Ayn Rand: Fountainhead of a New Fury : A New Memoir by Her Ex-Lover Shows Author Did More Than Just Talk About Nonconformity

Who was Ayn Rand?

One man’s answer to that question about the enormously popular novelist is making the cash registers sing at New York’s Laissez-Faire Books, a mail-order firm specializing in books on libertarian thought. Almost 2,000 orders have poured in for an ultra-candid memoir about the late author and champion of untrammeled freedom and capitalism whose work continues to inspire an almost cultlike following.

The eager readers want to be among the first to absorb the behind-the-scenes account by her former follower and lover, later excommunicated and driven into the desert by a jealous Rand. The strong response to the tale of secrets, adultery, love, fury, revenge, divorce, death--and, yes, ideas--has prompted proprietor Andrea Rich to order 1,000 more copies from publisher Houghton Mifflin.

Meanwhile, at that conservative bastion, National Review magazine, managing editor Linda Bridges says the book--not officially published until June 19--is stimulating gossip about its racy contents.

The object of this curiosity and anticipation: “Judgment Day: My Years With Ayn Rand” by Los Angeles psychologist Nathaniel Branden, previously perhaps best known for his books, “The Psychology of Self-Esteem” and “The Psychology of Romantic Love.” The book is the second in recent years by a former Rand intimate to detail the life of the novelist, who by almost all accounts was much more complicated than she wanted the world to be.

Among other things, Branden’s book reports that Rand for many years took daily amphetamines for weight control. The drug use may have stimulated “paranoiac reactions” in the single-minded novelist, he writes.

Bookseller Rich believes that a storm over “Judgment Day” and its portrayal of Rand--an exponent of reason--as a capricious woman of extreme passions is inevitable.

The book “already is controversial,” she said. “I have heard of people who have decided to stop doing business with us because we’re carrying this book.” When she read it herself, Rich said, “It had me on a roller coaster. Some of it’s almost distasteful. . . . (But) It was thrilling toward the end of the ride.”

The woman whose life raised Rich’s eyebrows became a public figure with the 1943 publication of “The Fountainhead.” In that novel, uncompromising architect Howard Roark destroys a housing project rather than accept modifications to his plans. Fourteen years later, Rand, a militant atheist, really hit the big time with “Atlas Shrugged,” a novel thick enough to stop bullets. The novel was nuked by most critics but nothing could deter its gargantuan success. In “Atlas Shrugged” inventor John Galt instigates a global strike by the world’s economically creative people to bring down the old order wrought by liberals and humanitarians.

In these and other works, Rand, who described herself as “a radical for capitalism,” made herself the darling of conservative and libertarian thinkers, including Nobeleconomist Milton Friedman and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan. Larded with sex as well as politics and economics, Rand’s vast fictions have sold more than 20 million copies and continue to sell briskly seven years after their creator’s death at age 77.

Nathaniel Branden seems at peace with the fact that he may be on the edge of a hurricane of vituperation. Before he even had finished the book, he received warning letters “from lawyers and stuff like that,” he said in his first interview about “Judgment Day.” But he quickly predicted that the wall of clouds on the horizon may contain pure silver.

Three Marriages Later

“I think that the book will evoke a positive response for its drama, for its intrinsic historical and literary interest,” Branden said. “I think on the other hand certain admirers of Miss Rand will be very, very angry because they will see it as an attack on Miss Rand, which is not how I see it. Other people who really are against Miss Rand may see it as a glamorization of Miss Rand. . . . I think that at a more personal level I will almost certainly be criticized for what may be labeled self-theatricalization, or self-dramatization because most people are not comfortable taking their life as seriously as I take mine.”

Branden has a lot to dramatize.

He has been married three times. The first marriage ended in divorce, after years of torment stemming from Branden’s affair with Rand. His second wife, Patrecia, drowned. His current wife, Devers, helped him deal with his grief, then helped him write frankly, he says, about the complex and tangled relationships between Rand and her inner circle.

