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Authors: Nora Ephron
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earlier to write the script of
The Fountainhead
. (The movie, released in 1949, was not financially successful, but Miss Rand loved it. Not a line of her script was altered. “She told me she would blow up the Warner Brothers lot if we changed one word of her beautiful dialogue,” said producer Henry Blanke. “And we believed her. Even Jack Warner believed her. He gave her a cigar.”) There, she received a letter from a UCLA psychology student named Nathaniel Branden asking about the philosophical implication of her novel. Branden became her disciple—and since his family name is Blumenthal, it is probably no coincidence that his adopted name contains his mentor’s last name. When he, his future wife, Barbara, and the O’Connors moved to New York a year later, Branden became the organizer of a group of Rand devotees who met every Saturday night at Miss Rand’s East Thirties apartment. They were known as the Class of 1943, after The Book’s publication date, and Miss Rand referred to them as “the children.”
In 1957, after
Atlas Shrugged
was published by Random House, Branden opened the Nathaniel Branden Institute and has since graduated twenty-five thousand students schooled in the principles of Objectivism: that individualism is preferable to collectivism, selfishness to altruism, and nineteenth-century capitalism to any other kind of economic system. Those beliefs, which run loose through
The Fountainhead
and run amuck through
Atlas Shrugged
are expounded by Miss Rand and Branden in
The Objectivist Newsletter
, which has sixty thousand subscribers. Objectivists occasionally smoke cigarettes with dollar signs onthem. They quote Howard Roark. Like John Galt, the Roark of
Atlas Shrugged
, Branden is an unabashed capitalist and bills his organization as “profit-making.” Miss Rand is said to wear a gold dollar-sign brooch.
One would have liked to ask Miss Rand about that brooch, but she does not give interviews to nonsympathizers. One would have liked to ask her a number of other questions: how she feels about
The Fountainhead’s
continuing success, how she reacts when she thinks of the people in publishing who said it would never sell, what she does when she opens her royalty checks. Presumably, Ayn Rand laughs.
Makeover:
The Short, Unglamorous Saga of a New, Glamorous Me
I spent about five years throwing desperate hints at magazine beauty editors about my passionate desire to be made over. When it finally happened it was one of the most depressing experiences of—well, if not of my life, then certainly of that month of my life. Like most of my friends who have been overexposed to fashion magazines, I had come to believe that cosmetic and plastic surgery could accomplish anything. Perhaps plastic surgery can—but I am here today, with my long face and drooping eyelid, to tell you that cosmetic surgery can do close to nothing
.
This piece as it originally appeared in
Cosmopolitan
was edited in order to give it a peppy, upbeat ending—a Helen Gurley Brown special. I have restored the original, bleak, dismal, downbeat, depressing one
.
BEFORE
May 1968
Monday
Cosmopolitan
magazine is going to make me over. On Thursday. Don’t know what they’re going to make me over into, but plan to suggest they try for Faye Dunaway. Called husband to tell him news. “That’s great, honey,” he said. “That’s fantastic. Terrific. Really marvelous.” Husband overreacting. Lupe doing my hair. Who, you may ask, is Lupe. Lupe spent summer doing Beautiful People’s hair in Southampton, and when summer ended Beautiful People said, “Lupe, Lupe, we cannot get through the winter without you. You must come to New York.” So he did. “He does all of high society,” said Beauty Editor. “Good,” said I, “because then he is used to coping with only moderately attractive people.” Mark Traynor doing my face. Said Mark Traynor in February issue of
Cosmopolitan:
“First I decided on a woman’s
type
. Is she high
The Fountainhead
. (The movie, released in 1949, was not financially successful, but Miss Rand loved it. Not a line of her script was altered. “She told me she would blow up the Warner Brothers lot if we changed one word of her beautiful dialogue,” said producer Henry Blanke. “And we believed her. Even Jack Warner believed her. He gave her a cigar.”) There, she received a letter from a UCLA psychology student named Nathaniel Branden asking about the philosophical implication of her novel. Branden became her disciple—and since his family name is Blumenthal, it is probably no coincidence that his adopted name contains his mentor’s last name. When he, his future wife, Barbara, and the O’Connors moved to New York a year later, Branden became the organizer of a group of Rand devotees who met every Saturday night at Miss Rand’s East Thirties apartment. They were known as the Class of 1943, after The Book’s publication date, and Miss Rand referred to them as “the children.”
In 1957, after
Atlas Shrugged
was published by Random House, Branden opened the Nathaniel Branden Institute and has since graduated twenty-five thousand students schooled in the principles of Objectivism: that individualism is preferable to collectivism, selfishness to altruism, and nineteenth-century capitalism to any other kind of economic system. Those beliefs, which run loose through
The Fountainhead
and run amuck through
Atlas Shrugged
are expounded by Miss Rand and Branden in
The Objectivist Newsletter
, which has sixty thousand subscribers. Objectivists occasionally smoke cigarettes with dollar signs onthem. They quote Howard Roark. Like John Galt, the Roark of
Atlas Shrugged
, Branden is an unabashed capitalist and bills his organization as “profit-making.” Miss Rand is said to wear a gold dollar-sign brooch.
One would have liked to ask Miss Rand about that brooch, but she does not give interviews to nonsympathizers. One would have liked to ask her a number of other questions: how she feels about
The Fountainhead’s
continuing success, how she reacts when she thinks of the people in publishing who said it would never sell, what she does when she opens her royalty checks. Presumably, Ayn Rand laughs.
Makeover:
The Short, Unglamorous Saga of a New, Glamorous Me
I spent about five years throwing desperate hints at magazine beauty editors about my passionate desire to be made over. When it finally happened it was one of the most depressing experiences of—well, if not of my life, then certainly of that month of my life. Like most of my friends who have been overexposed to fashion magazines, I had come to believe that cosmetic and plastic surgery could accomplish anything. Perhaps plastic surgery can—but I am here today, with my long face and drooping eyelid, to tell you that cosmetic surgery can do close to nothing
.
This piece as it originally appeared in
Cosmopolitan
was edited in order to give it a peppy, upbeat ending—a Helen Gurley Brown special. I have restored the original, bleak, dismal, downbeat, depressing one
.
BEFORE
May 1968
Monday
Cosmopolitan
magazine is going to make me over. On Thursday. Don’t know what they’re going to make me over into, but plan to suggest they try for Faye Dunaway. Called husband to tell him news. “That’s great, honey,” he said. “That’s fantastic. Terrific. Really marvelous.” Husband overreacting. Lupe doing my hair. Who, you may ask, is Lupe. Lupe spent summer doing Beautiful People’s hair in Southampton, and when summer ended Beautiful People said, “Lupe, Lupe, we cannot get through the winter without you. You must come to New York.” So he did. “He does all of high society,” said Beauty Editor. “Good,” said I, “because then he is used to coping with only moderately attractive people.” Mark Traynor doing my face. Said Mark Traynor in February issue of
Cosmopolitan:
“First I decided on a woman’s
type
. Is she high
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