Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [213]
She asked directly, and not for the first time, “Is it my age? I could accept that.” Oh, no you couldn’t, Branden remembered thinking, and gave her the answer he thought she wanted. “You will always be a sexual being,” he told her, and, “You have no equals at any age.”
Naturally, the man’s passion for Patrecia didn’t fade; it grew stronger, bringing him “happiness of a kind I had never known before.” The way out without hurting anyone, he madly imagined, was to encourage Rand to get to know Patrecia and so discover her virtues and potential to be a good Objectivist—even if, like Eddie Willers, she didn’t meet their highest standards. Only then, he thought, might Rand recover her reason and give her blessing to a sexual union between the lovely young woman and her own intellectual son and heir, while remaining his patroness, promoter, and friend.
As daffy as this was, at first it appeared to work. The celebrated author initially liked the ingenue, especially her physical type, so similar to that of Dominique and Dagny. “She’s very American looking,” she remarked, and once, having seen Patrecia perform in a play, startled both the young actress and Branden by declaring, with her usual air of excited self-absorption, “What is magnificent is that you have taken the philosophy of Objectivism and applied it to the art of acting!” The young beauty charmed most members of the inner circle. She and her twin sister, Liesha, volunteered as artist’s models and posed for Frank, Joan Blumenthal, and other painters and sculptors in the group. She offered suggestions about clothing and makeup to Rand and some of the other women and once showed the novelist and thinker how to cross her legs for a television interview. (Rand, assuming that she was supposed to keep her legs crossed, complained after the interview that she had developed a leg cramp.) Joan Blumenthal said to Branden, with amazement, “When you’re with Patrecia, you like the way you feel about yourself!” “I hated the calculations and manipulations this strategy entailed,” he wrote in 1989, “but I felt that my back was to the wall and my survival was at stake.”
As Rand more closely observed Branden and Patrecia, however, she changed her mind. She thought that the young woman was “role-playing,” as she noted in a 1968 summary of her impressions of Patrecia over a two-year period. (“I cannot stand people with ‘acts,’ particularly women with ‘acts,’” she wrote; “it is too clear to me that such acts come from dreadful premises.”) Of course, Patrecia was acting, as were Branden, Barbara, and possibly Rand herself. When Branden swore to Rand that he had no sexual interest in Patrecia—that his feeling for her was strictly playful, protective, and paternal—Rand claimed to believe him. She was disturbed by their friendship, she later confided to her journal, not because it was a sexual flirtation but because it was “a disturbing and incomprehensible sign” of a seeming change in her protégé’s tastes and priorities, away from philosophy and toward a “‘consumption’ (or ‘pleasure’) ‘emotional’ world.” When he tried to convince her that Patrecia reminded him of her, including the younger woman’s “man-worship” and “sexual view of the universe,” she balked. To the contrary, she wrote; watching Patrecia, she saw “only a faintly pretentious emptiness and fear.”
Gradually, his evasions, inconsistencies, and “drift” became intolerable to the woman for whom logic was tantamount to truth. They began to have explosive arguments. How could he be so out of focus about his reasons for not resuming his romance with her? Where was his mind? Why were his proclaimed values—his love for her and all she stood for—so evidently in conflict with his emotions? What was he repressing? What was he hiding? As to sex, “When, if not now?” she asked. When Branden didn’t answer, she took to making extensive notes on his psychology and discussing them