AS far back as she can remember, Arianna Huffington says, she has liked to “bring people together.” Around the table in her mother’s one-room apartment in Athens, on hikes near her home in Los Angeles, at the ritziest election parties in Washington. When she was a student at Cambridge, she was fined for having surplus men in her room after hours. “They fined me a shilling per man.” They were talking about politics.
At 55, she discovered the ideal venue for her brand of networking and launched the Huffington Post, an online newspaper. The impressive success of the Post means that, four years on, Huffington is often cited in Top 100 Most Influential Media People lists. But as the site keeps growing, the question of what, exactly, Huffington does and how she does it remains mysterious.
She is by background a biographer, a political analyst, a socialite — supposedly “the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus” — a Republican turned Democrat and, above all, perhaps, although it sounds pejorative, a PR genius, more capable of selling the value of her position than bigger and more established figures. This is partly a question of skill and partly one of style; she is a commanding presence, frequently impersonated on US comedy shows for her deceptively frilly air and hammy Greek accent, a person who stands out amidst the dry, dull voices debating the future of the Internet. In the tearoom of the St Regis hotel in Manhattan, it is hard not to notice that she matches the fittings: all fishpaste and gold, tinkly and expensive, with a vague air of indestructibility. In the early days of the Huffington Post, she had the advantage of being underestimated, but no one makes that mistake now.
Huffington’s approach to her career has always been premised on moving on when something no longer suits her. She grew up Arianna Stassinopoulos outside Athens and was encouraged by her mother to try as many different things as she wanted to. “If I failed, it wouldn’t matter. That was her main ethos about everything. So when I saw a picture of Cambridge in a magazine and said I want to go there and everybody else said you’re crazy, you’ll never get in, my mother said let’s go visit it. And I remember she borrowed the money and we took a plane from Athens to London, took the train and just walked around. We didn’t see anybody.”
Defying expectations, Huffington did go to Cambridge and became president of the Union. She now refers to those years as the most informative of her life, largely due to the “endless discussions about everything” they entailed, although not, perhaps, as endless as the discussions that the Huffington Post would one day facilitate. After Huffington left, she moved to London and met and moved in with the critic Bernard Levin, who became her mentor. He taught her about cliche, she says, and gave her a plaque for her desk that reads, “You can break every grammatical and syntactical rule consciously when, and only when, you have rendered yourself incapable of breaking them unconsciously.” Huffington, of course, has long since moved on from writing; in 1981 she wrote a biography of Maria Callas, followed by one of Picasso, followed by a series of polemical books arguing one political position or another, but the striking thing is that for the last 10 years she has dictated everything — blogs, columns, books — into a voice recorder, transcribing her thoughts and ideas, like a 1990s parody of busy people on the move. It better suits the way her mind works, Huffington says. It might explain the confusion over why, when a collection of George Clooney’s remarks to journalists were cobbled together by the Huffington Post and run under the actor’s byline, he was obliged to point out that speaking and writing aren’t always the same thing.
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