Friday, April 25, 2025
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
NATHANIEL BRANDON'S AFFAIR OF HIS OWN - EVENTUALLY HE ENLISTS HIS WIFE TO KEEP THIS SECRET FROM RAND
Excerpt page 345: ...She turned down modeling jobs to be available to him. He learned "to lie expertly," he wrote, "As I became a master at inventing reasons to be away from the office." .... In early 1964, he reluctantly gave his wife (Barbara Branden) permission to conduct her own affair with an NBI colleague she had grown fond of. He didn't reveal his affair with Patrecia until three years later, when he needed her help in keeping his secret from Rand.
Missy here: Despite almost flaunting it, Barbara took a while to catch on that her husband was having an affair with Patrecia. But in the summer of 1965, she asked Nathaniel for a separation. From 1964-1966, Rand was still counseling the couple in order to help heal their relationship. To me this is all so convoluted. Ayn Rand may have had a philosophy - a theory - that could be applied to therapy but she was not at all qualified just based on her personal involvement with these people. When the separation was announced, she may have hoped this would be when Branden turned to her, but it was not to be.
Excerpt page 347: Brandon stood on a precipice. Should he tell the truth, risking Rand's anger and his own disinheritance, or take up his duties as Rand's lover? He chose a third way, finding other but real incidental ailments to complain of: exhaustion from overwork, trauma from the end of his marriage, fragile self-esteem because of Rand's history of rebuking him, depression, "a sense of (emotional) deadness that made it exceedingly difficult to think of resuming a romance with her," and, somewhat astonishingly at this point, anguish over his second-fiddle status in the triangle with Frank, which had caused him pain in the past, he said, and almost surely would again.....
***
But, he was happy with Patrecia, perhaps more happy that he had ever been. Ayn, perhaps as predicted, tried to find a way to analyze the relationship he had with Patrecia into oblivion.
Excerpt page 349: Gradually, his evasions, inconsistencies, and "drift" became intolerable to the woman for whom logic was tantamount to truth. They began to have explosive arguments.
... The news of the Branden's impending divorce sent shock waves through the concentric circles of Rand's New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington D.C., Toronto, and Chicago organizations...
***
They denied others were involved in the decisions the couples made to divorce. It took three years into the affair, until 1966, that Nathaniel and Patrecia admitted to Barbara that they were going to start having sex! To me, this is a testimonial to the fear of Ayn Rand that Nathaniel must have felt. He seems to have been greatly confused about his feelings.
Perhaps Ayn had also had enough. When there are so many shades of grey, one sometimes starts to see thinks in black or white. Ultimately, but with tremendous anger, she did break with Nathaniel. It was an excommunication.
C 2025 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot All Rights reserved including Internet and International RightsSunday, April 20, 2025
AYN RAND : OUT OF DEPRESSION - WISHING TO RENEW HER AFFAIR WITH BRANDEN BUT HE'S FALLEN IN LOVE WITH A YOUNGER WOMAN
Although Ayn Rand got back to work - and business - and she - and Nathaniel Branden had lectured and created a following of Objectivists, in the early sixties she continued a long-held pattern of accepting others as friends and then discarding them. Her demands and expectations could be too much yet some of them were hurt. She wanted what - and who - she wanted. Though through her depression she and Nathaniel had gone without sex, now, at fifty-eight to his thirty-three, she wanted sex again. They were collaborators on many a business venture and that included monthly newsletters, promotions, tours, publications and speaking engagements. He was considered to be her intellectual heir. He had worked hard. But Nathaniel was no longer the twenty-four year old who had met his literary and philosophical heroine. By 1963 the Brandens, still married after all, moved into the same building as Ayn Rand and Frank O'Connor. But Branden did not want to go back to having an affair with Ayn but initially he agreed they would. Some of her followers would turn against him.
Excerpt page 344: What she didn't now was that, beginning in late 1963, Branden was juggling a new romantic triangle, or rather a parallelogram. As just about the time she decided that she was fully ready to resume sleeping with him, he fell in love with a younger woman - a willowy twenty-three year old fashion model and aspiring actress named Patrecia Gullison.
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Friday, April 18, 2025
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
TWENTY FOUR YEAR OLD NATHANIEL BRANDEN IS SEDUCED BY FORTY-NINE YEAR OLD AYN RAND
Missy here. I wish I could think of Ayn Rand's husband, Frank O'Connor, as her creative muse, but it seems he fulfilled another role in her life, one of unending support - the unselfish one. Nathaniel Branden, though intelligent, educated, and heading for a career as a psychologist, seems to have fallen under Ayn's spell.
Excerpt page 256: Nonetheless, he felt an unfamiliar sense of elation, power, even mastery. The woman with the magnificent eyes and the penetrating mind was looking to him for romance; and when he looked back at her, "the image (of myself) I saw reflected (in her eyes) was that of a god," he later wrote. "I am in love with you, " he said aloud. It was a fiction that would last fourteen years.
