Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [204]
That weekend, Mimi met the Brandens for the first time. “He was very rude,” she said. From her aunt’s manner when she spoke about him, Mimi thought she detected a hint that Branden had become “a slave—something she would like,” Mimi recalled, without malice, shortly after her aunt’s death.
After the following week, Rand did not see Ruth Beebe Hill again, either. The author and the Brandens left Chicago by plane for Portland, Oregon—Rand’s first flight. They led two days of campus-wide discussions of her novels at Lewis and Clark College, which was celebrating her work by awarding her an honorary doctorate of arts and letters. Then they headed south to San Francisco and Los Angeles, where Branden was set to deliver the opening lecture of “The Basic Principles of Objectivism” series. His frequent out-of-town appearances were always popular events, but when students learned that Rand was joining him for a question-and-answer session, the response was overwhelming. In Los Angeles, seats in the five-hundred-person lecture hall sold out quickly, and an hour or so before the start of the event another six hundred people tried to push their way into the lobby. The place was so crammed that a janitor called the fire department; the chief, instead of dispersing the crowd, created aisles and kept order, on the condition that he could meet Ayn Rand after the event. The commemoration of her work in Portland, the reverence and raw emotion of the crowds in Chicago and California—these were heady experiences, even for an author accustomed to a following.
A day or two later, she, Frank, and the Brandens drove northwest to the Chatsworth ranch, which none of them had seen since 1951. Their visit was unannounced. Ruth Hill, puttering on the second floor of the Neutra house, heard Frank’s voice through an open window, talking to her husband, Buzzy. She rushed downstairs. “Is that really you, Frank? Happiest day!” she called to O’Connor. “Is Ayn with you?” O’Connor looked pained as he said, “Yes. She’s coming now.” Hill ran to embrace her old friend and burbled, “Are you half as happy to see me as I am to see you, Ayn?” To her surprise, Rand answered stiffly, with her thick Russian accent, “Why should I be?” The problem, it turned out, was that Hill was guilty of an unintended slight. Months earlier, Branden had asked her to become the NBI representative in the San Fernando Valley. Instead of saying yes immediately, she had asked to hear a sample tape. She had not heard Branden lecture, and she didn’t believe in asking her acquaintances to pay for something she couldn’t personally recommend. Rand viewed this as a betrayal. “You turned down Nathaniel,” she shouted at Hill. “You turned down the tapes. You turned me down!” She and her companions walked into the house and remained there while Buzzy talked to Frank about the fields and flowers. By this time, it had long been clear to everyone that the O’Connors were not coming back to live at the ranch. The Hills continued to mail their monthly rent checks to New York, but the friendship was at an end. Hill stuck to her guns: “To this day,” she said, forty years later, “I would not sell something I had not sampled.” Yet for the rest of her life the spirited ethnographer, writer, and mountain climber missed her friend. Well into her nineties, she continued to give copies of Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged as holiday gifts to people she especially liked.
Rand also broke with Bennett Cerf. She had regarded his public defense of Atlas Shrugged as weak, at best, and for years had been displeased by reports that he didn’t always take her side in private conversations. As a result, she considered him “a chicken and unloyal,” recalled Perry Knowlton, an associate of her agent Alan Collins. When Cerf suggested publishing a second collection of her essays in October 1963, timed to stimulate discussion and book sales during the 1964 election season, she assembled a dozen articles from The Objectivist Newsletter along with some of her major speeches