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two close friends that she was concerned about the woman’s deteriorating mental condition and increasingly “reckless” behavior. Predictably, one of them told Rand, and that evening Rand summoned Barbara to a meeting to explain her comments in front of Rand and the group. Barbara knew the script and refused to go. In absentia, her friends found her guilty of making false and immoral statements; and after nineteen years of almost daily contact with the writer and visionary she had loved, she was summarily dismissed. Without much evidence, the great woman and generations of her disciples linked Barbara’s apparent “sudden switch” of attitude toward Rand to the loss of NBI, casting her along with Nathaniel as the successfully wily looter of an aging naïf. In this, Rand’s supporters draw an erroneously unflattering picture of their idol. Rand was not unobservant, and was not easily surprised. She was worn out with anger. She and Barbara would see each other only once again, shortly before the older woman’s death.

It didn’t end there. Rand made good on her threat to damage Branden, or protect herself, or both. She contacted her agent Perry Knowlton at Curtis Brown, Ltd., and her editors at NAL and asked them to block publication of Branden’s book. The literary agency declined to participate, but when Branden missed his deadline, NAL’s affiliate World Publishing canceled his contract. She also refused to return his copyrights to him—that is, unless he and Barbara agreed in writing never to discuss the nature of Nathaniel’s relationship with her or answer any public accusations she might make against them. “I knew that this was plain, undiluted evil,” Branden wrote somewhat hyperbolically in 1989. “What happened to property rights?” he scornfully asked Holzer, and refused to sign. A year later, Ed Nash, a savvy marketer, launched a small company to publish The Psychology of Self-Esteem—without copyrights, and without any trouble from Rand. This was followed by Breaking Free in 1970, The Disowned Self in 1971, and many other books on aspects of self-esteem. Thus did Branden become known as the father of the self-esteem movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Rand also kept her threat to thwart Branden’s efforts to get a license, but despite her intervention he was certified by New Jersey in 1969.

Now the Brandens went on the defensive. “You’ve got to understand,” Branden recalled Barbara telling him. “Ayn wants you dead!” The novelist’s allies began to hear reports that the Brandens had been screaming hysterical insults and threats against Rand in front of staffers who were being laid off and were packing to go. “The substance of [the Brandens’] accusations was that I had been unjust to them,” she mildly wrote in the October issue of The Objectivist; by then she had ordered the magazine moved into a new office, on East Thirty-fourth Street. In fact, as she knew, they had gone further in their comments in an effort to safeguard themselves against the damage they were aware was being done to them.

One afternoon, Holzer recalled, Branden’s sister and longtime office manager, Elayne Kalberman, called and asked him to come to NBI. According to Holzer’s recollection, he entered the half-emptied office to find staffers milling about, while Elayne, her husband, Harry, Barbara, and Nathaniel stood conferring in low voices. “Tell him. Tell him,” he recalled Nathaniel urging Barbara when he joined them. Barbara took Holzer into her private office, closed the door, and nervously informed him that Ayn and Nathaniel had been having an affair. Holzer didn’t believe it. “Nathan had so much to lose—he had built this whole empire,” Holzer said in an interview in 2006. “I thought he would say anything [including making up an affair] to keep it going.” Agitated himself, the attorney hurried home to his apartment (located across the street from Rand’s) and phoned his star client, whom he perceived to be an innocent victim of Branden’s lies. Rand listened as he repeated what he had been told, then asked calmly, “What do you think?” He answered, “It’s unthinkable,