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more like a “sports hunk” than a standard-issue intellectual. Although Rand usually wrote seven days a week, all day long, especially after she started intensive planning of Atlas Shrugged in the spring of 1946, she deviated from her schedule when Mannheimer was with her. On those occasions, she spent her weekend afternoons and evenings closeted with him in the study, discussing his play and other writing projects, developing her ideas, exchanging Hollywood political gossip, and, as time went on, offering him emotional counseling and support. “They spent an awful lot of time in there,” said Kurisu, then an eighteen-year-old college girl whose Japanese-American parents worked as the O’Connors’ live-in housekeeper and handyman. During the summer of 1947, and on weekends afterward, Kurisu typed the author’s handwritten manuscript pages and her personal letters and sometimes typed for Mannheimer at Rand’s request. She worked and slept on a balcony overlooking the double-height O’Connor living room. Mannheimer slept on the study couch. “I never saw them touch, but I always wondered. Frank O’Connor never went in” the study while Mannheimer was in there with his wife, but he never seemed to mind the time they spent together, either. During the two years Kurisu worked at the ranch, Rand referred to Mannheimer as her “intellectual heir,” the typist recalled. Another frequent guest, Hal Wallis’s personal assistant Jack Bungay, similarly remembered, “She was terribly, terribly fond of him. They were very close friends. I thought he was going to be her heir then.” But “intellectual heir,” that odd honorific, which Rand seems to have made up, would not belong to Mannheimer for long.

In 1945, another young man named Walter Abbott, a playwright whom Rand and Mannheimer had befriended in New York, began to show up at the ranch. Abbott had met her in late 1935 or early 1936, shortly before The Night of January 16th closed on Broadway. A theatrical producer who knew them both gave her one of his plays to read; she was crazy about it, she told an interviewer, and she and Mannheimer had pooled their money to buy an option to produce it. They couldn’t raise the additional capital to bring it to the stage, and the project withered. But when Abbott arrived in Hollywood in the mid-1940s, he joined Ashby and Mannheimer in a threesome of regular weekend votaries to Rand. Although she eventually came to think of him as an “emotionalizer” and the kind of ne’er-do-well writer who works only when “inspired,” she lobbied Hal Wallis to give him a job as a junior screenwriter at $150 a week. His first, or nearly first, mission was to collaborate with her on a script about the life of the Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, a celebrated alumnus of the St. Petersburg conservatory where her sister Natasha had studied. Leonard Bernstein, then twenty-seven, tried out for the composer’s role. But the film was not produced, probably because a company called Monogram announced plans for its own Tchaikovsky movie. Abbott took to writing B-grade screenplays, such as Scared to Death (1947), with Bela Lugosi, in which a murdered woman narrates dark deeds from a slab in the morgue.

Rand saw a lot of Jack Bungay, who sometimes joined the male trio and their intellectual guiding light in all-night philosophical discussions. For a period of months in 1946, he, too, lived at the ranch. In the evenings, he and O’Connor enjoyed watching her perform a little two-step, with a cane, to radio music, à la Marlene Dietrich. “She was a very sensual woman,” Bungay recalled. “Beautiful eyes, black hair, and very beautiful lips, very prominent lips.” She encouraged him, as she did the others, to write. “You must, you must, you must,” she told him. He didn’t, but he and the others adored her and during that period were her only regular visitors, she later told a confidante.

Her fondness for young men was apparent to her friends. Geologist and ethnographer Ruth Beebe Hill, who, with her husband, a biochemist named Dr. Borroughs (“Buzzy”) Hill, became close to the O’Connors in the