Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [163]
In late 1955, a young woman named Daryn Kent entered the second circle. Four years earlier, at the age of seventeen, she had left home to become a theatrical performer in New York. At twenty-one, a friend had suggested she read The Fountainhead, and, having read it, she was thrilled by Rand’s view of life as a heroic adventure. She sent a fan letter to the author, and after a few weeks received a phone call from Leonard Peikoff. He and she met in a restaurant on West Fifty-fifth Street, talked for hours about Rand’s philosophy, and agreed that she should meet the Brandens. The Brandens liked her. Within a few months, she and Peikoff were “in love” and living together in his apartment, and she was earning money by typing Atlas Shrugged for Rand.
Peikoff hadn’t really wanted her to move in with him, Kent later said, but she had wanted to, “desperately,” and he eventually agreed. Later, she learned that Leonard, Rand, and the Brandens had together decided that Leonard should phone her. Although he eventually married four times (twice to Rand’s secretaries), acquaintances said that the quick, funny, ungainly young philosophy student typically paid little attention to girls. The three Objectivist elders thought he should have a girlfriend, and Kent appeared to be an excellent candidate. Trouble soon erupted. “I was a needy person,” she recalled. “I was far too possessive, and I’m sure I made demands on him that he was unprepared to meet.” Before long, his unhappiness came to Rand’s attention. One day, Kent arrived home from acting class to find a note from Leonard instructing her to come to the novelist’s apartment that evening. There she discovered Ayn, Nathaniel, Leonard, Frank, and Barbara already seated. She sat on a corner of the sofa, not yet realizing that she was the person they were waiting for. Branden picked up a straight chair, placed it facing her in the middle of the room, seated himself, and said, “Tonight we’re going to have a psychological session, and the patient is you.”
The drama that unfolded that evening offered a disturbing glimpse of the imperious underside of Rand’s emerging vision. It was “devastating” to Kent, she said, because it represented “damnation by people I worshipped as models of what man could be and should be. Fifty years later, I still find it hard to talk about.” Branden launched into a highly personal inquiry that went on for two or three hours. “He dissected every move I’d made and everything I’d done, and ended up concluding that I was an Ellsworth Toohey and a queen bee in sexual matters.” At times, when he was making a particularly trenchant point, Rand clapped her hands, applauding like a child. “I had had a lifetime of being told I was nothing and nobody from nowhere,” Kent recalled, adding that this was the first time she had believed it. “I felt myself sinking into that sofa and disappearing completely.” In the end, she was offered an ultimatum: do everything possible to remedy her thinking and adjust her attitudes or be expelled. Choosing to stay, she entered psychotherapy with Branden. She paid for sessions by typing for him. That night Barbara accompanied her to Peikoff’s apartment and helped her to pack and move out.
Rand was arguing the need for unhesitating moral judgment in Galt’s speech. Anyone who refuses to judge others, “who neither agrees or disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility,” she wrote, “is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world.” Without the tacit consent of good people, the world’s leeches, looters, and tyrants could not survive, let alone rule. Not to condemn was to consent. Something in this theatrical call to moral judgment appealed to Branden, who gradually became not only Rand’s deputy but also her enforcer. After the publication of Atlas Shrugged, such mock trials, or “kangaroo courts,” as Barbara called them, became increasingly common. At one time or another every member of the original group, and many newcomers, endured at least one such improvised