Ayn Rand and the World She Made
Page 54
She made her last public appearance—before three thousand of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of men and women whose minds and lives her work had changed—at an economic conference in New Orleans on Saturday, November 18, 1981. James Blanchard, a gold-bug and founder of the sponsoring organization, the National Committee for Monetary Reform, enticed her with regal transportation in a private railway car, complete with a butler, a gourmet cook, and a formal dining room. It was the same kind of railway car that had carried Dagny Taggart across the country as the heroine tried to save both her own company and the last best hope of Earth. Rand had never traveled in one. She took a small entourage with her: Peikoff, Cynthia Pastor, Harry Binswanger, Binswanger’s girlfriend Molly Hays, and her housekeeper Eloise. After a two-and-a-half-day journey, limousines collected them at New Orleans’s Union Station, designed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright in 1892. The cars took them to an oversized suite of rooms at the Hilton Hotel—”the size of three houses,” said Molly Hays—and on to a round of elaborate lunches, dinners, and parties. At 3:00 a.m. on the night before her speech, she sat alone at a table, still writing it, as crowds of admirers and well-wishers milled in and out of the rooms. The speech was called “The Sanction of the Victims,” Rand and Francisco’s phrase for the unwitting cooperation great men and women often grant, in the name of charity, to their adversaries and destroyers. She walked across the stage to ebullient applause by the economists, businessmen, and financiers who filled the hall. She was animated but obviously in poor health, and she occasionally gasped for breath. She began to speak and then interrupted herself to ask that people stop taking pictures of her. “Please, gentlemen, don’t photograph me,” she said, sounding vexed and sad. “I am much too old for that. Just leave me as I am.” She ended her speech with a quotation from John Galt, filled with the unattainable absolutes that she had come to trust. “But to win requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past,” she read. “Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth. Thank you.” She was visibly affected by the reading and by the emotion of the audience, and she tried not to weep as men and women jumped to their feet and cheered as though they wished never to stop.
She fell ill on the train ride back. Home again, she was nursed by Eloise and shifts of professional nurses, but she gradually grew weaker. On New Year’s Day 1982, she rose and wrote the first page of the second part of her script for Atlas Shrugged, observing, as she always had, the Russian tradition of welcoming the new year by doing what you hope to do for the following twelve months. But she was losing heart. She had encountered facts about the politics and character of Hans Gudegast that did not mesh with her fantasies of him. Prospects for additional private financing of a miniseries had fallen through. She was hospitalized for the month of February but was released to die at home. “She had no will to live, so it was a simple thing,” said Eloise in 1997.
Peikoff spent many days and evenings by her side. He guarded others’ access to her. One evening, Mimi Sutton phoned to wish her aunt a belated happy birthday; there had been no answer when she called on February 2. Mimi was shocked to learn from Peikoff that her aunt was gravely ill. “Miss Rand cannot possibly come to the phone,” he said. Mimi would not take a near stranger’s haughty dismissal as final. She found the doctor in charge of Rand’s case and secured his permission to speak to her aunt. Peikoff was absent on the evening when she called again, and Eloise gave the phone to Rand. “I’m probably the last person she talked to who she knew who she was talking to,” Mimi told an interviewer in 1983. “I told her, ‘It’s Mimi. I love you,’ and we cried.”
Ayn Rand died on that night, March 6, 1982. The cause of death was congestive heart failure, or, as the nineteenth-century Romantic novelists and poets she had loved in her youth might have hinted, a broken heart. Newspapers around the world announced her death, and most were respectful of her accomplishments. Only a few, such as The New York Times and National Review, took the occasion to be cool or carping. Eight hundred friends and followers crowded into the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel for the memorial service, where guards were posted, needlessly, to repulse the Brandens should they try to enter. One hundred gathered at the gravesite, in the snow, where David Kelley read another poem by Rudyard Kipling, the stoical “If.” She was buried next to the man she had loved as thoroughly as her lonely, driven, and revolutionary nature permitted her to love, in Valhalla, New York.
