American Rhapsody (33 page)

Some men, in their impotent frustration, set up a Web site showing pictures of the occasional cuts and bruises on Bill Clinton's handsome face. Her asshole husband, these men claimed, was Hillary's battered wife.

[16]

The Sorceress from Hell

“Just because you wear a red sweater does not mean you have to wear red lipstick,” Linda Tripp said.

“I understand that,” Monica said. “I would never wear red lipstick to see him.”

She had made a cynical deal with a sexually troubled man, those who loathed her said. She knew what their marriage would be like but married him anyway. What she was really interested in was power, not sex. She was smart, articulate, and politically involved, a star already in college, a fierce debater, an intellectual. She had depth and lofty spiritual inclinations, even suffering the media's arrows when it was revealed she was devoted to a New Age guru. She was tough and resilient, and knew how to play political hardball. She knew how to play personal hardball, too. When the decision was finally made between them to divorce . . . she told those close to her husband . . . that he was . . . gay.

A
s I watched Arianna Huffington trash Bill Clinton during his impeachment crisis, I was certain she was the unwanted result of a thirty-second coupling between Joe McCarthy and Zsa Zsa Gabor. She was everywhere, in print and on the air, dagger in hand, carving him up with her nasal Mediterranean accent, looking elegant in her Carolina Herrera suits and fiery auburn hair. She was “dizzy and nauseated,” she said, by Bill Clinton's actions. “His DNA has been spilled in more places than Starbucks coffee . . . . Leave office he must—prolonging the nation's nightmare is the worst possible thing for the nation . . . . Clinton first vulgarized political leadership and then made the vulgarization respectable . . . . He emptied American politics of all principle and, with the help of his wife and his minions, refined the art of scapegoating . . . . Like a drowning man grabbing on to his rescuer, the president is willing to take the nation down with him. We must not let him . . . . There is nothing wrong with this poor soul [Clinton] that cannot be cured by standing him upside down and shaking him gently until whatever is inside his head—all the bloodless, calculating, truth-twisting equivocations that have worked for him in the past—fall out.”

She set up a Web site called Resignation.com and said, “Take responsibility, Mr. President, for what you have done to your party, your office, and your country.” Arianna made jokes, too: “If Hillary is indicted, can Al Gore become First Lady?” and “Taft kept cows on the White House lawn. Clinton considered having cows there, but Hillary vetoed it. She was afraid Bill would eat them.” Arianna drew up a Christmas gift list for the first family: for Bill, AstroTurf for “the Rumpus Room” at the Clinton library; for Hillary, a Deana Carter CD—“Did I Shave My Legs for This?”; for Chelsea, “Her freshman face book from her father, who has had it since Parents Weekend at Stanford.”

Arianna Huffington? I pondered.
Arianna Huffington
was saying these morally outraged, judgmental things? The same Arianna Huffington who'd hired private eyes to research Maureen Orth, about to do a magazine profile of her? The
same
Arianna Huffington who'd offered to find campaign manager Ed Rollins “companionship” if things weren't right between him and his wife?

This was the same Arianna Huffington who, through the years, had been called “craven and beyond contempt”; “a dangerous Greek Rasputin determined to ride her husband's wealth to political glory at any cost”; “one of the most unprincipled political creatures I've ever encountered”; “a spectacularly dedicated and shameless social climber”; “scheming, indefatigably ruthless”; the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus”; “the Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbers.” Ed Rollins, the warhorse Republican campaign manager said, “She was the most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I'd met in thirty years in national politics—not to mention that she sometimes seemed truly pathological. Her allure and style were only a veneer: The soul of a wily sorceress lurked beneath.”

