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By Root 1803 0

his brothers had cooked meals and done housework during their mother’s illness, so it didn’t seem unnatural that he and Nick should now take over many household chores to give her time to write. As she became better known, he joked that he was “Mr. Ayn Rand.” But it was not a joke. Without paid employment, his working-class values sometimes troubled him. If the situation had occurred four or five decades later, “there would not have been so much hurt pride,” his niece Mimi later said. It’s difficult to know whether his financial dependency troubled her, since now and in the future she did not complain. Neither did he. He seemed to lack the drive and focus to begin a new career, and by 1936 she was the sole breadwinner.

For the first time, they began to lose their tempers with each other. A quiet man in the best of times, he withdrew from conversation. She was brimming with new ideas about the psychology of individualism, Americans’ sorry slide toward collectivism, and the many political and, now, architectural texts and periodicals she was reading. She craved intellectual companionship. For relief, she turned to Albert Mannheimer, the curly-headed young convert to capitalism, and to Nick, who joined the O’Connors for dinner almost every night. Nick was charming, funny, well read, intelligent, a good critic, and a gifted storyteller, although he seemed as lackadaisical about his writing career as his younger brother was about acting. He and Joe O’Connor had both served in World War I, and he had been wounded in a chlorine gas attack. He collected disability payments for lung disease, later diagnosed as tuberculosis. He often had free time.

Nick became Rand’s own first Commandant Kareyev, the man who stands between the heroine and her hero and so preserves their union. “He supervised,” said Frank and Nick’s niece Mimi, who visited Nick and the O’Connors twice in the middle 1930s and more often after that. “He was Noel Coward.” Like Rand’s later young male protégés, he talked with her about ideas and her current work in progress late into the night, while O’Connor dozed in a chair, but he differed from them in important ways. He didn’t flatter her, and he acted as her practical guide in matters of dress and entertaining. In the 1930s, Rand had a “peasant” face and figure and no clothing style at all, said Millicent Patton. Typically, she wore a housedress all day long, remembered Mimi, and went around wiping her hands on it. (“My father was appalled,” said the niece.) But she had rococo tastes when dressing up. Once, Mimi recalled, her aunt by marriage gaily modeled “a small white Dutch hat with a starched peak and a blue netty veil,” which couldn’t have looked worse. While Frank tactfully hemmed and hawed at the sight of the whimsical headpiece on the logical head, Nick told her to take it off. He steered her—not always successfully—to simpler, more tailored clothing and a conventional entertaining style. This was important, because she was meeting influential people at political events and cocktail parties and beginning to give dinners. Also, in contrast to the younger men who came later, he was never a candidate for seduction. He was a homosexual, although Rand probably did not know it. (“She would have been the last person on earth to realize that Nick was gay,” said a 1960s friend, even though by then Rand condemned homosexuality on philosophical grounds.) The good-looking husband, the lively brother-in-law, and the diminutive dark-haired Russian woman with hypnotizing eyes now made a threesome.

For most of the summer of 1936, Ayn, Frank, and Nick, with the occasional addition of Mannheimer, remained in the broiling heat and humidity of New York City. In August, O’Connor left to play Guts Regan in a Connecticut summer-stock production of The Night of January 16th, while Rand remained behind. They had never before been parted. In spite of whatever tensions may have existed between them, she missed him terribly; for much of their marriage, she would feel safe only when he was by her side. They exchanged love letters,