Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  Amid illnesses and a diminished social life, Rand pursued two major preoccupations in the years before her death. One was to see Atlas Shrugged brought to a wider audience by means of a movie or television production. Because she believed that she had been betrayed by the makers of The Fountainhead, she was determined to exert control over every aspect of any adaptation of her masterpiece, including approval of the cast. For years, no producer would agree to her requirements. Then, in May 1972, her agent introduced her to Albert Ruddy, an independent Paramount producer who had just released The Godfather and who accepted all her terms. They held a press conference at the “21” Club. But when Rand demanded veto rights over film editing, the deal dissolved.

  It was during the Ruddy negotiations that Daryn Kent, the actress whom Branden had berated as an Ellsworth Toohey in the 1950s, was acutely disillusioned. She asked Rand to allow her to audition for the part of Dagny. Rand, whom Kent had heard say, “You should aim high and have a right to aim high,” answered, pragmatically, “Don’t aim too high, Daryn.” Three decades later, Kent could recall the intensity of her surprise and distress. But she never lost her love and admiration for the author who she felt had identified monumentally important principles “for man to live by. I still want that world” that Ayn Rand envisioned half a century ago, she said in 2008.

  In 1976 or 1977, producers Henry Jaffe and his son, Michael, approached Rand with a proposal to turn Atlas Shrugged into an eight-hour miniseries for NBC. With support from network executives, they reached an agreement giving her broad decision-making power. They hired Stirling Silliphant, who had won an Academy Award for his screenplay for In the Heat of the Night, to adapt the novel for television. Rand and the writer worked together well, and she enjoyed the Jaffes’ attention and solicitude. For years, she had made a game of casting the characters of Atlas Shrugged; now she decided that she wanted Raquel Welch or Farrah Fawcett-Majors as Dagny, Clint Eastwood as Rearden, and (at the Jaffes’ suggestion) the French actor Alain Delon as Francisco d’Anconia. “She never had [an actor to play] Galt,” Susan Ludel recalled.

  Silliphant finished an outline sometime in 1978. He and Rand had begun working on revisions when NBC installed a new chief executive, Fred Silverman, who scuttled the project. The Jaffes took the idea to other television studios, but the outline was long, the staging next to impossible, and the terms Rand demanded unusual and onerous. With prospects fading, Silliphant arranged to have a final meeting with Rand in New York and then fly out to meet another author and possible collaborator on a new project at her home in the San Juan Islands, off the coast of Washington State: Ruth Beebe Hill, Rand’s sharp-witted former friend from California, who had written her own soon-to-be best-selling novel called Hanta Yo and was considering the possibility of turning it into a miniseries. Without being aware beforehand that Hill knew Rand, Silliphant told her a harrowing story. He had made an appointment to meet Rand in the lobby of her building, where they often conducted business. He waited but she didn’t appear, so he took the elevator up to her apartment and knocked on the door. She opened it an inch or two, recognized him, said, “Just a minute!” and closed it again. He heard movement and some muffled conversation, and had the impression that she had pushed O’Connor into another room. She reopened the door a crack. “With a yell he’d never heard before, or a cry, or an expression of being frantic,” Hill recalled Silliphant telling her, Rand rushed into the bathroom and closed and latched the bathroom door, leaving the apartment door ajar. He pulled it closed and left. Hill was frightened by Silliphant’s description of the terrible scene, not least because she didn’t know until later that Frank was suffering from arteriosclerosis, let alone that he was by now in the throes of full dementia. Silliphant surmised that Rand had been trying to hide her husband, although he didn’t know why.

  Frank was Rand’s other preoccupation, and by far the deeper and more painful one. After the loss of Nathaniel, she had turned back to him—to the warm, patient, often witty man who, if he had never satisfied her yearning for an idea-driven, sexually dominating partner, had never been disloyal to her. But she was too late. Even then, he was failing. One evening in the early 1970s, he collapsed and was taken to the hospital. Doctors believed that he had suffered a mild heart attack; if so, they said, the cause was probably arteriosclerosis. Those who met him afterward assumed that he was inebriated or had had a stroke, since he found it hard to speak and seemed to be aphasic. He grew increasingly fragile, vacant, hard to reach. Rand was terrified of losing him, and for the rest of his life she—anxiously, even intrusively—monitored his exercise and eating.

