American Rhapsody (34 page)

He was sitting in Ann Getty's magnificent mansion one night, when Arianna Stassinopoulos walked into the parlor. They were introduced and Michael Huffington asked her what the most important thing in her life was. The Sorceress said, “God.”

He went to New Year's dinner at Arianna's house in Beverly Hills. Shirley MacLaine and Arianna's mother were there with a group of others. The Sorceress passed a crystal magic wand around the table. Everyone had to make a wish. The Sorceress said she wished to be pregnant within the year. Michael Huffington wished that her wish come true. When they were alone, he told her that he had had sex with men. The Sorceress said it made her love him even more.

They were married in New York. “We'd almost given up on you, Michael!” Big Roy toasted. Her bridesmaids were Barbara Walters and Lucky Roosevelt. Everything was paid for by Ann Getty, including Arianna's eighteen-thousand-dollar wedding gown. Among those at the wedding were Henry Kissinger, Norman Mailer, Helen Gurley Brown, and Shirley MacLaine. Kissinger said the wedding “had everything except an Aztec sacrificial fire dance.” She spent her wedding night not with her husband but with John-Roger, giving a moving speech at an MSIA fund-raiser. In an interview shortly after the wedding, Arianna said, “I always knew I would be taken care of. I always felt I wouldn't have to worry about money.”

They honeymooned in the Caribbean and in Europe. Michael was hurt that even during the honeymoon, Arianna was working on her Picasso book. They moved to Washington, where, through Big Roy's influence, George Bush had appointed Michael as his deputy assistant secretary of defense for negotiations policy. His immediate supervisor at the Pentagon, Frank J. Gaffney, would say, “It was a favor from George Bush to the Huffingtons, but it was no favor to the rest of us. The organization continued to toil away under him and in some cases in spite of him. It didn't matter who he was or what he was doing as long as he wasn't doing any damage. His schedule would typically have a lunch on it—and that would sort of be it.” Michael lasted a year at the Pentagon. Arianna worked on her Picasso book. Michael went to the movies a lot alone.

Their son was stillborn and Michael went to an Episcopal monastery for three days with a close male friend. When he got home, he told Arianna he wanted them to move to California. He bought a $4.3 million house in Santa Barbara, but he only saw her there on rare weekends. He was back working for Big Roy at Huffco. Arianna got pregnant again after they saw
Wings of Desire
together. She gave birth to a daughter, Christina. “We put her in a crib next to my bed,” Arianna would later write. “A few moments later, after everyone had left the room, I began trembling convulsively . . . and then my body was no longer shaking. I had left it. I was looking down at myself, at Christina, at the tuberoses on the night stand, at the entire room. I had no fear at all . . . . I knew I would return, and I was being washed in a sense of enormous well-being and strength. It was as if the curtain of heaven had been pulled back to give me a glimpse of wholeness: Birth, life, and death—and seeing them all at once, I could accept them all.”

She published her Picasso book. She was accused of plagiarism again;
Time
magazine called the book “mere fluff . . . best suited for talk show hosts and gossip columnists.” Picasso's daughter Paloma said, “She uses cheap psychology. At a party she looks you right in the eye and asks you questions about your personal life, then tells you it's so interesting you should write a book. Next day she'll send a little present, so you don't forget her.”

In 1990, Big Roy Huffington sold his company for $500 million. Michael's share came to $80 million. In 1991, Arianna gave birth to another daughter, Isabella. She had gotten pregnant after they saw
Jesus of Montreal
together. In Santa Barbara, they started getting involved in California politics. They hosted parties for Pete Wilson and for Bill Bennett. Six months after coming to California, Michael announced he was running for Congress. He was a terrible speaker. He shook and sweated. But he spent $5.6 million of his own money and beat an eighteen-year incumbent.

