Miscellaneous Anecdotes about Ayn Rand

At 1960 Yale speech (overfull audience), someone shouted: “under your system, who will take care of the janitors?” She sang out, “Young man: the janitors!” and the hall erupted in laughter. (1, 318)

Following are observations from: Notes from 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand book by Scott McConnell (published 2010)

• Julius Shulman, world-renowned architectural photographer – photographed Rand’s Chatsworth home. Q: Have you met any architects motivated or inspired by Howard Roark? A: Oh, more than that! You’d be surprised how many architects. Don’t forget that every architect in the world read that book. It was one, first, front and center in the life of every architect who was a modern architect. And invariably, many architects would say to me, “Well, you know that Ayn Rand patterned Howard Roark after me?” [Raphael Soriano, Richard Neutra, Greagory Ain. . ] Oh, many people said that!
• Ruth Beebe Hill was a friend who lived in the O’Connor’s Chatsworth home for twenty years after they moved to New Your in 1951. [When she first met Rand:] I told her I had memorized a condensed version of The Fountainhead. [Two hour performances – only using Ayn Rand sentences. She also had done 150 dramatizations of Anthem.] Ayn came to hear me do a dramatization of The Fountainhead for the AAUW, the American Association of University women. . . . at Ayns’s request, nobody knew she was in the audience. The woman sitting next to her, said to Ayn, “God, I didn’t even know about it, let alone read this wonderful book. Have you ever read it?” Ayn later told me that it was one of the top moments in her life, when she could say: “I wrote it!” She was very proud. And the woman turned her head away and almost fainted. She didn’t know what to say or do.” (122)
• Evan Wright, a UCLA student and friend; during his first discussion with Rand: I quoted something to her from Schopenhauer, and she said, “Did you know that later in the same book that you must be quoting from, he contradicted himself?” I was stunned—and still am. I thought, “What am I dealing with here?” she had evidently read all of the philosophers, knew their works and had her own philosophy. I began to realize I had a formidable person to talk philosophy with. (140)
• Al Ramus, television producer, and writer for Mike Wallace: [1958] I had never read Rand, and from everything I knew or thought I knew, she was a foolish figure with some flaky ideas. How could she be anything else, since she wasn’t a liberal? I hadn’t even read The Fountainhead, because my New York crowd considered it a best-seller read only by the lower orders on the IQ scale. But Rand was different, controversial, so I was curious. [So a friend took him to Rand’s apartment where they spent a couple of hours there.] That was a life-transforming experience. As Mike Wallace’s writer, I was always dealing with national and international figures: [e.g.,] Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams, Aldous Huxley; Frank Lloyd Wright and Salvador Dali; Sidney Poitier, bette Davis. Just to name a few. . . . But I had never met anybody like Ayn Rand. She was so brilliant and so perceptive, and her comments were so fresh and original. . . . most prominent writers, political commentators, TV anchors and celebrities sound more or less like echoes of the New York Times editorial page. But there was no similarity between anything Ayn Rand said and the New York Times. I mean, she really shook me to my boots and jarred my liberal assumptions. . . . And then we put her on Mike’s TV interview show, and I was hooked.
• Q: What was the culture’s reaction to Ayn Rand in those years? She was hated by the media, academia, the artistic community. No intellectual figure in America was more loathed than Ayn Rand in those days, because she was so formidable, uncompromising and challenging. They thought she was nuts, wacky, dangerous. And most of them had never read her. They would . . glean an impression from what somebody else said. . . . Mis Rand’s greatest gift to us, along with her books, was the example she set for intellectual courage and integrity. Here was a woman who dared to stand virtually alone against ideas, political systems and cultures that were dominating the planet and had been hallowed by intellectuals for centuries. What heoroism. . . . I doubt whether young Objectivists today can imagine how collectivist and hostile the culture was, back in the 1950s and 1960s. . . . it was almost impossible for an avowed Objectivist or even a conservative to work in the news media. I was lucky . . . writing for Wallace when I was an ardent socialist . . . Within less than two years, I encountered Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged—and poor Mike suddenly found himself with a fire-breathing Objectivist on his hands. I didn’t hide it from anybody, in fact regarded it as a badge of honor. (157-60)
• Scott Stanley, editor of various national conservative journals: Q: What influence do you think Ayn Rand has had? A: I’m sure that, without her advocacy and influence, the free-market economics of Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School would never have gone beyond that small coterie of lower-case libertarians associated in the 1950s . . . What she did was to lead free-market economics out of the stuffy business community and put it into a community of artists and philosophers and intellectuals. And that was vital. They attracted to it a dimension of youthful support, which was vital as well, making it possible to raise up heroes of creativity among the business leaders who followed the age of mechanics to create electronics and high tech. The lady was a wowser. [!] (202)
• John Ridpath – taught intellectual history and economics at York University in Toronto, lectured on Rand’s ideas and debated in defense of capitalism at universities across No. America and in Europe: Once [Rand] understood any question put to her clearly, she would have no difficulty in answering it completely, including bringing her questioner to see other implications of the question, and even to answering, in advance, ramifications of the discussion she knew the questioner would arrive at later. And all this transpired in a considerate and unthreatening manner, even when—in my own opinion—a questioner had overstepped the boundary of precision and respectfulness. (358)
• Doug Messenger met Rand at public lectures: The morning after the Ford Hall Forum talk, we went to Harvard and sneaked into the breakfast room where Miss Rand was speaking to the Harvard Business School [1968]. She was wonderful. They came and they were as rude as can be to her for the first ten or fifteen minutes, but at the end of the question-and-answer period, she received a standing ovation. She had won them over. . . . I remember that a reviewer of the proceedings wrote, “They came to jeer, but they stayed to cheer.” (381)
