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evening rush, but instead of asking the pair to leave, the staff pulled up chairs and listened to their conversation. Rand loved the fact that Spillane’s potboiling plots and gun-toting heroes were dedicated to separating good from evil in a black-and-white world. (“Grays don’t interest me,” she said, apropos of his work.) She later befriended the rough-edged author publicly, praising his bawdy and often bloody tales of good guys and bad guys in a syndicated column she wrote for the Los Angeles Times and in other forums. Spillane, then at the critical nadir of his career, rewarded her with love and loyalty. At a Westinghouse-sponsored party following their joint appearance on Mike Wallace’s P.M. East in the fall of 1961, he arrived escorting an aging ex—burlesque queen but excused himself at the door and headed straight to Rand. Grinning mischievously, he told her that, if their lives had been different, he would have wanted her to be his lady friend. She threw back her head and laughed; she loved flirtatious behavior and didn’t get enough of it. They formed a mutual admiration society that pleased them both. After she died, he said, “Ayn Rand and I, we don’t have to shrug. We can carry that weight,” and, “We were friends. That’s the biggest thing I can say.”

Her public adoption of the flamboyantly anti-intellectual Spillane—a dashing Irishman who could have doubled for Guts Regan in The Night of January 16th—was yet another instance of Rand’s combining the courageous with the contrarian. She said she wanted, and for many reasons deserved, to be taken seriously as a novelist and thinker and was surely shrewd enough to know that she did not help her cause by writing in the Los Angeles Times that Spillane was a victim of “vicious injustice on the part of the ‘intellectuals.’” Like her legend building and her combativeness toward influential critics (“moral cannibals,” she publicly called them), her support of Spillane seemed tailor-made to tempt the William F. Buckleys and the Granville Hickses to make fun of her. They rarely resisted.

Privately, she welcomed and assisted a young woman named Lisette Glarner, who was the grown daughter of her first cousin and childhood playmate Vera Guzarchik, to whom Rand had sent food and clothing after the war. When Lisette arrived in New York from Lyon, France, to study English, the novelist dispensed cookies, tea, and small gifts, and when Vera proposed a visit, Rand paid for her hotel. Neither Vera nor Lisette was interested in philosophy, but they were deeply impressed by their American cousin’s fame, glamour, and hospitality. She enjoyed them, too. After Vera returned to France, Rand wrote that she missed her. A decade later, Rand’s youngest sister, Nora, would locate Rand and also pay a visit, with very different results. Yet until old age, Rand could be warm and gracious when she chose to be.

At the same time, she shied away from meeting more accomplished men and women, particularly authors; her literary mission accomplished, her social reticence returned. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Joan Kennedy Taylor hosted a radio program called The World of Books on an educational radio station in New York. When Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita shocked the nation in the summer of 1958, Taylor asked Rand for advice about whether to interview the author on her program. To the younger woman’s surprise, Rand didn’t comment on Nabokov’s lurid subject matter or abstract literary style but instead said, wistfully, “Oh, Nabokov! If you do interview him, please ask him how his sister is! She was once my best friend.” It was a remarkable moment of nostalgia for the characteristically forward-looking Rand. Yet she made no effort to see Nabokov, although he was a professor of Russian at Cornell and visited New York a number of times to promote Lolita. And she never contacted his sister Olga, who was living openly in Prague. “She was very, um, cautious about being identified,” said Taylor. “She was afraid of being on some kind of [secret Soviet] list and being found.” She remained wary of Soviet