Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [186]
The amphetamines she took may have aggravated her condition or added to its duration. In memoirs and interviews, some former friends recalled that her amphetamine habit was confined to a steady, continuous low dose, but there is a small body of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that suggests she increased her dose at least occasionally—when she wanted to work all night or lose weight, for example. Roger Callahan, a Ph.D. therapist who joined Rand’s extended circle in the middle 1960s as one of Branden’s professional disciples, recalled seeing “someone, I won’t say who” carrying a jar of Dexedrine pills to her apartment. He inquired about them and was told, “Oh, these are for Ayn.” Libertarian gadfly Roy Childs once said in an interview that Rand’s secretary—he didn’t say which one—told him that “she’d take a couple of five-milligrams” of Dexamyl and if nothing happened after an hour, “she’d take another two, three, or four. She was taking this on top of pots of coffee.” Said Robert Hessen, “She was wired up. She subsisted on black coffee and cigarettes and very dark, sliced Russian bread and slices of Swiss cheese or white cheese,” as well as Swiss chocolates. Joan Blumenthal recalled that Rand said she needed the pills to get up in the morning. She didn’t complain of hallucinations, as some longtime low-dose users do. But she “always had a very elevated pulse rate,” which “is very unusual,” recalled Allan Blumenthal, a doctor, and she displayed the telltale symptoms of suspicion, panic, lack of sleep, and volatility. “The atmosphere was like that of a hospital at times,” recalled Branden, who visited the apartment two or three nights a week, often staying until dawn, and spoke to her on the phone every day, sometimes for hours. “I once made the mistake of telling her so, and she went berserk: How could I make such a statement? Didn’t I understand her at all? she shouted.” Most of the time, she was adamant that her emotional condition was a natural response to intolerable circumstances.
Although her kindly husband had always been able to lift her spirits in moments of distress, he could not help her now. He was supportive but largely silent during these discussions, and Branden thought he appeared helpless and bleak. Gradually, he withdrew into his painting. She leaned more heavily on her heir, for aid in untangling her “premises,” some of which she sometimes conceded must be wrong, as well as for hours-long doses of emotional support. She was grateful, but also demanding. “You are my lifeline to reality,” she told him. “Without you, I would not know how to exist in this world.” She intensified her complaints about his emotional distance. She called it his “disappearing professor” act. She was quick to judge and condemn members of the inner circle for their motives and “sense of life,” and Branden, under strain, became harsher and more peremptory, too. “He had always been arrogant and judgmental in his dealings with people,” Barbara wrote in 1986. “Now, attempting to live his own life while finding for Ayn a reason to live, constantly tense … he was more coldly arrogant and demanding than ever before.”
As to Rand’s low spirits, what O’Connor understood but Branden and the others didn’t was that her suffering was new in degree but not in kind. It was an acute and persistent instance of her old malady of disappointment at the moment of her popular triumph. In her play Ideal, the Garboesque screen idol Kay Gonda can believe in her fans’ devotion only if they are willing to risk their lives for her; the heroine cries out, “If all of you who look at me