There is only the faintest whiff of perfume about Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, but, oh, how big is the scent of virtue.
Huffington, the titian-haired wife of the newly elected Rep. Michael Huffington (R-Calif.) and the author of controversial best sellers on Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso and friend of Bernard Levin, Ann Getty, Barbara Walters and Mortimer B. Zuckerman, has reinvented herself-again.
This time, Huffington’s goal is the redemption of the Republican Party. If she has her way, greed and selfishness will be banished forever, to be replaced by altruism, compassion and the “kindler, gentler” world George Bush talked about.
Already, Huffington has convinced her husband, a Republican millionaire whose family made its money in Texas oil, to contribute his $133,600-a-year congressional salary to a charitable venture which she co-founded in Santa Barbara, Calif., Partnership for Children of Santa Barbara County, a children’s advocacy group.
What’s her motive? Is there a power vacuum in Democratic D.C. that she can exploit? Will she be a Republican Pamela Harriman, keeping the social fires lighted until a GOP return to power?
“I think the times are different,” Huffington said in a recent interview. She was talking about what she calls the fourth instinct after survival, sex and power.
“The fourth instinct is that longing to find a meaning in life that goes beyond our own preoccupations; basically an instinct that takes us outside of ourselves.”
“The Fourth Instinct,” not surprisingly, is also the title of her latest book, to be published by Simon & Schuster later this year.
Like the god Hermes with whom she identifies, Huffington hustles generosity and justice into the halls of conservatism with the panache of the winged messenger.
See her at the Conservative Summit on the Sunday after the Democrats inaugurated Bill Clinton. Huffington sat patiently at the dais in the Mayflower Hotel’s cream-and-gilt Grand Ballroom, waiting to speak on her favorite topic these days: “Can Conservatives have a Social Conscience?”
During the 2 1/2 hours before she spoke, a restrained smile never left her face, the perfect feminine bookend to five men, including Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.).
Charlton Heston, the master of ceremonies, warmed up the crowd, which was predominantly white and mature.
Heston said he is probably “one of the most politically incorrect people” in Washington: “I am heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, married to the same woman for 49 years and not the recipient of any entitlement of any kind.”
Outside the ballroom, a security guard checked to make sure that no one without a Conservative Summit badge got into the event, as if a town recuperating from a Democratic high would want to crash. But this group perceives itself as besieged.
These were not happy people. You could see it in the tight set of the women’s mouths, in the lowering visages of the men. Their great solace, said John O’Sullivan, editor of the National Review, which sponsored the summit, is that they no longer have to apologize for George Bush.
Huffington was the last to speak.
“I am delighted to be here as a result of the National Review’s new policy to have its panels look more like America!” she proclaimed.
Huffington chastised conservatives who don’t address mounting social problems, “as if even mentioning homelessness or poverty or child abuse would contaminate them.”
She excoriated the idea that happiness was “more acquisitions, more power, more wealth, more fame.”
She denounced conservatives who “display a level of mean-spiritedness that is embarrassing and even chilling. We need unequivocally to dissociate ourselves from them.”
She left her audience cheering.
In an interview a week later, Huffington pooh-poohed the audience’s enthusiasm for the meaner-spirited speakers.
“We have the demons and the angels in us; we’re not of a piece,” she said. “I got applause from those same people. I think it means that people need the right leadership. You can stand up and appeal to the best in people or the worst in them. Let’s not forget, Hitler got elected.”
Huffington may chide, she may scold, but she is never not nice. And though she is a congressional spouse, she feels no compunction to censor herself for the sake of her husband’s career.
Huffington talked about her husband’s election (“When your husband’s very engaged in something, your marriage is better”), showed pictures of the couple’s two daughters and pressed cookies on her visitors.
The 42-year-old author was born in Greece and educated at Cambridge.
Huffington has made a career out of upending conventional views.
She outraged the cultural establishments of two continents with her best-selling 1981 biography of Maria Callas, “Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend,” not to mention being charged with appropriating as her own an unseemly amount of material from earlier books on the diva.
She next moved to the world of art, ruffling the feathers of art mavens with her 1988 biography of Picasso, “Picasso: Creator and Destroyer.” In it, she portrayed the artist’s dark side, showing him to be a ruthless misogynist in private, a man who beat one of his mistresses into unconsciousness and left her lying on the floor.
In 1982, Arianna Stassinopoulos hit the Manhattan social scene like a melteme-one of those dynamic storms that appear out of nowhere each autumn to roil the shallow Mediterranean waters around Greece.
Armed with introductions and advice from everyone from the socialite Fleur Cowles; Lord Bernsteim, the founder of Granada Television; and George Weidenfeld, her publisher, she soon was being squired about by Zuckerman and Edmund (Jerry) Brown Jr.
Getty introduced her to Michael Huffington, a Texas oil heir. Getty paid for the 1986 wedding.
Shortly after the honeymoon her husband was named deputy assistant secretary of defense for negotiations policy, and the Huffingtons moved into a five-story town house in Georgetown. And into this fairy-tale life came tragedy, when Huffington had a miscarriage.
“I had been longing to have a child, but I was determined that the Picasso book would be finished before the baby was born,” Huffington said. “I had not switched gears. The baby was stillborn after five months.
“But Michael and I had an incredible bonding. He spent three days in an Episcopalian monastery and at the end he decided he wanted to sell the oil business and live in California.”
The couple moved into a peach-colored Italian villa in Montecito, just outside Santa Barbara, and produced two daughters, Christina Sofia and Isabella Diane.
“The first day of orientation for congressional spouses was very specific about your husband’s office. I’m not involved, but it was very clear that a lot of wives were very involved. They were involved in the hiring of staff, going on interviews. Of course, wives are involved in the campaign, but I expected to disengage after the campaign.”
Huffington may have disengaged from her husband’s political life, but only to engage in the quest for that last bastion of exclusivity: virtue.
