Perhaps her happiest moments that fall came during three guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Extremely popular as a late-night TV talk-show host, Carson wasn’t known for inviting controversial guests, but she and her ideas apparently appealed to him. She was his first guest on the night she initially appeared, and during the first commercial break he reportedly canceled the other guests who were waiting backstage and kept her on alone. He was deferential and, even better, asked thoughtful questions and listened to the answers. By the late 1960s, her media appearances had become so potentially fraught with conflict that she and her legal bodyguard Hank Holzer insisted that producers sign a twenty-point contract before she would go on. It required her agreement in writing to any introductory remarks and proscribed surprise guests, debate, quotations from her enemies, etc. “You won’t attack me?” she asked Carson sweetly and disarmingly on being seated on the set. He laughed and they engaged in a lively discussion of her third collection of nonfiction, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, which NAL had published. Carson’s broadcast reached as many as fifty million viewers, and Rand was a massive hit. Many baby boomers remembered first hearing of her “morality of reason” there. The show received a record number of letters, all but twelve of them positive. Carson invited her back twice before Christmas 1967.
At year’s end, she and Branden entered one of their honeymoon periods. He became “more openly, romantically expressive toward me than he had been … since the beginning,” Rand recorded in her journal. In fact, he was effusive. He told her that he couldn’t live without her. He kissed her in a sexually arousing way. Only later did she call to mind two anomalies that marred her sense of a hopeful new beginning with him: His eyes were lifeless when he professed his love for her and, on New Year’s Eve at the Plaza Hotel, in a party that included Nathaniel, Patrecia, Patrecia’s sister Liesha, Alan Greenspan, Rand, and Frank, he danced too often with Patrecia. At the beginning of 1968, he again grew moody and retreated from emotional discussions. In late January, he shocked her with a new disclosure, which she accepted on its face: for the last ten years, he had secretly suffered from a “sex problem” or “sexual freeze” (suggesting impotence). His explanation, recorded by her, was as shocking as his statement. Early on, he had learned to repress his sexuality in response to his rejecting wife, he said. The affair with Ayn had acted as an antidote, but when she first made demands and then withdrew into rage and depression after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, he experienced a “subconscious total renunciation of sex,” he told her, as a result of this second and mortal blow to his sexual self-esteem.
Setting the stage for the artful introduction of Patrecia into the discussion, he talked wistfully about “a hypothetical ‘Miss X’ of his own age.” Surprisingly, Rand didn’t react angrily, at least in her journal notes. She asked him what he would want from such a woman. He would want to travel with her, spend his growing income on her, and go to nightclubs, he replied—all things he couldn’t do with Rand. Her notes suggest that he and she also discussed how such a “Miss X” might help to thaw his “sexual freeze.” And just where would she, Rand, fit in? she asked him. Ideally, they would conduct a very secret, very private, and very spiritual romance, he answered, sleeping together five or six times a year. From her notes, she seems briefly to have considered this impossible scheme, provided it was the only way to solve Branden’s sexual problem and she would never have to meet the woman. She soon changed her mind. In such a triangle, “I would be the only remnant of the [heroic] ideal” remaining to Branden as he went about his pleasurable activities, she reflected. “Therefore, our relationship would be consigned to unreality.” Also, of course, any hypothetical Miss X would be intellectually and morally inferior to her; thus, if Branden succeeded in such an affair, it “would destroy his mind.” Both practitioner and patient pretended not to know that they were talking about Patrecia.
Later, Nathaniel and Barbara reported separately that during face-to-face discussions of these issues Rand was almost unrelentingly suspicious, resentful, and bitter—and no wonder. She was assembling puzzle pieces in the dark, even if the dark was partly self-imposed. The missing piece was Patrecia. It was always on the table, but she couldn’t pick it up. She referred obliquely to the actress. “Don’t ever let yourself think, even for a minute, that Patrecia or some equivalent is going to cash in on my ambition, mind, and achievement,” she reportedly told Branden during one conversation, and, “You have no right to casual friendships, no right to vacations, no right to have sex with some inferior woman! Did you imagine that I would consent to be left on the scrap heap?” By way of contrast, her journal entries were methodical and calm, although entirely lacking in an ordinary grasp of reality. As always, her mind was well disciplined when she was writing, her discourse fiery and impulsive when she spoke in anger or distress. And while she still did not directly connect Miss X with Patrecia in her journal, on Valentine’s Day of 1968 she ended a diary entry with the note, “As far as I am concerned I will not be Cyrano to a brainless Christian.” It’s hard not to read this sentence as a double entendre: In Rostand’s play, Cyrano’s good-looking, dim-witted rival is named Christian, of course, but Rand also knew that her rival, Patrecia, had grown up in a family of Christian fundamentalists; Patrecia’s twin sister, Liesha, remained a true believer. Later, Liesha would join an evangelical television ministry.