  But she did not acknowledge his mental deterioration, just as she had never really acknowledged the fact of his separate mental life. When conversation was still within his power, he had sometimes told Eloise, the housekeeper, or one of Rand’s secretaries how much he missed the open spaces and greenery of the San Fernando Valley. “But he hated California,” Rand reportedly would say. “He loves New York.” She nagged at him continually, to onlookers’ distress. “Don’t humor him,” she told Barbara Weiss, before the woman resigned. “Make him try to remember.” She insisted that his mental lapses were “psycho-epistemological,” and she gave him long, grueling lessons in how to think and remember. She assigned him papers on aspects of his mental functioning, which he was entirely unable to write. At one point she asked his niece Mimi Sutton, now widowed and living in Chicago, to come to New York to help care for him, but Mimi sensed that her uncle and aunt were in a state of conflict and said no. For months and years Rand went on goading him, out of fear, horror, or, perhaps, a cultivated prejudice that what is not rational is not quite human. “He never got kindness from her,” said Weiss.

  Perhaps it’s not surprising that he drank heavily whenever he could. He apparently ordered beer or hard liquor from neighborhood stores and took delivery in his studio, where he still spent many afternoons, or when she was out of the apartment. “If Ayn happened to open the door, she’d send it back,” said a regular visitor during those years. “Once he asked her about it. ‘Are you trying to take this away from me, too?’” he said. He drank at night, so that morning callers smelled liquor on his breath. Eloise Huggins later disclosed to a confidante that every week she removed empty bottles from the studio. After the death of both O’Connors, Peikoff took stock of the neglected studio, found old liquor bottles, and told friends that Frank had used them for mixing paints, although he hadn’t been able to paint in many years.

  And yet Rand valued him above all others. Even in the period of her greatest frustration with him, just before Nathaniel Branden entered her life, the possibility of her leaving him was very small. She loved to look at him. Until the end of her life, “she [always] talk[ed] about how he looked, how good-looking he was,” said Huggins. She never tired of his company or his touch. She genuinely prized his early, vital contributions to her work—his American optimism, his fund of idiomatic language, his active interest in her writing, his wit. (In The Fountainhead, for example, Roark’s response to Ellsworth Toohey’s second-handed inquiry, “Why don’t you tell me what you think of me?” was borrowed from Frank: “But I don’t think of you,” as Frank had once told a troublemaker.) He understood her origins and frame of reference better than anyone ever had; he understood her. And whatever it might have cost him, he deferred to her natural gifts and superior sense of purpose. Something she had written to Gerald Loeb in 1944 remained always true. “I [have] had Frank, which is the greatest mercy God has ever granted me (and I say that without being religious).”

  Her impossible expectations of him arose partly from her need. With this exceptionally handsome, affable, and apparently doting man by her side, she was not an aberration or an idol but a woman who belonged on earth. One year, when Frank wasn’t strong enough to accompany her to Boston for her annual Ford Hall Forum speech, she shook with anxiety during the four-hour drive in a hired car. She was frightened but she didn’t call it that. “She said, ‘I am v
ery nervous. I am worried about him,’” said an employee who escorted her to Boston. “But she wasn’t worried about him. She [gave her speech and] got an ovation, and her worry about Frank disappeared.” Having known Rand and O’Connor for many years, this acquaintance said, “I knew she didn’t love him. But he was something in her life that was really crucial. She needed him by her side to make her a person, a woman, something. She said she’d never travel without him again.”

  In the spring of 1979, New American Library published her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, a theoretical treatise on the nature of human reason first published in several installments in The Objectivist. Surprisingly, perhaps, she made an appearance on The Phil Donahue Show to promote the book. She also posed for a Look magazine photograph, a majestic portrait showing her, with arms flung wide, standing above the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal, a Beaux Arts monument to the American industrial era she loved.

