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By Root 1567 0

Passion of Ayn Rand. Such harsh invective proves that she was behaving as a woman scorned, said some. The incident didn’t happen, or it was the outcome of her love of justice, insisted others. In fact, it was fully consistent with her evolving appraisal of Branden’s character over the preceding months. One day after he handed her his “age” paper, when she still assumed that he was impotent, she wrote in her journal, “I believe that he has been attempting to cure himself by the primitive, concrete-bound notion of watching his emotions and waiting for some woman to arouse his sexual response somehow. … And if, by some accident of random factors and evasion, he succeeds in desiring some woman and in sleeping with her—it will not and cannot last; he will lose his sex power again, only with a stronger feeling of hopelessness and despair.” This had always been her credo: “To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’” Branden desired “Patrecia or the equivalent” out of weakness, inadequacy to reach his utmost values, including her, and an erosion of self-esteem, Rand suggested in her journal, stating, “The horrible truth is that he ha[s] no self to assert. “If her final malediction against Branden was rage dressed as philosophy, or delusion refusing to pay homage to reality, it was also a reflection of half a century of reasoning and concentrated imaginative power. It was Rand’s world, her creation, and it was closing down.

The deterioration of her lover from a young Howard Roark into a self-destructive Leo Kovalensky, Kira’s gifted young lover who becomes a gigolo in We the Living, was complete. It was almost as though Rand had created Branden and then clung to what he might have been, just as Kira did with Leo. This time there would be no second chances. Ayn Rand never saw her protégé of nineteen years again.

There are many who remember the period that followed. During the dog days of that explosive summer of 1968—pivotal for the protest- and riot-torn nation as well as for Rand—she notified key contacts that she had severed her relationship with Branden; she told them only that she had discovered immoral actions on his part. She gave no hint of her sexual history with him, then or ever. Not until after her death did Leonard Peikoff, her final heir and lone remaining full-time follower, uncover evidence of the fourteen-year affair. When, on August 24, she met with her attorney and “legal bodyguard,” Hank Holzer, she told him curtly, “I have broken with Nathan,” and explained that he had lied to her. Holzer and his wife, Erika, were as shocked “as if she had said that the sun wasn’t coming up tomorrow morning,” but they asked no probing questions. She told them that she had also become suspicious of Branden’s business conduct, and Holzer agreed to review the books of The Objectivist. It wasn’t long before he found the $25,000 loan made by The Objectivist to the diminished accounts of NBI. In the nine months since then, there had been no payments on the loan, except for a series of monthly rental credits to the magazine, whose offices were now also in the Empire State Building as a subtenant of NBI.

Later that day, Rand met with Barbara and, in effect, forgave her for protecting Branden. Where there were divided loyalties, she said, it was understandable that a man-worshipping woman would stand by the man she had married. She embraced the younger woman as her heir apparent and offered her a salary to assume Branden’s former position as co-editor of The Objectivist. She also either encouraged Barbara to draft a plan to continue operations at NBI or reluctantly agreed to let her do so. She sent Barbara to inform her disgraced heir of certain nonnegotiable demands: that he cede his half interest in The Objectivist to Rand, without compensation; that he transfer ownership of NBI to Barbara; that he inform the staff and all associates that he was relinquishing participation in Rand-related enterprises; and that he limit himself to saying only that he was guilty of immoral behavior of such severity that Rand had broken