Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [247]
And yet Rand valued him above all others. Even in the period of her greatest frustration with him, just before Nathaniel Branden entered her life, the possibility of her leaving him was very small. She loved to look at him. Until the end of her life, “she [always] talk[ed] about how he looked, how good-looking he was,” said Huggins. She never tired of his company or his touch. She genuinely prized his early, vital contributions to her work—his American optimism, his fund of idiomatic language, his active interest in her writing, his wit. (In The Fountainhead, for example, Roark’s response to Ellsworth Toohey’s second-handed inquiry, “Why don’t you tell me what you think of me?” was borrowed from Frank: “But I don’t think of you,” as Frank had once told a troublemaker.) He understood her origins and frame of reference better than anyone ever had; he understood her. And whatever it might have cost him, he deferred to her natural gifts and superior sense of purpose. Something she had written to Gerald Loeb in 1944 remained always true. “I [have] had Frank, which is the greatest mercy God has ever granted me (and I say that without being religious).”
Her impossible expectations of him arose partly from her need. With this exceptionally handsome, affable, and apparently doting man by her side, she was not an aberration or an idol but a woman who belonged on earth. One year, when Frank wasn’t strong enough to accompany her to Boston for her annual Ford Hall Forum speech, she shook with anxiety during the four-hour drive in a hired car. She was frightened but she didn’t call it that. “She said, ‘I am very nervous. I am worried about him,’” said an employee who escorted her to Boston. “But she wasn’t worried about him. She [gave her speech and] got an ovation, and her worry about Frank disappeared.” Having known Rand and O’Connor for many years, this acquaintance said, “I knew she didn’t love him. But he was something in her life that was really crucial. She needed him by her side to make her a person, a woman, something. She said she’d never travel without him again.”
In the spring of 1979, New American Library published her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, a theoretical treatise on the nature of human reason first published in several installments in The Objectivist. Surprisingly, perhaps, she made an appearance on The Phil Donahue Show to promote the book. She also posed for a Look magazine photograph, a majestic portrait showing her, with arms flung wide, standing above the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal, a Beaux Arts monument to the American industrial era she loved.
In the late 1970s, Frank’s condition worsened. He became housebound and didn’t always recognize familiar faces. In an attempt to anchor his mind to the present, she gave him household chores to do, such as feeding the cats, and became agitated when he forgot to do them. He refused to eat, and she tried to force him, in spite of the fact that he appeared to be “frightened, terribly frightened,” Peikoff’s first wife, Susan Ludel, recalled. “Don’t eat the food,” he whispered to Barbara Weiss. “She’s trying to poison me. She might try to poison you.” Sometimes she was cruel. When he became incontinent, she referred to his diapers in the presence of a friend. One day, she confided to the same friend that he had tried to hit her. (“I was sorry he missed,” said the friend.) Yet he still rose to his feet when a woman entered