“It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end,” she liked to say. Of course, the world went on. But her extraordinary achievement extended far beyond the collapse, later in the decade, of the Communist tyranny she so abhorred, and still informs our thoughts about the competing values of liberty and safety, individual rights and the social contract, ownership and equity, and the sometimes flickering light of freedom.
AFTERWORD
Some of the central figures in Ayn Rand’s circle of the 1950s and 1960s are still at large.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN lives with his fourth wife, Leigh Horton, in a high-rise apartment in Brentwood. He maintains a therapeutic practice in his home office and by phone. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, he published a dozen books of popular psychology, some of which were best-sellers, and as a result earned the appellation “father of the self-esteem movement.” In his writing and practice, he has remained faithful to Rand’s major tenets but has departed from her strict emphasis on rationality by restating the importance of emotions. Turning Rand’s maxim “Emotions are not tools of cognition” on its head, Branden advised a college audience to “feel clearly to think clearly” shortly after Rand’s death in 1982. Over the years, he has expressed regret for his harsh manner with former followers, saying in 1971, for example, “I feel I owe an apology to … every student of Objectivism who ever heard me lecture at NBI—not only for perpetuating the Ayn Rand mystique but also for contributing to that dreadful atmosphere of intellectual repressiveness that pervades the Objectivist movement.” In and out of his workshops and lectures, he makes it a special point to counsel Objectivists on emotional health. Yet in many ways, Rand remains Branden’s lodestar. In 2009, he was preparing to publish for the first time the twenty original lectures of the NBI series “The Basic Principles of Objectivism,” which he developed under Rand’s guidance, along with commentary reflecting his current views.
BARBARA BRANDEN lives a few miles from Nathaniel, in West Hollywood. She and her former husband attend many of the same Objectivist and libertarian conferences and parties. Barbara serves as a guide to what Rand-inspired Web sites call “neo-Objectivist” thought and practice, meaning Rand’s philosophy tempered by a suitable sense of human limitations and the occasional need for kindness. In 1986, she published the only previous biography of Rand, The Passion of Ayn Rand; there, for the first time, she made public Rand and her former husband’s sexual affair, igniting yet another firestorm of moral outrage and debate among the five to ten thousand dedicated Randians remaining. Leonard Peikoff and his loyalists refused to believe the story until, later in the 1980s, Peikoff’s second wife, Cynthia, stumbled upon a personal journal Rand had kept during the pivotal years 1967 and 1968, buried in a box of Rand’s papers. Peikoff claims never to have read his cousin Barbara’s book, and the two have not seen or spoken to each other since the fall of 1968.
At eighty and seventy-nine, respectively, Barbara and Nathaniel remain the objects of fitful but intense vituperation by a second and third generation of zealous Randians. These younger men and women, most of whom didn’t know Rand, have adopted her famous injunction to “judge, and be prepared to be judged.” Hard as it is to believe, twenty-five years after her death they, too, seem to be vyin
g for her approval.
PATRECIA BRANDEN (née Gullison) married Nathaniel in 1969 in a civil ceremony in Las Vegas. She died in a drowning accident in 1977.
