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By Root 1523 0

working on revisions when NBC installed a new chief executive, Fred Silverman, who scuttled the project. The Jaffes took the idea to other television studios, but the outline was long, the staging next to impossible, and the terms Rand demanded unusual and onerous. With prospects fading, Silliphant arranged to have a final meeting with Rand in New York and then fly out to meet another author and possible collaborator on a new project at her home in the San Juan Islands, off the coast of Washington State: Ruth Beebe Hill, Rand’s sharp-witted former friend from California, who had written her own soon-to-be best-selling novel called Hanta Yo and was considering the possibility of turning it into a miniseries. Without being aware beforehand that Hill knew Rand, Silliphant told her a harrowing story. He had made an appointment to meet Rand in the lobby of her building, where they often conducted business. He waited but she didn’t appear, so he took the elevator up to her apartment and knocked on the door. She opened it an inch or two, recognized him, said, “Just a minute!” and closed it again. He heard movement and some muffled conversation, and had the impression that she had pushed O’Connor into another room. She reopened the door a crack. “With a yell he’d never heard before, or a cry, or an expression of being frantic,” Hill recalled Silliphant telling her, Rand rushed into the bathroom and closed and latched the bathroom door, leaving the apartment door ajar. He pulled it closed and left. Hill was frightened by Silliphant’s description of the terrible scene, not least because she didn’t know until later that Frank was suffering from arteriosclerosis, let alone that he was by now in the throes of full dementia. Silliphant surmised that Rand had been trying to hide her husband, although he didn’t know why.

Frank was Rand’s other preoccupation, and by far the deeper and more painful one. After the loss of Nathaniel, she had turned back to him—to the warm, patient, often witty man who, if he had never satisfied her yearning for an idea-driven, sexually dominating partner, had never been disloyal to her. But she was too late. Even then, he was failing. One evening in the early 1970s, he collapsed and was taken to the hospital. Doctors believed that he had suffered a mild heart attack; if so, they said, the cause was probably arteriosclerosis. Those who met him afterward assumed that he was inebriated or had had a stroke, since he found it hard to speak and seemed to be aphasic. He grew increasingly fragile, vacant, hard to reach. Rand was terrified of losing him, and for the rest of his life she—anxiously, even intrusively—monitored his exercise and eating.

But she did not acknowledge his mental deterioration, just as she had never really acknowledged the fact of his separate mental life. When conversation was still within his power, he had sometimes told Eloise, the housekeeper, or one of Rand’s secretaries how much he missed the open spaces and greenery of the San Fernando Valley. “But he hated California,” Rand reportedly would say. “He loves New York.” She nagged at him continually, to onlookers’ distress. “Don’t humor him,” she told Barbara Weiss, before the woman resigned. “Make him try to remember.” She insisted that his mental lapses were “psycho-epistemological,” and she gave him long, grueling lessons in how to think and remember. She assigned him papers on aspects of his mental functioning, which he was entirely unable to write. At one point she asked his niece Mimi Sutton, now widowed and living in Chicago, to come to New York to help care for him, but Mimi sensed that her uncle and aunt were in a state of conflict and said no. For months and years Rand went on goading him, out of fear, horror, or, perhaps, a cultivated prejudice that what is not rational is not quite human. “He never got kindness from her,” said Weiss.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that he drank heavily whenever he could. He apparently ordered beer or hard liquor from neighborhood stores and took delivery in his studio, where he still spent many