A History of Ayn Rand

0:00The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. Ayn Rand is in the news again. In fact, she's all over the news. She hasn't seen exposure like this since her heyday back in the fabled 1960s. Still, the official reason for the great outburst of coverage Rand received just this past fall, mostly in October and November, was the almost simultaneous publication of two new books on the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller and Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns.

0:52And of course, the very fact that two such books could be published at virtually the same time tells us that Ayn Rand has been pretty continuously getting public attention for the past several years. Otherwise, the authors of these new books would likely never have hit upon the idea of writing about her. They'd never have realized that a book on Ayn Rand, an author who died more than 25 The Theory of Money and Credit

1:48between 800,000 and a million copies each and every year. Atlas Shrugged alone accounted for between 250,000 and 300,000 in sales this past year. Even Johann Hari, the wunderkindt journalist from London, who is, I assure you, no admirer of Ayn Rand. Even Hari conceded The basic story of Rand's life and career is familiar by now, and neither Heller nor Burns has anything new to add to it.

2:37or, it would probably be more accurate to say, nothing of any major importance. They tell essentially the same tale, and they tell it well. Burns tells it a bit more briefly, but I often found myself preferring Heller's longer version of the same story, precisely because it offered more detail. Neither of these books is long. Burns' Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand and the American Right, runs 286 pages, plus acknowledgements An Essay on Sources, Endnotes and an Index Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made runs 413 pages, plus comparable backmatter. It's a difference of about a hundred pages all told.

3:23In both Burns and Heller's versions of the story, Rand is born Alissa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg, Russia in 1905, the daughter of a prosperous self-employed pharmacist. At At the age of 12, in 1917, she witnesses the forced nationalization of her father's business and the expropriation of her family's modest wealth by the newly installed Bolshevik government of V. I. Lenin. At the age of 16, in October 1921, she enters college at the former St. Petersburg University, now, under Bolshevik rule, Petrograd State University. She studies history and philosophy and spends most of her spare time watching movies.

4:10Silent movies, of course. This is the early twenties, after all. She especially favors American movies and daydreams endlessly about somehow escaping Russia and moving to America. At the age of 19, in October of 1924, she graduates from what had now become Leningrad State University, and immediately enrolls in film school at the State Technicum for Screen Arts. A year later, in the fall of 1925, the 20-year-old Alisa Rosenbaum secures permission to leave the Soviet Union for the United States. She plans to visit relatives in Chicago for six months, she tells the Soviet authorities, while attending American Film School to further hone her cinematic and the Soviet Union and produce propaganda films for the greater glory of the Soviet regime. She leaves early in 1926, a little more than two weeks before her 21st birthday, and never returns. She arrives in New York having turned 21 while crossing the Atlantic and spends a few days in the Big Apple before for Catching a Train for Chicago.

5:29By now, she's changed her name from Alyssa Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, and it is as Ayn Rand that she spends six months in Chicago, working on her English and watching silent movies free of charge at a theater on the South Side owned by one of her American relatives. Then she moves on to Los Angeles, where she almost immediately finds work, off-camera Work in the Film Industry. She also meets a struggling young actor named Frank O'Connor, whom she marries at just about the time Alyssa Rosenbaum's visa is due to officially expire. On her wedding day in 1929, Ayn Rand is 24 years old. All this time she has been working on her English and trying to write fiction, short stories mostly, in her adopted language.

6:21Finally, in 1934, when she's 29 years old, something she wrote in English captures the public's attention. Her play, the night of January 16th, after what Anne C. Heller calls a limited, though successful run at the Hollywood Playhouse, is taken to Broadway by a veteran producer and enjoys an even more successful run there. Rand moves to New York late in 1934 to shepherd her play through the production process. While she's there, she submits her first novel, We the Living, for publication. It appears the following year, 1936, not long after her 31st birthday, to mixed reviews and poor sales.

