The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 49

VIEW Cos Angeles (Times Tuesday, May 3a 1989 Part Jack Smith the Anguish Is Getting There www- I jt 5 I JIIIII Ayn Rand: Fountainhead of a New Fury A New Memoir by Her Ex-Lover Shows Author Did More Than Just Talk About Nonconformity By GARRY ABRAMS, Times Staff Writer Who was Ayn Rand? One man's answer to that question about the enormously popular novelist is making the cash registers sing at New York's Laissez-Faire Books, a mail-order firm specializing in books on libertarian thought Almost 2,000 orders have poured in for an ultra-candid memoir about the late author and champion of untrammeled freedom and capitalism whose work continues to inspire an almost cultlike following. The eager readers want to be among the first to absorb the behind-the-scenes account by her former follower and lover, later excommunicated and driven into the desert by a jealous Rand. The strong response to the tale of secrets, adultery, love, fury, revenge, divorce, death and, yes, ideas has prompted proprietor Andrea Rich to Illlf -k order 1,000 more copies from publisher Houghton Mifflin. Meanwhile, at that conservative bastion, National Review magazine, managing editor Linda Bridges says the book not officially published until June 19 is stimulating gossip about its racy contents. The object of this curiosity and anticipation: "Judgment Day: My Years With Ayn Rand" by Los Angeles psychologist Nathaniel Ayn Rand Dr.

Nathaniel Branden, with his wife, ELLEN JASKOL Los Angeles Times Devers, writes about his relationship with author Ayn Rand. Branden, previously perhaps best known for his books, "The Psychology of Self-Esteem" and "The Psychology of Romantic Love." The book is the second in recent years by a former Rand intimate to detail the life of the novelist, who by almost all accounts was much more complicated than she wanted the world to be. Among other things, Branden's book reports that Rand for many years took daily amphetamines for weight control. The drug use may have stimulated "paranoiac reactions" in the single-minded novelist, he writes. Bookseller Rich believes that a storm over "Judgment Day" and its portrayal of Rand an exponent of reason as a capricious woman of extreme passions is inevitable.

The book "already is controversial," she said. "I have heard of Please see AUTHOR, Page 4 'He didn't make it dirty or anything, but it really shows she was a very important part of his life, not just intellectually Devers Branden Recently we drove down to Temecula, where I was to make a talk to the Friends of the Rancho California Library. The trip opened my eyes to what is happening in what we used to think of as the boondocks. Temecula is about 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles in southwestern Riverside County. It is situated in a valley 15 miles below Lake Elsinore amid stony brown hills.

It is wine country. The air is dry and clear. We took the Santa Ana Freeway to Garden Grove and switched to the Riverside Freeway to Corona. It was midday on a Thursday. The Riverside Freeway was as crowded as the Santa Monica Freeway at 5 p.m.

We crept along from 15 to 30 miles an hour. I wondered, as I always do on crowded freeways, where everybody else was going, and why they didn't stay home. Of course we had a legitimate goal. As we neared Corona, vast tracts of new houses appeared on the hills and in the valleys beside the freeway: mostly large stucco houses in earth tones with red tile roofs. There were seas of them.

Beyond them new ones were going up, now skeletons of raw studs. I wondered who bought them. Did all the people who lived in them commute? Were they retired? Were they rich? Certainly there wasn't enough industry in Corona and the other small towns around to employ them. I remembered that my barber had said he and his wife had grown tired of crime and congestion in Eagle Rock and had moved to Corona. They got up every morning at 4 o'clock to get him to his shop and her to her job in Los Angeles.

He said they didn't mind the drive. They were happy. Did all the people who lived in these thousands of new homes commute? From the ads in The Times' Real Estate section, I knew those houses were out there. They are going up everywhere. In Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, San Diego and in northern Los Angeles counties houses are going up by the tens of thousands.

One day it will be one solid city from Santa Barbara to San Diego. Beyond Corona we took 1-15 past Lake Elsinore and on to Temecula. Not far beyond Elsinore the housing tracts began again. I believe Rancho California is the biggest development in the Temecula area, but there appeared to be others as well. The houses were clustered together in islands.

They infiltrated the valleys. They climbed the hillsides. They were almost all two stories big, boxy, look-alike houses, the architecture Hollywood eclectic. I saw almost no signs of life. Cars were in some driveways, but few people were visible.

Were they all commuters? We bypassed the town of Temecula itself and drove straight to Temecula Creek Inn. Our room overlooked a golf course as green as Ireland. We were to be picked up there by Joyce Scully, president of the Friends of the Library, for the evening meeting. She was on the dot. Having minutes to spare, she drove us around one of the new tracts that was encroaching on the brown hills.