• Susan Ludel, friend [married to Leonard Peikoff from 1968-78]: Q: What was [Rand’s] attitude to reading Atlas [Shrugged] herself? A: She was afraid to read it because, no matter what she was doing, if she just wanted to look something up or find something for an article, she would be completely drawn right into the book, as a reader. She would lose herself and put away everything else and want to finish the novel. (3, 407)
• Ken MacKenzie, legislative aide to Congress, 1970s: !n 1973 and ’74 . . . Congressman Phil Crane . . . introduced a bill to legalize ownership of gold, which had been outlawed. . . . I decided it would be good to put in the Congressional Record Alan Greenspan’s article on gold and economic freedom, which had been published in The Objectivist. . . . That amendment got offered, and within a year or two, gold ownership was legalized, and Mr. Greenspan’s article was read into the Record. (462-63)
• Malcolm Fraser, prime minister of Australia from Dec. 1975 – March, 1983; he wanted to meet Ayn Rand at a White House visit in 1976. He was often quoted in the media as saying that Atlas Shrugged was his favorite book and Ayn Rand his favorite author: We’d had in Australia a government that had spent far too much money, who had pretended all problems could be solved by governments waving some sort of a wand, and we had to draw all that back and cut expenditure and reduce government activities. . . . My government was about the first that started to turn back the tide of excess socialist expenditure. . . [When he met Rand at the White House:] She said she was delighted to meet the only head of government implementing the sorts of policies that she was advocating. I took that as a great compliment. (3, 504, 506)
• Raquel Welch was interested in Atlas Shrugged and was hoping to do it as a television miniseries: By the time I arrived in Hollywood in the 1960s . . . I felt I was walking into a totally chaotic situation with no order . . . Because Ayn Rand had a very ordered, logical mind, there was a lot of what she said that appealed to me. . . . [Rand’s books] encouraged me a lot to continue being strong-minded and courageous. I felt like I was a loner and somebody who did have a vision of the kind of woman that I wanted to portray. In many cases, people would want me for a role, physically, but they wouldn’t want my persona. They would want to water the role down and make it cute. I never liked cute women. I always thought that women should be extraordinary and magnificent. (569)
• Louis Rukeyser, internationally recognized and influential economic analyst and commentator. In 1981 he interviewed Ayn Rand in New Orleans on his show Louis Rukeyser’s Business Journal. He had read Ayn Rand’s novels and thought she was on target, “the minute I started reading her:” Well, I don’t know that she influenced me, because I agreed with her. But she certainly was a seminal thinker . . . She was a brilliant thinker, one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century . . . She was ahead of her time. I have a feeling that the future lies with those who believe in freedom; that the twentieth century has, among other things, been the testing ground and discrediting of government as the answer to everyone’s problems, real and perceived. And I would hope that in the twenty-first century we proceed down the road that neither lets the government come in and screw up the economy, as it has shown great capacity to do all over the world, or, on the other hand, turn to government as the house nanny and censor. I think that the philosophy that she put forward is the way of the future. (3, 574)
• Harry Binswanger met Rand in 1964. He has a PhD in philosophy, is an author and editor, including much work with Objectivist publications: Someone told me that a psychologist in her circle used to say, “Ayn doesn’t have a subconscious—it’s all conscious.” . . . What he meant was that everything in Ayn’s brain was accessible to her. She didn’t have any hidden material in there. It was all transparent. None of it was unavailable to her conscious mind. And it was all just logic. Except that it was logic with values. That’s important—it wasn’t cold logic, it was passionate logic (576). After the New Orleans speech in 1981 (shortly before her death) . . . Now, this was to an audience of three thousand “god bugs,” hard-money enthusiasts. Somebody in the audience asked her, “What is the basic reason for a gold standard?” [Instead of giving a typical financial theory answer about why gold is needed,] Ayn said, “To keep the looters’ hands off your savings.” The audience burst into applause. She was the same in 1981 as she was in 1962, in content, in approach and in spirit (579).
• Jack Bungay: Hal Wallis’s assistant, and Miss Rand’s secretary in 1946. Q: Was she high energy, high voltage? A: Oh, high voltage all the time. You wondered, is this battery ever going to wear out? . . She was thinking all of the time. This machine never turned off, never. You could feel this magnetism this dynamo inside this lady that never shut down. . . . and I used to wonder how she could even sleep. I adored her. (60)
• Ake Sandler, professor of political science at Los Angeles State College; Rand spoke to his class in 1950. Q: You said she was the most intelligent woman you have ever met. Could you explain that? A: First of all, the way she looked at you, like she could read your mind and know what you were thinking and talking about. I think her intelligence was so apparent; she seemed to be almost clairvoyant when she looked at something. She could see it very clearly. She was very concentrated, very focused. I have never met anybody that brilliant. (132)
• Larry Abrams (venture capitalist) thought he wanted to be a fiction writer and attended Rand’s fiction-writing class: She had an answer for everything. I had never come across anything like that before or since. People would ask her questions about everything, not just fiction. There was never a time when she couldn’t answer a question, and there was never a time after thinking about it, when I thought that her answer was wrong. . . . Her eyes just held you and you could see the intelligence radiating from them. (194)
• Larry Cole, author, educator, and psychotherapist, was a talk-show host in NYC when he interviewed Miss Rand on his radio show in 1973: Q: What was she like as a guest? I don’t remember using this word before to describe my first impression of anyone: she was delightful. . . . She turned out to just be this really lovely, warm and funny person, and that just knocked me over. [He had read Atlas and other essays of her work.] . . . We had some call-ins, and she was feisty with people who had her wrong. I was surprised by her humor, her willingness to listen and her ease of expression. We had almost an hour together, and it was the most memorable, wonderful fifty-four minutes and forty-eight seconds I can remember. (465)