Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [219]
Frank and Ventura liked each other. On Monday nights they, Joan, and an actor named Phillip Smith attended Robert Beverly Hale’s lectures on artistic anatomy at the League. Afterward, they went to the Russian Tea Room for cocktails. When Frank learned that Ventura couldn’t afford to rent a studio, he occasionally invited the younger man to work in his small studio on Thirty-fourth Street. During breaks, he told Ventura stories about the early days of his marriage to Rand. “He loved nostalgia,” Ventura recalled, “loved to talk about his relationship with Rand when they were poor.” He described rides on the Staten Island Ferry and laughed about the first time Rand had heard herself on the radio and realized she had a heavy Russian accent. Why hadn’t Frank told her about it? she had asked indignantly. Because he thought her accent was cute and he didn’t want her to change it, he had teased her. By the time Ventura met them, “Frank was very subordinate to Ayn Rand,” he said. “In the days he was nostalgic about, he seemed to have been with her more. Their life was simpler.”
Rand’s distress about Branden gradually spilled over and affected Ventura, his friends the Blumenthals, and many of the followers they knew. For the sculptor, Frank became “an anchor in a turbulent sea” filled with shifting hierarchies and rampant gossip about who was rational and moral and who was not. “More and more, people were operating from the outside in,” said Ventura, “judging [each other’s] actions in terms of good and evil. For [Rand], that was part of the way she operated. It was integrated, consistent.” For those around her, it was often a matter of hiding supposed flaws or jockeying for position. “I became one of [the people] functioning from the outside in,” Ventura said. “I was playing such a game [of mimicking the convictions of others] I couldn’t see straight.”
For a period of weeks, Ventura was in O’Connor’s studio working on a small statue of the Greek hero Icarus, who fell to earth when his wax wings melted in the sun. Frank was making a painting of the same subject. He called his painting in progress Icarus Fallen, and Ventura began referring to his statue as Icarus Fallen, too. One evening, Rand visited and announced that when Ventura’s statue was finished she would like to buy a copy; two other visitors chimed in that they wanted to buy copies, too. This was a momentous endorsement, and word of it spread quickly. “From then on,” Ventura recalled, “I began to receive telephone calls and letters from people who wanted to see my work. Overnight, I became ‘the Objectivist sculptor.’” He decided to look for a studio of his own. He found a rent-controlled unit in a nearby building, but lacking the required proof of income from his art, he solicited official orders from a few friends. Then he flew too close to the sun. He wrote to Rand, explaining his predicament and asking for a small deposit on Icarus Fallen, whose price he set at three hundred dollars. Rand reportedly flew into a rage. She raved that the sculptor had stolen the title of Frank’s painting and was a plagiarist and had revealed his immorality by trying to exact a price she hadn’t agreed to in advance. He should keep Icarus Fallen as a “skeleton in his closet” for the rest of his life, she reportedly told the Blumenthals. They relayed her message to Ventura, who was stunned. As quickly as many of Rand’s minions had sought him out, so they snubbed him when they heard that he was out of favor. Without being invited to explain himself, he, like John Hospers, was suddenly outside the circle.
For Ventura and other outcast followers—including, in the summer of 1967, Edith Efron, the former writer for Mike Wallace who was by then a well-known staff reporter for TV Guide—being expelled from the Randian subculture was traumatic. Efron, who had been close to Rand for a decade, was tried in absentia and purged, for gossiping, or lying, or refusing to lie, or flirting; surviving witnesses couldn’t agree on exactly what she did, except that it was related