Searching for Answers in the 1961 Death of an Ayn Rand Follower
Joanne O’Connor keeps a three-ring binder as thick as a cinder block to contain the story that echoes through her head. It is stuffed with her research about a young woman she never met who died more than 50 years ago. She has trouble explaining why obsession gripped her so, but she does know: "I had to find out what happened."
Ms. O’Connor is a 61-year-old wedding and events planner who lives with her cat and dog in a small, elegant Kips Bay apartment. Six years ago, she found herself pondering her building’s history, but no one living there remembered much. Nor did her landlord. So she called the Buildings Department while at work one day.
She will never forget the operator’s first words, she says, which set off the investigative odyssey that has consumed her life since.
"Well, she didn’t die there," the man said, "if that’s what you wanted to know."
"Who died where?" she asked.
"The lady," he replied. "She died of a botched abortion. Her name was Vivian Grant." (Picture of Joanne O'Connor at Vivian Grant's grave)
The tragedy involving one of her building’s former tenants occurred in the early 1960s. Most of the characters involved are dead. But at the time, the death of Vivian Grant was widely reported in newspapers across the country. In New York, she shared the front page of The Daily News, smiling primly, in a photo alongside a picture of President John F. Kennedy and headlines on the hijacking of a cruise ship.
Vivian Grant was by most accounts a pretty and ambitious Russian-Jewish 23-year-old from the Bronx who had moved to Manhattan to seize her dreams. But in January 1961 she grew convinced she was pregnant and visited a gynecologist in Queens, Dr. Mandel Friedman. He tried to perform an abortion — then illegal — and she died of an air embolism. The autopsy revealed that she carried no child. "A fatal desperation," read the caption underneath a picture of her in The News.
The story riveted Ms. O’Connor. She raced home to try to learn which of the building’s six apartments Ms. Grant had occupied. In a rickety basement filing cabinet she found an aged ledger and discovered that Ms. Grant was a previous tenant of apartment 2F — her apartment. Ms. O’Connor had been sleeping in Ms. Grant’s former bedroom for years.
"I had been telling myself all day: ‘Not my apartment. It can’t be my apartment,’ " Ms. O’Connor said. "But it was. Somebody was saying hello."
Ms. O’Connor has a penchant for investigation. Her profile photo on Facebook is of Nancy Drew holding a magnifying glass. But Vivian Grant’s story, she says, was different, coming over her "like a force." She has often wondered, "Does Vivian Grant want me to tell her story?"
The coincidences Ms. O’Connor sees, or perhaps chooses to see, are numerous, and she records them diligently, interpreting them as signs that a forgotten story wants to be told. Two years ago, she says, she found Ms. Grant’s last name scrawled on an old piece of tape in a hard-to-reach section of her building’s mailbox. As a teenager she watched "Love With the Proper Stranger," a 1963 movie unrelated to Ms. Grant’s death; in it, Natalie Wood is faced with the decision to have an illegal abortion, and parts were filmed near Kips Bay.
And there’s her cat: a tuxedo she initially had no intention of adopting when she encountered it at a local pet shop five years ago. But weeks passed without anyone buying it, so she took it home. She learned in its release papers that it had been found in the Bronx, a few blocks from Ms. Grant’s childhood home. "This cat was trying to get into my life," Ms. O’Connor said. She named it Vivian Grant.
Joanne O’Connor was born to a nurse and a banker in the Finger Lakes region and, like Ms. Grant, moved to Manhattan to reinvent herself. She has worked as a roller-skating waitress and a hostess at Delmonico’s, and she aspired to be an actress. She is still prone to theatrics, leaping into show tunes during casual conversation. She is now the director of catering and events at the Water Club, where she has worked for 11 years.
After she discovered the dusty ledger, she began spending nights at the library, blurring through old newspaper microfilms and entering a world of "unhelpful librarians." She mined ancestry archives and posted online queries about Ms. Grant’s life on message boards. When she broke a wrist in 2011, she made the best of it, inhabiting a James Stewart in "Rear Window" kind of existence, an invalid who could stay on the phone for three hours on hold. She had many breakthroughs: tracking down the case’s court documents, finding an impassioned letter that Ms. Grant once wrote to a political magazine, and reaching old acquaintances of Ms. Grant as well as Gloria Levine, a first cousin of Vivian’s who lives in Boca Raton, Fla.
