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By Root 1614 0

whatever they set out to do? Of course he supported reason, Branden answered, hardly daring to believe that this brilliant woman was interested in what he thought. While O’Connor listened from a nearby chair or padded back and forth from the kitchen with coffee and sweets, she amplified her ideas. The basic issue in all her writing, she explained, was not so much individualism versus collectivism as reason versus mysticism—the conflict between objective thinking on the one hand and irrational subservience to a deity, a tyrant, or a group of people on the other. Capitalism was the only economic system in history to operate on the basis of independent reason; furthermore, without capitalism’s underpinnings, the right to own private property and to work for one’s own profit, no other political rights could be guaranteed. If the state could seize the wealth and property a person had acquired through hard work and the use of his own mind, why would anyone bother to invent new things? Glancing at Frank, who nodded, she revealed that she was working on a new novel that would explain all this and more.

When Branden rose to go, it was 5:30 a.m. He and Rand had talked for nine and a half hours. She handed him her phone number so that he could call with additional questions. He drove away from the ranch at dawn, with an exhilarating conviction that the world really did make sense and that he could master it. He also had an invitation to return.

Branden was involved in an on-again, off-again romantic relationship with a slightly older girl whom he had met while working for his uncle. She had been a sophomore at the United College in Winnipeg, where she had grown up. The two were introduced by a mutual friend who thought they would like each other because they both talked nonstop about The Fountainhead. The girl’s name was Barbara Weidman, and she, too, had read Rand’s novel in her early teens. That she happened to look like a Rand heroine was serendipitous; tall, blond, willowy, and lovely, she had delicate features and a diffidence that could easily be mistaken for cool reserve. Men found her attractive. Like Branden, she saw herself as different: for one thing, she was an intellectual; for another, in Winnipeg, where she grew up, she was the only Jewish child she knew until high school, and she was aware of anti-Semitism all around her.

She and Branden started a sexual relationship in Winnipeg—Branden’s first. It didn’t go well. She liked him and admired him as a brilliant young thinker on philosophical and psychological subjects. But she was uncomfortable with him as a lover, and by summer’s end she was dating other boys. They both enrolled at UCLA—he as a freshman studying psychology, she as a transfer student majoring in philosophy, and they maintained a close friendship on the basis of their shared love of The Fountainhead, which at that time few students at liberal colleges admired. But Branden continued to want more.

“Ayn Rand is fascinating,” he reported to Barbara on the morning after his visit. “She’s everything I could have expected from the writer of The Fountainhead, and more. She’s Mrs. Logic.” This brief encounter with the famous author had made him feel appreciated, understood, competent, and psychologically visible in a way that nothing else ever had, he told Barbara, and Rand had given every appearance of liking him, too. He promised to ask if he could bring the young woman along on the following Saturday evening, when he planned to visit Rand again.

He phoned on Sunday evening, and five times more that week, and on Saturday evening at eight o’clock he and Barbara drove up the long, birch-lined driveway to the house. This time, both Frank and Ayn greeted them at the door. Although Rand wasn’t pretty “by any means,” her eyes were dark and magnetic and “seemed to be staring right down to the bottom of your soul,” Barbara would recall. Her face was square, but her mouth was sensual. Her exceptional intelligence was apparent even before she spoke. O’Connor appeared vaguely aristocratic, with a gaunt beauty and a