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"do you have a source?"

I stand corrected. You are right in that my account was NOT accurate but she certainly was a whack-job in her personal life and didn't have a problem with trying to break up marriages, as the below excerpts from this web page show:

"Rand certainly tried to exercise a superrationalistic control in her own life, with disastrous results: Her psychological understanding of people, and even of herself, was clearly and gravely limited. Thus she engineered the marriage between Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, even though (according to Barbara, in The Passion of Ayn Rand) they weren't all that attracted to each other -- their unease was "irrational" to Rand. Then she decided that she and Nathaniel should have some sort of "rational" love affair, like characters in her novels. That Nathaniel was not comfortable with that, especially since they were both already married, does not seem to have mattered. When he finally refused to continue their relationship, Rand furiously expelled him from her "movement" and then scuttled the "movement" itself. That was, curiously, all for the better, since under her control the Objectivist movement was taking on more and more of the authoritarian or totalitarian overtones of the very ideologies it was supposedly opposing.
In another incident, related by the columnist Samuel Francis, when Rand learned that the economist Murray Rothbard's wife, Joey, was a devout Christian, she all but ordered that if Joey did not see the light and become an atheist in six months, Rothbard, who was an agnostic, must divorce her. Rothbard never had any intention of doing anything of the sort, and this estranged him from Rand, who found such "irrational" behavior intolerable. "

Ok, and thanks for the clarification.

Frankly, (heh heh) I am so intensely hostile to Rand that I try hard to keep the full facts straight about her and her life. I wouldn't have been surprised if it was true; how they DID meet and marry is rather a mystery to me.

My own sense is that, as you document well in your small excerpt, she was an utter fruit cake, EXACTLY like K. Marx. And she, like Marx's Dad, was satisfied with her given name .... nope, had to change the name she did, like so many other authors of books that 'change the world'.

I always look at the following: first, did they have a strong dad. Typcial authors like Rand, Hemingway, Marx ... even Frost, it goes on and on ... had a weak/absent Dad, a Fatherless void if you will. Thus the groundwork is laid for totalitarianism.

Then, the wife and kids or husband .... so much ground so much data. Marx and how he treated his daughters, all 3 of which who killed themselves (and did marx ever acknowledge the bastard son from the housemaid? nope, and in fact never even SPOKE to him ... tsk tsk Karl, protector of the proletariat), Hemingway and his shotgun (the letters from Hemingway's Mom to Earnest ... yeeeeechhh!!, Frost and the son who killed himself (Frost: 'every path I took failed with him ...'), and of course Rand and her antipathy to Christian marriage.

The key to so much of 'Modern' thinking doesn't actually live with the so called left. It lives alive in the 'right', the Randians. They are the new Darwinists, but they would hotly deny this.

"...when Rand learned that the economist Murray Rothbard's wife, Joey, was a devout Christian, she all but ordered that if Joey did not see the light and become an atheist in six months, Rothbard, who was an agnostic, must divorce her."

That quote says it all. Atlas Shugged and the Fountainhead bundled together in one quote. Thanks for the excerpt.