Barbara Branden on Ayn Rand’s Inner Life and Legacy

As Brian Doherty noted last
night, author and longtime associate of Ayn Rand and major
figure in the development of the broad-based libertarian movement
Barbara
Branden has died at the age of 84. In his eloquent obituary,
Doherty writes that Barbara “Branden was a living and bracing
example of how one needn’t either blindly worship or ignore the
humanity of Ayn Rand to admire and promote her philosophy.”
Branden’s The Passion of Ayn Rand, which focused on the
emotional life of a writer best known for promoting rationality,
was a controversial best-seller that was later turned into a
popular Showtime drama. 

Click above to see Branden discuss Rand and her legacy as part
of Reason TV’s 2009 series Radicals for Capitalism: Celebrating
the Ideas of Ayn Rand. (Watch all
of our Rand-related videos, including interviews with Nathaniel
Branden, the founders of Reason Foundation Bob Poole, Manny
Klausner, and Tibor Machan, behind-the-scenes footage of the making
of the movie of Atlas Shrugged, and more).

The interview with Barbara Branden originally ran on November
10, 2009. Here’s the writeup that accompanied it:

Arguably, no two people were closer to Ayn Rand than Barbara and
Nathaniel Branden, whom Rand once named as her “intellectual heir.”
Indeed, when the Brandens married in 1953, the author served as
bridesmaid (Rand had also urged the pair to wed).

A decade later, the Brandens would collaborate on the first
biography of Rand, Who Is Ayn Rand? In 1986, Barbara published a
second biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand, which eventually was
made into an award-winning Showtime movie starring Helen
Mirren. 

Despite the ruinous and controversial romantic affair between
Rand and Nathaniel Branden and her eventual ouster from Rand’s
inner circle, Barbara still feels fondly for the author of The
Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. As Branden, now 80, recalls in
this Reason.tv interview, “I felt like she’s answering questions
that I’ve been looking for answers for, and nobody’s been giving me
any sort of answer until now.”

Approximately seven minutes. Interview by Seth Goldin, camera by
Alex Manning, and editing by Hawk Jensen.