Beauty and the Blog

"We're leaving momentarily," Huffington herself says. "The car has arrived, and I will blow out the candles now. Do you like candles? I'm going to take extra batteries for the BlackBerry. And now we're walking off into the sunset together. I am going to go get a coat and a bag. Five minutes. Can I have five minutes? Would you like some pomegranate juice? We will take my iPod with me. It has great music. We will have time for a Starbucks. I am a coffee addict. We can have endless coffees." Five minutes later, reclining in the back seat of a limo taking her to Palm Springs for a book signing, she cues up a couple of songs from her iPod, the Rivers of Babylon first, followed by Young, Gifted and Black. "Unexpected, right?" she says. And then she says, "Let's talk. Tell me about you."

What everyone wants to know is how she came to be this way. It happened while growing up in Greece, ne Stassinopoulos, under the influence of a mother, Elli, who could convert total strangers into complete friends like turning on a light. Conversely, her late father, Konstantinos, a journalist, loving though he was, had learned certain inhospitable lessons in the Second World War while incarcerated in a Nazi prison camp for publishing an underground newspaper. He believed that the universe was indifferent, that life was without meaning and that his wartime suffering entitled him to endless affairs. Elli did not believe any of this and left him when their daughter was eleven. Taking after her mother, who died in 2000, Huffington is equally of the belief that everything in life has meaning. Her favorite verse from the Bible is "Not a sparrow falls but that God is behind it."

And so, on any given day, in the company of any given individual, she bubbles over with questions, looking for the intersections and overlaps, the living sparrows still crossing paths, that might prove her convictions right. "Do you like to dance?" "Can we talk about perfumes?" "Do you think the breast stroke is more feminine than the crawl?" "Do you like Leonard Cohen?" "What do you think of my lipstick?" She says this is all part of her innate "capacity for intimacy," something she inherited from her mom. But this capacity seems to have other sources as well, including the teachings of what a few University of California/Santa Cruz students in the early 1970s called Mind Fucking 101.

Actually, most people know it as Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP. It was developed at the height of the human-potential movement by John Grinder, a UCSC linguistics professor, and Richard Bandler, a psychology student, who theorized that any subjective human experience could be reprogrammed in the brain almost instantly, using light hypnotic trance states in conjunction with a particularly cunning way of talking. It was freaky stuff, and aficionados soon realized that the techniques could be employed in darker, more manipulative ways, to maybe persuade anyone of just about anything. These days, it's used by pickup artists to pick up girls, by the self-help guru Tony Robbins (a Huffington pal) and by car salesmen everywhere, who almost always employ it clumsily, hence that creepy snake-in-the-grass feeling you get in their presence. Huffington, though, has it down. Liltingly, musically, always with those exotic, ancient overtones of faraway Greece, the way she talks lulls you into a kind of full-blown dream state while you listen to her say things like "I have a handful of best friends, girls and boys, men and women. Some you would know, like Larry David's wife, Laurie, and Bill Maher, and some you would not know. I call them my tribe. And when you are in the tribe, you are not judged. You are just loved."

The operative sentences here are the last two. As delivered by Huffington, they impart a message that is nearly impossible to resist. You are not judged. You are just loved. This is what everyone wants, and wants to hear, and if it's all part of some grand, mysterious calculation, it does seem to be on the side of the angels, harmless enough. And thus has many a man, and not a few women, succumbed to her charms.

"Did I study NLP? I did," Huffington says. "I took Tony Robbins' Walking on Coals workshop, which was based on NLP principles, read lots of books about NLP, took the concepts that I found valuable and kind of integrated them. There's good stuff in it. Would you like some almonds?"

The driver has gotten her lost somewhere near Palm Springs with time running short, but Huffington does not get upset. She views this as an opportunity to remain cool despite the heat, much like some of the other opportunities that have come her way. There was the time in 2003, during an ill-fated campaign for governor of California, that she knocked over a forest of press microphones while trying to horn in on a photo-op with fellow candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger and wife. The time during the same campaign that she spouted off about tax-avoiding "corporate fat cats," shortly before The Los Angeles Times revealed that she'd paid only $771 in taxes the two previous years. The time that she formed a group to oppose gas-guzzling SUVs, only to have it come out that she once drove an SUV. The time that Time magazine wrote about her "past involvement" with John-Roger, "a former schoolteacher who assumed the name John-Roger in the early '70s after the 'Mystical Traveler Consciousness' entered him after a kidney-stone operation. The Cult Awareness Network classifies John-Roger's Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness as "destructive," its most damning category. The many, many times, ever since she switched political parties, she has been called a feckless hustler. And so on, ad infinitum, such that one might be tempted to conclude that, in addition to a gift for intimacy, she also has a gift for self-sabotage. And yet she remains calm, like these were the most welcome of sparrows.

"Why waste an ounce of your energy?" she says. "This is the only life you have. It's like what [L.A. Weekly columnist] Nikke Finke did the day the Huffington Post went online." What Finke did was write a bizarrely scathing review of the Web site titled "Why Arianna's Blog Blows." "It would be a problem if I allowed it to affect me in any way. If you let craziness of that kind affect you, there's something wrong with you. That's what I'm saying in my new book about fearlessness, and that's what I'm telling my own daughters. Those things don't matter. I have zero interest in analyzing them. And I don't think it's my job to have to explain them."