Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [218]
Later, Nathaniel and Barbara reported separately that during face-to-face discussions of these issues Rand was almost unrelentingly suspicious, resentful, and bitter—and no wonder. She was assembling puzzle pieces in the dark, even if the dark was partly self-imposed. The missing piece was Patrecia. It was always on the table, but she couldn’t pick it up. She referred obliquely to the actress. “Don’t ever let yourself think, even for a minute, that Patrecia or some equivalent is going to cash in on my ambition, mind, and achievement,” she reportedly told Branden during one conversation, and, “You have no right to casual friendships, no right to vacations, no right to have sex with some inferior woman! Did you imagine that I would consent to be left on the scrap heap?” By way of contrast, her journal entries were methodical and calm, although entirely lacking in an ordinary grasp of reality. As always, her mind was well disciplined when she was writing, her discourse fiery and impulsive when she spoke in anger or distress. And while she still did not directly connect Miss X with Patrecia in her journal, on Valentine’s Day of 1968 she ended a diary entry with the note, “As far as I am concerned I will not be Cyrano to a brainless Christian.” It’s hard not to read this sentence as a double entendre: In Rostand’s play, Cyrano’s good-looking, dim-witted rival is named Christian, of course, but Rand also knew that her rival, Patrecia, had grown up in a family of Christian fundamentalists; Patrecia’s twin sister, Liesha, remained a true believer. Later, Liesha would join an evangelical television ministry.
Meanwhile, Rand’s husband of thirty-eight years was ill.
In the fall of 1967, Frank was seventy. Two or three years earlier, he had been diagnosed with a chronic condition whose symptoms included painful contractions in the tendons of his hands, making it difficult for him to hold a paintbrush. The source of the problem seems to have been Dupuytren’s syndrome, a disorder often associated with alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver, as well as with arteriosclerosis. O’Connor suffered from two of these three conditions: he drank heavily, and he had incipient arteriosclerosis, or a hardening of the arteries, which gradually reduces blood flow to the brain and body. His father had also had arteriosclerosis. Neither condition was apparent at the time, when hints of his failing health were limited to thinness, pallor, silence, and the problem with his hands.
He had surgery, which was temporarily successful. Although he constantly had to squeeze a rubber ball to flex his tendons, he returned to his classes at the Art Students League, where his popularity had won him a seat on the school’s executive Board of Control. The League was a world apart—its large, old, turpentine-smelling classrooms and informality were so dear to him that when Joan Blumenthal unwittingly let slip to a group of admiring women artists that Frank was married to Ayn Rand, he told her, “I wish you hadn’t said it. This is the one place where people know me.”
Beginning in the painful years when Rand was writing John Galt’s speech, painting had diverted and protected him from full immersion in his wife’s affairs. Through Joan Blumenthal, it also introduced him to other artists, including a young sculptor named Don Ventura. Bright and friendly, although shy, Ventura had been working as an electrologist when Allan Blumenthal discovered him. Allan introduced him to Joan, who took him to NBI lectures and parties and encouraged him to pursue his vocation as a sculptor. Like Daryn Kent, he was attracted by the group’s emphasis on individualism and intellectual attainment. When he met Rand herself, he thought that she was wonderful. “When there was no public around,” he later said, “she was very easy to be with, very reassuring.” He also found her endearingly unpretentious. “Once, I told her that Frank Sinatra, in Hollywood, had his bread flown in from New York every day and that it cost a fortune. Her eyes widened and she let out a long, low whistle. The way