  In the late 1970s, Frank’s condition worsened. He became housebound and didn’t always recognize familiar faces. In an attempt to anchor his mind to the present, she gave him household chores to do, such as feeding the cats, and became agitated when he forgot to do them. He refused to eat, and she tried to force him, in spite of the fact that he appeared to be “frightened, terribly frightened,” Peikoff’s first wife, Susan Ludel, recalled. “Don’t eat the food,” he whispered to Barbara Weiss. “She’s trying to poison me. She might try to poison you.” Sometimes she was cruel. When he became incontinent, she referred to his diapers in the presence of a friend. One day, she confided to the same friend that he had tried to hit her. (“I was sorry he missed,” said the friend.) Yet he still rose to his feet when a woman entered the room. Out of loneliness, devotion, depression, or the fear that she was running out of time with the man she had most deeply loved and deeply betrayed, she slept beside him on rubber sheets. Eventually, friends persuaded her to buy a hospital bed. During his final days and nights, she sat by his side, held his hands, and wept.

  Frank O’Connor died on November 7, 1979. Rand asked Evva Pryor, an attentive young associate at her lawyers’ office, to help arrange a memorial service in the city and choose a gravesite in the countryside. At the service, held in the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, she sat silently, apparently exercising steely self-control, while dozens of old acquaintances and former students filed past, offering condolences. Later, she, Leonard, and a small group of Leonard’s friends drove to the nonsectarian Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. David Kelley, a student of Leonard’s (whom Leonard, later a philosophy professor at Vassar, excommunicated), read “When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted” by Rudyard Kipling, a writer from the heroic age of Ayn’s and Frank’s childhoods. Then she watched as her husband was lowered into the ground, beside an empty plot she had purchased for herself. She had heard that long-married couples often die within months of each other. “I won’t have to suffer long,” she told one of Leonard’s friends. Her fellow exile and favorite composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff, lay in a grave nearby.

  Although the last three years of Ayn Rand’s life were scored with private sadness and ill health, they were not entirely lacking in contentment. Perhaps her happiest moments took place when she was able to reminisce about Frank with Peikoff or Huggins, who was her closest companion after her husband’s death. She spoke often with Frank’s niece Mimi Sutton and begged Mimi to call collect and tell her family stories about his boyhood and young manhood. “‘Mimi, talk to me about Frank,’ she would say. ‘Tell me everything you can remember.’ I feared she would commit suicide,” Mimi reflected. “Every time I called, she was alone.” At first, her days were blank with bewilderment and loss. Slowly, she revived. She began to take antidepressant medication. Leonard introduced her to his student Cynthia Pastor. Together, the two women tackled the stacks of letters, bills, and invitations that had gone unattended, and Rand began to receive visitors again. Evva Pryor came to play Scrabble once a week. Alan Greenspan stopped in to see her when he was in New York. She occasionally spoke to George Reisman, Murray Rothbard’s onetime crony, who was teaching Austrian-school economics at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, and she grew close to Reisman’s romantic partner, Edith Packer, a psychologist and Objectivist stalwart who lived in New York.

  With encouragement from Eloise, she began to take short walks, sometimes in street clothes and sometimes in a housedress and slippers. A neighborhood rental agent who knew her encountered the women walking and had to look twice at Rand, who was almost unrecognizable in a shabby dress and a babushka. “She looked like a poor old Russian woman,” said the agent, Roberta Satro.

  She watched reruns of a 1960s television series called The Rat Patrol and developed a crush on a German-American actor named Hans Gudegast. Straight and slender, with European manners and an aristocratic bearing, Gudegast, also known as Eric Braeden, struck her as a living representation of Francisco d’Anconia. He “look[ed] like Cyrus,” observed an acquaintance of the time who later saw reproductions of the original 1914 drawings of Cyrus and his rescuers. With the actor as her inspiration, she began to compose her own script for a miniseries of Atlas Shrugged.

  An ex-NBI student named Kathryn Eickhoff, a vice-president of Greenspan’s former Wall Street consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan, paid regular visits to counsel her about her finances. Eickhoff tried to disguise her dismay when Rand revealed that all her money was in a savings bank across the street from the apartment; the champion of capitalism had no time to research stocks and disapproved of government savings bonds, she told Eickhoff, who eventually persuaded her to invest her savings in money-market funds. When Eickhoff learned that Rand was drafting a new teleplay of Atlas Shrugged, she asked if she and her husband, a jazz club owner, could help finance the project. So did Ed Snider, a Rand fan and the founder of a sports conglomerate. Thus buoyed, Rand wrote steadily, and during evening Scrabble games with Pryor or one of Peikoff’s friends, she returned to the pastime of casting Atlas Shrugged. About a third of the script was completed when she died.