It wasn't a conscious fiction, not at first. That they had fallen in love struck them both as philosophically inevitable and romantically and morally correct.
That first afternoon, they told each other that whatever they did they would not hurt each other or their spouses. Rand suggested that the affair would be "nonsexual" in the ultimate sense," meaning that their lovemaking would stop short of intercourse. Brandon agreed, disappointed but also relieved, he recalled. As crusaders for integrity and honesty, they also prepared to present the fact to Frank and Barbara. They decided to ask permission to meet by themselves twice a week....
***
And actually, they all four met. Ayn and Nathaniel claimed that this did not mean they did not also continue to love their spouses. So, as I see it, they altered their relationships and were now in Open Marriage. A couple months later they revamped the agreement to include full sexuality. Barbara also felt that her frustrating sex life with her husband was part of the reason. But Barbara was not well, suffering nightmares and panic. Nathaniel, who was enrolled in a master's degree program at NYU began to play therapist with his wife - and others - using Rand's theories. Evolved a whole language of ideas about a person's psychological state. By my way of thinking, what this all amounted to is psychological abuse of Barbara. If she could not find this change in her relationship with her husband acceptable then she was blamed. Objectivists could not also be Emotionalists, like Barbara.
By the fall of 1958 Ayn herself was depressed despite increasing wealth and being in demand as a speaker and lecturer. She was also having to face literary criticism and took to secluding herself. She remained depressed until early 1961. She smoke and drank coffee. She had also begun using stimulants by prescription and may have used the drugs to lift her mood, loose weight, or get wired. Frank O'Connor didn't desert his wife, but he also withdrew.
Missy
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Sunday, April 13, 2025
Saturday, April 12, 2025
THE FOUNTAINHEAD NOVEL BECOMES A FILM and NATHANIEL BRANDEN COMES INTO THE LIFE OF AYN RAND and HUSBAND FRANK O'CONNOR
Page 211 Excerpt: (Regarding The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand's novel, which she had worked long and hard on, not being hoped for literary hit or the well received film, which premiered in Hollywood in June 1949 and was seen in Warner Brother's theaters after that.)
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
AYN : MRS. FRANK O'CONNOR and FRANK O'CONNOR : MR. AYN RAND : FAME AND FINANCIAL SUCCESS LEAD TO A DIFFERENT LIFESTYLE
Missy here!
She saw him again in the Hollywood branch of the public library, in May 1927... Ayn and Frank began to see each other in the evenings and on weekends... Perhaps for the first time in her life, Rand was transparently, completely happy.... O'Connor probably gave her her first kiss; he was her first and, for a long time, only lover...
Monday, April 7, 2025
Saturday, April 5, 2025
AYN RAND EARLY in HOLLYWOOD : WORKING SUBSISTENCE JOBS and A ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHY
Page 68 excerpt: From mid-1928 until the summer of 1929 - the last summer of the nation's long, carefree era of prosperity before the Great Depression - the girl with the sign of a crown on her forehead worked as a waitress, a department-store clerk, and a door-to-door saleswoman. It was an embarrassing and probably a frightening time for her. At age twenty-two she was without dependable employment in what was still to her a foreign country. She had half-jokingly boasted to family and friends that she would be famous within a year of reaching Hollywood, but for the moment she stood outside the golden circle of that City's opportunities. She had to borrow small sums from her Chicago relatives, and, according to unpunished letters from her parents, for a time on a twenty-five dollar monthly subsidy from them, in order to pay her Studio Club rent. Worst of all, her legal standing in the United States was in jeopardy. While she had been working for DeMille, the director presumably sponsored visa extensions for her with the immigration service, as was the custom in movie industry. Without a permanent job or a powerful sponsor, she had reason to fear that her time in the United States was running out. At one point, things looked so bleak that Anna (her mother) actually urged her to come back to Russia, or at least to return to her relatives in Chicago. Rand of course, refused.
Pride was not a defect of character in Ayn Rand's universe. She concealed her menial jobs from industry acquaintances by working in the suburbs, and she disguised her dire financial condition from O'Connor, who was making ends meet by working in a restaurant alongside Nick and Joe. (His brothers.) She wanted her suitor to see her at her best - that is, to see the woman in Ayn Rand. She already believed, as she would later write, that romance should never be mixed with suffering or pity. Echoing her mother's Victorian maxims, she also thought that a woman should avoid cooking or cleaning in the presence of her lover and steer clear of becoming her lover's pal.....
Friday, April 4, 2025
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
AYN RAND ; LONG MARRIED SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST - KNOWN FOR HER OBJECTIVIST PHILOSOPHY - FRANK O'CONNOR HER HUSBAND - NATHANIEL BRANDON HER MUCH YOUNGER MARRIED PSYCHOLOGIST LOVER
Continue with me this month as we explore these complicated relationships.