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FROM NOVELIST TO PHILOSOPHER, 1944–1957
that, but there was still a certain coldness about her. It was in her personality.
She had her own mind and her own opinions—and that was
that.” 7 Rand sought, with some success, to convert students to her own
point of view. One remembered, “I’d been confronted with 250 different
philosophies, but it was all like a big wheel with its spokes all counterbalancing
each other, and I didn’t know what I thought anymore. She
began removing spoke after spoke after spoke. Finally, the wheel began
to turn. And I turned defi nitely in her direction.” 8 In contrast to the
mature conservatives she had met in New York and Hollywood, Rand
found it easy to make converts out of the young seekers who fl ocked to
her side.
In the group of students that crowded around Rand, Nathan
Blumenthal stood out above all others. The connection between them
was immediate. Rand liked him from the start, and Blumenthal had a
simple feeling: “I’m home.” 9 That fi rst evening they dove into conversation,
talking until the sun rose the next morning. It was shades of Isabel
Paterson all over again, but this time Rand’s counterpart was not her
peer, but a handsome young man hanging on her every word. A few
days later Blumenthal returned with Barbara Weidman, his future wife.
Weidman too was entranced by Rand. She gazed into her luminous eyes,
“which seemed to know everything, seemed to say that there were no
secrets, and none necessary.” 10 The couple soon became regulars at the
ranch. Although Rand was always eager to talk philosophy and politics
with her newfound friends, she also listened patiently to Barbara’s personal
troubles in long walks around the property. Chatsworth became a
refuge for the two college students, who found their increasingly rightwing
political views made them distinctly unpopular at UCLA. For her
part, Rand had fi nally found a friendship in which she could feel comfortable.
Blumenthal and Weidman didn’t demand more than Rand
could give, they never challenged her authority, and their appreciation
for her work was a tonic.
An impressionable teenager in search of an idol when they met,
Nathan slipped immediately into Rand’s psychic world. He did not have
far to go, for his basic mentality was strikingly similar to hers. Like Alisa
Rosenbaum, Nathan was an alienated and angry child who felt divorced
from the world around him. Where Alisa had movies, he sought refuge in
drama, reading close to two thousand plays during his high school years.
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