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to the Russian zone in Austria and from there to the Soviet Union. It took two and a half years of legal maneuvering for Rand to gain permission for “Missis,” as she called her former teacher, to travel to the United States, but in late 1948 von Strachow arrived in California and moved into the Neutra house. She lived there for six or nine months, June Kurisu recalled, until the women’s political disagreements created friction. Although Missis tried to be agreeable and avoid arguments, she “wasn’t a quiet lady,” Kurisu said appreciatively. “She would speak up at the dinner table. She would say just what she thought.” This made for an intolerable strain on Rand as she was working on a difficult and important section of Atlas Shrugged. Eventually, the writer arranged for von Strachow to live elsewhere in California and saw the woman no more.

Assorted friends and family members also came and went. Two of Rand’s Chicago cousins stopped by to see her and were amazed that she was living in Marlene Dietrich’s former house. One of them, Jack Portnoy, the twenty-three-year-old son of Rand’s mother’s cousin Mandel Portnoy, marveled at the moat, the bright gardens, the rooftop pool, and the tree that grew straight through the foyer floor, reaching for the roof. Late in the afternoon, when Rand had finished her day’s work on Atlas Shrugged and joined Jack and his traveling companion, her favorite cousin, Burt Stone, in the living room, Jack noticed that she had a needle wrapped around her thumb; it looked like a ring, except that the point stuck up and out. What was it for? he asked. When she was writing, she answered, she sometimes pricked herself “to keep my thoughts alive.” He also noticed that O’Connor supervised the care of the house as well as the property and did the shopping for their dinner. Like other relatives, he found the arrangement odd.

Frank’s brother Joe O’Connor, now an itinerant actor with a small theatrical troupe based in Los Angeles, visited when he was in town. As a young man in Lorain, he had hoped to marry a woman named Millie. Millie married someone else, gave birth to a daughter, got divorced, and, in the 1920s, moved to California. Joe became the godfather of Millie’s daughter, whose name was Rosalie Fitzgerald. In the late 1920s, the small girl often visited the O’Connors in their apartment on North Gower Street. Rand kindly appointed herself Rosalie’s godmother, and Rosalie was very fond of her.

Fifteen years later, Millie and Rosalie enjoyed driving out from Los Angeles together after church on Sundays. On one such Sunday, Ayn revealed a facet of her background and character that took Rosalie and her mother by surprise. The four were talking about a newspaper article concerning a federal investigation of American Communists when Millie said, apropos of the conventional wisdom that most Communists were Jewish, that she didn’t approve of Hitler but agreed that “he should have incinerated all those Jews.” Dead silence ensued. Then Rand said quietly, in a voice that Rosalie remembered as beautifully modulated, “Well, Millie, I guess you’ve never known, but I am Jewish.” (On hearing this story, a longtime acquaintance of Rand’s commented that she didn’t believe Rand’s reportedly mild response: “I guarantee that her reaction would have been rage,” the acquaintance remarked.) Rosalie was horrified, ashamed of her mother’s bigotry, and frightened that she would lose Rand as a godmother and friend, but Millie wouldn’t apologize. “I’m sorry it has to end this way,” Frank told the women as he walked them to their car. That Sunday was one of the few times Rand disclosed her Jewish background to anyone other than Frank, Nick, Mimi, and possibly Joe. On this day, her principled abhorrence of anti-Semitism, and, indeed, of any collective, group-based bias, trumped whatever generalized fear of humiliation or of tactical disadvantage she may have had. By then she would almost certainly have seen photographs of liberated Nazi concentration camps. A few years later she would tell a friend, “But they [the Nazis] were killing