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to questions sent in by off-site tape-transcription groups. Thus she aided NBI’s growth—and, presumably, sales of her books—without accepting any remuneration from NBI, although Branden repeatedly offered to pay her. (NBI “was certainly profitable,” Barbara told an interviewer in 1990, though “nobody got rich.”) Rand backed Branden’s first published book and gave his writing on Objectivist psychology a boost by including his essays in The Virtue of Selfishness and in her third collection, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), where she also reprinted essays by Alan Greenspan. Sales of these books presumably generated royalties for Branden, fortifying his income from NBI and The Objectivist Newsletter, as well as his psychotherapeutic practice. Every month or two, they traveled together for public appearances. He had her unqualified public sanction: “You can speak for me anytime you wish, on any subject whatsoever,” she called out to him from the audience one evening at NBI. She let it be known that he, and only he, would be permitted to write the screenplay for a movie of Atlas Shrugged.

Finally, in late 1963, they more or less moved in together. The Brandens traded their set of rooms at 165 East Thirty-fifth Street for a two-bedroom apartment in a brand-new high-rise at 120 East Thirty-fourth Street at Lexington Avenue, where they settled on the ninth floor and where Branden set up an office for writing and conducting therapy. On the second floor, Barbara transformed a studio into administrative headquarters for NBI and The Objectivist Newsletter, with a separate office for herself. She oversaw editorial and business operations, and a Canadian friend of hers named Wilfred Schwartz took charge of NBI’s financial affairs, while Branden’s sister Elayne Kalberman managed the newsletter staff. The O’Connors followed a few months later, choosing an apartment on the sixth floor. It was new and spanking clean but again ordinary, with an L-shaped living room windowed at one end, a galley kitchen, a standard-size bedroom, a bathroom, and a small separate study just large enough to hold Ayn’s desk and files. O’Connor, who had been working in a rented studio on East Twenty-eighth Street, transferred his paints and canvasses to a one-room apartment on the fourth floor. After a while, others, including Leonard Peikoff and psychologist Roger Callahan and his family, moved into the building, while rank-and-file followers continued to fill rentals in neighboring streets. An intercom joined the O’Connors’ apartment with the Brandens’. Ayn and Nathaniel spoke on the phone two or three times a day. Often, the Brandens were awakened by late-night calls from Rand to Nathaniel. Except when traveling separately, they were barely out of each other’s range of hearing.

After the move, the writer liked to visit her husband’s fourth-floor art studio and sit quietly and watch him paint. His dedication to his work elicited her deep admiration, remembered Barbara. Yet she tended to have fixed ideas about drawing and painting, as about other things; some were apparently inherited from an art class she had taken as a teenager in Russia. Once, for example, she told NBI students that all curved lines should be drawn not as freehand swoops but as the intersecting planes of the straight lines that define the curve. Sometimes, while watching Frank, she made suggestions. She might point out that his colors were running together or that the perspective in a painting was off. When worried about his progress, she phoned her favorite painter, José Manuel Capuletti, and then relayed to Frank what Capuletti recommended, or she asked knowledgeable friends to buy books for him on aspects of technique. He took pleasure in her pride in him and was typically good-natured about her advice. Once, when she whispered to a guest, “He is a tiger at the easel,” he replied, “Well, just don’t grab me by the tail.” Occasionally, however, he reacted with anger. One evening, while he was making a study of a model’s face, she put a hand on his shoulder and pointed out that one of