Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [109]
Young men were aware of her sexuality, too, perhaps for the first time in her life. Bungay recalled observing “a lot of sex in her face.” Evan Wright, a young ex-marine whom she hired to proofread her typescripts in 1951, said that she once stood silently by his side while he worked, exuding a powerful sexual magnetism that was far from disagreeable. She stood there for a long time. “I don’t know what would have happened if I had looked up,” he said. “Yes, perhaps I do know.” He was young and shy and didn’t look up, and she walked on.
At the same Books and Authors Club luncheon, Rand uttered one of her occasional uproarious, and revealing, bon mots. During a question-and-answer period, a white-gloved matron asked where all those wonderful sex scenes in The Fountainhead had come from. Were they based on Rand’s own experience? Hill, knowing well that her friend could be prickly, winced, but Rand responded with perfect poise. “Wishful thinking,” she said, and smiled. Hilarity ensued among the audience of mostly wealthy women.
At this early juncture, she was just beginning to set conditions for public appearances, in order to screen out disputatious hosts and potentially hostile audiences. “She will not speak with liberals,” Hill remembered warning the club’s president, a Mrs. Helen Guervin. Mrs. Guervin was required to call on Rand in Chatsworth before the author would commit herself to speaking to the group. The club president passed the test, as Hill herself had done before being welcomed into the circle of Rand’s acquaintances.
There were additional, more-or-less permanent houseguests who came to stay at the ranch in the middle 1940s. She provided sanctuary to at least two European refugees fleeing the postwar Soviet occupation of central Europe. The first was a woman who, Ashby recalled, developed a paranoid fixation on him and eventually was evicted. The second was Marie von Strachow, Rand’s long-lost former English tutor from St. Petersburg. Von Strachow had been a close friend of Rand’s mother and, in 1925, had helped to prepare the young émigré for life in the United States. She seems to have fled Russia for Western Europe before the onset of the Stalin Terror. In early 1946, she managed to locate Rand through the American delegation to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees in Austria, where she was living as a displaced person. She wrote to tell her former pupil of the elder Rosenbaums’ deaths. Zinovy had succumbed to heart disease in 1939, she reported. Anna had perished from cancer during the siege of Leningrad, in November 1941. Rand later learned that her sister Natasha and her childhood friend and cousin Nina Guzarchik also had died, Natasha during a Nazi air raid and Nina on a ship in the Caspian Sea that was bombed. A year or two later, she discovered that Nina’s sister Vera was alive and had made her way from Berlin, where Rand had last seen her in 1926, to Paris to take a medical position at the Pasteur Institute. Vera had married and given birth to a daughter, Lisette, then moved to Lyon. Rand sent Vera’s family packages of food and clothing. No one knew what had happened to Rand’s lively and much beloved youngest sister, Nora.
Rand’s reaction to the shock of her parents’ deaths was muted, but she declared herself anxious to bring her mother’s former friend to safety in the United States. Evidently, as a person carrying a Russian passport, von Strachow was in danger of being extradited