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By Root 1746 0

she had seen her lover’s wife, who had been moved to phone her after watching her speak about Frank to Donahue. Seated in the living room where they had spent hundreds of hours together, the women reconciled. They spoke about the past, but there were no recriminations. Rand, unconsciously perhaps, had forgiven Barbara long ago. Like herself, she seemed to say, Barbara was a hero-worshiper, and whatever mistakes the younger woman had made were a consequence of loyalty to her husband. Rand did not and never would forgive Nathaniel, and so they talked not of failures or betrayals but of politics, philosophy, former friends—and Frank. An afternoon had passed and the sun was setting when Barbara stood at the apartment door, saying good-bye, and Ayn Rand blew her a kiss. “It was not 1981, it was 1950,” Barbara wrote, “we were young and the world was young, and the glow of ideas outshone the sun.” Yet when Barbara wrote to her a few months later, announcing that she planned to write a book about Rand’s life, the aged lioness retreated into silence.

She made her last public appearance—before three thousand of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of men and women whose minds and lives her work had changed—at an economic conference in New Orleans on Saturday, November 18, 1981. James Blanchard, a gold-bug and founder of the sponsoring organization, the National Committee for Monetary Reform, enticed her with regal transportation in a private railway car, complete with a butler, a gourmet cook, and a formal dining room. It was the same kind of railway car that had carried Dagny Taggart across the country as the heroine tried to save both her own company and the last best hope of Earth. Rand had never traveled in one. She took a small entourage with her: Peikoff, Cynthia Pastor, Harry Binswanger, Binswanger’s girlfriend Molly Hays, and her housekeeper Eloise. After a two-and-a-half-day journey, limousines collected them at New Orleans’s Union Station, designed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright in 1892. The cars took them to an oversized suite of rooms at the Hilton Hotel—”the size of three houses,” said Molly Hays—and on to a round of elaborate lunches, dinners, and parties. At 3:00 a.m. on the night before her speech, she sat alone at a table, still writing it, as crowds of admirers and well-wishers milled in and out of the rooms. The speech was called “The Sanction of the Victims,” Rand and Francisco’s phrase for the unwitting cooperation great men and women often grant, in the name of charity, to their adversaries and destroyers. She walked across the stage to ebullient applause by the economists, businessmen, and financiers who filled the hall. She was animated but obviously in poor health, and she occasionally gasped for breath. She began to speak and then interrupted herself to ask that people stop taking pictures of her. “Please, gentlemen, don’t photograph me,” she said, sounding vexed and sad. “I am much too old for that. Just leave me as I am.” She ended her speech with a quotation from John Galt, filled with the unattainable absolutes that she had come to trust. “But to win requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past,” she read. “Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth. Thank you.” She was visibly affected by the reading and by the emotion of the audience, and she tried not to weep as men and women jumped to their feet and cheered as though they wished never to stop.

She fell ill on the train ride back. Home again, she was nursed by Eloise and shifts of professional nurses, but she gradually grew weaker. On New Year’s Day 1982, she rose and wrote the first page of the second part of her script for Atlas Shrugged, observing, as she always