Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  Perhaps the most stunning blow had come a year before her cancer diagnosis. In 1972, half a world away in Leningrad, her youngest sister, Nora, now also in her sixties, stumbled on a copy of a Russian-language magazine published and distributed by the U.S. Information Agency in Washington, D.C. The magazine contained an article about the range of political opinion in America and included a thumbnail sketch of Rand. Nora was familiar with her older sister’s pen name but had heard nothing about her since 1937, when the first-time novelist had, perforce, stopped writing to her family. The decades-long Soviet barricade against Western influences had insulated Nora and her husband, a retired factory engineer named Fedor Andreyevich Drobyshev, from all knowledge of Rand’s best-selling novels and her fame as a polemicist. In March 1973, Nora contacted the U.S. embassy in Moscow and, with its help, sent a letter of inquiry about Rand to the USIA magazine. A translation of the letter crossed the desk of an assistant editor named Lilyan Courtois, who phoned Rand. “Do you have a sister in Russia?” Courtois asked. “I don’t think I do anymore,” Rand answered. Told that her beloved sister Nora had been trying to contact her, she burst into tears. “She’s alive!” she exclaimed, again and again. “She’s alive! All these years, I thought she was dead!” Courtois wept, too. “It was unbearably moving,” Courtois later said.

  In 1973, Rand was already experiencing early symptoms of lung disease. Energized by relief and affection, however, she began a campaign to bring Nora to the United States. This was an old and treasured dream; at least until Nora’s marriage in 1931, she had wanted to show this most compatible sister the splendors of America. Lest even now direct communication from her endanger Nora with the Soviet authorities, she turned to the U.S. State Department for advice. A plan was hatched: The USIA magazine dispatched a brief reply to Nora, signaling between the lines that Rand had received her sister’s letter. Soon afterward, the women were able to write to each other, the more easily because of Nora’s fluency in English. Then phone calls flew back and forth, and, to everyone’s surprise, when Nora and her husband applied for foreign travel papers the Soviet government granted a permit with relatively little fuss. (Later, it came to light that the government was all too willing to rid itself permanently of retired residents such as Nora and Fedor, who were collecting government pensions.) Rand rented a furnished apartment in her building and had it cleaned and fitted out with telephones and a television set. She stocked the refrigerator with Western treats unavailable in the Soviet Union and placed long-treasured objects Rand had carried from St. Petersburg in the rooms to make Nora feel at home, including one of her sister’s early Art Deco—style drawings. She considered buying the couple a little house in a Russian-American community in New Jersey, if they agreed to defect and resettle, as she hoped they would. In letters, she rejoiced in her and her sister’s similarities. When Nora wrote about her love for her husband, Rand replied, “Everything you wrote about Fedya, I can say (and often have said) about Frank, even using the same words. … Our friends say we have an ideal marriage.” In another letter, she told her darling Norochka that “I have not changed at all, except to age,” and she imagined that Nora hadn’t, either.

  At Kennedy Airport, Rand spotted her sister and brother-in-law sitting on a bench in the waiting room, looking lost, foreign, shabbily clothed, and anxious. Nora’s large, dark eyes set among thick features gave her face a striking resemblance to Rand’s, but she was taller and heavier. The women clung to each other and wept in greeting. Frank and Fedor shook hands. But even before the two couples reached home in the chauffeured limousine Rand had hired for the occasion, there came a first discordant note. Nora, having lived all but a few years of her life under a Communist system in which neighbors and shopkeepers might be government agents, whispered to Rand that their driver was an informant planted by the U.S. government to monitor their movements and conversations. Rand explained that spying on visitors wasn’t a feature of American life, but Nora and Fedor were insistent. Once at home, they were pleased with their apartment but showed no response to Rand’s girlhood mementos or the sight of Nora’s drawing; this upset Rand, because she considered the drawing emblematic of the best part of Nora. During a welcoming dinner in Rand’s apartment that evening, Nora and Fedor were afraid that Eloise Huggins, Rand’s cook and housekeeper, was also an informant. And they were so sourly suspicious of Leonard Peikoff, who joined the group after dinner, that they answered his polite questions in monosyllables. Their hostess, who possessed her own streak of paranoia that had deepened with age, began to take it amiss that they couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize that America was a free country. For their part, the Drobyshevs were disappointed in Rand’s standard of living. They had expected a “rich, noble lady” in a three-story house, Nora later said.

