Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [209]
He was an unmistakably gifted (if occasionally “droning”) speaker, displaying a seductive mixture of self-assurance, poise, and wit, as well as a tone of moral seriousness and a hint of moral threat. Like Sinclair Lewis’s famous two-fisted evangelist, he “was so strong on purity and the virtue of womanhood,” so to speak, that disagreeing with him was tantamount to admitting one’s own moral weakness. He even had an Elmer Gantry—like maxim to describe his speaking technique: “Omnisciate and inflamminate,” he used to call it, meaning, “Act as if you know everything, and stir up the emotions of the audience.” He dressed the part of an impresario, in good suits and monogrammed shirts. His business style was manic, adrenaline filled, abrupt. To relieve stress, “he would go off on shopping sprees,” remembered Robert Hessen, who pinch-hit as NBI’s bookkeeper in the 1960s. “He came in one day and [showed me] a bill for five hundred dollars worth of Sulka ties.” In general, he treated staffers brusquely. “Nathan had a theory about ‘men as tools,’” recalled a secretary who worked for both him and Rand. “These were [people] who weren’t particularly worthy but could aid in the cause in certain limited ways. That was his view of the staff.” Rand agreed with this theory and deemed it “brilliant,” according to Barbara, but in spite of this her secretaries and typists found her exceptionally fair, scrupulous, and considerate. “She didn’t know how he’d been treating us,” the secretary recalled in 1983. To the contrary, she knew more than anyone thought she did.
In New York’s East Thirties, where many young adherents lived and others milled about before and after NBI events, Branden and Rand were celebrities. Whether from shyness or a fear of being buttonholed, the novelist tended to shrink from unexpected public recognition. Shelly Reuben, a typist for The Objectivist Newsletter in 1965, remembered seeing her in the street one day, flagging down a taxi. As Reuben approached, Rand frowned, but when she explained that she just wanted to say hello, Rand “broke out into the most beautiful smile.” Wow, thought Reuben, she thinks people always want something from her.
More difficult, perhaps, from her point of view, was that people often wanted the same things. She was a remarkable teacher, but after six or seven years of answering questions at NBI and at college lectures she could become bored and frustrated when required to repeat herself. Asked for the umpteenth time during an NBI question-and-answer session how she expected people to be rational in an irrational society, she shouted, “I did it myself! No one taught me how to think!” Her steadfast follower and one of her attorneys, Hank Holzer, typically spent hours a week fending off possible copyright and intellectual property violations by fans who wrote to announce, say, the founding of a John Galt line of curtains; so when an ingenuous NBI student from Texas asked, “Miss Rand, would it be an infringement of your rights if I painted a picture of my ideal man and called it John Galt?” she exploded, perhaps with some justification in view of the fact that the woman didn’t have enough imagination to create a hero of her own. To some degree, then, she found herself in the same position as Kay Gonda and Gail Wynand, dependent for admiration and support on people she didn’t respect. Because she now tended to see everything as a moral issue, she sometimes lost her patience in public as well as in private and harangued a naïve or dim-witted stranger about his motives and his moral condition. “She had a huge number of young people hanging on her every word,” reflected Joan Kennedy Taylor. “It was almost as if she developed what she thought was a psychological analysis of certain questions and then applied it to everybody who asked.” When displeased, she had a habit of beginning to speak in an angry tone, then pulling out a cigarette and her Zippo lighter, inserting the cigarette into a holder, flipping open the