They bought another home for $4 million in Washington. On the wall of his congressional office, Michael kept a picture of Jimmy Stewart. He told reporters that he cried when he saw
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
“There's a lot in me similar to what the movie represented,” he said. But he hated being a congressman. “There is nothing to do but deal with constituents,” he said. Representative Barney Frank said of his performance as a congressman, “Even when he's around, he isn't.” Michael really wasn't around much of the time. Scheduled to be at an embassy party or at a banquet, he'd sneak off alone to see a movie. He began to hug his male staffers so often that one of them quit. He talked about Washington as a “black hole.”

But the Sorceress prospered. She spent $130,000 of his money to buy a talk show for herself on a conservative television network. She organized celebrity “Critical Mass” dinners. Each dinner had a theme that each guest had to address. “Critical Mass” meant, according to Arianna, “a critical mass of spiritually-inclined citizens who would succeed where the government failed, volunteering time and money en masse to care for the tired and the poor.”

Very rich but sick and tired of being a congressman, Michael went to Greece for a vacation with Arianna and the girls. She was at work on a new book and he climbed a mountain to get to a Greek Orthodox monastery on Mount Athos. He stayed there for three days. He spent the time “praying and just looking over the sea and enjoying the monks.” When he came back off the mountain, he told Arianna he was going to run for the Senate, even though he was only halfway through his congressional term. “I think that's when he had a great sense about the crisis we are facing as a nation,” Arianna said. “We could say—wait!—but these are not normal times.”

“I should have decked her,” Michael Huffington's campaign manager in his Senate race against Diane Feinstein would say later. “And if she were a man, maybe I would have.” The Sorceress's motto, she told Ed Rollins, whom
she
hired, was “Strike first! Strike fast! Strike hard!” Her campaign would cost Michael Huffington $28 million, more than twice the amount previously spent on a Senate seat ($10 million by Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia).

It became quickly obvious to political insiders (and to many outsiders) who the
real
candidate was.
She
debated Michael's primary opponent six times; Michael debated him not once. After two campaign appearances, Michael went to vacation in Hawaii for two weeks while
she
kept hitting the stump. “I'm running against a missing person,” his primary opponent said. “His wife is the one with the ambition, who wants to buy the Senate seat on the way to the White House. Hillary wants to be in the White House for the purpose of making policy for the country. Arianna wants to be in the White House as a way of making a social life.” When it was time for a photo op at a forest fire, Arianna flew in with bottles of Evian water. Barney Klueger, a prominent Santa Barbara Republican, said, “It's his wife who's running, not him. You can call his office with any request, it has to be filtered through his wife.” A columnist for the
San Francisco Examiner
wrote, “Never mind Michael Huffington debating Diane Feinstein on Larry King—I'm waiting for Arianna versus Diane. Eliminate the front man.” A friend of the Huffingtons said, “I think of that thing inside John Hurt in
Alien.
But with better hair. In Michael, she's found a host.” Rollins, the campaign manager, concluded, “The campaign I'd been hired to run was the obsession of his upwardly-mobile wife, not his . . . . When she wasn't seducing me, she was bossing him around. He sat there for the most part like a bump on a log.”

The media tagged Michael “Perot West” when they got wind of how much of his own money he was spending for the campaign, although Rollins said, “Compared to Arianna and Michael, Perot is St. Francis of Assisi.” Rollins concluded that Michael “couldn't relate to average people or their problems. He is awkward, shy, also painfully poor at small talk and public speaking. He is as much of an oddity among the moneyed set as in the political water.” Pete Wilson's press secretary said, “There was a suspicion that Michael was not able to give a speech while Arianna was drinking a glass of water.” Another campaign observer said, “You look into his eyes and you see the back of her head.” A headline read,
HER BRAINS, HIS MONEY
. Michael was described as “a complete cipher who gives empty suits a bad name . . . . A tabula rasa, a man who stands for nothing . . . . A virtual candidate.” Rollins would write that he soon realized “this poor bastard wants to be a senator about as bad as I want to be the Pope. I thought to myself—he hates all of this, he hates fund raising, he hates giving speeches, he hates campaigns, he hates meeting constituents, and if he gets elected, he's going to hate being a senator.”