And that’s not half of it.

However, from the perspective of age 59, Branden seems to have grappled with his improbable and emotional past and made peace with it, partly through writing his memoir.

“For many years, I was pretty hard on myself for the mistakes that I made during that period,” Branden said. “In writing the book, I felt a kind of appreciation for my virtues and strengths of the period that I had kind of lost contact with in the intervening years. I, at times, felt a compassion for myself, which I had not felt previously.”

Returning to the subject later, Branden, his wife at his side, exhibited an uncommon moment of reticence. “This is a terrible thing to say,” he began. “Am I saying this into a tape recorder? . . . I also reconnected with why Rand had fallen in love with me.”

Love for an Author

“Judgment Day” is the story of how Branden at age 14 read one of Rand’s monumental novels, “The Fountainhead,” came under the sway of the author’s vision, later met his idol, became her acolyte and proselytizer and--for 14 tumultuous years--her lover. The adulterous affair--conducted with the assent of Rand’s and Branden’s spouses--with a woman 25 years older was a melodrama that might have been carved from Rand’s gigantic fictions.

To the Russian-born author of “Atlas Shrugged,” Branden was, according to his book, the fleshly counterpart of her imagined heroes. He was a worthy disciple of her philosophy called “objectivism,” which touts reason, personal freedom and capitalism as sources of human fulfillment. In the thrall of her magnetism, Branden developed a blind devotion. He became the “enforcer” who punished the heresies of deviators from Rand’s unbending views. Through the Nathaniel Branden Institute and a newsletter, the psychologist promoted Rand’s ideas in lectures, classes and essays.

But the abrupt end to the affair in 1968 split the tightknit group around Rand. Branden and his wife, Barbara, were drummed out of Rand’s exalted inner sanctum.

It is a controversy even now. In his travels around the country, at cocktail parties and even on all night talk radio shows, people forever are asking him, “What happened between you and Ayn Rand?” he said, adding that is a reason why he wrote his book.

(Barbara Branden wrote a Rand biography, published in 1986, that also recounts many of the events in “Judgment Day.” The L.A. Times reviewer of “The Passion of Ayn Rand” observed that it “holds you with a horrid fascination, makes you snicker out loud, and wake up the person sleeping next to you in the dead of night.”)

Branden’s account of the hermetically sealed Rand circle is unusually frank, too, and the author admits that the tell-all nature of the book was a form of psychotherapy.

“When I was reflecting on these events, I had to look at the fact that I was now asking (of) myself at least as formidable a challenge as the kind I put to my clients and I was adding to it the further challenge of being willing to publish the results,” Branden said. “. . . And I have to say that there was something in the challenge of that kind of self-confrontation, which I found exciting. Whatever the reason is, it was for me ‘could I really keep pushing deeper, could I really keep pushing deeper.’ ”

The Private Details

But Branden admitted that even his capacity for frankness was strained by writing about the most private details of his affair with Rand.

He explained: “Devers read an earlier draft and she said, ‘Nathaniel, this is all very well, this is terrific, but sex is a very important part of this story and you have to tell us more’. . . by the time my agent was making the same statement to me, I realized I clearly was not dealing with something.”

A scene from the book illustrates what Branden was initially reluctant to reveal:

“I recalled the day last winter when, returning to Ayn’s apartment after lunch, I had made love to her in the living room, both of us dressed, Ayn still in her fur coat. I heard myself saying, ‘I’ve always wanted to make love to a woman in a fur coat,’ and her answering, ‘Next time, without the dress, just the coat.’ ”

But the fervor eventually died. Branden, in love with another woman and turned off by the 25-year difference in their ages, tried to end the affair with a letter that provoked Rand into a temper tantrum.

A final confrontation, however, tapped new depths in Rand’s rage. According to Branden, the novelist placed a curse on him as he left her life. “If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health--you’ll be impotent for the next 20 years! And if you achieve any potency sooner, you’ll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation,” Rand storms in “Judgement Day.”

