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.)

But the larger explanation for the disparity lies within Rand's character. She would not admit that she had written a flawed script.  From adulthood, if not before, she positively refused to consider that she bore significant responsibility for any of the conflicts, failures, or disappointments of her life.  "In all the years I knew her, I never heard her say anything remotely to the effect that she had acted badly, mistakenly, or unfairly," recalled a former friend. As her fame increased and she became conscious of her own iconic stature with readers and audiences, she tended increasingly to fuse her life with the lives of her characters, whose mistakes, if any, arose from ignorance of other's bad intentions and not from a lack of objectivity, diplomacy, or wisdom. She remembered obstacles and disappointments less as ordinary, if infuriating, setbacks than as episodes in a tug of war --- like Roark's *a character who appears to be her idealized man), like Equality 7-2521's - with evil. People and events appeared as black or white. She minimized to the vanishing point the help she had received, failed to mention thinkers who had influenced her, and presented herself as a wholly self-created soul. ..."

Page 219 Excerpt: Of all the readers and viewers of The Fountainhead, however, only one had personal meaning for her, she later said. This was a nineteen year old college freshman named Nathan Blumenthal.  A few years after meeting her, he would legally change his name to Nathaniel Branden.

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Book Review/Report:

Nathaniel Brandon had read the novel for the first time at age fourteen... In the fall of 1949, when the Canadian, who was also of Russian-Jewish heritage, was in his first semester at UCLA, he wrote Ayn Rand and began a correspondence with her. Husband Frank suggested she call the young man and she did, inviting him to visit her at the couple's ranch. She was forty-five and a woman of power and he was a college freshman. They talked for nine and a half hours - all night long - about her philosophy and how to make sense of the world. He was invited to come by again. Ayn considered him to be a genius.

Romantically, Nathaniel Brandon was involved with Barbara Weidman, who was also Canadian and of Jewish heritage, also read and loved The Fountainhead, and also was a student at UCLA. He brought her along to meet and talk with Ayn on the next visit. She too was intellectually stimulated by the conversation and Ayn as an example of an intellectual woman. Meanwhile Frank occupied himself with farming enough to have a somewhat successful business of it.  Ayn and Frank had welcomed so many visits from Nathaniel and Barbara that they began to regard them as, and call them "the children."

I wonder, especially because of reports that Frank never initiated sex with Ayn, if Ayn had ever wanted children.

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Excerpt page 230:  Most intriguing to them was her marriage.  O'Connor, who could have posed for an Esquire ad and who exuded warmth, gentility, and wisdom, was unresponsive to philosophical discussion and even to most books, yet Rand, who usually placed the highest premium on analytical intelligence and self-assertion, called him her "top value."  Seated, she would glance around to be sure he was nearby; she continuously touched him and held his hand.  "Frank is my rock," she told Barbara.  To Nathaniel, she said, "He believed in me when no one else did." and "We have the same sense of life." He was silent because he was "Too disgusted with people to share what he is with the world," she told them...."

In the fall of 1950, Rand began touching Nathaniel, too. She sometimes held his hand as they strolled the grounds and talked about their ideas and her work.  Barbara saw nothing odd in the older woman's affections for Nathaniel.....

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