We are in the queue for the ladies’ lavatories and all around Arianna Huffington women are gathering in clusters, exclaiming at the talk she has just given, admiring her hair, telling her she is fabulous. She has just spoken to them about the need to work less and sleep more and they bring forth their own stories from their overburdened lives. “I was in six different cities this week,” one woman tells her. “I flew in from Buffalo this morning and when you said that we are working ourselves to death, I thought, ‘That is my life!’” Another tells her how she is so overstretched that “I went to work last week and didn’t realise until I got there that I had forgotten to put on my skirt! I had to go out and buy one from J Crew!”
Arianna, glamorous, approachable, smiling, laps it up. “I love the story about the skirt!” she says. “You should write about that for us.” It sounds like the sort of invitation you might offer someone to submit to the parish magazine or the company newsletter, though, of course, when Arianna says “us”, she means the Huffington Post, the second most popular news site in the world that she created from nothing and that is now, after a $315 million (Dh1,156 million) deal, part of the AOL empire. “I love getting people to write things,” she tells me. “I find stories everywhere.” And then she gets out a bunch of business cards and starts scattering them around. One goes to the skirt lady, one to the Buffalo lady, one to someone who had just popped in to go to the loo and looks a bit startled.
And then, after a quick lipstick readjustment and a pat of the fabulous hair — blonded, blow-dried, almost supernaturally swishy — she is done. Which is a shame because hanging out in the ladies with Arianna is a masterclass in many things. Her assistant, panicked at the potential disruption to her schedule, sees the queue for the lavatories and says to me: “I’m going to have to find a way to get Arianna to the front of that.” But Huffington doesn’t queue-jump. She waits patiently. She deploys her weapons-grade charm. But then, Arianna Huffington didn’t get to be Arianna Huffington without knowing how to work a room; it is of no import that this one just happens to be the ladies. She had, that morning, already enraptured an audience of high-level corporate women at a private event for International Women’s Day in New York by preaching a mix of self-help, female empowerment and a home-spun, can-do, go girl! chutzpah.
And, despite the fact that she has committed to this interview, and scheduled an hour for it, it turns out that there doesn’t seem to be an hour. Or, at least, I am the hour that is the most dispensable in her supercharged day. Her latest book, “Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Happier Life”, is all about reprioritising one’s work-life balance in favour of life. She has a flight to catch to Los Angeles and, with a sinking feeling, I realise that I am the priority that is rapidly being reprioritised.
“We are doing the interview in the car on the way to the airport,” she says. “Is that right?” “Well, no your assistant said if we ran over we might finish it in the car,” I say, but we are already walking towards the street. “How long does it even take to get to JFK?” I ask, more panicky now. It’s mid-morning. There is no traffic. I wasn’t expecting a heart-to-heart in which we shared our deepest longings for the future and then brushed each other’s hair, but I have questions about love, about life, about death. I have never actually done an interview in a high-speed taxi ride en route to the airport, so I can’t say for sure, but it doesn’t seem ideal. “I have come from London,” I say, helplessly. But there is no swimming against the tide of Huffington’s will. We are already in the car, the driver is smoothly pulling away from the kerb and Arianna is pulling an iPhone and a BlackBerry from her bag.
“Doesn’t this count as multitasking?” I say. “I thought you hated multitasking.”
“No, because I’m not driving,” she says. “Sshh. We will make sure there is enough time.” But first there are phone calls. “I just have to tell you I sent the Ronaldo thing,” she says to one of her multiple assistants. “OK, wonderful. I’ll call Nika when I’m at the airport. I need to talk to her before she talks to Microsoft. Can you tell her that? Did you see the typo in the section that Tom sent? OK, OK. Wonderful.”
And then, suddenly, she is there. Putting her phones into her bag, turning to face me, her hands calmly folded in front of her, ready and waiting for her first question. Except she has just answered all my first questions during the onstage Q&A and there is something about her smooth unruffability, her poise, her world-conquering success that has me sweating and rifling the pages in my notebook.
Arianna looks on patiently. Or maybe pityingly? It is as if she has risen to a higher plane of what it is to be human or at least what it is to be a woman in professional life. She has banished self-criticism. She brushes off failure. In “Thrive”, she writes about her struggle to subdue and contain the voice in her head that she calls her “obnoxious room-mate”.
