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seduce her. He said she gave him ample opportunity. She would lie on the divan in her study and invite him to sit beside her. They would talk about ideas deep into the night, while O’Connor slept upstairs. “We’d stop talking and stare into each other’s eyes, for sometimes a couple of hours,” he recalled in 2005, at the age of eighty. When O’Connor was away from the ranch, which wasn’t often, she would figuratively “leave the door open,” he said. “When I didn’t follow up, she would be mad at me.” She began to tease him about his shyness, even though he thought of himself not as shy but as careful. One day she told him the plot of a story she had read at the studio. As he remembered the story sixty years later, a male houseguest finds that he is attracted to his married hostess, who sleeps apart from her husband. One night, the houseguest dresses up as a Revolutionary War soldier whose ghost is rumored to haunt the house. Wearing his uniform, he enters his hostess’s bedroom. She wakes and gazes at him. He wants to make love to her but is too shy. Nothing happens. “Ayn said that I reminded her of him,” said Ashby. When the teasing became too frequent and intense, he said he moved out of the house. Like Mannheimer, Abbott, and Bungay, he took to visiting her once a week or so until he left Los Angeles to enroll in Harvard in the fall of 1946. During the 1950s and 1960s he worked for tiny libertarian magazines and became a devotee of Robert Heinlein, as well as of the effects of magic mushrooms.

Rand remembered their falling-out very differently. In 1961, she told an interviewer that when she and Frank traveled to New York during the summer of 1945, she had left the ranch jointly in the care of Ashby and Mannheimer. Home again, she discovered that Ashby had broken his promise to remain in the house during the day while Mannheimer was at work in Hollywood. The young man had also driven, and dented, O’Connor’s Packard and then tried to cover it up, she said. In her recollection, he left the ranch that fall, having lived there fewer than five months, and sent her a long letter regretting his lies and errors and wishing he were more like Roark. Yet six weeks earlier, Rand had written lovingly about him to Isabel Paterson, calling him her adopted son and describing him as the image of herself at the same age. In search of reflected images of herself, she would say much the same about another favorite young man in 1950.

When they were alone, Rand and Frank were again becoming impatient with each other. The admirer of skyscrapers and airplanes had never learned to drive a car; a friend later speculated that this was her way of ceding control in one small area of life to Frank. In practice, it meant that during her working months at Paramount he had to drive her back and forth to town each day, an hour each way, leaving behind his flowers, animals, and fields. Friends of the period sometimes heard him snap at her—not about her control of the household purse strings, although that sometimes bothered him, or about young men, but about her nagging him to watch out for germs, her tendency to wear snagged stockings, and occasionally her rudeness or her temper. Once, she had a tantrum because Frank was engaging in too much small talk with guests. Another time, on Thanksgiving Day in 1945, she had a public screaming fit because a Christian minister showed up unbidden at the door and, when Frank invited him in to join the small group assembled at the dinner table, began to lecture her about her heartless view of the poor. Frank, visibly angry at his wife’s vehement reaction, reminded her that it was an American custom to offer hospitality to anyone who stopped by on Thanksgiving. Few other people saw them argue in public, but O’Connor was apt to make deprecatory jokes. “Frank is the power behind the throne,” Rand sometimes told acquaintances. “Sometimes I think I am the throne, the way I get sat on,” a friend heard Frank reply. Another acquaintance recalled that Rand had once confided in her that this period was a bad one for their marriage.