and makeup to Rand and some of the other women and once showed the novelist and thinker how to cross her legs for a television interview. (Rand, assuming that she was supposed to keep her legs crossed, complained after the interview that she had developed a leg cramp.) Joan Blumenthal said to Branden, with amazement, “When you’re with Patrecia, you like the way you feel about yourself!” “I hated the calculations and manipulations this strategy entailed,” he wrote in 1989, “but I felt that my back was to the wall and my survival was at stake.”
As Rand more closely observed Branden and Patrecia, however, she changed her mind. She thought that the young woman was “role-playing,” as she noted in a 1968 summary of her impressions of Patrecia over a two-year period. (“I cannot stand people with ‘acts,’ particularly women with ‘acts,’” she wrote; “it is too clear to me that such acts come from dreadful premises.”) Of course, Patrecia was acting, as were Branden, Barbara, and possibly Rand herself. When Branden swore to Rand that he had no sexual interest in Patrecia—that his feeling for her was strictly playful, protective, and paternal—Rand claimed to believe him. She was disturbed by their friendship, she later confided to her journal, not because it was a sexual flirtation but because it was “a disturbing and incomprehensible sign” of a seeming change in her protégé’s tastes and priorities, away from philosophy and toward a “‘consumption’ (or ‘pleasure’) ‘emotional’ world.” When he tried to convince her that Patrecia reminded him of her, including the younger woman’s “man-worship” and “sexual view of the universe,” she balked. To the contrary, she wrote; watching Patrecia, she saw “only a faintly pretentious emptiness and fear.”
Gradually, his evasions, inconsistencies, and “drift” became intolerable to the woman for whom logic was tantamount to truth. They began to have explosive arguments. How could he be so out of focus about his reasons for not resuming his romance with her? Where was his mind? Why were his proclaimed values—his love for her and all she stood for—so evidently in conflict with his emotions? What was he repressing? What was he hiding? As to sex, “When, if not now?” she asked. When Branden didn’t answer, she took to making extensive notes on his psychology and discussing them at length, first with him and then with Barbara, whom she recruited as an ally in deciphering his state of mind. Starting in 1967, she kept a personal journal of her talks with him and her insights into their long history together. The truth was hidden in plain sight, but the aging visionary wouldn’t or couldn’t allow herself to see it. She tormented herself, and him, by trying to untangle his half-earnest rationales and shifting confusions, which she did by writing, as she always had.
Without providing a truthful explanation, Patrecia asked her husband for a separation in December 1965. Branden’s cousin Allan Blumenthal, acting as Branden’s proxy, passed the word that they should keep their separation secret until the Brandens announced theirs, which they finally did a few weeks later. “We don’t want people to think the two events are related,” Blumenthal told the Scotts. “You know how gossip and rumors start.”
The news of the Brandens’ impending divorce sent shock waves through the concentric circles of Rand’s New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., Toronto, and Chicago organizations. Insiders couldn’t believe that Objectivism’s “ideal couple,” as Al Ramrus described the pair, was divided, and dividing. No, there was no one else involved, the Brandens told their family, friends, admirers, and students. “We’re just incompatible,” they said. “We’re just not able to be happy together.” Soon other Rand-centered marriages began to sever, as Roarks and Dominiques took a second look at the Brandens and each other.
In late 1966, almost three years after Branden and Patrecia began sleeping together, the harrowed psychotherapist finally told his estranged wife that he was about to begin a sexual affair with the beautiful young woman. Although he lied about the timing, he was evidently seeking relief from lies; he later
wrote that he could barely tolerate the strain of carrying on his double life. Once separated and living apart, he and Barbara fell into a pattern of joining together as allies only when under duress. She urged him to tell Rand—if not about Patrecia, then at least about the impossibility on his part of reigniting a twelve-year-old flame. But when he begged for time, she agreed.