Ms. Levine said she had always felt her older cousin’s story fell through the cracks, so she opened up to Ms. O’Connor. "She was gorgeous," she told her over the phone. "Like a movie star. Like a Natalie Wood." From that moment, Ms. O’Connor had a primary source and an avid collaborator.
Vivian Grant was born in 1937 to Anna and Aron Greczka, and her adolescence, Ms. Levine said, was defined by the attention showered upon an only child. Her father owned a beauty salon on Nelson Avenue in the Bronx, and she attended Taft High School. Ms. O’Connor obtained a 1954 Taft yearbook and found Vivian in a class portrait: Dressed in black, she is the only student not smiling. A caption declared her "outstandingly well groomed."
Toward the end of 1960, according to Ms. Levine, Ms. Grant brought an older boyfriend home to meet her parents; it was a pivotal moment in Ms. Grant’s short life.
"There was a huge argument," Ms. Levine said in a recent phone interview. "The parents said, ‘It’s either him or us.’ " Ms. Grant apparently chose him, moving to Manhattan, where she would later start a job as an editor at Dell, the publishing house. According to Ms. Levine, it was one of the last times Ms. Grant’s parents saw their daughter; Mr. Greczka’s hair, she said, turned "white overnight" when his daughter died months later.
It was also in Kips Bay that Ms. Grant was able to fully embrace her passion for the teachings of Ayn Rand, who lived in nearby Murray Hill, famously holding smoke-filled salons for her acolytes, a congregation she dubbed the Collective. A young Alan Greenspan, the future Federal Reserve chairman and a favorite of Rand’s, and Nathaniel Branden, one of her most prominent disciples, would attend. One essay about those times describes how a "typical New York Randian, upon his or her conversion, would leave his parents and find an apartment as close to Rand as possible." The article added that "virtually the entire New York movement" lived within a few square blocks.
Vivian Greczka also changed her name to the more Randian-sounding Vivian Grant, as was customary. Beyond personal accounts of the salon, not much is known of Ms. Grant’s involvement with Rand’s circle; she was most likely Junior Collective and not a part of the circle closest to the author. In any event, it would not be long before her appointment with Dr. Friedman.
One year after Ms. Grant’s death, Dr. Friedman, while out on bail, would perform another fatal abortion, on a woman named Barbara Covington. He was eventually convicted of two counts of manslaughter and sentenced to two to four years. He died in 1980.
But of all the details surrounding Ms. Grant’s death, Ms. Levine said the boyfriend’s identity gnaws at her most: News reports say he took her to Dr. Friedman — indeed, it was reported that the $800 fee for the procedure was returned to him after Ms. Grant’s death. But he was never named.
"Over the years I’ve thought he was a very powerful person because his name was never mentioned in any news articles," Ms. Levine said. She hints darkly that he must have been an influential member of Rand’s inner circle and that members were "sworn to secrecy" after the tragedy. To what extent an intellectual salon in Murray Hill could have manipulated a murder investigation is not clear.
Court documents suggest (in Ms. O’Connor’s reading, at least) that a key witness testified in exchange for anonymity, and when she acquired the case’s documents in Queens, she noted, the court clerk withheld a set of sealed papers. "He pulled it right out of my hand," she said. "There is something in that file not meant for the public."
One cold day this month, I took a train with Ms. O’Connor to Kensico Cemetery, in Valhalla, N.Y.
I live in her neighborhood and have known Ms. O’Connor for some years. Her belief in synchronicity extends even to me. I briefly mentioned her and her cat in a 2012 article for this newspaper about a cat wrangler. I knew then of her research project, and I recently decided to write about it. In Ms. O’Connor’s eyes, the first article was merely the necessary prelude to this one.
"Am I done with the story?" she sometimes asks. "Is the story done with me?"
She took white roses to the graveyard. The anniversary of Ms. Grant’s death was approaching, and she wanted to lay them at her grave, as she has taken to doing since she discovered the burial plot in 2012.
The winter’s first snow had fallen overnight. The graveyard was otherwise empty and blanketed in white, which made for a jarring sight: a lone set of footprints leading directly from the road to Vivian Grant’s grave. Ms. O’Connor erupted into speculation: Could they belong to a certain former lover who never let go of the tragedy of his first romance? It took her a moment to calm down.
She knelt over the grave and dusted off the snow. It read "Vivian Greczka." She placed the roses on the slab.
"Well, Vivian, look who’s here," she said. "It’s me."
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