Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [191]
A year or two after the Nabokov incident, Albert Mannheimer turned up in New York, apparently at Rand’s suggestion, for the purpose of entering into psychotherapy with Branden. In the previous dozen years, Mannheimer had largely faded from public view. He had written one screenplay (Bloodhounds of Broadway) and co-authored an unproduced play (Stalin Allee, a comedy about Soviet life). In his view—and, no doubt, Rand’s—he was a failure. His emotional troubles had become incapacitating, he confided to his estranged friend in a letter praising Atlas Shrugged. In a return letter, she recommended the therapeutic skills of Branden. Mannheimer arrived from Hollywood appearing anxious, stiff, and visibly frightened of his former mentor, and after a number of sessions with Branden he returned to Los Angeles, having seen almost nothing of Rand. He went on to write episodes of the television series Gidget and The Flying Nun. In 1972, he fatally shot himself, leaving behind a widow and three children. Rand seemed unable to grieve his death. She shook her head ruefully and said, “Too bad,” recalled Joan Blumenthal. Mannheimer had long ago ceased to live by her principles or share her point of view. As with Paterson, to her he had practically ceased to exist.
In the ordeal of her own depression, she let other people slip away. She saw little of Frances and Henry Hazlitt, partly because they remained on friendly terms with William F. Buckley, and she broke with them completely after Hazlitt published his classic book, The Foundations of Morality, in 1964. The book’s defense of utilitarian ethics—”the greatest good for the greatest number”—struck her as a betrayal of both capitalist individualism and herself. She never had a good word to say about him after that. In late 1958, she, Peikoff, and the Brandens dropped in on Ludwig von Mises’s celebrated NYU seminar; a regular student remembered the sensation she created with her wide black hat, flowing cape, and trailing entourage. She also accepted an invitation to attend Mises’s eightieth-birthday party in the fall of 1961. Otherwise, she saw little of the elderly economist and his wife. Some old friends disappointed or even horrified her: Her “best” California business conservative, William Mullendore, fell under the influence of a libertarian mystic and LSD aficionado named Gerald Heard and, along with Leonard Read, Thaddeus Ashby, and others, took psychedelics and frolicked at Bohemian Grove. (“LSD steps up our voltage and frequency,” wrote Mullendore, the electric-company president. “To use the new vision thus made available one must be able to ‘plug in.’”) Ashby, having returned to California with a degree from Harvard, was editing a quasi-religious libertarian magazine called Faith and Freedom; no doubt that sealed his fate with Rand. Yet he continued to think of her as the twentieth century’s most important philosopher. “Whenever I wrote anything” in the following decades, he said in his eighties, “I tried to slip in her name.” She never joined the influential Mont Pelerin Society, an annual free-market think tank, and she shunned the old J. B. Matthews crowd, many of whom now wrote for National Review.
Even as old bonds loosened, however, professional good tidings continued to arrive. In the spring of 1958, Atlas Shrugged was nominated for a National Book Award, along with a dozen other distinguished novels of 1957, including James Agee’s A Death in the Family, John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle, and Nabokov’s second novel in English, Pnin, about an awkward but endearing Russian émigré professor teaching in an American college. Although she lost to Cheever, she attended the awards ceremony and enjoyed herself amid a thousand other literary guests, recalled Joan Kennedy Taylor, who was with her on that evening. In December 1958, Random House published a handsome new hardbound edition of We the Living, with an introduction by the author and her extensive revisions, which muted both her youthful Nietzscheanism and her master-slave eroticism in