Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [229]
The designated guilty party agreed to give up The Objectivist, but only if Rand conveyed copyrights to him on dozens of essays he had published over the years. The essays formed the spine of his partly finished book. She agreed but refused to commit her promise to writing.
On August 28, Branden held an NBI staff meeting and formally resigned from both the magazine and the institute. According to his nephew, Jonathan Hirschfeld, who attended the meeting with Branden’s sister Florence, his presentation was brief and anguished. He had done something “unforgivable” and had “betrayed the principles of Objectivism,” he announced, and Ayn had therefore required him to withdraw from NBI. Since he didn’t explain what he had done, he “left everybody completely mystified,” recalled Hirschfeld. “But you could see that he was [a] broken [man], and that he was confessing to something real.” The volunteers and secretaries were shocked and frightened, both for their mission and their jobs. Then, beginning the next day, hundreds of followers began to phone or arrive at the office, crying and begging to be told what had come between their two icons. Said Branden later, “We were like mother and father figures” to thousands of young members of the movement. Rumors “spread like wildfire,” he wrote in 1989: he was a drug addict, a drinker, a thief, and a child molester. In his years of lecturing, prescribing, and sometimes posturing or bullying from his position of authority, he had made few friends, and some associates were not unhappy to see him go.
The issue of NBI became moot. Barbara and Wilfred Schwartz, the business manager, drafted a plan for a scaled-down but potentially still-profitable lecture organization. By the time they and Hank Holzer, who had approved the plan, presented it to Rand, she had decided against continuing NBI. She was weary of the risks and obligations she bore as the figurehead of a crusade that was often in the news. NBI had been central in adding “philosopher” to her designation as a novelist, a development she had appreciated and enjoyed—and then adding “cult leader” to her reputation as a thinker. “I am not a teacher by professional and personal inclination,” she wrote some weeks later. “My way of spreading ideas is by the written, not the spoken word.” To Barbara, she said, “I won’t hand my endorsement and reputation to anyone, for any reason! I can’t run a business and I can’t let anyone else run it when it carries my name!” She spoke with such vehemence that Barbara didn’t argue; indeed, Barbara remembered, it was with a sense of liberation that she agreed to close the doors of NBI. But she was angered by Rand’s escalating accusations and threats against Nathaniel, which the older woman shouted out in bursts of anger mixed with grief and fear. She swore that she would not merely write a paragraph in The Objectivist—she would expose him to the world. She would deny his book a chance at publication and create a public scandal that would deprive him of a license to practice psychology, which he had recently applied for in New Jersey.
Ironically, Rand made her decision to close NBI on September 2, exactly twenty-two years to the day after she had written, “Who is John Galt?” at the head of a blank sheet of paper. No doubt, she was relieved to be rid of a set of duties she did not enjoy. “I never wanted and do not now want to be the leader of a ‘movement,’” she wrote in The Objectivist. A philosophical and cultural movement had been Branden’s idea and his accomplishment. Now that her brilliant star, as she once called him, had faded in the light of day, his business ventures and the organized following he had built held little interest for her.
Barbara, too, was quickly pulled into the gravitational field of Rand’s anger. On September 3, she confided to