It began innocently in Russia, where Rand, born Alissa Rosenbaum in 1905, spent her childhood as the daughter of a prosperous Jewish pharmacist in pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg, experienced the Bolshevik Revolution as a teenager, and graduated from university in Lenin’s new USSR. One of the signal contributions of both biographies is to open up this previously ignored but crucial period in Rand’s life. Little Alissa, nicknamed Ayinotchka and sometimes called Ayin by her father (a delicious tidbit from Heller’s research that calls into question all the other theories about the origin of “Ayn”), was a brilliant but socially awkward child who found her escape in books and, later, films. Nothing wrong with that — it would be odd if a novelist did not have an active fantasy life as a child. But you cannot understand Rand the adult until you understand how central those fictional worlds were to her interior life.
Her predilection for faking reality as an adult first emerged in the conflict between the reality of her husband, Frank O’Connor, and her image of him. O’Connor was a handsome bit-part actor Rand met soon after moving to Hollywood in 1927 — in Heller’s words, a “sweet, gallant, stoic, funny, emotionally inexpressive, easily led, and profoundly passive” man who drank too much, was never the one who initiated sex, never brought in much income, and in his own eyes was always “Mr. Ayn Rand.” And yet Rand herself always insisted that O’Connor was a Randian hero in the mold of The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark. It never made any sense to friends who knew them both.
Her idealization of O’Connor had an endearing aspect — Rand genuinely loved him and remained devoted to him through his long, sad decline in old age. But her self-delusion could be hurtful. O’Connor was happiest and most productive on their 13-acre ranch in the San Fernando Valley where they lived in the last half of the 1940s, and was miserable when Rand unilaterally decided they would move to New York in 1951. She always pretended that Frank had hated California too (“You feel the same way, don’t you, Frank?” she would say insistently whenever the subject came up), even though everybody knew — surely including Rand, her friends thought — that the move had caused him lasting pain. That’s called faking reality to protect yourself from acknowledging the consequences of your own actions — a mortal sin in Randian ethics.
There was her 30-year use of amphetamines, beginning with Benzedrine in 1942, as she was rushing to complete The Fountainhead, and continuing with Dexedrine and Dexamyl into the 1970s. Until now it has been described as a two-pill-a-day prescription for weight control, but evidence in Heller’s book indicates that it wasn’t seen that way by everyone. As early as 1945, her then-close friend, journalist Isabel Paterson, was berating her in letters with passages such as, “Stop taking that benzedrine, you idiot. I don’t care what excuse you have — stop it.” Heller presents other evidence that Rand had periods of heavy use in the 1950s and ’60s. But the exact extent of her dependence on amphetamines is peripheral here to the broader self-delusion. As anyone who has had the experience knows, a good way to get a really, really distorted sense of reality is to swallow a couple of Dexedrines. If you want to take them anyway, don’t go around bragging that you never “fake reality in any manner.”
There was her repeated claim that she owed no philosophical debt to anyone except Aristotle. It would be more accurate to say that everything in Objectivism is derivative of ideas that thinkers from John Locke to Adam Smith to Friedrich Nietzsche had expressed before. That’s the way advances come about — in Isaac Newton’s famous words, by standing on the shoulders of giants. But Newton, like other important thinkers, knew it and acknowledged it. By insisting that Objectivism had sprung full blown from her own mind, with just a little help from Aristotle, Rand was being childish, as well as out of touch with reality.
There was her affair with Nathaniel Branden. It began in 1955 with an open declaration to her husband and Branden’s wife that the affair would take place — no faking of reality in that instance — but ended in 1968 with Rand demonstrating beyond doubt that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. She expelled Branden from the Objectivist movement, tried to get a publisher to block publication of one of his books, and falsely alleged financial shenanigans by him, all accompanied by a 53-paragraph statement to her followers about the reasons for repudiating Branden (including the sentence, “I do not fake reality and never have”) that was a deception from beginning to end. That’s called maliciously faking reality to get vengeance and to protect one’s image.
Finally, there was the cult surrounding Rand that developed during the 1960s. Reasoned discourse with Rand became impossible unless you began by accepting her pronouncements about everything — then you could argue the logic of your position. What had been lively back-and-forth explorations of ideas in the early 1950s became sessions at which the students sat at the feet of the master, “shivering, scared children who dared not say the wrong thing lest they incur her wrath,” in the words of John Hospers. The lifelong aspect of Rand’s personality that had fueled the brilliance of her novels, the capacity to imagine the world as she wanted it to be rather than the world as it is, had taken over real life. She had constructed a reality in which, if she so decreed, A was Z, and she lived within it for the rest of her life.
Murray adds that Objectivism has nothing to do with what mesmerizes people about The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.