  If Rand hadn’t fundamentally changed, Nora had. Rand remembered her as a spirited girl of sixteen who admired Western fashions, loved to draw, and worshipped her older sister. Now she appeared to be an average, aging Russian woman, satisfied to be cared for by the state. She and Fedor were childless, and they lived in a one-room apartment that was regarded as luxurious in a period when many Russian families had to double or triple up. After teaching for a few years, Nora had made a career in display design. Fedor had invented a piece of factory equipment that earned him a larger than ordinary pension. Although they were not Communists, they thought of themselves as loyal Soviet citizens, attended shul, and were proud of their relatively comfortable position. When Rand or one of her circle argued against Soviet totalitarianism and in favor of individual liberties, Nora responded, “What good is political freedom to me? I’m not an activist.” She quarreled with her sister over the benefits of capitalism and the evils of altruism, about which she later said, “It was the altruism of our entire family that enabled Alyssa to get out to the United States in the first place.”

  Worse, perhaps, Nora didn’t approve of America. She disliked American conveniences, which left her with nothing to do all day; she preferred her old routine of waiting in food lines and gossiping with her friends, she told Elayne Kalberman. When Kalberman asked what she and her friends talked about, she said that they discussed freedom and what it would be like to do and say anything they wanted, adding, however, that they really didn’t mind the Soviet way of life. One day, she went into a store to buy a tube of toothpaste and found herself overwhelmed by the number of brands and sizes and became angry when a clerk wasn’t willing to help her choose. Why were there so many kinds of everything? How did New Yorkers stand the crowds of strangers? Why was Central Park so dirty? The one thing she wanted to do was to visit Hollywood, and Rand disappointed her in this; the writer had a deadline to meet for The Ayn Rand Letter and, besides, she lacked the physical stamina to travel or act as a tour guide. “But you are a rich and famous person!” Nora objected. “You can do whatever you want!” Naturally, Rand was indignant. How dare this opinionated woman criticize America and make demands? What had happened to the little sister who had shared her love of Western values?

  Worst of all, Nora did not admire Rand’s novels. On the Drobyshevs’ first evening in New York, Rand had proudly presented Nora with copies of all four: taken together, they were the heart of Rand’s life’s achievement, which until now no one in her family had ever seen or read. Rand had fulfilled her youthful promise, in every sense. But she gained no recognition from Nora. With the exception of part of We the Living, Nora did not read any of the books; of We the Living she later said that the little she had read was offensive and contrived. “[My sister] had just artificially constructed everything,” Nora told an interviewer in 1997. “She had made up all of our lives.” Setting aside Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, Nora borrowed or bought a volume by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose more subversive works were unavailable in Russia and who in 1974 would be charged with treason and forced to emigrate, eventually settling in Vermont. Rand hated Solzhenitsyn for his outspoken anti-Western views and his religiosity, and when she discovered tha
t Nora preferred his writing to her own, she demanded that Nora return her books. Nora complied. All told, the little sister pronounced her older sister’s writing to be “fake” and “lacking in talent,” and she paid no more attention to it.

  In the second or third week, Fedor, who had a history of heart disease, collapsed with a sudden heart attack. By then, Rand had stopped speaking to her sister. Nora managed to dial 911, and an ambulance took Fedor to Bellevue Hospital, where he underwent successful surgery. Nora called Rand, but Rand did not come, either that day or during the two weeks of her brother-in-law’s hospitalization. After he had been discharged and taken a few days to recuperate, Rand suggested that the pair return to Russia. She did not see them off. She did contact her lawyer, Eugene Winick, to assure herself that Nora would not automatically inherit any of her money when she died. Nora would not, he told her. Nor, as it turned out, did Nora wish to; the younger sister resembled the older in her stubbornness and her propensity to mix anger with contempt. When Nora and Fedor were gone, Rand’s friends discovered that their vacated apartment was “filthy, with rotten food in the refrigerator,” said one. “It was a disgrace.”

