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to the many rumors by then circulating about Branden and Patrecia. Since she had occasionally written for The Objectivist, the magazine published a notice informing readers that she was no longer associated with Objectivism or Ayn Rand and canceling her fall 1967 nonfiction-writing course at NBI. Afterward, in a familiar pattern, Rand spoke disparagingly of Efron and at least once denied that she had ever respected Efron’s writing, and an NBI-affiliated therapist counseled the woman’s eighteen-year-old son, Leonard, that his mother was “a horrible woman, that she was evil, and that I should have nothing to do with her,” Leonard recalled years later. When he refused, he was made to feel awkward and unwelcome. (On the other hand, Efron’s brother Robert, a distinguished physicist who also occasionally wrote for The Objectivist, sided with Rand and temporarily disowned his sister.) As for Ventura, he was so mortified that he moved out of the neighborhood. “I had been seeking an identity, and [instead] I lost myself,” he said in 2004.

Frank didn’t phone him, nor did Ventura try to call or see his friend. “I thought I was too bad a person to contact him,” said the sculptor. But one day, Ventura ran into Frank on a street corner. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about what happened,” Ventura told him. Frank looked sad. “It’s not the end of the world,” he answered, and turned away. He no longer had the power to argue for restraint at home, as he had in the 1940s.

After a recurrence of the trouble with his hands, O’Connor ceased painting in 1968. He resigned from the Board of Control and stopped taking classes at the League. He kept his studio but—so the Brandens and others close to him claimed to have discovered—was drinking there instead of painting. Rand may or may not have noticed his idleness. She was greatly distracted by Branden. In any case, when she brooded aloud over her lover’s apparent transgressions, which she did almost continuously, “she insisted that Frank be present for many of the conversations about what was wrong with Nathan,” recalled Barbara, to whom Rand increasingly turned for support. “My God, the conversations went on for hours, theorizing, speculating, raging, crying. He was in the room for discussions he should not have been present for.” If ever Rand’s affair had been acceptable to him, her anguish about its approaching end could not have been. His air of absence, forgetfulness, and lethargy were signs of emotional retreat, his friends thought. They were also early symptoms of senility. Month by month, Barbara recalled, he seemed to understand less and less of what Rand said to him. Out of context, he once cried, “That man [Nathaniel] is no damn good! Why won’t you see it?” He flew into violent rages against his wife, which left her baffled and hurt. “Frank, darling, are you angry with me about something you haven’t told me?” Branden recalled her asking. “They would have interminable talks about his psycho-epistemology,” he wrote in 1989. “Ayn did the talking, and Frank listened silently.” Privately, she asked her recalcitrant lover for advice about how to persuade her husband to talk to her. When Branden suggested that the reason for his silence might be anger he had stored, she asked Frank about it and reported to Branden, “He says absolutely not. You’re wrong.” Once, during a vicious quarrel between the O’Connors in the presence of the Brandens, Frank walked out of the living room, into the bedroom. Barbara followed. She found him half sitting, half lying on the bed in an attitude of sorrow and defeat. “I want to leave her,” he told Barbara, clutching her arm. “But where would I go?” Rand was the center of his life.

By then, O’Connor had lost his remarkable ability to be both Cyrus and non-Cyrus, Galt and non-Galt, at the same time and in the same respect, an ability that had made his marriage work. But many of the younger people surrounding the sixty-three-year-old guru were finding safety and power in playing roles. While Branden hid whom he loved, for example, he expanded his popular (and prescriptive)