“How do you do that?” I ask, as I think I really ought to have got my questions in order. “It’s not been completely eliminated,” she says. “The last time I heard it I was doing a TV show and I was running late and I started hearing the voice — ‘You should have left earlier. You always do that. Why did you do that?’ It’s like, that’s the voice. You recognise it?”
I’m still panicking about my next question. Of course I do, I say.
“And, you know it was a legitimate thing, I should have left earlier. But now I can acknowledge something like that without tearing myself down. That’s the difference. It’s like, ‘I made a mistake.’ As opposed to, ‘You are a bad person.’”
But then Arianna’s whole life has been an act of will. She willed herself to Cambridge University, despite growing up Greek and poor with her single mother in a one-bedroom flat in Athens. She willed herself to the presidency of the Cambridge Union. She willed herself on to the national stage, aged 23, with a counter-feminist tract, “The Female Woman” — a counter-blast to Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch”. And it has just gone on from there.
She moved to New York. Married a billionaire oil magnate. Supported his political career. Divorced. Tried her hand at her own political career. Failed. Started a blog. Was ridiculed for creating a silly little vanity site. And went on to turn it into what is arguably the most successful blog of all time, the Huffington Post, a commentary-cum-aggregation site that changed the face of news.
There is something phenomenal about Arianna. As in, she is a phenomenon. Female media moguls didn’t exist until she was invented. Or, more accurately, she invented herself. She has recreated herself so many times that she makes David Bowie look like a slacker. Even her hair has been bent to her incredible will, blow-dried into submission, though it is, she says, naturally “very very curly”.
But then, who can resist Arianna? Her enemies, obviously, of whom there are plenty. Katha Pollitt, the columnist for the Nation, said “I find it amazing anyone would take her seriously” when she launched the Huffington Post in 2005. Ed Rollins, her husband’s political agent, called her “the most ruthless, unscrupulous and ambitious person I’d met in 30 years in national politics”, while an unnamed employee quoted by New York magazine described her as “the stepmother that you just want to love but can’t because you know she’s pure evil”.
But her friends are more numerous. She collects friends. Or, more likely, aggregates them. She is Facebook in fleshy form. “If Arianna wants to be your friend,” said the television host Bill Maher, “I mean, give up. You’re like a weak swimmer in a strong tide.” Barbara Walters interviewed her shortly after she landed in New York and soon found herself jogging with her every morning. Ann Getty introduced her to her husband-to-be, the oil scion Michael Huffington; Henry Kissinger noted that their wedding, attended by Gettys and Roosevelts, had everything “except an Aztec sacrificial fire dance”.
Later, many of these, and dozens of celebrity friends and acquaintances wrote for her for free, burnishing the Huffington name, propelling her on to the international stage, helping her achieve the $315 million sale price to AOL, and the editor-in-chiefdom of its entire media holdings.
And yet. I found “Thrive” unexpectedly moving in parts, despite the awful subtitle, (the Third what?), the self-helpy tone, the summings-up at the end of the chapters, and the examples of corporate naffdom that make me scrawl “bleugh” across it at various points. (The biggest bleugh is when she quotes the chief executive of Whole Foods Market at a “Third Metric” conference she hosts saying: “We must bring love out of the corporate closet.” What?)
Six years ago, she collapsed from exhaustion and found herself “lying on the floor of my home office in a pool of blood. On the way down, my head had hit the corner of my desk, cutting my eye and breaking the cheekbone.”
There was nothing seriously wrong with her. “But doctors’ waiting rooms, it turns out, were good places for me to ask myself a lot of questions about the kind of life I was living.”
In the ensuing months and years, she took up yoga, started practising meditation and, above all, made it her mission to get seven hours of undisturbed sleep a night. She banished electronic devices from her bedroom and “treated bedtime like it was an urgent appointment”. So far, so middle-aged woman or, at least, the kind of middle-aged woman whose New York apartment is big enough to host a conference for 340 people although “we did have to use Jon Bon Jovi’s terrace on the top floor for the reception”.
