Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [141]
It was as her protégés that she presented Barbara and Nathaniel to her California acquaintances: Adrian and Janet Gaynor, a young libertarian activist named Herbert Cornuelle and his eighteen-year-old brother Richard, William Mullendore, Lela Rogers, and Morrie Ryskind. Along with the last two, Rand was a defendant in a $2 million lawsuit filed by Emmet Lavery, a playwright and the former president of the Screen Writers Guild, who alleged that Mrs. Rogers had defamed him by calling his latest play, Gentleman from Athens, “communistic” during a Town Hall Meeting of the Air, and that Rand and Ryskind had counseled her to do so. Lavery eventually settled for $30,000, but for a while Rand saw a lot of both Rogers and Ryskind.
The young pair sometimes encountered Albert Mannheimer at the ranch. He flirted pleasantly with Barbara and joined in evening conversations. But his friendship with Rand was waning. The stage play she had spent many hours helping him to finish, The Bees and the Flowers, had been produced at the Cort Theatre in New York in the fall of 1946 but had lasted for only twenty-eight performances. Its lackluster success effectively ended Mannheimer’s theatrical career. Although he was working on a film adaptation of Garson Kanin’s successful Broadway play Born Yesterday, for which he and Kanin would share an Academy Award nomination, he was discouraged by the inanity of most of his Hollywood assignments. This was especially true in light of his idealization of Howard Roark’s uncompromising drive and Rand’s own larger-than-life example of mixing high-voltage creative work with commercial success. When a girlfriend committed suicide in his Los Angeles apartment, his sense of despair increased. Rand tried to convince him that he was not at fault—that the girl was responsible for her own unhappiness and death—but to little avail. After that, their relationship consisted of little more than her helping him with his psychological problems, she later said. When she realized that he wasn’t going to resolve his emotional conflicts, she drifted away from him, and by the end of 1950 he stopped coming to the ranch.
When Barbara and Nathaniel asked about him, Rand told them that his anxieties had affected his rationality and had destroyed his commitment to philosophy. “I think we replaced him in Ayn’s life,” Barbara said in 2006. Ten years after their parting, Rand would deny that she and Mannheimer had ever been close. Their relationship was really only something that “could be called—should have been a semi-friendship,” she said, while also declaring that Mannheimer and Paterson had been her only friends of any duration from her arrival in the United States until the end of the 1940s. They were “the only two … which I consider serious relationships or semi-friendships or potential friendships,” she said, demoting them in importance even as she spoke. Barbara thought differently, remarking, “She was very, very close to Albert. He was important to her, and the rejection of him was total.”
Altogether, Branden was disappointed by the people in Rand’s social circle. They weren’t good enough for her, he thought. When he hesitantly told her this—and confessed to feeling awkwardly possessive of her—she did not seem to mind. “That’s the Dominique premise,” she explained, “not wanting to share your values with anyone.” It was a precept she had lived by since before encountering Cyrus at the age of nine.
Other than Nathaniel and Barbara, the O’Connors most often saw Ruth Beebe Hill and her husband, Buzzy, who were transplanted mid-westerners and avid Fountainhead enthusiasts. Buzzy, a medical doctor, conducted cancer research at the new Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance. Ruth, a crisp, high-spirited woman of thirty-six, was an ethnographer, a mountain climber, and yet another person who had memorized long passages from The Fountainhead. Because she loved its celebration of creativity and independence,