  Ever after Nora’s return to Russia, Rand avoided speaking of her sister. Yet she must have sorely felt the loss—if not of the living Nora, then of a long-cherished illusion that, once upon a time, she had possessed a girlhood soul mate. “She had hoped that the idea of freedom was still burning in her sister,” recalled Elayne Kalberman. But the lure of freedom may never have been as powerful for Nora as it was for Rand. Although childhood had been the time “when I liked everything about [my sister],” Nora recalled in 1997, “I was [merely] her shadow and yes-man. … She always wanted adoring fans.” Nora died in St. Petersburg in 1999, at the age of eighty-eight, without ever again speaking to Rand.

  Rand never fully recovered from her lung surgery. But by the autumn of 1974 she was well enough to travel to Washington, D.C., for another uplifting occasion, the swearing in of her most famous protégé, Alan Greenspan, as the chairman of President Gerald Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers. An Oval Office photograph of the occasion shows Rand, looking proud but frail, standing beside Greenspan as the president embraces the new chairman’s diminutive mother, Rose. Three weeks later, Time noted that during one of Greenspan’s first official meetings, convened to discuss a soaring inflation rate, John Kenneth Galbraith joked that the only known remedies for inflation applied alike to “Bolsheviks and devoted supporters of Ayn Rand, if there are any present,” whereupon Greenspan called out, “There’s at least one.” Rand was immensely pleased by the public recognition of her Sleeping Giant. By all accounts she did not pester him to advocate for her antigovernment agenda. “I am a philosopher, not an economist,” she told Time. “Alan doesn’t seek my advice on these matters.” But they clashed over his leadership of a committee whose purpose was to bolster Social Security (a benefit she deplored as socialistic but, unlike Isabel Paterson, accepted, because she had paid into the fund). And during one of their semimonthly dinners at the sedate University Club when he visited New York, she scolded him so vehemently that other diners turned and stared. They remained loyal friends. He met his second wife, Andrea Mitchell, a journalist, a year after Rand’s death, and, unable to enact the Objectivist custom of taking prospective spouses to meet the famous author, he showed Mitchell a copy of an anti-antitrust article he had contributed to The Objectivist Newsletter in 1963, and they discussed it—on their first date. In The Age of Turbulence, the former Federal Reserve chairman paid further tribute to his philosophical mentor. She had drawn him from a world of empiricism and statistics into a deeper engagement with human beings, “their values, how they work, what they do and why they do it, and how they think and why they think. This broadened my horizons far beyond the models of economics I had learned,” he wrote. “I’m grateful for the influence she had on my life.”

  There were other friends with whom she clashed—and parted. In 1970, she bid farewell to the Holzers. In 1973, she banished two longtime followers named Phillip and Kay Nolte Smith, who combined careers in the theater with Rand-inspired writing and art. The casus belli was a mistake Kay Smith made during an Off-Broadway production of The Night of January 16th, Rand’s 1930s courtroom drama, which the Smiths had mounted at the McAlpin Rooftop Theater on West Thirty-fourth Street. Like Barbara Branden before them, they appear to have been motivated by a wish to please their friend and honor her work. They restored the play’s original title, Penthouse Legend, and used its original script, minus Al Woods’s props and innovations—giving Rand and the public their first experience of the play as she had written it. The revival stirred unusual interest, and for the first time in many years Rand gave extensive interviews to newspaper reporters. On opening night, jubilant fans filled the theater. But the play was not favorably reviewed. (In The New York Times, Clive Barnes wrote mockingly, if irrelevantly, “[Penthouse Legend] is the kind of play that makes you wish Perry Mason had become a Supreme Court judge.”) It closed after thirty performances. During one of the last of these, Kay Smith altered or cut a line, or a few lines (how many is not clear), of Rand’s dialogue, either because the lines were generating unwanted laughter from the audience or because the actor playing the role requested a change, or both. Outraged that a so-called student of Objectivism had tampered with her lines, Rand dismissed both Smiths and banned them from her inner circle and her world. “One mistake was all it took to be drummed out for life,” said Kay Smith bitterly in 1992. “She was”—or became—”a cruel woman.”

