NATHANIEL BRANDON'S AFFAIR OF HIS OWN - EVENTUALLY HE ENLISTS HIS WIFE TO KEEP THIS SECRET FROM RAND

Nathaniel Brandon and Patrecia Gullison agreed to keep their affair a secret and he thought that their affair would end and not mean much.

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.....

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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...

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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.

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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 pages 340-341: Those who took his side pointed out that he had dedicated himself to her and her ideas from is freshman year in college, was intensely protective of her self-image, and was naturally frightened of her volcanic temper and allegiance to a black-and-white moral universe.  In any case, he later admitted that he didn't love her, not in the romantic sense she meant, and hadn't since before the publication of Atlas Shrugged. (Fall of 1957)  If he appeared to forget her original horror of being "an old woman pursuing a younger man" and was maneuvering to get what she wanted, he was procrastinating. He also told her something that was true: that she was the most important person in the world to him.  He said he needed time to work out the problems in his ten year marriage to Barbara before resuming a romantic relationship with her.  During that early conversation she replied, sighing, "I don't feel fully ready yet, either.  I was just testing your attitude for the future." She offered to counsel the unhappy couple.  He accepted.  For the moment, he was off the hook.

He knew, if she didn't. that it was far too late to begin again.  During the years of her depression, he had behaved toward her as a good son behaves to an ailing mother, except that they occasionally slept together. Yet he had also distanced himself from her. ...

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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Missy here.  Yes Patrecia Gullison was married.  Branden had attended her wedding a year or so earlier. She was youthful but also had attended one of his lectures and was also a bit of a devotee.

Excerpt page 344: Unlike Rand and Barbara, she didn't ask hum to check his premises or overcome his flaws. Unconditional female admiration was a thrilling new experience for him, and he was starving for an extraphilosophical experience of sex.  She was "what Nathan had never had in his life," said Barbara in 2005, "someone who wasn't trying to save his soul."

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