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half an hour of airtime to a woman whom they thought of as a reactionary crackpot. In 1959, when there were no Oprahs and Edward R. Murrow still set the standard for news and interviews, Rand was considered beyond the pale. “It is hard to imagine the hostility directed at her,” said Wallace’s producer Al Ramrus. “Most of the media treated her like a leper or the Antichrist.” Yet Wallace himself, a lifelong liberal, enjoyed the interview and admired her courage, swiftness of mind, and flair, even if he considered her ideas marginal and her style eccentric. (“I remember with amusement her haircut,” he told an interviewer in 1998, “which [was] a little like the one that I wore when I was four or five years old—a Dutch cut.”) In the mode of William F. Buckley, Jr., and Bennett Cerf, he went out of his way to become her friend. For the next twenty years, he and she dined together, along with Frank and Wallace’s wife, every eight or ten months and occasionally attended each other’s parties and celebrations. He invited her to appear on his next show, P.M. East, this time in tandem with her improbable new literary flame, Mickey Spillane. Again like Cerf, however, Wallace had dwindling patience with Nathaniel Branden (whom he once called a “creature who sat on her shoulder”) and some of her “slavish followers,” as he called them. Apparently, this didn’t include Efron and Ramrus, both of whom continued to work for him for years, or Barbara, to whom he was courtly. He maintained a warm friendship with Ramrus until he was in his nineties.

For the most part, the shy philosopher stayed out of public view during the most difficult months of her depression, but she made a few new friends in addition to Wallace. One was an elderly composer and music critic named Deems Taylor, the father of Rand’s friend Joan Kennedy Taylor. The younger Taylor had met Rand a few weeks before the publication of Atlas Shrugged, when her mood was still buoyant. A publicity assistant for Alfred A. Knopf, Taylor received an advance copy of the novel and, like Rothbard, wrote a complimentary letter. At Rand’s suggestion they met for lunch. Taylor was flattered but also surprised. “Why did you want to see me?” she asked. “Atlantis,” Rand mysteriously replied. Taylor, later a writer and editor, guessed that the novelist was auditioning people for her own version of Galt’s Gulch; if so, her disordered state of mind soon put an end to the plan. Through Taylor she met Deems, who at seventy-five had largely outlived his fame as the composer of the 1927 opera The King’s Henchman and as the host of Walt Disney’s 1940 masterpiece Fantasia. Rand very likely knew his speaking voice, since in the late 1930s and early 1940s he had been the announcer for weekly radio broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic. At a time “when the whole world wanted her attention, she made the time to visit my father and listen to every single piece of music he had written,” Taylor said, adding, “I think she was kinder to people who were not students. She didn’t expect as much from them.” Besides, “she respected creative people.”

Naturally, she asked Deems what he had thought of her fictional character, the composer and striker Richard Halley. He must have answered favorably, because she asked him to write an operatic rendition of Anthem, using romantic themes to identify the heroes and atonal music to represent the authoritarian social order. Although flattered, the elderly man didn’t want to compose atonal music. No opera of Anthem was ever created, but Rand befriended Deems until he died in 1966.

In one of the stranger literary love matches of the period, she also developed a professional crush on crime novelist Mickey Spillane, the tough-guy author of I, the Jury and other novels featuring Mike Hammer, private eye. Spillane’s publisher, New American Library, had bought the paperback rights to Atlas Shrugged, and the editors arranged for a lunch meeting between the firm’s two best-selling authors. They talked late into the afternoon, until the restaurant closed its doors to prepare for the