Certainly Rand was unusually conscious of the commercial value of her name -- her brand -- and protected it fiercely from usurpers. She even had a lawyer on retainer just to pursue people who advertised a John Galt line of curtains or Roark drill bits. The curtains were a real product, by the way.
Given that Alan Greenspan was a member of her coterie and contributor to her newsletter, to what extent should we hold Rand accountable for the economic meltdown?
To what extent can Marx be blamed for Stalin's massacres? I don't like to blame the writers and thinkers for the way the executors use their ideas. That's silly.
It wasn't until last year that Greenspan retracted the arguments for self-interest that he made in the essay "The Assault on Integrity," published in Rand's newsletter The Objectivist in 1963. I find it incredible that he went 45 years without having revised that thinking. Still, the Randians liked him less over time. They think he sold out because he didn't reinstate the gold standard.
Greenspan's reevaluation of his beliefs notwithstanding, are there aspects of Rand's ideas that our current economic leaders should bear in mind?
I think the most important idea may be her emphasis on individual liberties. She viewed the expansion of state power, which most certainly included government economic power, as a bad thing in itself. She believed that it favored some parties over others and stymied innovation and competition. She also believed that government intervention introduces coercion into the marketplace, which threatens freedom. She didn't recognize the social contract or even individual well-being as an important opposing value.
What would Rand have thought of the fortunes being made from Facebook and similar companies?
She would not like people who use such things and might not love the things themselves. But she would say if people are willing to pay for it, then you have a right to the money. Rand idealized the Founding Fathers and the tycoons of late 18th- and 19th-century America. The railroad builders and the steelmakers. The miners and the inventors. She admired big engineering projects. But as she got older, people seemed to get smaller. They were doing smaller things. What she would not have liked is people doing a little arbitrage, earning $250 million, and taking that out of the productive capital of the country.
It's interesting that Rand wrote sweeping epics full of exalted ideas about the ascendancy of man, yet she's almost as famous for her sex scenes.
I think the sex scenes are very appealing to many people. Rand would say that we have been taught that there is a mind-body split. The body's lusts are bad, but the mind can control them. She would argue there is no mind-body split. What your soul longs for, your body longs for, too. If you are a moral person, you desire the best thing you see out there for yourself.
Are the keepers of her flame possessive of her? Did you encounter any resistance or hostility?
The keenest resistance came from the single heir to Rand's property, papers, and copyrights, a former philosophy professor and Rand disciple named Leonard Peikoff. Peikoff remained by Rand's side through her final illness and death in 1982. He is a strict constructionist of Randian ideas and the chief guardian of her legend, which, according to him and his circle of friends, is as the world's best novelist and greatest philosopher after Aristotle.
In 1986, Peikoff's cousin, Nathaniel Branden's ex-wife Barbara Branden, wrote a book that disclosed for the first time the fact that Nathaniel had been Rand's lover as well as her acolyte, although he was 25 years her junior. Peikoff refused to believe this until some years later, when hard evidence turned up. He has not spoken to more than a few outsiders since then, and he would not speak with me or grant me access to her papers.
Both the Brandens were major sources for you. I'm surprised they are not retributive, given her treatment of them.
The Brandens have been publicly attacked by generations of Randian true believers, and they had a story to tell. They met Rand as worshipful undergraduate students in 1951. In my view, Rand engineered the Brandens' disastrous marriage so that she could safely take Nathaniel, then 24, as her lover. She was 49. She browbeat Barbara and her own husband, Frank O'Connor, a passive, gentle man, into agreeing to the affair and keeping it a secret. It lasted 14 years. And when finally, at 38, Nathaniel fell in love with a 23-year-old artists' model and Rand devotee, Rand ousted him, the model, and Barbara from her Objectivist cult and tried to sabotage his career. The Brandens, now divorced and living in L.A., argued to me that her moral absolutism, her appetite for admiration, and her strong cruel streak had damaged them and ruined many others' lives.
The book addresses some other unsavory aspects of Rand's life.
She had a habit of exaggerating her own suffering, and she often forgot to credit those whose ideas she borrowed and who helped her in more material ways. She humiliated her husband. She could be narcissistic, shrill, demanding, untidy, even unclean, and her use of amphetamines exacerbated her angry outbursts, unkempt periods, and paranoia. In later years, she participated in what Barbara Branden called kangaroo trials of her closest followers and seemed to relish punishing them for small infractions. In the end, she suffered from loneliness, a sense of betrayal, and bitterness.
Rand was very similar to her characters in that she was unwavering in her beliefs. In what ways was she unlike them?
She was not fearless. She was certainly not without a desire for recognition and adulation, as Roark and Galt both are. She suffered from depression and once said, "John Galt wouldn't feel this. He would know how to handle this. I don't know," and "I would hate for him to see me like this." Yet she also wrote, at the end of Atlas Shrugged, "I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written -- and published -- is my proof that they do."
