Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (38 page)

Rand’s attack on the campus clubs was part of her increasing impatience with NBI students, whom she now regularly assailed during her question-and-answer sessions. The chance to hear from Rand in person had originally been one of NBI’s greatest draws. In the beginning she was a regular attendee at the New York classes and occasionally delivered a lecture herself. Although she was normally generous in her responses to general audiences, NBI students were held to higher standards. Rand was likely to denounce anyone who asked inappropriate or challenging questions “as a person of low self-esteem” or to have them removed from the lecture hall. In front of journalists she called one questioner “a cheap fraud” and told another, “If you don’t know the difference between the United States and Russia, you deserve to find out!” These were moments of high drama, with Rand shouting her angry judgments to the widespread applause of the audience. But this antagonism toward his paying customers made Nathan extremely uncomfortable, and he began discouraging her from attending lectures.
²¹

Always quick to anger, Rand now erupted regularly. She even began to clash with Frank. Since that first fateful evening with the Collective, Frank had continued to paint. His work was impressive, and one of his best paintings, a gritty yet etherial composition of sky, sun, and suspension bridge graced the cover of a 1968 reissue of
The Fountainhead
. But Ayn forbade him to sell his paintings, saying she couldn’t bear to part with any of them. When she offered unsolicited advice about his work, he blew up at her. Frank preferred the Art Students League to NBI. He kept a low profile, never telling anyone about his famous wife. He stood out nonetheless. Before either became fashionable, Frank wore a navy blue cape and carried a shoulder strap bag. His fellow students described him as “always just very chic, very elegant without overdoing it.” In 1966 they elected him vice president of the League. This vote of confidence came just as Frank’s artistic career was cut short by the decline of his body. Stricken by a neurological disorder, by the end of 1967 his hands shook so badly he could paint no more.
²²
Once playful and witty, Frank now became sharp and snappish. He withdrew to the sanctuary of his studio, where he drank his days away.

Besides Frank’s decline, Rand was further disconcerted by the deterioration of her connection to Nathan. Aside from a few brief episodes just after
Atlas Shrugged
appeared, their relationship had been platonic for years. Rand had halted the affair during the depths of her depression. After recovering her spirits she became eager to rekindle their romance. Nathan, however, was reluctant and uninterested. He offered one excuse after another. It was the strain of betraying Barbara; the stress of cuckolding Frank; the pressure of lecturing at NBI, deceiving his students and public audience. What Nathan kept from Rand was the most obvious explanation of all: he had fallen in love with one of his NBI students, a twenty-three-year-old model named Patrecia Gullison.

Nathan first noticed Patrecia when she enrolled in his Principles class. Strikingly beautiful in the manner of Dominique Francon or Dagny Taggart, Patrecia was far more lighthearted than any Rand heroine. Carefree and gay, she teased Nathan about his serious bearing, even as she made her dedication to Objectivism clear. She struck up a romance with another Objectivist and invited both the O’Connors and the Brandens to the wedding, where Nathan brooded at the sight of her with another man. Soon the two began meeting privately under the aegis of her interest in Objectivism. Their conversations in his office grew longer. Nathan’s feelings for Patrecia, which developed into an intense sexual affair, lit the fuse that would blow Objectivism sky high.

Unaware of Nathan’s new dalliance but anxious to maintain Objectivist rationality, Barbara petitioned her husband for permission to renew relations with an old boyfriend who was now working at NBI. First Nathan forbade it, then he relented. Barbara’s new sanctioned liaison forced the Brandens to admit that their marriage had been a hollow shell for years. Mismatched from the beginning, the pair had no natural chemistry and little in common besides mutual admiration for Rand. In 1965 they decided to separate. Just months later Patrecia and her husband split up.

All this was more than enough to make Rand uneasy and illtempered. She had counseled Barbara and Nathan through each step of their relationship and endorsed their marriage. The separation was a sign that she had failed. Even more significantly, the Brandens’ marriage, however troubled, meant Nathan was taken by a woman Rand liked and even controlled; their secret was safe with Barbara. Now Nathan could once again become a single man. And he had lost the one believable excuse that could explain his reluctance to begin relations with Rand
anew. Rand worried that her deepest fear had come true: Nathan did not love her anymore. She was still his idol, but no longer his sweetheart.

After his separation from Barbara, Nathan began a lame effort to integrate Patrecia into his public life, even as their affair remained a secret to all. He told Patrecia about his past with Rand, swearing her to silence. Nathan assumed that if Rand discovered his new romance she would banish him forever. Still, he allowed himself to hope that if she got to know Patrecia first, she would be less hurt when their relationship came to light. He began to drop Patrecia’s name into conversation, and he included her regularly in Collective events.

At first Rand did not suspect Patrecia of being a rival. By now she was a high-profile member of the Junior Collective, by dint of her good looks and eager interest in Rand’s philosophy. At an Objectivist fashion show she wowed the audience in a glamorous wedding gown. Following Nathan’s lead, Patrecia worked to develop a friendship with Rand. She was solicitous and respectful, telling her in a letter, “When I read
The Fountainhead
and
Atlas Shrugged
, when I first saw you, when I think of you and see you now, and when I look at this picture of you—my head is always bowed.”
²³
When Patrecia decided to pursue an acting career she took the stage name “Patrecia Wynand,” after a character in
The Fountainhead
. Before her
Tonight Show
appearances Rand asked Patrecia for help with her makeup. Rand liked Patrecia and admired her beauty. She had even asked for one of her professional headshots, which she kept in her desk drawer. But she could not understand why Nathan kept bringing her up in their private conversations.

