Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [243]
Ever after Nora’s return to Russia, Rand avoided speaking of her sister. Yet she must have sorely felt the loss—if not of the living Nora, then of a long-cherished illusion that, once upon a time, she had possessed a girlhood soul mate. “She had hoped that the idea of freedom was still burning in her sister,” recalled Elayne Kalberman. But the lure of freedom may never have been as powerful for Nora as it was for Rand. Although childhood had been the time “when I liked everything about [my sister],” Nora recalled in 1997, “I was [merely] her shadow and yes-man. … She always wanted adoring fans.” Nora died in St. Petersburg in 1999, at the age of eighty-eight, without ever again speaking to Rand.
Rand never fully recovered from her lung surgery. But by the autumn of 1974 she was well enough to travel to Washington, D.C., for another uplifting occasion, the swearing in of her most famous protégé, Alan Greenspan, as the chairman of President Gerald Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers. An Oval Office photograph of the occasion shows Rand, looking proud but frail, standing beside Greenspan as the president embraces the new chairman’s diminutive mother, Rose. Three weeks later, Time noted that during one of Greenspan’s first official meetings, convened to discuss a soaring inflation rate, John Kenneth Galbraith joked that the only known remedies for inflation applied alike to “Bolsheviks and devoted supporters of Ayn Rand, if there are any present,” whereupon Greenspan called out, “There’s at least one.” Rand was immensely pleased by the public recognition of her Sleeping Giant. By all accounts she did not pester him to advocate for her antigovernment agenda. “I am a philosopher, not an economist,” she told Time. “Alan doesn’t seek my advice on these matters.” But they clashed over his leadership of a committee whose purpose was to bolster Social Security (a benefit she deplored as socialistic but, unlike Isabel Paterson, accepted, because she had paid into the fund). And during one of their semimonthly dinners at the sedate University Club when he visited New York, she scolded him so vehemently that other diners turned and stared. They remained loyal friends. He met his second wife, Andrea Mitchell, a journalist, a year after Rand’s death, and, unable to enact the Objectivist custom of taking prospective spouses to meet the famous author, he showed Mitchell a copy of an anti-antitrust article he had contributed to The Objectivist Newsletter in 1963, and they discussed it—on their first date. In The Age of Turbulence, the former Federal Reserve chairman paid further tribute to his philosophical mentor. She had drawn him from a world of empiricism and statistics into a deeper engagement with human beings, “their values, how they work, what they do and why they do it, and how they think and why they think. This broadened my horizons far beyond the models of economics I had learned,” he wrote. “I’m grateful for the influence she had on my life.”
There were other friends with whom she clashed—and parted. In 1970, she bid farewell to the Holzers. In 1973, she banished two longtime followers named Phillip and Kay Nolte Smith, who combined careers in the theater with Rand-inspired writing and art. The casus belli was a mistake Kay Smith made during an Off-Broadway production of The Night of January 16th, Rand’s 1930s courtroom drama, which the Smiths had mounted at the McAlpin Rooftop Theater on West Thirty-fourth Street. Like Barbara Branden before them, they appear to have been motivated by a wish to please their friend and honor her work. They restored the play’s original title, Penthouse Legend, and used its original script, minus Al Woods’s props and innovations—giving Rand and the public their first experience of the play as she had written it. The revival stirred unusual interest, and for the first time in many years Rand gave extensive interviews to newspaper reporters. On opening night, jubilant fans filled the