Rand’s sole legal heir, LEONARD PEIKOFF, at seventy-six remains her most faithful adherent. In his 1982 book, The Ominous Parallels, he traced the causes of the Holocaust to collectivism and altruism, his mentor’s bêtes noires. In 1985, he co-founded the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) with Philadelphia Eagles owner Ed Snider. ARI promotes Rand’s books and ideas and provides support to approved Rand study groups around the world. It also acts as a repository for the author’s papers, which, according to Rand’s stated wishes in the 1960s and 1970s, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., had expected to receive upon her death. In 1991, Peikoff did make a donation of the original manuscripts and galley proofs of her four novels—from his hospital bed, after a heart attack. When he recovered his health, he accepted a million-dollar tax deduction for his donation but delayed making further gifts of her papers. In 1998, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he revealed that when he had donated the manuscripts he “stole,” or kept back, both the first and last pages of the handwritten first draft of The Fountainhead, and the Library of Congress, backed by the Department of Justice, threatened to sue. The dispute smoldered for a few years, but Peikoff eventually agreed to relinquish the manuscript pages, and in 2002 the library sent a conservator to Peikoff’s Los Angeles home to remove the framed pages from the wall. The next day, hundreds of angry e-mails sent by Objectivists arrived in the mailboxes of library staff members and assorted others, including employees of the congressional committee that oversees the library’s operations. The Peikoff supporters were furious at what they regarded as government theft of private property. The librarians were “thugs with guns,” the e-mails claimed, using one of Rand’s favorite designations for government officials. This is one of many peculiar incidents I heard about that indicate the Ayn Rand cult endures into the twenty-first century.
Peikoff was recently divorced from his third wife, Amy Peikoff, and lives in Riverside, California. He keeps a Web site at peikoff.com. His daughter, Kira Peikoff, is a 2007 graduate of New York University with a major in journalism and, according to her university Web site, an aspiration to write a novel.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Elena Tsvetkova of Blitz research services in St. Petersburg, Russia, who provided information and documents concerning Ayn Rand’s Russian childhood, youth, and family. Also: John Allen; Thaddeus Ashby; Iris Bell; Susan Belter; Indira Berndtson, The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Archives; Michael Berliner; Kathy Berlowe; Robert Bidinotto; Kai Bird; Alice Lotvin Birney, Literary Manuscript Historian, Library of Congress; Jude Blanchette; Joan and Allan Blumenthal; Nell Boeschenstein (research); Leonard Bogat; Jeff Britting, archivist, Ayn Rand Institute; Fern Brown; William F. Buckley, Jr. (deceased); Roger J. Callahan; Becky Cape, the Literary Guild; Stephanie Cassidy, archivist, Art Students League; Margaret Cheney, The Lorain, Ohio, Genealogy Society; John Christensen, librarian, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University Library; Simon Elliott, Charles E. Young Research Library, Department of Special Collections, Manuscripts Division; Mary Marshall Clark, director, Columbia University Oral History Project; Lee Clifford; Frederick H. Cookinham; Richard Cornuelle; Lilyan Courtois; Stephen D. Cox; Aura Davies (research); Wendy de Weese; Frederick Dews, National Archives and Records Administration; Mary Beth Dunhouse, Ford Hall Forum Archives; Murray Dworetsky, M.D.; Jenny Eiger; Katie Eiger; Albert Ellis; Marsha Enright; John Enright; Walter Flamenbaum, M.D.; Joel Frank; Bettina Bien Greaves; Liesha Gullison; Avner Hacohen; Barbara Hall, oral historian, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Muriel Welles Hall (deceased); Don Hauptmann; Molly Hays; Margaret Smith Heller; Hertog Fellowships at Columbia University School of the Arts, Writing Division, and Susan and Roger Hertog; Robert Hessen; Dalma Heyn; Ruth Beebe Hill; Florence Hirschfeld; Leonard Hirschfeld; Jonathan Hirschfeld; Tony Hiss; Beth Hoffman, archivist, Foundation for Economic Education; John Hospers; Gerry Howard; Spencer Howard, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library; Edward Hudgins; Elayne Kalberman; David Kelley; Michael Stuart Kelly; Daryn Kent-Duncan; George Kline; June Kurisu; Jenny Lee, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; Winnie Lee (photo research); Justin Martin; Scott McConnell; Ed Nash; Patricia Neal; Ruth Ohman; Kerry O’Quinn; Suze Orman; Connie Papurt; Jack Portnoy; Al Ramrus; Justin Raimondo; Shelly Reuben; Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., Ludwig von Mises Institute; Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal; Allan Ryskind; Roger Salamon; Roberta Satro; Wilfred Schwartz; Marc Schwalb; Chris Matthew Sciabarra; Duncan Scott, director, the Objectivist History Project; Marian L. Smith, historian, History Office and Library, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Department of Homeland Security; Betsy Speicher; Ellen Stuttle; Joan Kennedy Taylor (deceased); William Thomas, director of programs at the Atlas Society; John Thornton; Henry Teitel; Alvin Toffler; James S. Valliant; Don Ventura; Jeffrey Walker; Mike Wallace; Greg Walsh, archivist, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Eugene Winick; Marna Wolf.