When Michael wouldn't release his tax records or his personal financial worth, the media attacked him. Rollins told him he had to release the information. “I can't do that,” Huffington told him. Rollins pressed him, but Michael was adamant. “If Arianna knows how much money I have, she'll spend all of it,” Huffington said. The records were never released.

There were constant rumors that Michael was gay, journalistic descriptions like “secretive, strange, elusive, troubled.” Ed Rollins got a case of condoms from a friend with a note that said, “Remember when you're around Mike, protect your ass at all times.” When Rollins asked him if he was gay, Michael didn't deny it. “I'm not going to answer questions like that from you or anybody else,” he said. His response to
Vanity Fair
was, “I'm sorry, I have no comment.” But Arianna denied it vehemently, saying, “That's like saying that Michael is Chinese.” When asked by the
Los Angeles Times
about the congressional staff members he'd hugged, Michael said, “I'm a hugger, so is Bill Clinton.” To himself, he raged at Arianna and John-Roger. He was certain Arianna had told John-Roger that he had slept with men, and he considered John-Roger, as David Brock would later write in
Esquire,
“a spooky man who had a hold on his wife.”

It was John-Roger who gave the campaign its first serious bump. The media not only uncovered Arianna's special closeness to the MSIA messiah but also found male ex-members who said John-Roger had used “spiritual threats and promises” to elicit sexual favors from them. Other ex-members said that those who complied with J-R's sexual advances were promoted to positions of authority and praised for their spiritual qualities. Two former members claimed they had been subjected to hate mail, vandalism, and death threats. The Sorceress said she didn't believe any of it and called John-Roger “an old good friend,” downplaying her ministry in MSIA.

Yet, amazingly, even with John-Roger exposed as a badly tarnished messiah, Arianna's determination and Michael's $28 million almost pulled it off, thanks largely to a barrage of negative television ads designed by the man who'd created George Bush's racist Willie Horton commercials. The fact that Arianna and Michael lost the election finally by two points was due, ironically, to Arianna's own actions. Arianna had hired a nanny in the late eighties, over Michael's objections, who was an illegal alien. When the
Los Angeles Times
broke the story, Michael immediately dropped six points in the polls.

According to Ed Rollins, “Arianna was hysterical. She began babbling about the need for a counterattack.” When Rollins discovered what she meant by counterattack, he almost quit the campaign. She assembled a team of a dozen private eyes to find any illegal immigrant who'd ever worked for Feinstein. Rollins knew by then that she had also hired private eyes to investigate Orth, the
Vanity Fair
writer, and Peter McWilliams, an ex–MSIA member who was writing a tell-all book. “Arianna was utterly out of control,” Rollins would later write, “incapable of listening to me or anyone.”

The Sorceress lost her Senate seat. Michael Huffington told David Brock years later that he was hoping that he would lose.

Back in Washington, Arianna asked Michael to double her monthly allowance for two years so that she could launch a career as a political commentator. He agreed. She began appearing in print, in radio, and on television. She became a director of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank closely tied to Newt Gingrich. She appeared at fund-raisers with Gingrich and urged him in articles to run for the presidency. “Arianna wants to be famous,” a California Republican said. “Her first plan was getting her husband elected. That didn't work. So now she's working the Gingrich crowd. She'll hitch her star to anyone that will help her to get attention.” Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, kept a copy of Arianna's latest book
—The Fourth Instinct—
on a bookshelf in his office, next to his copy of Dr. Seuss's
If I Ran the Circus.

The Sorceress was becoming known in Washington as a lavish hostess, “the Imelda Marcos wanna-be of the New Republican plutocracy.” Michael was seen at these parties, which he was paying for, flicking the lights on and off when he wanted guests to leave. He was meeting gay men at these parties, too, and asking them out to private dinners. When his two-year arrangement with Arianna was up, he told her he wanted them to move back to California.

But the Sorceress wasn't going anywhere. She said she wanted a divorce. She called Michael's mother, his sister, and some of his friends and told them Michael was gay and that she was getting a divorce. Michael went back to California, became a movie producer, and had sex with gay men. He had a lot less money now, but Arianna was out of his life and Big Roy was dead.