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By Root 1811 0

TV talk-show host, Carson wasn’t known for inviting controversial guests, but she and her ideas apparently appealed to him. She was his first guest on the night she initially appeared, and during the first commercial break he reportedly canceled the other guests who were waiting backstage and kept her on alone. He was deferential and, even better, asked thoughtful questions and listened to the answers. By the late 1960s, her media appearances had become so potentially fraught with conflict that she and her legal bodyguard Hank Holzer insisted that producers sign a twenty-point contract before she would go on. It required her agreement in writing to any introductory remarks and proscribed surprise guests, debate, quotations from her enemies, etc. “You won’t attack me?” she asked Carson sweetly and disarmingly on being seated on the set. He laughed and they engaged in a lively discussion of her third collection of nonfiction, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, which NAL had published. Carson’s broadcast reached as many as fifty million viewers, and Rand was a massive hit. Many baby boomers remembered first hearing of her “morality of reason” there. The show received a record number of letters, all but twelve of them positive. Carson invited her back twice before Christmas 1967.

At year’s end, she and Branden entered one of their honeymoon periods. He became “more openly, romantically expressive toward me than he had been … since the beginning,” Rand recorded in her journal. In fact, he was effusive. He told her that he couldn’t live without her. He kissed her in a sexually arousing way. Only later did she call to mind two anomalies that marred her sense of a hopeful new beginning with him: His eyes were lifeless when he professed his love for her and, on New Year’s Eve at the Plaza Hotel, in a party that included Nathaniel, Patrecia, Patrecia’s sister Liesha, Alan Greenspan, Rand, and Frank, he danced too often with Patrecia. At the beginning of 1968, he again grew moody and retreated from emotional discussions. In late January, he shocked her with a new disclosure, which she accepted on its face: for the last ten years, he had secretly suffered from a “sex problem” or “sexual freeze” (suggesting impotence). His explanation, recorded by her, was as shocking as his statement. Early on, he had learned to repress his sexuality in response to his rejecting wife, he said. The affair with Ayn had acted as an antidote, but when she first made demands and then withdrew into rage and depression after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, he experienced a “subconscious total renunciation of sex,” he told her, as a result of this second and mortal blow to his sexual self-esteem.

Setting the stage for the artful introduction of Patrecia into the discussion, he talked wistfully about “a hypothetical ‘Miss X’ of his own age.” Surprisingly, Rand didn’t react angrily, at least in her journal notes. She asked him what he would want from such a woman. He would want to travel with her, spend his growing income on her, and go to nightclubs, he replied—all things he couldn’t do with Rand. Her notes suggest that he and she also discussed how such a “Miss X” might help to thaw his “sexual freeze.” And just where would she, Rand, fit in? she asked him. Ideally, they would conduct a very secret, very private, and very spiritual romance, he answered, sleeping together five or six times a year. From her notes, she seems briefly to have considered this impossible scheme, provided it was the only way to solve Branden’s sexual problem and she would never have to meet the woman. She soon changed her mind. In such a triangle, “I would be the only remnant of the [heroic] ideal” remaining to Branden as he went about his pleasurable activities, she reflected. “Therefore, our relationship would be consigned to unreality.” Also, of course, any hypothetical Miss X would be intellectually and morally inferior to her; thus, if Branden succeeded in such an affair, it “would destroy his mind.” Both practitioner and patient pretended not to know that they were talking about