Special thanks to Barbara Branden, who gave generously of her time, knowledge, and resources; to Nathaniel Branden, who spoke with me at length, on multiple occasions; and to Patricia O’Toole, without whose encouragement this book would not have been written.
And thanks, always, to my parents, Neil and Miriam Smith Heller.
ABBREVIATION KEY
KEY TO NAMES, PLACES, THINGS
ARI Ayn Rand Institute
JMB Joan Mitchell Blumenthal
BB Barbara Branden
NB Nathaniel Branden
JB Jeff Britting
FB Fern Brown
WFB William F. Buckley, Jr.
BC Bennett Cerf
RBH Ruth Beebe Hill
JH John Hospers
EK Elayne Kalberman
MSC Marc Schwalb Collection
LVM Ludwig von Mises
NBI Nathaniel Branden Institute
OHP Objectivist History Project
FO Frank O’Connor
IP Isabel Paterson
LP Leonard Peikoff
AR Ayn Rand
NR Nora (Eleanora) Rosenbaum
MR Murray Rothbard
MS Mimi Sutton
JKT Joan Kennedy Taylor
JW Jeff Walker
MW Marna Wolf
FLW Frank Lloyd Wright
KEY TO FREQUENTLY USED SOURCES
100 Voices 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand (Scott McConnell, ed.)
AS Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
AR Ayn Rand (Jeff Britting)
AR: SOL Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, book (Michael Paxton)
AR: SOL DVD Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, DVD (Michael Paxton)
BBTBI Barbara Branden taped biographical interviews, 1960-61
EOA Essays on Ayn Rand’s “Anthem” (Robert Mayhew, ed.)
EOTF Essays on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” (Robert Mayhew, ed.)
EOWTL Essays on Ayn Rand’s “We the Living” (Robert Mayhew, ed.)
FTNI For the New Intellectual (Ayn Rand)
JD Judgment Day (Nathaniel Branden)
JOAR Journals of Ayn Rand (David Harriman, ed.)
LOAR The Letters of Ayn Rand (Michael S. Berliner, ed.)
LOC Library of Congress
MYWAR My Years with Ayn Rand (Nathaniel Branden)
NYP New York Post
NYT New York Times
RPJ Rand’s private journals from 1967 to 1968, as quoted in The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics (James Valliant)
TEAR The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from Her Unpublished Fiction (Leonard Peikoff, ed.)
TF The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
TON The Objectivist Newsletter
TPOAR The Passion of Ayn Rand (Barbara Branden)
TPOARC The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics (James Valliant)
TVOS The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (Ayn Ra
nd)
VOR The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (Ayn Rand)
WIAR Who Is Ayn Rand? (Barbara and Nathaniel Branden)
WTL We the Living (Ayn Rand)
NOTES
ONE: BEFORE THE
REVOLUTION: 1905–1917
If a life can have a theme song: From a four-page biographical sketch that AR wrote at age thirty-one in 1936 to promote the British edition of WTL (Michael Paxton, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life [Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1998], pp. 17-18).
“My philosophy, in essence”: “About the Author,” in Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Plume, 1999), p. 1070.
the brief but bloody uprising: Bruce W. Lincoln, 1n War’s Dark Shadow:The Russians Before the Great War (New York: Dial Press, 1983), p. 290.
The slaughter gave rise to days of rioting: Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), pp. 173-80.