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in lectures and essays took a toll; gay men and women “bit their tongues and hid their guilt,” recalled O’Quinn. Some entered into therapy to rid themselves of unwanted sexual urges. (Rand herself reportedly once claimed to have “cured” one of her young favorites who admitted to a preference for men but denied that he had ever acted on his feelings.) They and other followers relied on a small group of therapists who admired Branden, although they didn’t necessarily agree with him about homosexuality or other issues, and practiced in New York throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. This group included Lee Shulman and Roger Callahan, Ph.D.s who migrated from Detroit to work with Branden and quickly built thriving practices, and younger practitioners such as Lonnie Leonard, who was an investor in NBI Theater’s planned production of The Fountainhead and, later, surrendered his license to avoid prosecution for preying sexually on young female Objectivists schooled in the art of hero worship. Many followers were operating from “the outside in,” repeated Don Ventura. “There were those who were extremely hypocritical and those who were less so,” and, most probably, hundreds or thousands who simply did their best to apply what they had learned from Rand and her books to their thinking, politics, and daily lives.

Although the whispered phone calls and emergencies didn’t escape the notice of NBI staffers or their friends and fellow students, there were still no rumors—not any, as far as surviving followers remember—about the romantic entanglement between Rand and Branden. Her preoccupation with Branden rendered her contact with other followers less frequent in 1967 and 1968, and when she did encounter them, she was edgy and suspicious. Her behavior during question-and-answer sessions at NBI was at times so censorious and even abusive that Branden asked students to write down their questions so that he could screen them in advance. When that failed, he and Barbara discouraged her from coming. In May 1967, during a heavily promoted public debate between Branden and the well-known, irrepressibly opinionated psychologist Albert Ellis, she threw an especially dramatic tantrum. The topic of debate was the merits of Ellis’s rational emotive behavioral therapy, which emphasized self-acceptance, versus the merits of Objectivist therapy, which aimed at correcting wrong or evil mental premises, though both approaches held that emotions flow from thought. Eleven hundred people had packed a ballroom in the New Yorker Hotel on West Thirty-fourth Street and heard Ellis declare from the podium that Miss Rand’s fictional heroes were destructive to the average person’s self-esteem because they were “unreal” and “utterly impossible.” Enraged, she stood up from the audience and shouted at Ellis, “Am I unreal? Am I a character who can’t possibly exist?” The crowd, mostly Rand’s partisans, shouted and booed. It took some time for the moderator, Lee Shulman, to calm them, and the debate ended on a sour note. Ellis, himself a notorious hothead, later described Rand as a full-blown narcissist and a manic-depressive, as well as “a fucking baby” and a fanatical bigot with Nazi leanings. A year after the debate he published a short book intended to prove that Objectivism was a classic religious cult, with Rand playing the role of God.

She and Branden had a reflexive explanation for her anger. They called it “the excess of a virtue” or “the fault of a virtue,” meaning that her commitment to a black-and-white moral universe excused, or even required, outsized passion. But the more pressing problem may have been that she was tired of lying, frightened of being lied to, and aware of more than she was willing to admit about the secret of Nathaniel’s deeply un-Galtish inner conflicts.

Spring 1968 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Fountainhead, “one of the most astonishing phenomena in publishing history,” as Nora Ephron wrote in a satirical essay in The New York Times. (Like the novel’s early critics, Ephron had at first missed its deeper point and had