In 1926, Ayn Rand first sighted Frank O'Connor, born in Ohio in 1897, and then twenty-nine, when he was a background actor. He had two brothers settled in Hollywood before he came. He eventually moved into some speaking roles. They were married in 1929, about the time that her Visa was to expire.
Excerpt pages 66-67: There is no doubt that Ayn Rand did stalk Frank O'Connor.... She ambled over to his side, stuck out her foot, and tripped him. He apologized for stepping on her toes, and they exchanged names... Later that day, she waited for him on the weekly parole line, and they spoke to each other again. And then he disappeared for nine long months...
Rand was heartbroken, and obsessed....
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...
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After some financial success due to her screenplay and authorship, in particular her novel The Fountainhead, which kept selling briskly, and after living in a cramped apartment, the couple moved to a house in the San Fernando Valley - Chatsworth - thirteen acres of farmland. The house had been designed for director Josef von Sternberg and his mistress Marlene Dietrich in 1935, a then modern steel and glass design! Frank became a gentleman farmer while they could afford a cook, maid, and handyman. However, despite this new lifestyle, despite having her own office on the studio lot at Paramount where she wrote screenplays, Ayn considered New York City to be her spiritual home, They traveled there on business trips. She was famous now and her confidence was at an all time high. She began to attract young men as friends, was socializing and entertaining politically conservative friends.
In 1951 she told friends they were moving to New York. Soon they were driving cross-country to the city, where a rental apartment had been arranged for them. Maybe Frank believed it was temporary when he left his beloved farm in the care of others - perhaps five years, or seven, but they would never live in California again. Nathaniel Branden and his wife, Barbara, lived in New York.
Excerpt page 237: No one who knew O'Connor believed that he willingly left the San Fernando Valley ranch. "That property was his business and his world," said Hill. "Ayn knew it. There was no way she didn't know how badly she was hurting Frank."
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Frank began working at a florist and took up painting... By 1957 Ayn and Nathaniel were neighbors, spending time with each other two to three times a week, holding hands and hugging good-bye, though they were both married. They were telling others they were "soulmates." It took a while, since these actions were often in front of their spouses, but Nathaniel's wife Barbara finally realized that Ayn was in love with her husband and said so.
Excerpt page 255: ...Now at the height of her mental and emotional power (he was twenty-four and she was forty-nine), she had been rehearsing just such a moment of triangulated passion for at least half her life. Branden, as flattered and incautious as he may have been, was out of his depth. For all his flirtatiousness, he had never really contemplated an actual affair with his literary and intellectual idol, he later said...
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