Meanwhile, Rand’s husband of thirty-eight years was ill.
In the fall of 1967, Frank was seventy. Two or three years earlier, he had been diagnosed with a chronic condition whose symptoms included painful contractions in the tendons of his hands, making it difficult for him to hold a paintbrush. The source of the problem seems to have been Dupuytren’s syndrome, a disorder often associated with alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver, as well as with arteriosclerosis. O’Connor suffered from two of these three conditions: he drank heavily, and he had incipient arteriosclerosis, or a hardening of the arteries, which gradually reduces blood flow to the brain and body. His father had also had arteriosclerosis. Neither condition was apparent at the time, when hints of his failing health were limited to thinness, pallor, silence, and the problem with his hands.
He had surgery, which was temporarily successful. Although he constantly had to squeeze a rubber ball to flex his tendons, he returned to his classes at the Art Students League, where his popularity had won him a seat on the school’s executive Board of Control. The League was a world apart—its large, old, turpentine-smelling classrooms and informality were so dear to him that when Joan Blumenthal unwittingly let slip to a group of admiring women artists that Frank was married to Ayn Rand, he told her, “I wish you hadn’t said it. This is the one place where people know me.”
Beginning in the painful years when Rand was writing John Galt’s speech, painting had diverted and protected him from full immersion in his wife’s affairs. Through Joan Blumenthal, it also introduced him to other artists, including a young sculptor named Don Ventura. Bright and friendly, although shy, Ventura had been working as an electrologist when Allan Blumenthal discovered him. Allan introduced him to Joan, who took him to NBI lectures and parties and encouraged him to pursue his vocation as a sculptor. Like Daryn Kent, he was attracted by the group’s emphasis on individualism and intellectual attainment. When he met Rand herself, he thought that she was wonderful. “When there was no public around,” he later said, “she was very easy to be with, very reassuring.” He also found her endearingly unpretentious. “Once, I told her that Frank Sinatra, in Hollywood, had his bread flown in from New York every day and that it cost a fortune. Her eyes widened and she let out a long, low whistle. The way she reacted was very funny.”
Frank and Ventura liked each other. On Monday nights they, Joan, and an actor named Phillip Smith attended Robert Beverly Hale’s lectures on artistic anatomy at the League. Afterward, they went to the Russian Tea Room for cocktails. When Frank learned that Ventura couldn’t afford to rent a studio, he occasionally i
nvited the younger man to work in his small studio on Thirty-fourth Street. During breaks, he told Ventura stories about the early days of his marriage to Rand. “He loved nostalgia,” Ventura recalled, “loved to talk about his relationship with Rand when they were poor.” He described rides on the Staten Island Ferry and laughed about the first time Rand had heard herself on the radio and realized she had a heavy Russian accent. Why hadn’t Frank told her about it? she had asked indignantly. Because he thought her accent was cute and he didn’t want her to change it, he had teased her. By the time Ventura met them, “Frank was very subordinate to Ayn Rand,” he said. “In the days he was nostalgic about, he seemed to have been with her more. Their life was simpler.”
Rand’s distress about Branden gradually spilled over and affected Ventura, his friends the Blumenthals, and many of the followers they knew. For the sculptor, Frank became “an anchor in a turbulent sea” filled with shifting hierarchies and rampant gossip about who was rational and moral and who was not. “More and more, people were operating from the outside in,” said Ventura, “judging [each other’s] actions in terms of good and evil. For [Rand], that was part of the way she operated. It was integrated, consistent.” For those around her, it was often a matter of hiding supposed flaws or jockeying for position. “I became one of [the people] functioning from the outside in,” Ventura said. “I was playing such a game [of mimicking the convictions of others] I couldn’t see straight.”