Out in the Open

Devers, who has been married to Branden for 10 years and is a psychotherapist, said she is relieved that her husband’s story is now out in the open. “I’m glad that now they can read it because I think he really glorifies it,” she said. “If you read it, he didn’t make it dirty or anything, but it really shows that she was a very important part of his life, not just intellectually but sexually. He gave Ayn another side that was human and womanly. . . . So I’m glad that its finally out there and they can stop their gossiping and making it dirty.”

She acknowledged her own role in producing “Judgment Day,” adding that helping her husband explore his relationships with three other women was helpful to them both.

“You can’t know your partner until you know his past, so it was not frightening or threatening to me,” she said. “In fact, I learned a lot and actually worked with the relationship. It was a very, very close time for us. . . .To sit and talk that intimately and that openly without hostility, without harassment. . . . It clarified. . . . I’ve been with him through--what?--eight or nine books now and I would say he was happier and more at peace than any other book he’s written. . . . He’s not a man who compares, so he never compared Ayn with Barbara or me with Patrecia. I never felt a challenge or in competition or jealous because the way he told it, he never played any of us against each other.”

Despite the bitter break with Rand, Branden remains an advocate of the ideas she embodied in her novels and other works.

”. . . In this century I don’t know of any writer who was a more consistent or passionate champion of the rights of the individual against the state,” Branden maintained. “So this whole association of her with political authoritarianism of any kind--I heard everything, I heard her called a fascist I also heard her called a communist believe it or not--is complete criminal irresponsibility.”

The Influence Remains

But Branden feels that Rand’s influence has trickled down in more fundamental ways.

“Today, more and more people are less and less willing simply to live lives of conformity,” he said, crediting Rand’s emphasis on individualism and “enlightened selfishness” with a role in many of the “self-realization” moments of the recent past.

Others are less charitable about Rand.

Edith Efron, a noted journalist who was briefly in the circle around Rand more than 20 years ago and is a minor character in “Judgment Day,” said in a telephone interview that she was “identified as seriously diseased” by Rand because she “criticized a plot ending of a short story” written by Rand. “Within 24 hours, I was informed I was a very sick and bad person,” she recalled “. . . I remember once being told I was seriously ill because I liked Mark Twain.”

In her opinion, Rand was a deeply flawed “genius” who suffered from “paranoid character disorder” and was “totally isolated from the universe, totally isolated from people,” Efron said, adding, “She was a very, very sick woman. . . .Never have I met anyone so incapable of empathy.”

Efron said Rand’s temper tantrums were daunting. Yet Rand’s complex character, Efron said, was not entirely odious.

“Ayn Rand, if she chose to, was able to push some kind of button and be transcendentally charming,” Efron said. “. . . She could have had a really interesting, happy life if she had not been such a lunatic.”

Religious Fervor

Joseph Sobran, a conservative columnist and commentator who follows the Rand movement, gave a kinder assessment of Rand, particularly of her influence on young people who read her books with a kind of religious fervor.

“She’s the kind of person it’s possible to be very high on for a couple of years and then discover you’ve sucked the fruit dry,” Sobran said. Her thought, he said, melded “Aristotle, Jefferson, Adam Smith and I don’t know what else” into a blend that proved especially seductive for young adults getting their first taste of life on their own.

“I think she makes her greatest appeal to young people right after adolescence, in early adulthood when they feel free and they don’t owe anything to society except to refrain from vandalism,” he said.

As for Rand, the tormented woman and writer, Branden believes that finally she was consumed by her own creations.

“To some extent she was so passionately involved as a visionary artist in this incredible cosmos that she had created that she did not a lot of the time know how to make the passage back” to reality, he said. Her work “consumed her and I dislike a great many things that she did and a great many choices that she made, but it’s very difficult for me to not feel a great deal of compassion just the same.”