Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [210]
Branden seemed to enjoy the attention. “In those days, people worshipped the ground he walked on,” recalled an acquaintance of the time. “He ate it up. He loved it.” In the early and mid-1960s, he liked to travel, make appearances on radio and television shows, give speeches, make new friends—a constellation Rand later referred to disapprovingly as “going Hollywood” and being “a man of action.” Together with Allan Blumenthal, he conducted day-long seminars on the techniques of what had become known as “Objectivist psychotherapy,” which aimed at correcting wrong or conflicting thoughts and beliefs as a cure for emotional problems. There, too, he won disciples who adhered to his theories and prospered from his and Blumenthal’s referrals. He kept his honorary position as John Galt’s avatar (“except for a few blemishes,” Rand sometimes added wryly) in front of friends and students. He made it clear that if a woman weren’t half in love with him, and if a man weren’t half in love with the creator of Atlas Shrugged, they were suffering from a lack of self-esteem. “He was the one who made a crusade out of her theory of sex,” Barbara recalled. “She didn’t.” In this, perhaps, he was doing to others what had been done to him.
He flirted with danger. An hour before a telephone interview with a Washington, D.C., radio station, he dialed in to change the number at which he wanted to be reached. Chatting with the production manager, an idealistic young member of the Washington Objectivist club who had booked his appearance, he mentioned that he was calling from Ayn Rand’s telephone—yes, and that right now he was lying on Ayn Rand’s bed. “This was before anyone knew about the affair,” said the woman, Lee Clifford. “But his manner was so familiar, so intimate, it was as if he were telling me. I knew. He communicated it.” When students at NBI asked whether it was really possible to be in love with more than one person at a time (apparently, a common question, given Rand’s steamy literary triads), he answered that only moral giants could possibly pull it off. (“It sounded like bullshit at the time,” recalled a member of the audience who knew him well.) Rand sometimes said much the same thing, but at other times answered, “No, but you can be half in love with two different people at the same time,” a kind of confession of her own.
What she didn’t know was that, beginning in late 1963, Branden was juggling a new romantic triangle, or rather a parallelogram. At just about the time she decided that she was fully ready to resume sleeping with him, he fell in love with a younger woman—a willowy twenty-three-year-old fashion model and aspiring actress named Patrecia Gullison. He had first noticed Patrecia two years earlier, watching him, openly spellbound, from the third row of seats at NBI. After lectures, he and she had talked, then flirted. In the summer of 1962, the young woman, assuming that Branden was happily married and unavailable, had married a tall, good-looking advertising account executive and NBI regular named Larry Scott. Branden attended the wedding, but he continued to think about her. Before her marriage, he had encouraged one of his male students to date her as a strategy for keeping her close at hand; afterward, perhaps with a similar purpose in mind, he offered her and Larry Scott free marriage counseling when they told him they were having marital problems. When she entered his ninth-floor office, he later wrote, she behaved “as if she were entering a temple.” Inevitably, one afternoon they found themselves alone together and fell into each other’s arms. She was impish, eager, and full of life. She hadn’t gone to college but was saving her money to go, and she was