Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [231]
Memories fade over the course of forty years, perhaps especially in matters of sequence and timing. In a statement Barbara circulated a few weeks after the incident, she described it differently. According to her, she did not divulge Rand’s secret. She conveyed a threat, telling Holzer she “was worried that [Ayn’s] attacks would compel [Nathaniel], in self-defense, to reveal information which would be painful and embarrassing to Miss Rand. I did not say what this information consisted of.” In addition, she stated, under duress Nathaniel had shouted loudly, in a tone of moral outrage, in front of Holzer and the staff, “How long is she [Miss Rand] going to count on me to remain silent?” In any event, Rand did not heed the Brandens’ indirect warnings. But, with very few exceptions, they kept their vow to remain silent about the affair until after she had died.
Among the exceptions were Branden’s sisters, Florence, Elayne, and Reva. All three believed their brother’s account, but their sense of unity ended there. Elayne and Reva sided with Rand. Florence flew from Toronto to New York to support her little brother. She asked for a meeting with Rand, which was granted and lasted for five hours. In the presence of Frank and a watchful Holzer, she asked outright whether there had been a romantic relationship between the older woman and Nathaniel. Rand dismissed the question as preposterous, as she would later dismiss the questions of less intimate acquaintances. Yet she spoke heatedly about Nathaniel’s moral degeneracy in choosing Patrecia over her. He was evil, depraved, a gigolo, Rand told Florence. At last, she asked, in a convulsion of loneliness and frustration, “Florence, am I real to you?” Yes, Florence answered in a letter written a few months later, she was real, both in the magnitude of her genius and in the fraudulence and cruelty of her pretence of being an innocent victim in a fourteen-year affair with a younger man.
Florence recalled that Rand became more and more inflamed as she discussed Nathaniel and his outrages against her. “The thing that really got to me was that she was leaning against a desk, with her legs spreading farther and farther apart as she talked about him,” Florence recalled. She interpreted the gesture as a graphic indication that there had been a sexual relationship between them. Finally, Rand shouted that if Nathaniel had been half the man he pretended to be, he would have been in love with her rather than with Patrecia. When the meeting ended, Holzer followed Florence out into the hallway and warned that if one word were said to any third party about what had just transpired, he would deny it. During both of these encounters, Frank sat by silently.
As a last direct strike, Rand and her attorney set to work on a blistering condemnation of the Brandens. When the statement appeared as a letter in the October issue of The Objectivist, entitled, “To Whom It May Concern,” it ran to fifty-three paragraphs, each contributing to a controlled, chronological though ultimately vague impeachment of Branden and, to a lesser extent, Barbara. The writing was elegant, without a trace of shriek or sprawl, but it seemed to protest in too much detail. It began:
This is to inform my readers and all those interested in Objectivism that Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden are no longer associated with this magazine, with me or with my philosophy.
I have permanently broken