7:10Undaunted, Rand begins work on her next novel, staying on in New York through most of the The Great Depression and all of World War II. She interrupts her work on the novel to toss off a much shorter work, a novella, or novelette, as some have called it, entitled Anthem, which doesn't immediately find a publisher in the United States, but is brought out in England. She returns to her labors on what is now her third novel, the story of an architect who blows up a building that isn't constructed according to his design. It is published under the title The Fountainhead in 1943 when Rand is 38 years old. It becomes an enormous bestseller and is sold to Hollywood for a film adaptation.

7:58Rand is invited to return to the film capital to write the script. She does so, and the resulting film, directed by King Vidor and starring Gary Cooper, Raymond Massie and Patricia Neal boosts the sales of the fountainhead even further. By now, she's living in a two-story steel and glass modernist house designed by Richard Neutra on a 13-acre spread in the northwest San Fernando Valley outside Los Angeles. This is the late 1940s and early 1950s, mind you. There was no Hollywood freeway yet. There was no Golden State freeway. The drive into Hollywood, which today would be done in 15 or 20 minutes, took about an hour to complete.

8:47After Rand finishes the screenplay for The Fountainhead, she works out a deal with independent producer Hal Wallis. She's a half-time screenwriter. She works at home. She comes into Hollywood, as necessary, for story conferences and other meetings. Her husband, Frank, who effectively gave up his acting career when they left Hollywood for New York in 1934 takes up horticulture and establishes a business that sells flowers and flower arrangements to Los Angeles hotels. Meanwhile, Rand begins work on her next novel, the story of a man who leads a strike of all the most intelligent, creative and productive individuals in a near future American society already impoverished by big government run amuck.

9:37Her working title for the novel is The Strike. It will eventually be published in 1957 under the title Atlas Shrugged. But this is nearly a decade in the future. Right now it is 1949, a year after the release of the fountainhead The Film, and the new novel is in the very earliest stages of its development. One day Rand receives a fan letter from a 19-year-old A Canadian named Nathan Blumenthal who is much taken with the fountainhead and wants to learn more about the ideas of the writer who wrote it. Rand ignores the letter, as she often does with letters of its type. A few months later, now a freshman at UCLA, Blumenthal writes again.

10:24This time Rand replies. She asks for Blumenthal's phone number. She calls him. They talk. She invites him to pay her a visit in the San Fernando Valley. He does. The two of them, the 20-year-old student and the 45-year-old novelist, stay up all night, talking philosophy. A week later, Blumenthal returns, this time with his 21-year-old girlfriend, Barbara Weidman, whom he had met in Canada because of their mutual admiration for the fountainhead. The Two couples, Blumenthal and Weedman, Rand and O'Connor, quickly become inseparable. When Barbara Weedman graduates from UCLA in the spring of 1951, she enrolls at New York University for graduate school.

11:13Nathan Blumenthal, still an undergraduate, decides to follow her across the country. He transfers to NYU himself. A few months later, Rand and O'Connor follow. Rand prefers New York to L.A., and though Frank O'Connor really prefers Southern California to New York, he dutifully follows his wife East. He gives up his horticultural career and his flower arranging. He takes up painting and interior design. As Ann Heller told a live audience at the Cato Institute in Washington late in October, it wasn't really Rand who was the wife in her marriage. It was O'Connor. I called the romantic life of Ayn Rand and some other aspects of her life in my mind, my life as a man.

12:02She married a wife and she married a good wife who was loyal to her, who followed her wherever she went, who gave up his own interests in acting primarily and in gardening in order to promote her career because he believed that she was a genius. As Heller sees it, given Rand's goals for herself, things couldn't have been any other way. She came to America to write with a purpose, with a vocation, with a mission, and she accomplished it and she put everything else aside in order to be able to do that. And her marriage had to conform to that pattern, I think. Nathan Blumenthal and Barbara Weidman married in 1953. A year later, Blumenthal legally changed his name to Nathaniel Brandon.