She holidays with Tina Brown, counts Oprah Winfrey as a friend, thanks Sheryl Sandberg (chief operating officer of Facebook) in her acknowledgements for her line-editing skills and tweets selfies with Twitter’s Biz Stone.
But then, that is the thing about redefining success, I suggest. “Thrive” is a book for women who have already achieved the corner office. The high-flying corporate ladies may have lapped it up but there are an awful lot of people out there simply struggling to get by.
“Well, that’s the point. Whether you’re struggling to put food on the table, or if you’ve just lost your job, the more we can cultivate our own strength and resilience, the more we’ll be able to navigate our lives more effectively.”
It is a pat answer. But she insists it is also true. It is not that she is impervious to criticism. It is more that she is completely permeable to it. It moves through her. “I cry a lot,” she says. And then she moves on. “I deal with it. I don’t internalise it.”
And she has always been prepared to fail. “Women need to be willing to be rejected. Willing to fail. We women, I think, have a harder time with failure. We want to do everything right.”
And actually, it’s Arianna Huffington’s failures that are the most compelling thing about her. “Everything that happened in my life from my children to being here with you now, happened because a man wouldn’t marry me,” she tells the International Women’s Day audience to roars of laughter.
But it is true. The man was the polymath journalist Bernard Levin. When they met, she was 21; he was 42. “I fell in love with his mind. He was my mentor in writing.” But he didn’t want children and she did. And, aged 30, she left him, left London, putting a continent between them although they remained the closest of friends until he succumbed to Alzheimer’s a few years before his death.
There is a lot that has gone Arianna’s way. But there is also quite a lot that hasn’t. She just doesn’t acknowledge it. She treats life, she says, as if “it’s rigged in my favour”. She loved Levin but he wouldn’t, ultimately, give himself to her. She married Michael Huffington — amid Kissingers and Gettys — who did for a time. Until he announced that he was gay and they divorced. And, aged 36, her first longed-for child was stillborn at the age of five months. “I had never known a pain like this,” she writes in “Thrive”. “What I learnt through it is that we aren’t on this Earth to accumulate victories or trophies or experiences but to be whittled and sandpapered down until what’s left is who we truly are.”
Women, in public life, generally, don’t talk about their dead babies, their fertility failures, the men who found them unloveable or rejected them or walked away. They don’t admit to crying in the course of their professional lives. And they don’t talk about the meaning of life, its purpose, what it is all for in the end or not. Every time I note down some particularly vomit-inducing happy-clappy passage in the book, some terrible Huffington Post innovation (I give you the “GPS for the Soul” app), I find myself taken aback by something moving: Huffington’s description of her mother’s death — she refused an ambulance and gathered her family around her on the kitchen floor for a drink; Laurie Anderson’s account of Lou Reed dying in her arms; the shock and pain of finding out her daughter had a drug addiction.
She treats mindfulness like it is the new curly kale superfood and cure for cancer combined, and, if evidence were needed that it has been well and truly bastardised for big business’s gain, she quotes (approvingly) a Rupert Murdoch tweet: “Trying to learn transcendental meditation. Everyone recommends, not that easy to get started, but said to improve everything!” But, ultimately, she is trying to inject a dose of transcendentalism into corporate life, to reshape the world “that men have made”. And to bring some human scale into the modern workplace, although, arguably, it is more about making people happier with their miserable lot than about actually changing the political system that has created that miserable lot in the first place.
And, of course, it does involve a certain amount of contradiction, although for someone whose politics have shifted from Republican to Democrat, this is a trifle. There is a whole chapter in “Thrive” on the importance of giving. She tells how she “tithes” 10 per cent of her income to charity and writes of its transformational qualities. Though if she was so keen on giving, I point out, she could have given some of that AOL money to the Huffington Post’s 9,000 unpaid bloggers.
“I think that this is a misunderstanding of the internet.”
It is?
“Yes, it’s what platforms are. Facebook did an IPO. I don’t think anybody who updates their Facebook profile for free expects to make any money. And when Tumblr sells to Yahoo, I don’t see their users getting any money.”
But content is an essential part of what made the Huffington Post what it is.
“Yes, but every platform is about the content. Tumblr is about the content. Wikipedia is about the content.”
