Arianna Huffington: mover and shaper
The Telegraph, 7-Feb-2011
By Mick Brown
Arianna Huffington this week became an internet mogul. Mick Brown examines her unstoppable rise
In a career spanning some 40 years, Arianna Huffington, once described as "the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus", has worn many faces.
She has been an author, polemicist, radio talk-show host, sometime staple of British newspaper gossip columns, a Republican political wife, a failed gubernatorial candidate, a woman who has journeyed across the political spectrum from ardent conservative to committed liberal. Indeed, looking at her CV, it can sometimes seem that Huffington has not so much had several cycles in one life, but several lives – to which can now be added yet another incarnation: media mogul.
This week it was announced that the The Huffington Post, the "internet newspaper" (as she describes it) that she edits, has been acquired by the internet provider AOL in a deal worth $315 million. Founded in 2005 by Huffington and the former AOL executive Kenneth Lerer, the HuffPo – as, excruciatingly, it has become known – has risen from being a marginal voice in the blogosphere to a prominent outlet for liberal opinion, and one of the most influential new-media platforms in America.
The HuffPo mixes content aggregated from traditional news outlets with in-house journalism, usually trumpeted in shouty upper-case headlines, and leavened with the obligatory dosage of celebrity gossip ("Christina Aguilera Totally Messes Up National Anthem"). But much of its following has been generated by a cast of bloggers that has included such disparate figures as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, Scarlett Johansson and Neil Young, as well as Huffington herself.
Its front page yesterday made no pretence at modesty, proclaiming the birth of "A BRAND NEW MEDIA UNIVERSE – Arianna: The Huffington Post & AOL – A Merger Of Visions".
Under the deal, Huffington will be president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media group, which will integrate all Huffington Post and AOL content, including news, entertainment, video and such AOL sites as Moviefone, MapQuest and TechCrunch. It is claimed that the new combined media group will reach 117 million Americans and 270 million globally.
Overnight it makes Huffington one of the major players in the rapidly changing world of global media. It is a position that all who know her say that Huffington will relish.
What Arianna Huffington has always craved is not so much power as influence. It seems that her life's journey has been to get to the centre of the action, wherever that action may be, in the process accumulating as many useful allies as possible. An indefatigable networker and name-dropper, she is on first-name terms with a who's who of American life, from entertainment, politics and business. It would be tempting to say that she has the most compendious Rolodex in America – except that Huffington, of course, does not do Rolodex, instead running her life with three BlackBerries, which she claims to hide in the bathroom at night to ward off temptation.
Huffington was born Arianna Stassinopoulous in Athens in 1950. Her parents had been active in the Greek resistance movement during the war. Her father Constantine was a journalist who edited a resistance newspaper, survived internment in a Nazi concentration camp and later became a publisher and management consultant. When Arianna was 16, her parents separated and she moved to Britain with her mother and her younger sister Agapi to take the entrance examinations for Cambridge. Arianna was duly awarded an exhibition to Girton to study economics.
Displaying the ambition and determination that would become her salient characteristics, she rose to become president of the Cambridge Union, earning herself the unkind sobriquet "Staryanna Comeacroppalos". Chris Smith, the former Labour minister and now Lord Smith of Finsbury, and a contemporary at Cambridge, recalls her as "a very prominent figure", who became known for her habit of leaving her Alfa Romeo parked on double yellow lines, accumulating parking tickets.
"She was very striking and very glamorous, probably more of a socialite than a political figure but the liberal icon she has since become was not very evident in her student days. She was very much of the Right. I was regarded as being of the Left, and therefore the enemy."
After graduating in 1972, she was romantically linked with the Conservative MP John Selwyn Gummer and the journalist Simon Jenkins, before meeting Bernard Levin, The Times columnist and polymath, and the man she would later describe as "the big love of my life". She was 21. Levin was 42. She prepared for their first date by boning up on the latest developments in the Soviet Union and the music of Wagner. The relationship would last eight years, finally ending in 1980 over Levin's reluctance to have children. Following his death in 2004, she described him as her "mentor as a writer, and a role model as a thinker".
