Barbara Branden - The Passion of Ayn Rand

"No," I answered, "we haven't been friends for some time."

"I'm glad," she said. "He was a bad influence on you."

Ayn's face and body relaxed. She smiled at me warmly as she said, "Now tell me about the last thirteen years." I began speaking about my life, and she told me of hers.

In the hours of that golden afternoon, as the light from the window softened the stem planes of her face, Ayn spoke of Frank with love and longing and despair. "After he died," she said, "I couldn't write at all, not for a long time, I wasn't motivated to do anything... Then I realized that I needed to do something that would be only for my own personal pleasure, something purposeful that I would do only because I enjoyed it. So I've begun taking lessons in mathematics. I have a private tutor who comes once a week to teach me algebra. It's wonderful! He can't believe how quickly I'm learning — he said he's never seen anyone move so swiftly. And it leads me in fascinating philosophical directions — there are so many intriguing connections between algebra and philosophy."

I listened to her, astounded, as she had always had the power to astound me. At the age of seventy-six, her concept of personal pleasure, of an exciting new activity, was to study algebra and to define its relationship to metaphysics and epistemology.

She spoke of politics — she disapproved of Ronald Reagan, whom she considered a typical conservative in his attempt to link politics and religion; she had refused to vote for him. She spoke of the activities she was engaged in and the work she was doing. She told me whom she saw and whom she no longer saw, and we gossiped cheerfully about old friends. We talked politics and philosophy and aesthetics — and it was not 1981, it was 1950, we were young and the world was young, and the glow of ideas outshone the sun.

When I rose to leave long after dusk — we would see each other again, we agreed, on my next visit to New York — we were both solemn, wondering when our next meeting would be... or if it would be. At the door, she blew me a final kiss, as she used to do when we parted, and I blew her a kiss in return. It was the last time I ever saw Ayn Rand.

Walking back to my hotel, I thought of the people, through the years, who had said to me, "How could you have stayed with Ayn all those years? How could you have allowed yourself to be a party to her affair with Nathaniel? How could you have been willing to endure all the pain of so many years? I would never have done it." I understood their perspective, but each time I heard the comment, I had thought, No, you would not have done it. The moments of joy and the passionate engagement, the struggle for the highest possible, would not have been worth their cost in agony. But they were worth it to me.

It was a few months later that I wrote Ayn to tell her I was planning to write her biography. I wanted her to learn it from me, and to understand my reasons. Knowing she always procrastinated about letter-writing, I was not surprised when weeks went by without a response. Finally, I telephoned — but she refused to speak to me. I was certain that her refusal must stem from anger at the prospect of my writing her biography. But many months later, I happened to be speaking to an acquaintance who had a business relationship with Ayn. "Ayn was in the office to talk about a business matter," he told me. "And she said, 'Barbara was in New York a while ago. We spent a day together. She's going to write my biography.' She said it perfectly calmly, there was no anger in her voice or manner — and then we went back to our discussion." I can only assume that if anger was her initial reaction, her attitude later changed.

In the summer of 1981, Ayn received an invitation that was to bring her, at last, a value from the outside world that was in her terms.

At the age of eighteen, James U. Blanchard — later founder and Chairman of the National Committee for Monetary Reform, an organization dedicated to the reestablishment of a gold standard and to educating the American public in the benefits of free market economics — was severely injured in an automobile accident. One afternoon, as he sat listlessly on the front porch of his home, a friend approached, tossed a book on his lap, and said, "You'll really like this." The book was Anthem.

"After I read it," Jim recalled, "I read all her other books nonstop. I got The Objectivist Newsletter and started reading everything it recommended. I became particularly interested in economics, especially the Austrian School, and from that came my interest in investments and later in monetary reform — and from that came financial success... Her work gave me a context within which to structure my life and make decisions — it gave me the sense of a consistent foundation on which I could build. That little book that was thrown on my lap changed my whole life."

In November of 1981, NCMR was to hold its annual conference in New Orleans for businessmen, bankers, financial consultants, entrepreneurs, investors, industrialists, economists, mutual-fund managers, and others in the financial world. Among the speakers would be Louis Rukeyser, Paul Erdman, Adam Smith, Harry Browne, Douglas R. Casey, Harry Schultz, and Howard Ruff.

"I wanted Ayn Rand to be our featured speaker," Jim said. "But I had been asking her to appear for about four years, thinking that the romance of talking to all these millionaires would reach her; there was never an answer to my letters. I began thinking how I might really excite her and convince her to come. I knew that the offer of a considerable fee wouldn't do it. Then I remembered her interest in the railroad industry and in trains — and I wrote again, saying that I would arrange for her to travel to New Orleans in a private rail car, with a butler and a gourmet chef. She accepted. Leonard Peikoff and Cynthia, his wife-to-be, were to join her. And then I faced the problem of finding a private car! I called around desperately for days, until I located Ray Thorpe, president of the Private Rail Car Association. When I told him what I wanted he said, 'Fantastic! Ayn Rand changed my whole life, I love her books. I'll give her my own private car and my personal chef. Ask her for a list of her favorite foods, so the chef can prepare them.'

"It was a marvelous car," Jim continued. "It looked like it was built in the nineteenth century, very ornate, with two private bedrooms and a formal dining area. We stocked it with everything she liked best, and added champagne and caviar. I knew she hadn't been anywhere or done anything for a long time; I wanted her to have the fun of the train ride, and to be where she would be appreciated and would see how many people she had affected — I had a feeling she didn't realize the depth of her influence."

Ayn did not realize the depth of her influence. Her reclusive life and her disinterest in the world outside her doors had prevented her from learning that her ideas were fast becoming a respected and astonishingly potent part of the culture of which she had despaired — that Objectivism was taught in high school and university classrooms across the country, that books and scholarly articles expounding aspects of her philosophy were pouring out of the presses in a growing stream, that men and woman influential in government, in the arts, in the sciences, in industry and finance were carrying her standard because it was their own. Tragically, when she was reaching the pinnacle of the success for which she had yearned, when the voices she had sought were, at last, speaking for her — she was no longer listening.

Ayn arrived in New Orleans after a two-and-a-half-day journey, to be met by Jim and the limousine that would take her to and from her hotel suite. Her eyes were glowing. The trip had been hard, the road-bed rocky, but she had loved the sense of living in the pages of Atlas Shrugged, of riding in the same kind of railroad car as Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden had done.