Anne Heller - Ayn Rand and the World She Made

“disappearing professor” act: TPOARC , RPJ, July 4, 1968, p. 323.

“he had always been arrogant”: TPOAR , p. 304.

“If all of you who look at me”:“Ideal,” Three Plays , p. 177.

She was paralyzed by disgust: TPOAR , pp. 302–3.

“Thinking is all I do”: JD , p. 240.

able to renew their intimacy: TPOAR , p. 304; MYWAR , p. 219.

She was never fastidious:According to RBH, AR’s friend from Chatsworth, California, NB approached BB and “asked her to ask AR to ‘clean up her act,’ though it wasn’t her act he wanted cleaned up.” RBH claimed to have heard this from BB, with whom she became friendly in the 1980s and 1990s. According to RBH, BB confided that “NB found her physically—unclean, not clean;” author interview with RBH, June 8, 2005. When asked if this story was true, Barbara replied, “No comment.”

“I needed all of my resources”: MYWAR , p. 219.

“How is it possible that we can be accused”: MYWAR , p. 209.

“it was more and more true”:Author interview with NB, August 10, 2004.

“the founder of a new and unusual philosophy”: The Mike Wallace Interview , February 25, 1959.

told the same story to both Brandens:The untruth that AR told to Wallace and the Brandens “is puzzling,” said BB in 2007 (author correspondence with BB, 2007).

Mr. Branden had received six hundred letters: The Mike Wallace Interview , February 25, 1959.

dumbfounded that Wallace had devoted half an hour:Author interview with Al Ramrus, March 1, 2007.

“Most of the media”:Author interview with Al Ramrus, March 1, 2007.

enjoyed the interview and admired her courage:Author interview with Mike Wallace, February 15, 2007.

“I remember with amusement her haircut”: 100 Voices , Mike Wallace, p. 156.

he and she dined together:Author interview with Mike Wallace, February 15, 2007.

“creature who sat on her shoulder”:Author interview with Mike Wallace, February 15, 2007.

“slavish followers”:Author interview with Mike Wallace, February 15, 2007.

received an advance copy of the novel:Also, like MR, JKT initially had an adverse reaction to NB. “When I first met Nathan at Ayn’s, my immediate reaction to him was that he might be a wife-swapper in some sense. But then I said, ah, no” (Karen Reedstrom, “Interview with Joan Kennedy Taylor,” Full Context , October 1993, p. 4).

“when the whole world wanted her attention”:Author interview with JKT, May 21, 2004.

“I think she was kinder to people”:“Interview with Joan Kennedy Taylor,” p. 3.

“she respected creative people”:Author interview with JKT, May 21, 2004.

didn’t want to compose atonal music:“Interview with Joan Kennedy Taylor,” p. 3.

pulled up chairs and listened to their conversation: 100 Voices , Mickey Spillane, p. 232.

loved the fact that Spillane’s potboiling plots:BBTBI.

“Grays don’t interest me”:“The Curious Cult of Ayn Rand,” p. 100.

the Los Angeles Times and in other forums:In her private lectures on the art of writing, she often mentioned him as a favorable example of descriptive writing and use of slang. In her short-lived weekly column of commentary in the Los Angeles Times , she devoted a column to his writing, beginning with the sentence, “Mickey Spillane is one of the best writers of our time” (“The Ayn Rand Column,” Los Angeles Times , September 2, 1962).

following their joint appearance:The broadcast aired on October 11, 1961; no videotape seems to have survived.

threw back her head and laughed:Author interview with Al Ramrus, February 7, 2007.

They formed a mutual admiration society:Spillane also met Rand’s followers. “I was never at her place when they weren’t there,” he told an interviewer. “Every time one of us would talk, all [their] heads would follow that person” (100 Voices , Mickey Spillane, pp. 235–38).

“Ayn Rand and I, we don’t have to shrug”: 100 Voices , Mickey Spillane, pp. 235–38.

“vicious injustice on the part of the ‘intellectuals’ “:“The Ayn Rand Column,” Los Angeles Times , September 2, 1962.

“moral cannibals”: AS , p. 928.

Rand paid for her hotel:Letter to Vera Glarner, née Guzarchik, March 2, 1962 (LOAR , p. 595).

deeply impressed by their American cousin’s fame: 100 Voices , Lisette Hassanil, pp. 257–59.

Rand wrote that she missed her:Letter to Vera Glarner, August 4, 1962 (LOAR , p. 599).

hosted a radio program:“Interview with Joan Kennedy Taylor,” p. 3. The station was WEVD, New York.

didn’t comment on Nabokov’s lurid subject:In a March 1964 Playboy interview, AR told Alvin Toffler that she regarded Nabokov as a brilliant stylist but that his subjects and “sense of life” were evil; “The Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand,” p. 40.

“Oh, Nabokov!”:Author interview with JKT, May 21, 2004.

never contacted his sister Olga:Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 388. Interestingly, Boyd describes a speech Nabokov gave at Cornell in 1958 in which he reenacted a love scene from Fyodor Gladkov’s 1930s Russian industrial novel Energiya , about the building of a Russian dam, in which the hero confesses love to the heroine while operating a pneumatic drill. “Social Realism’s ideal love scene—boy and girl with pneumatic drill,” Boyd quotes Nabokov as saying gleefully (p. 360).

“She was very, um, cautious”:Author interview with JKT, May 21, 2004.

Mannheimer turned up in New York:Author interview with BB, June 9, 2006. NB didn’t remember seeing Mannheimer as a client but thought that sending the screenwriter to him “sounded like something Ayn would do;” author interview with NB, April 3, 2008.

appearing anxious, stiff, and visibly frightened:Author interview with BB, June 9, 2006.

having seen almost nothing of Rand:Author interview with BB, June 9, 2006.

fatally shot himself:Obituaries, Variety , March 15, 1972.

“Too bad”:Author interview with Joan Blumenthal, October 10, 2007.

saw little of Frances and Henry:Karen Reedstrom, “Interview with Erika Holzer,” Full Context , February 1996, p. 3.

struck her as a betrayal:Author interview with BB, October 12, 2007.

never had a good word to say:Author interview with BB, December 16, 2005.

the sensation she created:Author interview with Bettina Bien Greaves, December 22, 2006.

Mises’s eightieth-birthday party:William Henry Chamberlain, “Ludwig von Mises at 80,” Wall Street Journal , October 20, 1961, p. 10; My Years with Ludwig von Mises , p. 163. The party was held at the University Club of New York.