The stakes were high. He was working on his first book in his field, to be published as The Psychology of Self-Esteem. With it, he hoped to make an independent reputation. Rand had introduced him to editors at an NAL affiliate, World Publishing, and they had offered him a contract for the book, sight unseen. She had praised the almost-completed book as a work of genius and had promised to describe it as such in a signed introduction. But the manuscript was running late. “Just wait until [Ayn] writes the introduction,” he implored Barbara during one of their discussions.
On behalf of NBI, he had also assumed a surprisingly large new financial obligation. In summer 1967, a few months after his partial confession to Barbara, he signed a lease on eight thousand square feet of office space one floor below the lobby of the Empire State Building, still the tallest example of engineering prowess in the world. The lease ran for fifteen years, and over that period of time it was likely to cost NBI at least a quarter of a million dollars. Given that the combined income of NBI and its offshoots now exceeded four hundred thousand dollars a year, the lease was affordable on paper, and it struck the business manager of NBI as a good price for the space. But the organization was experiencing its annual summer cash-flow shortfall. Each year, before the arrival of revenues from autumn lecture fees, NBI typically borrowed small amounts from the independent account of The Objectivist to pay for advertising and promotion of fall courses. Although the finances of the magazine, owned by Rand and Branden jointly, and of NBI, owned by Branden alone, were kept strictly separate, Rand didn’t object to these annual interest-bearing loans, which were always paid back in the fall. This year, however, in order to finance a year’s rent in advance, plus furniture and additional staff, a larger amount was needed. Rand had told Nathaniel not to bother her with business matters and was only mildly put out to be told about the loan after the fact, but she didn’t know its size, approximately $25,000. Meanwhile, in the view of at least one member of the staff, Branden was not paying adequate attention to the money-making part of the operation: the lectures themselves. “I felt we were really in trouble here,” said a longtime staffer. “But nobody would listen.”
One additional source of distraction for Branden was a brand-new venture he was then recruiting investors to finance: NBI Theater, Inc., a small corporation to be devoted to the production of romantic drama. “Patrecia’s involvement in acting had reawakened my early love of the theater,” he later wrote, “and I wanted to produce a series of plays and write for the theater myself.” Since an effective way to begin was to appeal to Ayn Rand’s audience, the first project was to be a dramatization of The Fountainhead, adapted by Barbara and approved by Ayn. The Brandens expected it to open in a community-based theater in the Jan Hus Church on East Seventy-fourth Street in the fall of 1968. Casting lay ahead, but at one point Branden considered Patrecia to play the part of Dominique. (Strangely but aptly, Patrecia had recently taken the stage name Patrecia Wynand.) Rand gradually cooled to the project. The involvement of Patrecia would not have increased her enthusiasm.
The lies and conflicts were piling up. By 1967, carefully guarded secrets, rampant gossip, and paranoia were the order of the day. And still Rand hoped for her lover to return.
FIFTEEN
EITHER/OR (THE BREAK)
1967–1968
Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.
—The Romantic Manifesto, 1969
In early 1967, Rand completed a book-length essay called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Never among her popular works, it laid out her theories of how man thinks and acquires knowledge and contains what some admirers regard as her seminal contribution to Western philosophy, a theory of concept formation.* Aside from this, and a fiery, farsighted speech against the Vietnam War in April 1967 at the Ford Hall Forum, and a few short essays for The Objectivist, her mental life was now almost entirely focused on what and how Nathaniel Branden thought. Marital counseling having ended, she assumed the temporary role of his personal psychotherapist, even though she had no training in psychology and had little appreciation for therapy’s methods and objectives. More or less adhering to traditional ethical practice, she placed their active relationship on hold “in every sense or aspect” while she probed his psyche. Yet the subtext of their verbal dueling was always their relationship. Over the next several months, they met hundreds of times at all hours of the day and night. In most of the sessions, he took to playing a gloomy child who mutters, “I don’t know,” while she alternated between obsessed scientist and spurned lover. He rationalized, improvised, planted clues, and followed up by denying their significance; she moralized, intimidated, and threatened even as she drilled for answers. She was determined to find out what had happened to her virile young lover “with the sovereign mind of a genius” and the moral courage to love Ayn Rand. In spite of the Brandens’ withholding of important facts—and her own naïveté or purposeful blindness—the thinker gradually pieced together some of Branden’s motives.
