Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [148]
In a Hollywood courtroom, 1951, as one of six defendants in a slander suit brought by Emmet Lavery. Other defendants included screenwriter Morrie Ryskind (first row, second from left) and Lela Rogers (talking to Ryskind).
Beyond family ties, these young people had a lot in common with one another and their new leader. They were passionate about ideas and courageous enough to go against the political and religious temper of the time. Everyone but Mary Ann Sures was Jewish. With the exception of Sures and Alan Greenspan, all were the children of first- or second-generation Russian immigrants whose religion they rejected, and all were seeking an ethical system and a moral worldview to replace it. Most had grown up in Ontario or Manitoba, where they were outsiders, if not outcasts, in the prevailing Anglican culture. Greenspan, a German and Polish Jew born and raised in Manhattan, proved less susceptible than the others to the convert’s classic evangelistic fervor. “Alan had his own relationship with her, which was dignified,” recalled Erika Holzer, a lawyer who joined the circle in the early 1960s. “He kept somewhat aloof from everybody. He was older and smarter.”
Both men and women tended to be intellectually serious, and all but one or two of the women were tall, slender, fair, beautifully groomed, and unusually good-looking. Because it was the 1950s, they dressed with care, as if for dinner or a formal office, the men’s dark suits pressed, shoes shined, the women’s dresses full and tightly cinched around the waist, hair coiffed in the manner of Grace Kelly. Since they had gravitated to Rand because of their admiration for The Fountainhead, she nicknamed them “the Class of ’43,” in honor of the novel’s year of publication. With cheerful irony, the eight or nine most intimate members—Nathaniel and Barbara, Joan Mitchell and Allan Blumenthal, Leonard Peikoff, Alan Greenspan, Mary Ann Sures, and Nathaniel’s sister Elayne and her future husband Harry Kalberman—called themselves “the Collective.”
Rand came to like them all, to a greater or lesser degree. At first, she disapproved of Alan Greenspan, whom she found so somber and uncommunicative that she called him “the Undertaker” behind his back. Once, during a philosophical exchange with Branden, Greenspan reportedly declared that he didn’t believe that objective reality, including his own existence, could be proved. Hearing of this, she took to asking others in the group, “How’s the Undertaker? Has he decided he exists yet?” At the time, the economist was working for the National Industrial Conference Board, studying steel inventories, and so was able to shed valuable light on the economics of steel for Atlas Shrugged. As she began to appreciate his mastery of economics, not to mention his surprising keenness as a reader of her novel in progress, she gave him a new nickname, “the Sleeping Giant,” and rightly predicted that he would achieve great things. Another favorite was Leonard Peikoff, who asked scores of eager questions for which she had clear and satisfying answers, a quality that still endears her to the young. (For example, “Is Roark idealistic, or is he practical?” Peikoff asked her. She answered, “If your ideals are rational, and your moral principles are based on reality, there’s no conflict. The moral is the practical,” a cornerstone of her developing ethics.) Peikoff said that in her presence he felt “total awe, as though I were on a different planet,” and she found his curiosity and boyish devotion endearing. Yet it seems unlikely that she would have entertained Leonard or many of the others for more than an evening now and then if it hadn’t been for her deepening interest in Nathaniel Branden. She confirmed this later when she said, “I’ve always seen [the Collective] as a kind of comet, with Nathan as the star and the rest as his tail.”
Nevertheless, their devotion offered important compensations. They were an unusually talented group of students and young professionals. They provided her with a comforting sense of being understood