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After I watched this portion of a Mike Wallace’s interview, I came across an almost 15 minute interview of Ayn Rand by a young Johnny Carson in 1967. I am always amazed by her command of language precision–especially when English is her 2nd or 3rd language after Russian and French.
Ayn Rand was always focused, coherent and concise in her public appearances. She did demonstrate, as you note, an impressive command of her second or third language (I think she knew French but I’m not sure). What I also found impressive was Carson. He had studied her writing and philosophy and was respectful without being intimidated. He asked some good questions that gave her a chance to explicate Objectivism.
I don’t remember what I was reading(over 2 decades ago), but I think she was giving a class/lesson and said that she had spent some hours translating a passage(Fr–>Eng) from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo because she did not like the translation by someone else–so I assumed she understood French. With your comment above I googled and found her answer in the Ayn Rand Lexicon:
“The learning of another language expands one’s abstract capacity and vision. Personally, I speak four—or rather three-and-a-half—languages: English, French, Russian and the half is German, which I can read, but not speak.”
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/language.html