Huffington once recalled that Levin used to tell her "that going to bed with him was a liberal education". And education – or rather a furious appetite for self-improvement – has been a Huffington hallmark. At the age of 23 she wrote The Female Woman, a rebuttal to Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch; she has since written serviceable biographies of Maria Callas and Picasso, self-help manuals, spiritual tracts and a novel about Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
With Levin, she became enamoured of the controversial Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the Rolls-Royce loving leader of the "Orange People", who promulgated a melange of traditional spiritual teachings and pop psychology nostrums. She departed from Rajneesh before he was engulfed in scandal, but her enthusiasm for new age thinking has been a constant in her life.
She went on to date Werner Erhard, a former encyclopaedia salesman whose organisation est made him one of the foremost self-help gurus of the 1970s, and she would later become a follower of another new age guru, Roger Delano Hinkins, known as "John-Roger", whose Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness was the subject of a series of exposés in the Los Angeles Times in 1988, in which former members described it as sexually and financially exploitative.
She was reportedly "ordained" as a minister in the movement, and her former husband Michael Huffington, the Republican politician and scion of a Texas oil family to whom she was married for 11 years, would later describe John-Roger as having "more influence on her than anyone else in the world". Much of Huffington's philosophy remains steeped in the conviction that mankind is on the verge of, as she puts it, "a breakthrough in our evolution". She continues to pray, meditate and practise yoga daily and is an ardent exponent of green issues.
Her introduction to Michael Huffington came in 1985. Following the break-up with Levin, she had left London for New York with her mother, heeding the advice of the publisher Lord Weidenfeld to befriend the wives rather than the husbands of the East Coast power-broking elite. It was advice that would ultimately lead to her friendship with the philanthropist Ann Getty, who not only introduced her to Huffington but graciously footed the bill for their wedding in 1986. Henry Kissinger was among the 500 guests, observing that it had everything but ''an Aztec sacrificial fire dance''. Barbara Walters was a bridesmaid. Huffington's ascendancy to the summit of American society was complete.
The couple based themselves in Washington, where Michael Huffington was a deputy assistant secretary of defence in the Reagan administration, before moving to California in 1988 where he ran for, and won, a seat in Congress. In 1994 he ran for a senate seat, exhausting almost $30 million of his fortune but losing. The Republican strategist Ed Rollins, who managed Michael Huffington's campaign, would later describe Arianna as "domineering" and "the most ruthless and ambitious person I'd met in 30 years in national politics".
The couple divorced three years later, with Huffington explaining that "Michael decided that he wanted to go off to Europe and go on a boat, and I wanted to pick up my life and continue writing". The marriage produced two daughters, Christina, 21, and Isabella, 19.
Arianna, meanwhile, was advancing her own entry into politics. In 1995, she became a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank founded by the Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, and hosted a talk-show on a conservative cable-channel, National Empowerment Television.
But she was undergoing a sea change in her political views. In 2003 Huffington entered the California gubernatorial race as an independent against Arnold Schwarzenegger. Her campaign came to a swift close when it was revealed that she had paid only $771 in taxes for the previous two years. (Huffington claimed that the bulk of her income was child-support payments.)
Huffington has attributed her move from Right to Left to a growing belief that the private sector could not solve America's problems. Much of the Huffington Post's rising popularity came from her support for Barack Obama (at least at the time when his popularity was in the ascendant). And while her enthusiasm for Obama has waned, she has remained a strident critic of the far Right and the Tea Party movement - her sentiments summarised in the wordy title of her 2008 book Right Is Wrong: How The Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded The Constitution and Made Us All Less Safe. (Sarah Palin, we may surmise, is not on the Huffington BlackBerry.)
Her merger with AOL, she has promised, will not temper the HuffPo's line. ''Far from changing our editorial approach," she wrote in an editorial yesterday, ''our culture, or our mission, this moment will be, for HuffPost, like stepping off a fast-moving train and on to a supersonic jet. We're still travelling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we're now going to get there much, much faster.''
Quite what this destination might be, she does not specify. But for Arianna Huffington, just getting there quickly has always been the point.