For a period of weeks, Ventura was in O’Connor’s studio working on a small statue of the Greek hero Icarus, who fell to earth when his wax wings melted in the sun. Frank was making a painting of the same subject. He called his painting in progress Icarus Fallen, and Ventura began referring to his statue as Icarus Fallen, too. One evening, Rand visited and announced that when Ventura’s statue was finished she would like to buy a copy; two other visitors chimed in that they wanted to buy copies, too. This was a momentous endorsement, and word of it spread quickly. “From then on,” Ventura recalled, “I began to receive telephone calls and letters from people who wanted to see my work. Overnight, I became ‘the Objectivist sculptor.’” He decided to look for a studio of his own. He found a rent-controlled unit in a nearby building, but lacking the required proof of income from his art, he solicited official orders from a few friends. Then he flew too close to the sun. He wrote to Rand, explaining his predicament and asking for a small deposit on Icarus Fallen, whose price he set at three hundred dollars. Rand reportedly flew into a rage. She raved that the sculptor had stolen the title of Frank’s painting and was a plagiarist and had revealed his immorality by trying to exact a price she hadn’t agreed to in advance. He should keep Icarus Fallen as a “skeleton in his closet” for the rest of his life, she reportedly told the Blumenthals. They relayed her message to Ventura, who was stunned. As quickly as many of Rand’s minions had sought him out, so they snubbed him when they heard that he was out of favor. Without being invited to explain himself, he, like John Hospers, was suddenly outside the circle.
For Ventura and other outcast followers—including, in the summer of 1967, Edith Efron, the former writer for Mike Wallace who was by then a well-known staff reporter for TV Guide—being expelled from the Randian subculture was traumatic. Efron, who had been close to Rand for a decade, was tried in absentia and purged, for gossiping, or lying, or refusing to lie, or flirting; surviving witnesses couldn’t agree on exactly what she did, except that it was related to the many rumors by then circulating about Branden and Patrecia. Since she had occasionally written for The Objectivist, the magazine published a notice informing readers that she was no longer associated with Objectivism or Ayn Rand and canceling her fall 1967 nonfiction-writing course at NBI. Afterward, in a familiar pattern, Rand spoke disparagingly of Efron and at least once denied that she had ever respected Efron’s writing, and an NBI-affiliated therapist counseled the woman’s eighteen-year-old son, Leonard, that his mother was “a horrible woman, that she was evil, and that I should have nothing to do with her,” Leonard recalled years later. When he refused, he was made to feel awkward and unwelcome. (On the other hand, Efron’s brother Robert, a distinguished physicist who also occasionally wrote for The Objectivist, sided with Rand and temporarily disowned his sister.) As for Ventura, he was so mortified that he moved out of the neighborhood. “I had been seeking an identity, and [instead] I lost myself,” he said in 2004.
Frank didn’t phone him, nor did Ventura try to call or see his friend. “I thought I was too bad a person to contact him,” said the sculptor. But one day, Ventura ran into Frank on a street corner. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about what happened,” Ventura told him. Frank looked sad. “It’s not the end of the world,” he answered, and turned away. He no longer had the power to argue for restraint at home, as he had in the 1940s.
After a recurrence of the trouble with his hands, O’Connor ceased painting in 1968. He resigned from the Board of Control and stopped taking classes at the League. He kept his studio but—so the Brandens and others close to him claimed to have discovered—was drinking there instead of painting. Rand may or may not have noticed his idleness. She was greatly distracted by Branden. In any case, when she brooded aloud over her lover’s apparent transgressions, which she did almost continuously, “she insisted that Frank be present for many of the conversations about what was wrong with Nathan,” recalled Barbara, to whom Rand increasingly turned for support. “My God, the conversations went on for hours, theorizing, speculating, raging, crying. He was in the room for discussions he should not have been present for.” If ever Rand’s affair had been acceptable to him, her anguish about its approaching end could not have been. His air of absence, forgetfulness, and lethargy were signs of emotional retreat, his friends thought. They were also early symptoms of senility. Month by month, Barbara recalled, he seemed to understand less and less of what Rand said to him. Out of context, he once cried, “That man [Nathaniel] is no damn good! Why won’t you see it?” He flew into violent rages against his wife, which left her baffled and hurt. “Frank, darling, are you angry with me about something you haven’t told me?” Branden recalled her asking. “They would have interminable talks about his psycho-epistemology,” he wrote in 1989. “Ayn did the talking, and Frank listened silently.” Privately, she asked her recalcitrant lover for advice about how to persuade her husband to talk to her. When Branden suggested that the reason for his silence might be anger he had stored, she asked Frank about it and reported to Branden, “He says absolutely not. You’re wrong.” Once, during a vicious quarrel between the O’Connors in the presence of the Brandens, Frank walked out of the living room, into the bedroom. Barbara followed. She found him half sitting, half lying on the bed in an attitude of sorrow and defeat. “I want to leave her,” he told Barbara, clutching her arm. “But where would I go?” Rand was the center of his life.
