Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [252]
BARBARA BRANDEN lives a few miles from Nathaniel, in West Hollywood. She and her former husband attend many of the same Objectivist and libertarian conferences and parties. Barbara serves as a guide to what Rand-inspired Web sites call “neo-Objectivist” thought and practice, meaning Rand’s philosophy tempered by a suitable sense of human limitations and the occasional need for kindness. In 1986, she published the only previous biography of Rand, The Passion of Ayn Rand; there, for the first time, she made public Rand and her former husband’s sexual affair, igniting yet another firestorm of moral outrage and debate among the five to ten thousand dedicated Randians remaining. Leonard Peikoff and his loyalists refused to believe the story until, later in the 1980s, Peikoff’s second wife, Cynthia, stumbled upon a personal journal Rand had kept during the pivotal years 1967 and 1968, buried in a box of Rand’s papers. Peikoff claims never to have read his cousin Barbara’s book, and the two have not seen or spoken to each other since the fall of 1968.
At eighty and seventy-nine, respectively, Barbara and Nathaniel remain the objects of fitful but intense vituperation by a second and third generation of zealous Randians. These younger men and women, most of whom didn’t know Rand, have adopted her famous injunction to “judge, and be prepared to be judged.” Hard as it is to believe, twenty-five years after her death they, too, seem to be vying for her approval.
PATRECIA BRANDEN (née Gullison) married Nathaniel in 1969 in a civil ceremony in Las Vegas. She died in a drowning accident in 1977.
Rand’s sole legal heir, LEONARD PEIKOFF, at seventy-six remains her most faithful adherent. In his 1982 book, The Ominous Parallels, he traced the causes of the Holocaust to collectivism and altruism, his mentor’s bêtes noires. In 1985, he co-founded the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) with Philadelphia Eagles owner Ed Snider. ARI promotes Rand’s books and ideas and provides support to approved Rand study groups around the world. It also acts as a repository for the author’s papers, which, according to Rand’s stated wishes in the 1960s and 1970s, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., had expected to receive upon her death. In 1991, Peikoff did make a donation of the original manuscripts and galley proofs of her four novels—from his hospital bed, after a heart attack. When he recovered his health, he accepted a million-dollar tax deduction for his donation but delayed making further gifts of her papers. In 1998, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he revealed that when he had donated the manuscripts he “stole,” or kept back, both the first and last pages of the handwritten first draft of The Fountainhead, and the Library of Congress, backed by the Department of Justice, threatened to sue. The dispute smoldered for a few years, but Peikoff eventually agreed to relinquish the manuscript pages, and in 2002 the library sent a conservator to Peikoff’s Los Angeles home to remove the framed pages from the wall. The next day, hundreds of angry e-mails sent by Objectivists arrived in the mailboxes of library staff members and assorted others, including employees of the congressional committee that oversees the library’s operations. The Peikoff supporters were furious at what they regarded as government theft of private property. The librarians were “thugs with guns,” the e-mails claimed, using one of Rand’s favorite designations for government officials. This is one of many peculiar incidents I heard about that indicate the Ayn Rand cult endures into the twenty-first century.
Peikoff was recently divorced from his third wife, Amy Peikoff, and lives in Riverside, California. He keeps a Web site at peikoff.com. His daughter, Kira Peikoff, is a 2007 graduate of New York University with a major in journalism and, according to her university Web site, an aspiration to write a novel.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Elena Tsvetkova of Blitz research