Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [136]
When they all sat down, Nathaniel explained that he and Barbara had met because of The Fountainhead. Rand seemed charmed. “It’s a wonderful fiction event!” she cried. There the evening’s small talk ended. The thinker and her new pupil dove into a discussion of economics, religion, ethics, epistemology, and the vast potential of the human mind. Somewhat bashful, Barbara didn’t say much but was exhilarated by the rapid stream of ideas that were new to her. Here, she thought, with this woman, in this room, ideas matter, with a life-and-death importance that both she and Branden seemed to have been waiting all their lives to find. She was also impressed by Rand’s obvious regard for Nathaniel.
Like Mannheimer and Bungay before them, they began to visit every weekend, and then, by appointment, on weekday afternoons and evenings, too. Rand and Frank were always gracious; in fact, Rand spent hundreds of hours with them over the next several months. They were astounded by her energy—she wrote all day and stayed up talking with intoxicating inventiveness all night—and by her generosity with her time. She almost always took Branden’s daily phone calls from the city; their conversation could go on for hours, explaining why the young man’s phone bills ran to a stupendous thirty or forty dollars a month. When he asked why she indulged an undergraduate who hadn’t yet accomplished anything with so much of her time, she answered, “You will!” The gap in their ages and levels of achievement mattered very little, she said, in light of their shared ability to think.
What Nathaniel couldn’t have guessed was that, once again, Ayn Rand was lonely. She was glad to meet an intelligent young man with the time and inclination to conveniently divert her from her unsatisfactory marriage. In 1949, she had worked for days and sometimes weeks in a row without leaving the ranch or, at best, the town of Chatsworth. Her prized Hollywood conservatives, who sometimes came to visit, were loyal political allies but uninterested in philosophical ideas. Paterson had written two or three letters after her disastrous visit, but Rand had answered coolly and the letters stopped. O’Connor, although always ready to listen to her work in progress, was now fully occupied and often tired; he went about the property, looking after the alfalfa, gladioli, fruit, and farm animals, including brightly colored peacocks, peahens, and caged white pigeons, with a pleasure and satisfaction that almost amounted to self-sufficiency. He created a modestly profitable business selling flowers to Beverly Hills hotels. When a friend came upon him dipping mums into buckets of colored dye, he laughed and said, “Not the sort of thing Howard Roark would do!” He was happy.
He had also made an independent friend. A local woman who raised flowers and sold them from the front porch of her house, this woman was “the joy of Frank O’Connor’s life” at the time, said a mutual friend, although there appears to have been nothing sexual in their friendship. Her name was Aretha Fisher. She and her brother Bill lived about a mile from the ranch, and O’Connor got in the habit of ambling over to see her in the early afternoons. Out of earshot of the Neutra house, he chatted amiably with her about the weather and flowers and usually fell asleep in a chair on the porch until late afternoon. Aretha told their mutual friend that she would wake him at four, so that he wouldn’t be late for dinner at the ranch. More than once, she said, he sighed as he rose and headed home. Rand never met Aretha and may not have known where Frank spent his afternoons. It was another one of the many satisfactions he found in his life as a gentleman farmer.
In any case, Nathaniel’s looks and manner reminded Rand of the dynamic and determined Howard Roark. Like Frank, the young man had her “kind of face,” she later said. She also quickly concluded that he possessed the best mind of anyone she had ever met. From his first visit, she ranked him as a genius, she told Barbara in 1961, “and