Evidently it was an expensive section. Enormous houses stood isolated on hilltops. The architecture would be hard to define; it seemed to combine French chateau, English Tudor, Pennsylvania farmhouse, California mission and Taco Bell. Some were pretentious beyond belief. A medieval chateau with a sentry tower in the wall.

A castle with stone turrets. A house of gables and towers that looked like the "Psycho" set. They were homes that betrayed the long -restrained fantasies of their owners. I asked Mrs. Scully where that many people with that much money came from.

She had no idea. "There can't be that many chief executive officers," she said sensibly. We drove on to the high school a large collection of plain one-story buildings. Since there was a high school, real people with real families must live in some of those houses. We met in the auditorium.

Mrs. Scully told me the present library was in a storefront, but they had already gone over the top in a $500,000 fund-raising drive for a new one. That seemed to mean there was community, as well as houses. Dinner that night at the Temecula Creek Inn was civilized, and the wine was superb. Book Review arKt ft I I mill i yum II 1 J.

i if HEALTH hp L. KENT WHITEHEAD Lot Angeles Times Amoxicillin is common treatment. si-s hp- iSf 0 1 tl a 1 itiii pi A 1 1 Big House Blues: Jail for Women By CAROLYN SEE Sing Soft, Sing Loud: Scenes From Two Lives by Patricia McConnel Atheneum: 246 pages) Easy to say: This is an extraordinary book, and let it go at that. The wrong thing to say: This is a heartbreaking book, and let it go at that. And probably too dumb to suggest: Everybody should read this book, because the last thing anybody wants to do is what he or she "should" do.

Nonetheless, "Sing Soft, Sing Loud" is extraordinary, heartbreaking, and yes, everybody should read it. Patricia McConnel, according to the author's blurb, "has spent varying amounts of time in jails in El Paso, San Diego, El Centra, Los Angeles, Tijuana and St. Louis. She is an alumna of the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, W. Va." So this is a book about jail, and the women who live there, and how they got there, and how time passes for them, and how they survive.

Reasons, Not Excuses The book is divided into three parts: six short stories centering on a girl named Iva, a perky hooker who keeps getting picked up, and picked up, and fails utterly the one time she tries to break out of the life and get a regular job; nine stories on Toni, a girl far more introspective and maybe more intelligent than Iva, but a girl who has been spewed out of a broken home where her mother doesn't like her, and her father-safe and sound with a second wife and a new set of kids makes occasional, condescending moves to "rescue" his errant daughter by a previous marriage. (Of course, let it be said, if every child disliked by its mother and ignored by its father ended up behind bars, whole cities might find themselves enclosed, and free men and women might live in isolated clusters out near Victorville or Barstow. That is to say, Toni's lack of love and lack of education are not used here as excuses, but only as partial reasons for her emotional paralysis, her lack of self-esteem, even her penchant for getting into trouble as in, why does Toni have a cold? She might have been sitting in a draft, but we can't blame it on the draft for sure, After the short stories, the author offers an impassioned "Afterword" in which she states that "About 95 of the events described in this book actually occurred." Please see BOOKS, Page 6 SCOTT ROBINSON Los Angeles Times Sherry Gordon worried about side effects of antibiotics after her son, Jonathan Pike, developed an ear infection. Kids and Antibiotics Parents, Doctors Worried Sick About Overuse of Wonder Drugs bout with strep throat. His mother, however, retains her concerns about children and antibiotics.

She is not alone. Many parents, physicians and researchers worry about the drugs, which have become as common as a cold in many children's lives. Their prevalance, in part, is a sign of the times, experts said, noting the dramatic upswing in working-parent households and the resulting increases in the numbers of children in day care. "Putting a lot of kids together in day care increases the risk of common communicable diseases at an early age" and, of course, the need for antibiotics, said Dr. Jim McMahon, clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at Stanford University.

Indeed, because respiratory and ear infections seem so widespread among youngsters, some child-care center re-Please see DRUG, Page 3 By JOAN LIBM AN Like many children, Jonathan Pike was 6 months old when he began suffering chronic ear infections. To control the problem, his pediatricians prescribed a constant dose of antibiotics for the boy for two years. "I was very concerned that Jonathan was taking all those drugs," said his mother, Sherry Gordon, who also worried about side effects such as the allergy Jonathan developed to penicillin, and whether, because of his constant early exposure to them, all antibiotics eventually would lose their effectiveness for her child. After Gordon consulted a specialist, Jonathan in December had tubes surgically placed in his ears to help drain fluid from them. Since then, his health has greatly improved, and Jonathan, now 3, has required an antibiotic only once for a Inside View ABBY: A little consideration goes a long way.

Page 2. ANN LANDERS: Understanding the epileptic. Page 8. ASTROLOGY: Sydney Omarr's forecast. Page 6.

BRIDGE: Alfred Sheinwold's column. Page 6. I NTO TH A gala 91st birthday party for Armand Hammer. Page 2..