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By Root 1781 0

her ideas, and they tried unsuccessfully to quash an early attempt he made to market his NBI lecture tapes under his own name. Only Frank and the Blumenthals were aware of the sexual component of Rand and Branden’s relationship, and with them she agonized over various explanations of his sexual psychology. On the one hand, she needed to understand his betrayal of her in order to restore the rule of reason in her life. Lacking the ability or willingness to be honest with herself about his conduct or to scrutinize her own, however, she could not find an adequate explanation. Gradually she stopped speaking about him, or even referring to him, with anyone other than members of her household: Frank, her housekeeper, her personal secretary Barbara Weiss, and perhaps Leonard Peikoff. As the 1970s wore on—a politically dreary sequence of years beginning with Nixon’s wage and price controls and final abandonment of the gold standard and ending with the fourteen-month-long Iran hostage crisis—she largely retreated from the public eye.

Like a younger son stepping out of his elder brother’s shadow, Peikoff took charge of Rand’s physical and emotional well-being. Now in his middle thirties, he was still young for his age, with a high-pitched voice, thick glasses, and a tendency toward excitability. He deeply revered Rand; he believed, and regularly said, that hers was the greatest mind in the universe. When asked to compare what he had learned from her with what he had learned in school, he once answered, “How would you compare … going to the Metropolitan [Opera House] and watching a ballet versus living in Auschwitz?” By way of explanation, he said, “If you took the total of my mind, whatever rational knowledge I have is ninety-eight percent from her, and one or two percent of simply historical data from fourteen years of universities.” She called him by the Russian pet name “Leonush” but still sometimes flew into a rage at his mistakes or oversights. Her verbal abuse seemed only to intensify his love. Said a member of Rand’s 1970s inner circle, “Sometimes she would wipe the floor with him. You’d think he had threatened to kill her. I finally said, ‘How can you let her do that?’ He said, ‘I would let her step on my face if she wanted.’”

If he heard rumors about sex between Rand and Branden, as he almost surely did, he dismissed them as slanders against Rand. He regarded her as a spiritual mother figure and could not imagine even the villainous Branden breaking the constraints of a universal taboo—let alone with the willing participation of his idol. He did his best to replace the vaunted genius Branden as her interpreter, buffer, publicist, and enforcer. In January 1969, he launched his own private lecture series, beginning with an “Introduction to Logic,” followed by a twelve-part series, “The Philosophy of Objectivism.” During his first lecture in the logic course, he answered a question about Branden’s forthcoming book, The Psychology of Self-Esteem, with a stern warning that no one was to buy or read it. “Either you deal with him or you deal with Ayn Rand and myself,” he reportedly declared. “Either/or. If you have dealings with him, I don’t want you in this course.” One student walked out of the auditorium and withdrew from the class. Her money was refunded but her name was stricken from The Objectivist subscriber rolls and she was barred from all future lectures and events. As letters of inquiry or protest arrived about the demands that students take sides, hundreds of others were reportedly added to a blacklist. Yet so tied to Rand or to the group were some of these defectors that they adopted pseudonyms to enroll secretly in lectures and subscribe to the magazine. In turn, loyalists later spoke of using false names on mailing lists, as means of ensuring that Rand’s new enemies weren’t communicating with subscribers by using the approved list. After one of his lectures, Rand herself was asked whether she and Branden had had a sexual relationship, as the bold questioner thought was implied by parts of Branden’s “In Answer to