She began by analyzing apparent contradictions between his proclaimed values and his behavior. For example, he often said she was important to him. Yet he knew “years ago,” she wrote in her journal, that his apparent inability to be emotionally intimate with her or to discuss their romantic relationship had hurt her. The hours of marriage counseling she had devoted to him and Barbara, along with months of analyzing his problems, had made her feel depersonalized and invisible, she both told him and wrote. And yet even after the breakup of his marriage he had taken no corrective steps. “I feel real fear when he tells me ‘I don’t know’ in regard to his feelings and desires in our relationship,” she wrote. “It is as if everything pertaining to his own emotions is that kind of vague, helpless ‘I don’t know.’” Also, although he said he wanted to live exclusively according to his—and her—highest values, he let their relationship drift while he filled his time with practical activities he claimed not to value or enjoy: “business, theatrical business, lunches (and worse),” the “worse” apparently a reference to his “friendship” with Patrecia. The pace of these activities, culminating in the real-estate deal, furnishing the Empire State Building offices, and the planned production of The Fountainhead, was increasing, not diminishing. Such obvious contradictions were not believable “in a man of Branden’s rationality and intellectual development,” she wrote in the fall of 1967. “He is hiding something here. What?”
As yet, she had been unable to “project” his psychology, she noted. As an aid, she tried to focus on what he wasn’t saying—although she, too, avoided any mention of Patrecia. She looked for things he had repressed. For example, in his perpetual turmoil and indecision, she wrote, she sensed that he was afraid. Afraid of what? One hypothesis: He was a second-hander, a social metaphysician, and feared showing it. She looked squarely at this possibility. If valid, then his underlying premise would be that he wanted to be loved (“or, rather, admired,” she wrote) more than he wanted to love; he wanted to be seen more than to see. Such an attitude would betray not only her but also the important principle of selfishness (defined by her as the pursuit of rational desires and one’s highest happiness) and of everything he admired in John Galt. But it would explain his years-long neglect of her needs and his chronic inability to decide what he wanted, she wrote. It would also account for his often frantic activities in the social and business realms, where he earned admiration, and for his apparent dependency on her to affirm his tottering vision of himself as a hero. She didn’t believe this theory, she noted, but should it prove true, the following would be her conclusion: “Here is a man who, for some reason unknown to me, was unable to live up to his own
greatness and mine, and ran from it (particularly mine),” and who, by refusing to grant her visibility in his emotional life, “killed me before my time.”
Although her language might be theatrical and her perspective skewed by self-absorption, in one respect her reasoning was sound. Branden did approach her as a mirror. But she had positioned herself as such through endless, extravagant compliments to him. Inner-circle member Edith Efron later commented that Rand had urged him to think of himself as a genius “on the same level as Kant and Hegel,” a seemingly double-edged compliment, given her hatred of these philosophers, but apparently spoken admiringly, since Efron went on to say that he was “murdered by flattery.” If he was even partly driven by “vanity, flattery-seeking, and, ultimately, glamorizing and reality-faking,” as Rand suggested in her notes a few months later, she had cultivated these qualities in him for seventeen years.
In the fall of 1967, in spite of their therapy sessions, he was still complaining that he felt depressed and hopeless about their relationship. Disgusted, for the first time she considered the possibility of a break with him. In her notes, she imagined such a rupture differently from the cataclysm both he and Barbara feared. To “break with him entirely,” she wrote, would mean “not to see him except ‘functionally,’ on business.” At this stage in what was left of their relationship, she seems to have been willing to end the affair without speaking out against him or terminating their professional and business bonds. Neither Branden believed this, and it would have been a first.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 46