The thing that began nudging me away from Rand was seeing how people who embraced her values system actually behaved. Years later and well after she had passed away, some biographies began to appear and I got a glimpse into the behavior of the person herself.   Unsurprisingly these random sickening glimpses of the person within are to be found everywhere she went.   In her novel The Charioteer, Mary Renault wrote that “some events are crucial from their very slightness; because circumstances have used no force on them, they are unequivocally what they are, test-tube reactions of personality.”   We leave our mark sometimes where we are least aware of it.   But these light little footsteps on our world are the most authentically us.

For an eyewitness portrait of Ayn Rand in the flesh, in the prime of her celebrity, you can’t improve on the “Ubermensch” chapter in Tobias Wolff’s autobiographical novel Old School.

Invited to meet with the faculty and student writers at the narrator’s boarding school, Rand arrives with an entourage of chain-smoking idolaters in black and behaves so repellently that her audience of innocents gets a life lesson in what kind of adult to avoid, and to avoid becoming. Rude, dismissive, vain and self-infatuated to the point of obtuseness — she names Atlas Shrugged as the only great American novel — Rand and her hissing chorus in black manage to alienate the entire school, even the rich board member who had admired and invited her.

What strikes Wolff’s narrator most forcefully is her utter lack of charity or empathy, her transparent disgust with everything she views as disfiguring or disabling: a huge wen on the headmaster’s forehead, the narrator’s running head cold, the war injury that emasculated Hemingway’s Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.

To the boy, she appears to be exactly the sort of merciless egotist who might have designed a fascist philosophy that exalts power and disparages altruism. Rand is wearing a gold pin in the shape of a dollar sign. After meeting her, he can no longer read a word of The Fountainhead, which as an adolescent romantic he had enjoyed.

The thing that still distresses me most to this day is how she treated her husband, Frank O’Connor, who became a painter after his acting career declined. He did the dust jacket illustration for the first hardbound editions of Atlas Shrugged…the one with the train tracks leading into the tunnel with the huge red stop light above the entrance (if you’ve read the novel you know what it refers to).   Rand’s affair with the younger Nathanial Brandon destroyed both their marriages (never of course, causing her to check her premises about the nature of human emotions), and O’Connor became a recluse in his own little apartment studio.   After he died some friends of Rand entered his studio and found it littered with empty bottles of booze scattered everywhere, and a lot of unfinished paintings.