• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1507 0

theater. But the play was not favorably reviewed. (In The New York Times, Clive Barnes wrote mockingly, if irrelevantly, “[Penthouse Legend] is the kind of play that makes you wish Perry Mason had become a Supreme Court judge.”) It closed after thirty performances. During one of the last of these, Kay Smith altered or cut a line, or a few lines (how many is not clear), of Rand’s dialogue, either because the lines were generating unwanted laughter from the audience or because the actor playing the role requested a change, or both. Outraged that a so-called student of Objectivism had tampered with her lines, Rand dismissed both Smiths and banned them from her inner circle and her world. “One mistake was all it took to be drummed out for life,” said Kay Smith bitterly in 1992. “She was”—or became—”a cruel woman.”

Although some professional connections and incidental acquaintances still described Rand as modest, unaffected, and charming, those who were closest to her witnessed increasing pathology. From the Blumenthals and Leonard Peikoff, she demanded a foot soldier’s forfeiture of privacy. “She was relentless in pursuit of psychological errors,” Allan recalled, and she seemed abnormally preoccupied with uprooting all deviations from her convictions and aesthetic tastes. Throughout the 1970s, she needled Allan about his penchant for playing Beethoven and other pre- or post-Romantic composers privately, on his own piano, and ridiculed Joan for her appreciation of painters including Rembrandt, whose “visual distortions” Rand so disliked that she had positioned one of Rembrandt’s etchings above the writing desk of the abominable Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead. After an evening’s bickering about the immorality of the Blumenthals’ “sense of life,” she would phone the next day to find out whether they had reconsidered their opinions; if not, she renewed the argument the following evening, and the evening after that. She questioned their choices of entertainment, travel, and friends and accused them of being secretive when they withheld information from her. “By then, there was something almost reckless in Ayn’s attitude toward us,” Joan Blumenthal recalled. “Along with Leonard, she considered us her closest friends, but, often, she would seem to deliberately insult and antagonize us. … She seemed almost to invite a break.” In 1978, these friends of twenty-five years’ standing phoned to tell her they would no longer see her. She talked about “denouncing” them but was persuaded that another public falling-out might further undermine her reputation. They were quietly designated enemies and Allan was written out of her will.

Elayne and Harry Kalberman also drifted away. Although Branden had recited to his sister the full story of his affair with Rand in 1968, Elayne and her husband had remained in Rand’s camp for a decade. By the late 1970s, however, Frank’s health had sharply declined. Rand’s response was to badger him with demands that he try harder and get better. Her behavior with him shocked and upset the Kalbermans, and they were further offended by her harsh invective against the Blumenthals, who, they pointed out, had nursed her and O’Connor through adversity and illness. The Kalbermans eventually reconciled with Branden.

Rand also had a final rift with Robert Hessen, her tireless advocate and helper. In his spare time, Hessen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, managed an independent West Coast book service based on the defunct NBI model, selling books that championed or complemented Objectivism. In 1981, he decided to list The Watcher, the first novel of “enemy” theatrical producer Kay Nolte Smith, and refused to back down when Rand threatened to withdraw her own books from the service. She viewed his rebellion as “siding with her enemy,” he recalled in 2004, and never spoke to him again. On the advice of her secretary, Barbara Weiss, who reminded her of the income she received from Hessen’s sales of her books, she rescinded her threat and once again refrained from a public rupture.