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By Root 1502 0

twice-yearly lecture “The Psychology of Romantic Love” into a ten-lecture series of its own. With plans to record John Galt’s radio speech for national distribution, he was rehearsing the role of the monogamous ideal man on weekends. If he still dressed like a successful young intellectual, his behavior had been altered by the permissive 1960s: On trips to Los Angeles, where he rented an apartment in 1967, he visited psychedelic nightclubs and practiced target shooting. On one occasion, he gathered together a dozen or so Southern California loyalists to listen to a tape of New York followers justifying the excommunication of Edith Efron. As the tape played, “Branden was off in a corner [of the apartment] oiling and polishing a handgun,” recalled Al Ramrus. “I moved out of the range of the gun. Afterward, I was sick to my stomach. All these people showing up and passively listening, and [in their minds] that was the end of Edith Efron.” About Branden, he said, “I think he was going through a belated adolescence. I think it was destructive for him to have been anointed by Ayn Rand at such an early age.” Said Iris Bell, another NBI alumna then living in Los Angeles, “He was having a slow-motion nervous breakdown.” Yet he did not cut back his social and professional commitments; because he found his only sense of meaning in action, he told Rand, he continued to ramp them up.

Meanwhile, Barbara was employing delaying tactics to protect him, although he still hadn’t told her about the four-year duration of his affair with Patrecia. There was little pleasure in playing the role of middleman with Rand. She lurched between impossible choices, she recalled. “[I used to race] from my office to Ayn in the middle of the day, or from my apartment to Ayn in the middle of the night,” she wrote, “when she called to say she had a new idea that might explain Nathaniel. … And then I ran to Nathaniel, to hear him say, tears streaming down his face, ‘Barbara, please help me! I don’t know what to do!’” She was convinced that disclosing Branden’s secret would, at that late date, place his mental stability at risk. She knew that telling the truth would threaten NBI. And she feared that the unmasking of Nathaniel might permanently weaken Rand’s desire to live and work—”not [Nathaniel] the person,” she told a friend after the author’s death, “but [Nathaniel] the symbol.” Yet to go on comforting the wounded lion as she brooded and raged in ignorance was cruel, and when Barbara finally understood that Branden was not going to outgrow or give up Patrecia, it was untenable. Again, she urged him to confess. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

In this atmosphere of urgent secrets and hushed conversations, other insiders built small followings of their own, typically acquiring authority through a false impression of intimacy with Rand, Branden, or Leonard Peikoff, who was back in favor with the diva. Prescription drugs, including tranquilizers and barbiturates, were readily available to Objectivists (as they were to many Americans in the 1960s), and some used them heavily to alter their “only tool[s] of survival,” their minds. Male bisexual and homosexual followers, who understood that by the dictates of Rand’s theory of romantic love they were not only irrational and immoral but also, as she once declared from the stage of Ford Hall Forum, “disgusting,” dated young women in public and hid their same-sex liaisons. “But of course [in the late 1960s] everybody was having affairs,” said a film producer who hosted NBI’s Romantic Screen movie nights. “I was dating guys and girls. There was stuff going on that was not at all according to Objectivist rules.” Before Patrecia’s marriage, for example, this man dated her sister Liesha while his male lover dated Patrecia. “It was a wild time,” recalled Kerry O’Quinn, a group-therapy patient of Allan Blumenthal’s and one of half a dozen artists who attended a painting class given by Joan. Some followers “knew about us and accepted us,” he said. But the antihomosexual bias expressed by Rand and hammered home by Branden