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apartment; the champion of capitalism had no time to research stocks and disapproved of government savings bonds, she told Eickhoff, who eventually persuaded her to invest her savings in money-market funds. When Eickhoff learned that Rand was drafting a new teleplay of Atlas Shrugged, she asked if she and her husband, a jazz club owner, could help finance the project. So did Ed Snider, a Rand fan and the founder of a sports conglomerate. Thus buoyed, Rand wrote steadily, and during evening Scrabble games with Pryor or one of Peikoff’s friends, she returned to the pastime of casting Atlas Shrugged. About a third of the script was completed when she died.

In 1980, Harry Binswanger, a philosophy professor and a longtime believer in Objectivism, founded a sixteen-page bimonthly magazine called The Objectivist Forum. Rand gave her consent to the endeavor and donated her old Objectivist mailing lists. But she did not endorse the publication, as she pointed out in an odd and astringent letter to readers in the first issue. She could not guarantee that the editors would accurately convey the tenets of Objectivism, she wrote. In case readers didn’t understand why she was so protective of the term “Objectivism,” “my reason is that ‘Objectivism’ is the name I have given to my philosophy—therefore, anyone using that name for some hodgepodge of his own, without my knowledge or consent, is guilty of the fraudulent presumption of trying to put thoughts into my brain.” She and her philosophical system had become a unit. Other matters also gave rise to bouts of solipsism and paranoia. Despite her sister’s safe return to Russia, for example, she often warned acquaintances that the Soviet authorities were plotting to capture her. She told Al Ruddy that she could not fly on a commercial plane to the West Coast, explaining, “Darling, if the Russians find out I’m flying on an airliner, they’ll hijack it.” She also warned him that the Russians might try to buy Paramount to block a film of Atlas Shrugged.

Phil Donahue had treated her cordially during her 1979 appearance on The Phil Donahue Show. In the spring of 1980, she agreed to return as part of a Great Minds of America series, which also included Milton Friedman. On screen, she looked old and frail, even in a bright blue dress and with her hair colored a coppery red. As Donahue fired philosophical questions at her, she grew more energetic, however, and when the audience laughed appreciatively at their bantering and applauded, she seemed surprised but greatly pleased. Then an audience member broke the spell by challenging her views on the merits of selfishness and the “Me Society.” Speaking above Donahue’s attempts to mediate, she angrily repeated the point she had made in The Objectivist Forum. “I want to hold only my ideas,” she said, almost pleading. “I don’t approve of those who preach the opposite.” At the age of seventy-five, she could no longer bear to listen to anyone who differed with her. Turning to Donahue, she said quaveringly, “I would love to see an honorable adversary, but I’ve stopped hoping for it.” Toward the end of the hour, he asked about the recent loss of her husband. Had it in any way changed her philosophy? “No,” she answered. “It has only altered my position in regard to the world. I lost my top value. I’m not too interested in anything else.” Wasn’t she tempted to believe in a heaven where she and her husband might be reunited? “I’ve asked myself just that,” she answered soberly. “And if I really believed that for five minutes, I’d commit suicide immediately to get to him…. I’ve [also] asked myself how I’d feel if I thought that he was now on trial before God or Saint Peter,” she continued. “My first desire would be to run and help him, to say how good he was.”

Her final Ford Hall Forum address, in April 1981, titled “The Age of Mediocrity,” was a prophetic polemic against “family values,” creationism, and other religious pieties of the Reagan-era Right. When she returned home from Boston, she received a visit from Barbara Branden. It had been thirteen years since