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steps. “I feel real fear when he tells me ‘I don’t know’ in regard to his feelings and desires in our relationship,” she wrote. “It is as if everything pertaining to his own emotions is that kind of vague, helpless ‘I don’t know.’” Also, although he said he wanted to live exclusively according to his—and her—highest values, he let their relationship drift while he filled his time with practical activities he claimed not to value or enjoy: “business, theatrical business, lunches (and worse),” the “worse” apparently a reference to his “friendship” with Patrecia. The pace of these activities, culminating in the real-estate deal, furnishing the Empire State Building offices, and the planned production of The Fountainhead, was increasing, not diminishing. Such obvious contradictions were not believable “in a man of Branden’s rationality and intellectual development,” she wrote in the fall of 1967. “He is hiding something here. What?”

As yet, she had been unable to “project” his psychology, she noted. As an aid, she tried to focus on what he wasn’t saying—although she, too, avoided any mention of Patrecia. She looked for things he had repressed. For example, in his perpetual turmoil and indecision, she wrote, she sensed that he was afraid. Afraid of what? One hypothesis: He was a second-hander, a social metaphysician, and feared showing it. She looked squarely at this possibility. If valid, then his underlying premise would be that he wanted to be loved (“or, rather, admired,” she wrote) more than he wanted to love; he wanted to be seen more than to see. Such an attitude would betray not only her but also the important principle of selfishness (defined by her as the pursuit of rational desires and one’s highest happiness) and of everything he admired in John Galt. But it would explain his years-long neglect of her needs and his chronic inability to decide what he wanted, she wrote. It would also account for his often frantic activities in the social and business realms, where he earned admiration, and for his apparent dependency on her to affirm his tottering vision of himself as a hero. She didn’t believe this theory, she noted, but should it prove true, the following would be her conclusion: “Here is a man who, for some reason unknown to me, was unable to live up to his own greatness and mine, and ran from it (particularly mine),” and who, by refusing to grant her visibility in his emotional life, “killed me before my time.”

Although her language might be theatrical and her perspective skewed by self-absorption, in one respect her reasoning was sound. Branden did approach her as a mirror. But she had positioned herself as such through endless, extravagant compliments to him. Inner-circle member Edith Efron later commented that Rand had urged him to think of himself as a genius “on the same level as Kant and Hegel,” a seemingly double-edged compliment, given her hatred of these philosophers, but apparently spoken admiringly, since Efron went on to say that he was “murdered by flattery.” If he was even partly driven by “vanity, flattery-seeking, and, ultimately, glamorizing and reality-faking,” as Rand suggested in her notes a few months later, she had cultivated these qualities in him for seventeen years.

In the fall of 1967, in spite of their therapy sessions, he was still complaining that he felt depressed and hopeless about their relationship. Disgusted, for the first time she considered the possibility of a break with him. In her notes, she imagined such a rupture differently from the cataclysm both he and Barbara feared. To “break with him entirely,” she wrote, would mean “not to see him except ‘functionally,’ on business.” At this stage in what was left of their relationship, she seems to have been willing to end the affair without speaking out against him or terminating their professional and business bonds. Neither Branden believed this, and it would have been a first.

Perhaps her happiest moments that fall came during three guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Extremely popular as a late-night