Ayn and Nathan were both trapped by Objectivist theories of love, sex, and emotion, which allowed them no graceful exit from a failed affair. From the start Rand had integrated sexuality into Objectivism. In
Atlas Shrugged
she argued that sexual love was a response to values and a reflection of self-esteem. Love was not mysterious, mercurial, or emotional, and desire was never a mere physical response. “Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself,” declares Francisco D’Anconia.
²⁴
So it was that Dominique loved Howard, Dagny loved Galt, and Nathan loved Ayn. According to Objectivism, Nathan’s love for Ayn was natural, even expected, because he held her as his highest value. To repudiate her was to repudiate all his
values; to deem her unattractive was to reject her on the deepest level. Yet Nathan was still an Objectivist, still considered Rand a genius. He could find no way to reconcile his esteem for Rand with the seeming contradiction that he no longer wished to be her lover. Even worse, how could he value the young and winsome Patrecia over her? What did that say about him?

Nathan’s problems were compounded by his development of Objectivist psychology, which denied the autonomy and importance of emotions. Working with the base materials of Rand’s novels, Nathan constructed an airtight model of the psyche that downgraded emotions to a subordinate position. Rand trumpeted her distrust of emotion in almost all her writing. In
For the New Intellectual
she declared, “Emotions are not tools of cognition,” a statement that would resurface repeatedly in all Objectivist writing. To Rand an emotion “tells you nothing about reality” and could never be “proof” of anything. In his radio speech Galt declares, “Any emotion that clashes with your reason, any emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.”
²⁵
It was Rand’s loss that her primary intellectual collaborator did little to broaden her outlook, shake her loose from her inherent emotional repression, or introduce her to the teachings of modern psychology. Instead, captive to Rand’s mind since meeting her almost twenty years before at age nineteen, Nathan pushed her philosophical ideas into the realm of psychology, with devastating results.

Nathan saw Objectivism’s deviation from the accumulated wisdom of psychology as evidence of pathbreaking innovation, rather than a denial of widely recognized human truth. Unlike all other schools of psychology, Branden boasted, Objectivism did not “regard desires and emotions as irreducible primaries, as the given.” Rather, emotions sprang from thought and “are the product of the thinking [a man] has done or has failed to do.”
²⁶
Therefore, the way to handle painful or unpleasant emotions was to uncover and change the thinking that had created them. Objectivist psychotherapy was not unusual in its rational investigation of emotional patterns. What made Nathan’s form of therapy truly destructive was its emphasis on judgment, another inheritance from Rand. The emotions that Objectivist therapy uncovered were to be judged and changed rather than accepted and understood. Objectivist
psychology was not even psychology as such, Nathan admitted. He told Rand, “My whole interest in psychology is not to cure patients, but to justify our view of man.”
²⁷
At the time he began his liaison with Patrecia Nathan was working to apply these ideas in the realm of romantic love.

Nathan’s own life provided the perfect example of his psychological system in action. Unable to accept, change, or rationally understand his feelings for Patrecia, he went into denial. Their affair was only temporary, he told himself, and would fizzle out before long. Nor was he able to pull away from Rand, despite his faltering desire. Instead he tried to explain his behavior in rational terms. And he began to lie. He told Rand he suffered from a mysterious sexual block; something was wrong with him. Ever eager to help her prize student, Rand met with him for long therapy sessions. She held out some hope that he and Barbara would reunite, seeing them together for additional meetings. Rand even allowed herself to confront the unacceptable: that Nathan, now in his early thirties, had no sexual or romantic desire for a woman who was nearly sixty. When she asked directly, Nathan denied that his feelings had changed. He at once prevaricated and hinted at the truth, hoping for a miracle that would deliver them all. Maybe Rand would decide of her own accord their affair was over and set him free. But Rand, never one for subtlety or nuance, could not read between the lines.
²⁸

Rand was also blinded by her idea of man worship, a corollary to her sex theory. Men and women are equal, Rand emphasized, but nonetheless a woman should look up to her man’s superior masculinity. When
McCall’s
called Rand for a puff piece about a woman president, she told the magazine, “A woman cannot reasonably want to be a commander-in-chief.” Many readers of
The Objectivist
were astounded by the assertion and asked Rand for clarification. She elaborated in a longer essay, “An Answer to Readers: About a Woman President.” According to Rand, a woman should never be president, not because she was unqualified for the task, but because a woman president would be too powerful. As commander in chief she would be unable to look up to any man in her life, and this would be psychologically damaging. Any woman who would consider such a position, Rand claimed, was unfit for it, for “a properly feminine woman does not treat men as if she were their pal, sister, mother—or
leader
–
²⁹
Rand’s theory of man worship was an abstract projection that kept her ignorant of both Frank’s and Nathan’s
inner emotional states. Although she called Frank a hero, in truth he was a passive and withdrawn man whose brief renaissance as an artist had been snuffed out by alcohol and old age. The idea of man worship was a wishful fancy, as unattainable for her as the svelte physiques and Aryan features of her heroines. Still, it was a fantasy that satisfied. Rand identified Nathan as a hero, a paragon of morality and rationality. Such beliefs made it impossible for her to let go of him as a lover or to suspect him of duplicity. “That man is no damn good!” Frank stormed after one of their counseling sessions.
³⁰
But Rand continued to take Nathan’s words at face value.

As these tensions simmered under the surface, Objectivism continued to grow rapidly. Ayn and Nathan renamed the newsletter
The Objectivist
in 1966, adopted a more professional magazine format, and saw paid subscriptions surge to a high of twenty thousand.
³¹
The new format marked Rand’s deepening interest in philosophy, as demonstrated by a series of articles titled “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,” later released as a book. Rand’s disillusionment with Goldwater, and her ongoing conversations with Leonard Peikoff, shifted her interest away from politics and cemented her new identity as a philosopher. Over time her most loyal students would identify
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
as her most significant work. In the short run, however, she remained far better known for her politics than for her philosophy.