There were rumours that he was gay, as there almost always are in such cases. But seen now, with the benefit of hindsight, the magazine profiles of Michael Huffington are studded with nudges and hints of something which, at the time, may have passed without notice, except to those in the know.
This, for instance: "We'd almost given up on Michael," joked his oil millionaire father as he proposed a toast at the wedding of his 39-year-old son and heir to Arianna Stassinopoulos back in 1986. Well, when a man takes the scenic route to the altar it can mean many things, and maybe Roy Huffington's remark at Mike's wedding didn't resonate so suggestively at the time. But it certainly does now, knowing what we know.
Then there were the ambiguous adjectives that friends came up with to describe the mega-rich, mega-conservative (or so it seemed then) and certainly mega-enigmatic Republican Senate candidate for California in 1994. "Secretive" crops up regularly in those profiles. So does "strange". Also "elusive". Sometimes, even, "troubled". With Michael Huffington there was always a mystery, a riddle, something that nobody could quite get. There were always more questions than answers.
He was prone to taking unexplained absences from his office, they said. But where did he go? Some observers had spotted his record of support for gay rights, too. An October 1994 Vanity Fair profile, at the height of his free-spending campaign to win the California Senate seat, called him "the virtual candidate". That same month, a New Yorker profile by Sidney Blumenthal (now a Bill Clinton spin doctor), called him a "tabula rasa", a man who stood for nothing.
Now, however, we can read something distinct on the blank sheet of Michael Huffington's personality. And it is, after all this time, something that he has put there himself, unassisted by campaign consultants, spin doctors and, especially, his former wife. It is his homosexuality. At 51, Huffington has come out. He has done it in yet another long profile, this time in the January 1999 issue of Esquire magazine, in an interview with the journalist David Brock, who himself came out in a 1994 Washington Post interview.
It's a classic, almost cliched story, of an introverted son of an extroverted father. Roy Huffington was a loud man, a large man, and an oil man. He made millions in Texas oil, ignored his family, worked his Republican connections, and planned for Michael to inherit. Michael was bisexual. He had girlfriends at college, and then started having sex with men when he was a young banker in Chicago. In the late 1970s he had "a handful of one-night stands", then a longer-lasting relationship with a man. He was scared, mostly of his father's wrath if he ever found out. And at 33, he vowed never to sleep with men again. He would get married and have children.
At which point, September 1985, cometh the woman. Enter Arianna Stassinopoulos. Even then, Arianna was a spectacularly dedicated and shameless social climber - "the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus", as one journalist dubbed her. During her English years, a quarter of a century ago now, she had made herself a celebrity. She was famous for being president of the Cambridge Union and for dating Bernard Levin, who took her to the opera a lot. But she became notorious by writing an attack on Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. The Female Woman became a best-seller and launched her on a career, which continues to this day, as a rightwing commentator.
Most of Arianna's other books - on Picasso, on Maria Callas, on politics and the horridness of socialism - have been panned by some pretty heavyweight critics. When Philip Toynbee reviewed The Other Revolution in 1978, he felt he was watching "a young woman struggling to get out of a primeval swamp" - and constantly wading back in again.
Critics say her ambitions have always exceeded her talents. She is also an irredeemable social climber, by reputation the kind of woman who will meet a woman at lunch and have flowers delivered to her fashionable Manhattan apartment or stuccoed front door in Knightsbridge next morning.
Her pushiness is legendary and has made her many enemies. When the BBC canned her talk-show, Saturday Night at the Mill in 1980, the howls of mirth and malicious glee could be heard from Oxford to TV Centre via Cambridge. Arianna was unfazed. She was probably too-upmarket, she explained. And Britain was still "too conscious of accents".
In those days, Arianna was briefly an adherent of the now-defunct movement known as "Est". She was a friend of Est's founder Werner Erhard, and she certainly embodied one of Erhard's central maxims. That maxim was: "If you say it, you are it". One of these days, they could put it on Arianna's gravestone.
In 1980, tiring of England, she embarked on a conquest of America. When she met Huffington, however, she set herself on a far more ambitious course. "A formidable charmer of the Pamela Harriman school" (Blumenthal again, and a double-edged compliment if ever there was one), Arianna was set on marriage, money and, ultimately, political power.
If you seek the incarnation of the word ambition, then you will find it embodied in Arianna. Her ambition was, and is, transparent.
It is, by turns, preposterous and awesome, as true ambition always is. Her contacts book must be a thing to behold. Even in the 1980s, her circle, as she built it up, was impressive. She dated the media magnate Mort Zuckerman, and the former California governor Jerry Brown. She was seen with Senator John Warner (an ex-husband of Elizabeth Taylor) and she was friends with stratospheric social hostesses such as Selwa Roosevelt and Ann Getty. And it was Getty who introduced her to Huffington.
In December 1985, Michael took Arianna to the company Christmas party, the first time he had ever attended with a woman. Arianna met his parents and the next spring they married in New York. Before the marriage, Huffington told his fiancee that he had had gay lovers in the past but had now stopped. Arianna said she loved him for it.
It was very clear what Arianna wanted, but not so obvious what he sought. In his Esquire interview, Brock reports: "On his wedding night, as Arianna waited in the next room, Mike found himself standing naked in front of the mirror in the bathroom, staring at the ring on his finger." In due course, however, Huffington got a family. A wife and, after a first miscarriage, two daughters. Arianna, on the other hand, got a vehicle for her ambitions. In 1992, she persuaded Huffington to run for the US Congress. Huffington spent more money - $5.4 million - in the race for a House of Representatives seat than anyone ever had. Two years later, he went for the Senate seat held by Democrat Dianne Feinstein. Again, he set a spending record - $28 million - but this time, he lost. The way he tells it today, he's glad he did.
Huffington's challenge to Feinstein attracted world attention. But the attention was on Arianna, not on him. Arianna duly obliged, making it clear that this was her campaign, running the show, and offering a succession of quotes which indicated that her ambitions would not stop at the Senate.
In 1992, for example, she told a California television host: "It's not about Congress." Asked if Huffington would run for president, his wife then replied: "He's destined for much greater things." The word got around. At Huffington's 40th birthday party, Norman Mailer announced that Mike would be president one day.
Except that now he never will be. Huffington lost in 1994, and gave up on politics. He even thinks, he told Esquire, that he may be a Democrat now. He started making films, and dating men again. For a while, he remained faithful to Arianna, while she continued to pursue her career as a newspaper columnist. In late 1996, they decided to divorce. The marriage was dissolved in June 1997. Huffington has begun to sleep with men once more, and now he has come out.
Huffington's revelation about his homosexuality explains a lot about him. It fills in some of those blanks that so disconcerted the political profilers in the 1990s, and it makes sense of the hints and obscurities that they used when they wrote about him.
It also says something even more remarkable about Arianna. She is not the first woman to have knowingly entered a marriage with a sexually tormented man. Nor is she the first to have tried to make it work in defiance of the evidence. But there are not many to have accepted such a faithless marriage, from the very start, as the worthwhile price of their own unbounded political ambitions.
What we know now about Arianna's priorities is even more dramatic than what we had always assumed. After all, if Huffington had won a Senate seat in 1994, then he would, presumably, have been driving for the White House in 2000. Perhaps he might have run on the slogan that he used in 1994. "Finally. A Reason to Believe." The mind boggles. Yet Arianna Huffington, it is almost superfluous to add, thinks that Bill Clinton should be driven from office in disgrace for lying about sex.