The Sorceress was born Arianna Stassinopoulos in 1950 in Athens, Greece, the daughter of the publisher of a financial newspaper. She was born into the Greek Orthodox faith and was praying to the Virgin Mary at the age of three. Her parents divorced. At sixteen, she went to Shantaniketah University outside Calcutta to study comparative religion. At seventeen, she moved with her mother to England to prepare for English university exams. They had little money. She got into Cambridge and distinguished herself quickly. She became president of the Cambridge Union, the university's debating society. She was the first foreigner and the third woman to head the university's internationally known debating team. She was brilliant and beautiful—her build was statuesque and her hair fiery red. In her farewell debate, she attacked late seventies feminism for ignoring “a woman's special needs for children and family.” The debate was televised and, with her own quick wit and sexy looks, Arianna became a celebrity in England. George Weidenfeld, her new publisher, gave her some advice: “Don't bother with the men. You'll only make the wives jealous. Concentrate on the key women, and if you play your cards right, you'll be a success.” Her new friend Werner Erhard, the founder of est, also gave her advice: “If you say it, you
are
it.”

Arianna wrote her first book,
The Female Woman,
an answer to Germaine Greer's
The Female Eunuch,
and went out on her first book tour. “Everything went wrong one day. I was on my own. I got to the hotel and there was a line of two hundred GIs checking in, so I had to wait. Then I got into my room, and it was the tiniest little room, a postage stamp that smelled of cigarette smoke, and there I was. I had nothing to do that night, and I had to leave at five in the morning to go on an early morning talk show.” The Sorceress didn't like being alone. The Sorceress didn't like waiting in line to check in. The Sorceress didn't like tiny rooms or cigarette smoke. She didn't like having nothing to do at night or having to get up at five in the morning. The Sorceress was “depressed and in despair,” so she went back to England and went on a water fast. “I wanted to touch the spirit, to be filled by it, that anything that was not spirit or about spirit was an encumbrance.” When she finally stopped fasting, “I could tell the difference between sips full of the various brands of bottled water I had in my flat,” she said.

Taking Weidenfeld's advice, she sought out the company of socially prominent English women and became known for sending flowers after a first meeting. She began a relationship with an elderly columnist for the London
Times.
They went to the opera a lot. She did a BBC television talk show,
Saturday Night at the Mill,
which quickly failed. She explained the failure by saying, “Britain is too conscious of accents.” She was, meanwhile, working on another book—this one about Greek opera diva Maria Callas.

When she went to New York to promote her Callas book, the Sorceress “felt right at home.” The book made a little money—Ari Onassis, she wrote, considered Jackie “cold-hearted and shallow” and was about to divorce her before he died—but she was sued for plagiarism and her publisher had to pay a five-figure amount to settle it. She met and befriended society figures like Barbara Walters and Lucky Roosevelt, President Reagan's chief of protocol. Through Weidenfeld, she met San Francisco social queen Ann Getty. She dated real estate tycoon Mort Zuckerman. She was the Sorceress—charming, smart, witty, beautiful, and sexy. “She's a great, great flatterer and we've all been seduced by it,” Bob Colocello would write in
Vanity Fair.
He also said she was “relentless . . . with the discipline of a religious zealot.” She met Kathleen Brown, the California governor's sister, and did a brief lecture tour with her. She did a piece on Jerry Brown for
People
magazine and then started dating him. The Sorceress who didn't have any money was a socialite. “They gave me the sobriquet of socialite and I earned it,” she would say later.

Arianna was also a minister by then in MSIA, known on the West Coast, where it was centered, as “the Cadillac of cults.” She had met John-Roger, its Christ figure, in 1973 in London. John-Roger, who had once been a night orderly at a psychiatric hospital in Salt Lake City, was inhabited by a spirit named John the Beloved while in a coma after surgery for a kidney stone in 1963. John-Roger said that John the Beloved told him that John-Roger was “the Mystical Traveler Consciousness,” which inhabited the earth once every 25,000 years. The Sorceress liked John-Roger and believed in the Mystical Traveler Consciousness. “He dealt in the only thing that I was really interested in,” she wrote in
Interview.
“Helping people wake up to the spirit inside themselves, to their natural knowing and inner wisdom. I bought his books, I subscribed to his monthly discourses, I went to meditation retreats.” She also tried to help John-Roger find new disciples among her celebrity friends. “I had him thrust upon me by her,” columnist Liz Smith said. “He really sort of gave me the creeps. He wanted to lay hands on me because I had a headache and it was very dismaying and embarrassing to me. And I also thought he was a fake.”

