Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [180]
Even as Rand’s moods grew more changeable and dangerous in the months following the publication of Atlas Shrugged, her public emphasis on philosophy—”a philosophy for living on earth,” she called it—attracted new intellectual seekers. One was a journalist, a former staff writer for The New York Times Magazine named Edith Efron, who became intellectually infatuated with the author while researching a New York newspaper interview column that ran beneath the byline of her current boss, Mike Wallace. Soon after, Efron began attending NBI lectures and Rand’s Saturday night salons and set out to enlist one of her colleagues, Al Ramrus, a producer and writer for Wallace’s late-night TV show, The Mike Wallace Interview. Suddenly, recalled Ramrus, Efron started “spouting these strange ideas about the insidious influence of the welfare state” in the office. This surprised him, he said, because she and he had shared a die-hard “nonobservant New York Jewish left-wing” outlook. They clashed with each other until, one evening, she invited him to meet the novelist. The meeting didn’t go well, Ramrus remembered, especially after he remarked that maybe Atlas Shrugged had received “lousy reviews” because she was “a lousy writer.” Two days later, along came a special delivery letter from Efron, notifying him that she, Rand, and other Objectivists wanted nothing more to do with him. Relations with his colleague remained chilly until he actually read Atlas Shrugged and “was hugely impressed” by its magisterial and life-altering message of individualism and achievement. In his second meeting with the author, he was acutely aware of her mental gifts. Fifty years later he remembered the impression she made on him that evening. “Her big, black, glowing, lustrous eyes radiated a tremendous energy, and penetration, and focus, and intensity,” he said. “And they never left you.” With infinite patience and no display of haste or condescension, she teased out buried assumptions in his liberal creed and carefully corrected them. She emanated “universal genius” to a degree he had never before witnessed and never would again. (“The only [other person] who came close,” he said, “was Frank Lloyd Wright.”) Watching such a great and disciplined mind at work “was inspiring and, by example, empowering” to Ramrus. As with so many others, his next two or three meetings with her revolutionized his political outlook. He, too, enrolled in NBI, and both he and Efron joined the circle surrounding Rand.
At about the same time, Rand received an effusive letter from her former late-night debating partner, Mises student and Circle Bastiat ringleader Murray Rothbard. Rothbard and his friends had obtained early copies of Atlas Shrugged from an airport bookstore where one of them worked and had read the novel straight through, pausing only to call one another and rave about its insurrectionary power. Rothbard had avoided Rand since young George Reisman’s losing argument with her in the summer of 1954; even at that time, he had recognized the inherent pressure toward rigidity in her thinking. Writing to his friend Richard Cornuelle in August 1954, he observed, “Since [Ayn’s followers] all have the same premises, they are all … individual parts in a machine.” As a consequence, he added, in a flight of whimsy that six months afterward became half fact, “there is no reason whatever why Ayn, for example, shouldn’t sleep with Nathan, or Barbara with Frank.” Because her followers all seemed intent on evolving into the same kind of person—replicas of Howard Roark or Dominique—”the case [is] really very good for a complete Stalinist tyranny that plans