Jubilee Prosperity

Rand’s potent message could lead to intoxication and even to madness,
as the second half of her life showed. In 1949, Rand was living with
her husband, a mild-mannered former actor named Frank O’Connor, in
Southern California, in a Richard Neutra house. Then she got a fan
letter from a 19-year-old college freshman named Nathan Blumenthal and invited him to visit. Rand, whose books are full of masterful,
sexually dominating heroes, quickly fell in love with this confused
boy, whom she decided was the “intellectual heir” she had been waiting
for.

The decades of psychodrama that followed read, in Heller’s excellent
account, like “Phèdre” rewritten by Edward Albee. When Blumenthal, who
changed his name to Nathaniel Branden, moved to New York, Rand
followed him; she inserted herself into her protégé’s love life,
urging him to marry his girlfriend; then Rand began to sleep with
Branden, insisting that both their spouses be kept fully apprised of
what was going on. Heller shows how the Brandens formed the nucleus of
a growing group of young Rand followers, a herd of individualists who
nicknamed themselves “the Collective” — ironically, but not ironically
enough, for they began to display the frightening group-think of a
true cult. One journalist Heller refers to wondered how Rand “charmed
so many young people into quoting John Galt as religiously as
‘clergymen quote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.’ ”

Inevitably, it all ended in tears, when Branden fell in love with a
young actress and was expelled from Rand’s circle forever. That he
went on to write several best-­selling books of popular psychology
“and earned the appellation ‘father of the self-esteem movement’ ” is
the kind of finishing touch that makes truth stranger than fiction.
For if there is one thing Rand’s life shows, it is the power, and
peril, of unjustified self-esteem.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist for
Tablet Magazine. He is the author, most recently, of “Benjamin
Disraeli.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Kirsch-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

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