By then, O’Connor had lost his remarkable ability to be both Cyrus and non-Cyrus, Galt and non-Galt, at the same time and in the same respect, an ability that had made his marriage work. But many of the younger people surrounding the sixty-three-year-old guru were finding safety and power in playing roles. While Branden hid whom he loved, for example, he expanded his popular (and prescriptive) twice-yearly lecture “The Psychology of Romantic Love” into a ten-lecture series of its own. With plans to record John Galt’s radio speech for national distribution, he was rehearsing the role of the monogamous ideal man on weekends. If he still dressed like a successful young intellectual, his behavior had been altered by the permissive 1960s: On trips to Los Angeles, where he rented an apartment in 1967, he visited psychedelic nightclubs and practiced target shooting. On one occasion, he gathered together a dozen or so Southern California loyalists to listen to a tape of New York followers justifying the excommunication of Edith Efron. As the tape played, “Branden was off in a corner [of the apartment] oiling and polishing a handgun,” recalled Al Ramrus. “I moved out of the range of the gun. Afterward, I was sick to my stomach. All these peo
ple showing up and passively listening, and [in their minds] that was the end of Edith Efron.” About Branden, he said, “I think he was going through a belated adolescence. I think it was destructive for him to have been anointed by Ayn Rand at such an early age.” Said Iris Bell, another NBI alumna then living in Los Angeles, “He was having a slow-motion nervous breakdown.” Yet he did not cut back his social and professional commitments; because he found his only sense of meaning in action, he told Rand, he continued to ramp them up.
Meanwhile, Barbara was employing delaying tactics to protect him, although he still hadn’t told her about the four-year duration of his affair with Patrecia. There was little pleasure in playing the role of middleman with Rand. She lurched between impossible choices, she recalled. “[I used to race] from my office to Ayn in the middle of the day, or from my apartment to Ayn in the middle of the night,” she wrote, “when she called to say she had a new idea that might explain Nathaniel. … And then I ran to Nathaniel, to hear him say, tears streaming down his face, ‘Barbara, please help me! I don’t know what to do!’” She was convinced that disclosing Branden’s secret would, at that late date, place his mental stability at risk. She knew that telling the truth would threaten NBI. And she feared that the unmasking of Nathaniel might permanently weaken Rand’s desire to live and work—”not [Nathaniel] the person,” she told a friend after the author’s death, “but [Nathaniel] the symbol.” Yet to go on comforting the wounded lion as she brooded and raged in ignorance was cruel, and when Barbara finally understood that Branden was not going to outgrow or give up Patrecia, it was untenable. Again, she urged him to confess. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.
In this atmosphere of urgent secrets and hushed conversations, other insiders built small followings of their own, typically acquiring authority through a false impression of intimacy with Rand, Branden, or Leonard Peikoff, who was back in favor with the diva. Prescription drugs, including tranquilizers and barbiturates, were readily available to Objectivists (as they were to many Americans in the 1960s), and some used them heavily to alter their “only tool[s] of survival,” their minds. Male bisexual and homosexual followers, who understood that by the dictates of Rand’s theory of romantic love they were not only irrational and immoral but also, as she once declared from the stage of Ford Hall Forum, “disgusting,” dated young women in public and hid their same-sex liaisons. “But of course [in the late 1960s] everybody was having affairs,” said a film producer who hosted NBI’s Romantic Screen movie nights. “I was dating guys and girls. There was stuff going on that was not at all according to Objectivist rules.” Before Patrecia’s marriage, for example, this man dated her sister Liesha while his male lover dated Patrecia. “It was a wild time,” recalled Kerry O’Quinn, a group-therapy patient of Allan Blumenthal’s and one of half a dozen artists who attended a painting class given by Joan. Some followers “knew about us and accepted us,” he said. But the antihomosexual bias expressed by Rand and hammered home by Branden in lectures and essays took a toll; gay men and women “bit their tongues and hid their guilt,” recalled O’Quinn. Some entered into therapy to rid themselves of unwanted sexual urges. (Rand herself reportedly once claimed to have “cured” one of her young favorites who admitted to a preference for men but denied that he had ever acted on his feelings.) They and other followers relied on a small group of therapists who admired Branden, although they didn’t necessarily agree with him about homosexuality or other issues, and practiced in New York throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. This group included Lee Shulman and Roger Callahan, Ph.D.s who migrated from Detroit to work with Branden and quickly built thriving practices, and younger practitioners such as Lonnie Leonard, who was an investor in NBI Theater’s planned production of The Fountainhead and, later, surrendered his license to avoid prosecution for preying sexually on young female Objectivists schooled in the art of hero worship. Many followers were operating from “the outside in,” repeated Don Ventura. “There were those who were extremely hypocritical and those who were less so,” and, most probably, hundreds or thousands who simply did their best to apply what they had learned from Rand and her books to their thinking, politics, and daily lives.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 47