Partly to be closer to John-Roger and partly to be closer to Ann Getty, the Sorceress moved to Beverly Hills in 1984. She was planning another book by then, too, on Pablo Picasso, and Picasso's longtime mistress, Françoise Gilot, now the wife of Jonas Salk, who lived part-time in Southern California. Her friend Ann Getty, meanwhile, wanted to find a husband for her. She even drew up a list of possibilities. In Tokyo one day at a meeting of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, Ann Getty met a man who said to her, “You're so wonderful, do you have any daughters?” And Ann said to him, “I don't have any daughters, but I have a great friend.”

Ann called the Sorceress from Tokyo and told her she'd found the perfect husband for her. His name was Michael Huffington. He was the son of one of the wealthiest men in America. The Sorceress smiled.

Big Roy Huffington was Michael's dad, oilman, wildcatter, hard-drinking, hard-living, larger than life, as Texas as they come, big, macho, cussing up a storm: John Wayne magnified! And Michael was his only son, his one eye so bad, he had to wear a patch over it when he was a kid, scrawny, packing none of the beef that Big Roy had in excess. When Michael was seven years old and Big Roy caught him playing with matches, he took Michael out into the backyard and made him light matches until he'd burned both of his hands. Big Roy did it to him with cigarettes and alcohol, too. You want to smoke a cigarette, kid? Here you go, partner . . . . Until Michael was green . . . until Michael threw up from all the booze. By the time he was fourteen, all he did much of the time was watch TV with his mother, Phyllis, once a beauty queen, now stoking herself constantly with nicotine. Phyllis was such a die-hard Republican, she'd rant and rave at the set if any of those goddamn Commie-loving liberal turkeys said something biased, East Coast, and critical.

Big Roy sent Michael to the Culver Military Academy in Indiana that year, and he was pleased about how Michael did: near the top of his class, a marksman, letters in crew and swimming. The other cadets hated him. He was in charge of busting them for reading
Playboy
and for being late to their barracks. “I even turned in my roommate for being five minutes late to our room. Two days later, he moved out on me. But the point is, I was abiding by the rules.”

After graduation, Michael went to Stanford. He joined the Young Americans for Freedom and stood defending the administration building against antiwar protesters. Big Roy was proud of him. He was drafted but rejected—he was legally blind—in the summer of 1968. As most of Michael's generation was smoking dope and getting high, Big Roy got him a job as a gofer in George Bush's congressional office. Michael had his own apartment and decked it out with
NIXON'S THE ONE
posters. He wore a Spiro Agnew watch; its face showed Agnew flashing the peace sign with each hand. One day, as he was walking with George Bush, the congressman casually put his arm around this nice clean-cut kid . . . and Bush's casual, meaningless gesture moved Michael Huffington like he'd never been moved before. His parents had rarely hugged him.

He went to grad school at Harvard Business. He'd had sex with a woman at Stanford, and in his senior year, he became friends with a guy who told him he was gay. A year later, in the banking business in Chicago, Michael Huffington had sex with a man for the first time. He went back home to Houston and founded an investment bank, and his mother asked him to join the family oil business, Huffco. Michael couldn't say no to his mother, though he saw her only once a month, at a formally scheduled dinner.

He became a vice president of Huffco. A competing oilman said, “He was the typical rich kid who was playing with his father's money. Almost everything he put his hands on failed. He had a refinery and a drilling company that failed. The banks ended up holding the bag. He made a lot of promises to the banks and ruined his reputation.” Michael irritated many employees by banning coffee, which he felt to be unhealthy, from the office. A commercial banker said, “There are a lot of guys who had run-ins with him during negotiations. Some people have the smooth touch and others the bludgeon. He had the bludgeon.”

He converted from Presbyterianism and became an Episcopalian. A friend said Michael talked to him for hours about the existence of God. When his friend wanted to play golf, Michael insisted they keep talking about God. At the same time, he was taking clients to lunch at a topless bar, where they'd paint the women with their fingers. He was also having sex with men, mostly one-night stands, but he had one serious relationship with a man, whose photograph he kept hidden in his apartment. He prayed to God that he not be attracted to men. When he saw a gay man on TV who claimed that he had given up homosexual sex, Michael started to sob. He promised God that he'd never have sex with a man again.