Talking with Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand biographer
Though Ayn Rand, who liked to flaunt a brooch shaped like a dollar sign, died in 1982, her books are on track to sell 2 million copies this year. Both big novels - "The Fountainhead," and "Atlas Shrugged" - advance her philosophy of objectivism, which argues that the sole purpose of life is to be happy and that reason trumps all.
Or let me rephrase that a bit: The sole purpose of life is for superior men to triumph over stupid men and be assisted by compliant women.
Alan Greenspan was among the many who fell under her spell, as Anne C. Heller relates in her new biography, "Ayn Rand and the World She Made" (Doubleday, $35). Heller refers to the former Federal Reserve chairman as Rand's "most famous follower."
We spoke over lunch recently in New York.
Ron Paul, Rush Limbaugh, Ronald Reagan, Clarence Thomas, Glenn Beck and Ralph Lauren number among Rand's fans. What's the appeal?
For people who are passionate about what seems to me to be an unrealistic view of radical individualism, she makes the strongest possible case. What she lacked was empathy and a sense that there's a social contract.
What did Alan Greenspan mean when he said that Rand put the moral basis under capitalism?
She emphasized the right of each man to pursue his own self-interest, based on the idea that he is an end in himself.
She was a speed freak, addicted to amphetamines for decades. Did that add to her irascibility?Yes, it probably did.
She fell in love with a disciple who was 25 years her junior. Is she the original cougar?
Yes, a literary lion and a romantic cougar. My view is that she tried out a number of people before she got to Nathaniel Branden and he was the first to respond positively.
In "The Fountainhead" she writes that sexually the man "ravishes her as an act of scorn," and that "it's shameful, contemptuous possession." Why the masochistic flavor?
It's everywhere in her books! It's always the man dominating the woman, forcing her to recognize his superior greatness. From the time she began to write in English, she imagined triangles of two or three men and one woman. She finally managed to have it in her own personal life.
In Rand's view, a man has to be attracted to the highest possible woman, so what happens when Branden falls in love with a 23-year-old model and aspiring actress?
If Branden weren't evil, or weak, or a people-pleaser, a second-hander, a thief of her ideas, he wouldn't be in love with this nitwit; he'd be in love with Ayn Rand since she will always be the best woman in the room. That's the beauty of this little formula.
By the end, she was disposing of friends and followers because they weren't toeing the line to her liking. Didn't she wind up almost totally isolated?
Yes, by that time she was a kind of god in her own mind.