12:51He realized by now how much Ayn Rand enjoyed having young people around her, young people who were students of her ideas, admirers of her fiction, and enthusiastic, loving friends. He began recruiting friends and family members, his sister Elaine and her husband Harry Kalberman, His Cousin Alan Blumenthal, Barbara's Cousin Leonard Peacoff, Barbara's childhood friend and college roommate Joan Mitchell and her boyfriend and later husband Alan Greenspan, the people who came to be known as Rand's Inner Circle. In 1989, 35 years after he had assembled this group, when Brandon talked with CBS Radio's The Theory of Money and Credit in particular.

14:08And so it was an incredibly exciting period for me intellectually. Great conversations, great feeling of growing intellectually by leaps and bounds from month to month, except that at the more personal level, two things were happening, a marriage with Barbara which should not have taken place in the first place, not faulting her and not faulting myself. It just shouldn't have taken place. People make mistakes and God knows we did. And at the same time, the heating up of the relationship between Ion and me, the intensity of the admiration spilling over and getting more and more personal and more and more intimate, until it began to change its whole form from becoming a friendship to beginning to show the signs of becoming a romance, which was rather shocking for everybody concerned.

14:57According to Anne Heller, Brandon is right. No one noticed, no one suspected that any such transformation of his relationship with Ayn Rand was taking place. After the 50-year-old Rand and the 25-year-old Brandon began sleeping together early in 1955, they made a special effort to keep this new development in their relationship a secret from everyone except their spouses, Frank and Barbara, who were pressured into giving their permission for the affair. And their efforts were apparently successful, for again, no one noticed anything amiss. No one suspected anything untoward. In one sense, of course, nothing untoward was going on.

15:43As Anne Heller told her Cato Institute audience in October, this could be seen as merely the traditional behavior of a notable mid-career business executive or professional man. Rand and Brandon were lovers as well as business partners and intellectual colleagues throughout the late 1950s and through most of the 1960s. The period which saw the publication of Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, the establishment of the Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist and the Nathaniel Brandon Institute with its courses of lectures on objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand and related matters.

16:34These were the years of Rand's non-fiction bestsellers, the virtue of selfishness and capitalism the unknown ideal, the years of her regular appearances on network television, the years of her enormous influence on campus. Ayn Rand became a major celebrity during the 1960s, and no small share of the credit for that belongs to Nathaniel Brandon. The time came in the mid-1960s, however, when things could no longer go on as they had been going on. Rand was now in her early 60s, Brandon was in his late 30s, and he had fallen in love with a model, NBI student and aspiring actress in her 20s. When he tried to end his sexual relationship with Rand, she erupted.

17:24She denounced him publicly and pressured the members of her inner circle to do the same. She tried to ruin his publishing prospects. She tried to damage him in any way she could. She never saw him or spoke with him again. She forced the closure of the Nathaniel Brandon Institute. The lecture courses on objectivism and related matters disappeared. Brandons of thousands of students of objectivism all over the country felt that their lifeline had been cut. To some extent Rand had cut it deliberately and was glad she had done so. As she wrote in her public denunciation of the Brandons, I never wanted and do not now want to be a leader of a movement.

18:10I do approve of a philosophical or intellectual movement in the sense of a growing trend among And she had never been particularly dazzled by the majority of the young people drawn to the Nathaniel Brandon Institute lectures. According to Anne Heller, she was not overly impressed with most of them. They struck her as well-meaning, perhaps, but lacking in intellectual depth and quickness. Heller quotes Rand as having said that during the first years of the Nathaniel Brandon Institute, I thought that my fans disappointed and depressed me worse than my enemies.

18:55So the objectivist movement imploded and thousands of movement rank and filers were cast adrift. What became of them? Mostly they drifted into the newly established libertarian movement. I'll have more to say about that next week. This is Jeff Rigenbach.