  Although some professional connections and incidental acquaintances still described Rand as modest, unaffected, and charming, those who were closest to her witnessed increasing pathology. From the Blumenthals and Leonard Peikoff, she demanded a foot soldier’s forfeiture of privacy. “She was relentless in pursuit of psychological errors,” Allan recalled, and she seemed abnormally preoccupied with uprooting all deviations from her convictions and aesthetic tastes. Throughout the 1970s, she needled Allan about his penchant for playing Beethoven and other pre- or post-Romantic composers privately, on his own piano, and ridiculed Joan for her appreciation of painters including Rembrandt, whose “visual distortions” Rand so disliked that she had positioned one of Rembrandt’s etchings above the writing desk of the abominable Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead. After an evening’s bickering about the immorality of the Blumenthals’ “sense of life,” she would phone the next day to find out whether they had reconsidered their opinions; if not, she renewed the argument the following evening, and the evening after that. She questioned their choices of entertainment, travel, and friends and accused them of being secretive when they withheld information from her. “By then, there was something almost reckless in Ayn’s attitude toward us,” Joan Blumenthal recalled. “Along with Leonard, she considered us her closest friends, but, often, she would seem to deliberately insult and antagonize us. … She seemed almost to invite a break.” In 1978, these friends of twenty-five years’ standing phoned to tell her they would no longer see her. She talked about “denouncing” them but was persuaded that another public falling-out might further undermine her reputation. They were quietly designated enemies and Allan was written out of her will.

  Elayne and Harry Kalberman also drifted away. Although Branden had recited to his sister the full story of his affair with Rand in 1968, Elayne and her husband had remained in Rand’s camp for a decade. By the late 1970s, however, Frank’s health had sharply declined. Rand’s response was to badger him with demands that he try harder and get better. Her behavior with him shocked and upset the Kalbermans, and they were further offended by her harsh invective against the Blumenthals, who, they pointed out, had nursed her and O’Connor through adversity and illness. The Kalbermans eventually reconciled with Branden.

  Rand also had a final rift with Robert Hessen, her tireless advocate and helper. In his spare time, Hessen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, managed an in
dependent West Coast book service based on the defunct NBI model, selling books that championed or complemented Objectivism. In 1981, he decided to list The Watcher, the first novel of “enemy” theatrical producer Kay Nolte Smith, and refused to back down when Rand threatened to withdraw her own books from the service. She viewed his rebellion as “siding with her enemy,” he recalled in 2004, and never spoke to him again. On the advice of her secretary, Barbara Weiss, who reminded her of the income she received from Hessen’s sales of her books, she rescinded her threat and once again refrained from a public rupture.

  Barbara Weiss resigned. Over the course of fifteen years, Weiss had looked on as dozens of hapless followers had endured interrogation and humiliation. At first, she had attributed her employer’s anger to a blind, passionate, highly charged moral temperament. Later, “I saw how repressed she was, and I knew [her anger] had to come from fear,” Weiss said, echoing an observation made two decades earlier by Random House copy editor Bertha Krantz. “I decided she was possibly the most fearful person I had ever met.” After the Blumenthals’ departure, Weiss decided that Rand was not, after all, unconscious of the turbulence and pain she had caused in the lives of people who had cared for her, including Frank. “She just robbed him of everything,” the secretary said. “I [came to] look on her as a killer of people.”

  Thus Peikoff became the sole heir to her copyrights, manuscripts, and savings and, except for Eloise Huggins, often her sole companion. He had grown anxiously possessive of her, a wound-up version of an attentive son. Her enemies were his, of course, and as she became more isolated he supplemented his own visits with visits from his friends, including his first wife, Susan Ludel, and his second wife, Cynthia Pastor, both of whom served, successively, as Rand’s secretaries. Two decades after her death, married for the third time, he was still pursuing her vendettas, mounting acrimonious attacks on heretics, prosecuting legal threats against outsiders, and demanding loyalty oaths from a second generation of Rand disciples. While she lived, he was the only acolyte who remained close to her, and—whether she knew it or not—he had to further stifle his spirit. “Leonard was destroyed,” said an acquaintance. “He was a robot at the end.”