  In 1980, Harry Binswanger, a philosophy professor and a longtime believer in Objectivism, founded a sixteen-page bimonthly magazine called The Objectivist Forum. Rand gave her consent to the endeavor and donated her old Objectivist mailing lists. But she did not endorse the publication, as she pointed out in an odd and astringent letter to readers in the first issue. She could not guarantee that the editors would accurately convey the tenets of Objectivism, she wrote. In case readers didn’t understand why she was so protective of the term “Objectivism,” “my reason is that ‘Objectivism’ is the name I have given to my philosophy—therefore, anyone using that name for some hodgepodge of his own, without my knowledge or consent, is guilty of the fraudulent presumption of trying to put thoughts into my brain.” She and her philosophical system had become a unit. Other matters also gave rise to bouts of solipsism and paranoia. Despite her sister’s safe return to Russia, for example, she often warned acquaintances that the Soviet authorities were plotting to capture her. She told Al Ruddy that she could not fly on a commercial plane to the West Coast, explaining, “Darling, if the Russians find out I’m flying on an airliner, they’ll hijack it.” She also warned him that the Russians might try to buy Paramount to block a film of Atlas Shrugged.

  Phil Donahue had treated her cordially during her 1979 appearance on The Phil Donahue Show. In the spring of 1980, she agreed to return as part of a Great Minds of America series, which also included Milton Friedman. On screen, she looked old and frail, even in a bright blue dress and with her hair colored a coppery red. As Donahue fired philosophical questions at her, she grew more energetic, however, and when the audience laughed appreciatively at their bantering and applauded, she seemed surprised but greatly pleased. Then an audience member broke the spell by challenging her views on the merits of selfishness and the “Me Society.” Speaking above Donahue’s attempts to mediate, she angrily repeated the point she had made in Th
e Objectivist Forum. “I want to hold only my ideas,” she said, almost pleading. “I don’t approve of those who preach the opposite.” At the age of seventy-five, she could no longer bear to listen to anyone who differed with her. Turning to Donahue, she said quaveringly, “I would love to see an honorable adversary, but I’ve stopped hoping for it.” Toward the end of the hour, he asked about the recent loss of her husband. Had it in any way changed her philosophy? “No,” she answered. “It has only altered my position in regard to the world. I lost my top value. I’m not too interested in anything else.” Wasn’t she tempted to believe in a heaven where she and her husband might be reunited? “I’ve asked myself just that,” she answered soberly. “And if I really believed that for five minutes, I’d commit suicide immediately to get to him…. I’ve [also] asked myself how I’d feel if I thought that he was now on trial before God or Saint Peter,” she continued. “My first desire would be to run and help him, to say how good he was.”

  Her final Ford Hall Forum address, in April 1981, titled “The Age of Mediocrity,” was a prophetic polemic against “family values,” creationism, and other religious pieties of the Reagan-era Right. When she returned home from Boston, she received a visit from Barbara Branden. It had been thirteen years since she had seen her lover’s wife, who had been moved to phone her after watching her speak about Frank to Donahue. Seated in the living room where they had spent hundreds of hours together, the women reconciled. They spoke about the past, but there were no recriminations. Rand, unconsciously perhaps, had forgiven Barbara long ago. Like herself, she seemed to say, Barbara was a hero-worshiper, and whatever mistakes the younger woman had made were a consequence of loyalty to her husband. Rand did not and never would forgive Nathaniel, and so they talked not of failures or betrayals but of politics, philosophy, former friends—and Frank. An afternoon had passed and the sun was setting when Barbara stood at the apartment door, saying good-bye, and Ayn Rand blew her a kiss. “It was not 1981, it was 1950,” Barbara wrote, “we were young and the world was young, and the glow of ideas outshone the sun.” Yet when Barbara wrote to her a few months later, announcing that she planned to write a book about Rand’s life, the aged lioness retreated into silence.