You don’t think it would have been a nice gesture to give something back? A tithe to the poor bloggers?
“No. We’re a combination of journalistic enterprise. And a platform. Nobody made these people blog. They blog because it has a value to them. They want the distribution. They want to be heard.”
She shrugs. But then this has perhaps been her greatest gift: to be both warm and charismatic in person, to have placed her two daughters, Isabella and Christina, now 25 and 23, at the centre of her life, but also to be a hard-nosed businesswoman when required. She has no regrets but then as she tells me, she doesn’t do regrets.
Do you ever look back and wonder what you could have done differently? I ask at one point. “I don’t look back,” she says. Oh, so you are more about looking ahead? “No. I don’t look back. I don’t look forward. I try to just be here, now.”
And then my recorder switches itself off and I have another panic while I try to sort it out and in the two minutes it takes me, she has fished out the BlackBerry and the iPhone (there is another BlackBerry that remains in her bag that is the dedicated hotline to her daughters) and starts emailing and calling. I press record again and obediently she drops them, folds her hands and is ready to go. I have heard about the concept of being “present” before; it is hard to avoid it in a world in which mindfulness is the new Atkins diet, but I have never seen it quite so compellingly illustrated. Her focus is absolute.
There are only a few minutes left. And I want to ask her about Britain. Because what I hadn’t realised until I started researching this interview was how prominent she had been in Britain in the 1970s. I find a piece from 1994 by Brian Cathcart in the Independent in which he says that Arianna Stassinopoulos was “an emblem of Britain in the 1970s to rival Nationwide and the Austin Allegro”. She became the first foreign, and only the third ever, female president of the Cambridge Union, and then ascended, effortlessly, from the Cambridge student stage to the national one. She published “The Female Woman”, her controversialist attack on the women’s movement, which she claimed appealed only to “women with strong lesbian tendencies” and that women might want careers but they wanted children too.
She met Levin when she appeared on the panel show “Face the Music”, became a staple in “Private Eye” (it nicknamed her “the gigantic Greek pudding”). Meanwhile, writes Cathcart, “gossip writers catalogued her companions. John Selwyn Gummer ... who said, ‘I enjoy her company enormously.’ David Mellor, an old Cambridge chum, was said to have sent her poetry. Simon Jenkins [later editor of the Times] was linked romantically.”
It is a weird collision this, to think of Arianna Huffington hanging out with David Mellor and John Selwyn Gummer. To think that Britain was ever large enough to contain her free-ranging ambition. She moved on. Or, as she puts it: “I metabolise experiences quickly.” But even at 21, the Times described her as “glamorous with lots of charm” and noted that she wore “stunning clothes” (the report went on to say the clothes in question were “a mauve ski suit”, but still). She is 63 now and insists she has changed. “I’m much happier than I was then.”
But then, in a way, she is “the Female Woman”. She has had both career and children, though she never remarried and has not been linked with anyone since her divorce. “I focus on what I have,” she says, “not on what I don’t.” On her daughters, her sister, her work, all of which have been there for her, in her life, in a way in which her father, partners, husband haven’t. “I had this conversation with my daughter about a boyfriend after her relationship ended and I said, ‘What do you miss about it?’ And she said, ‘I miss how I felt while I was in that relationship.’ And I said, ‘Well, you can give yourself that.’ She didn’t miss him. She missed who she was. These are all things we can give ourselves. They do not depend on a man ...”
She mentors her daughters constantly, believes “that Madeleine Albright thing of believing there is a special circle of hell for women who don’t help other women”, and her company is a refreshing blast of freedom from female paranoias. She doesn’t just preach female empowerment. She is actually empowered. She doesn’t apologise for herself. In the back of a cab, at John F. Kennedy airport, with the engine idling, I find myself basking in the sunlight of her certainty, her confidence.
And then she is off. “Do you have my personal email?” she asks, opening the car door. “I’ll give you my card.”
I don’t feel that is such a privilege having seen you scattering them around the ladies’ lavatories, I say. And she laughs, but she is already gone. Her focus has moved on. Christopher Hitchens called her ascent to media mogul as her “last chrysalis. The last pupation”. But I wouldn’t be so sure.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
