Arianna Huffington Interview: On Learning to Fail (part 2)
Arianna Huffington has had a remarkable rise from poverty to become editor of the world's second-biggest news website, the Huffington Post. To read part 1 of this article please click this link.
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. (I've always used surnames in interviews but Arianna, like Oprah and Nigella, has ascended to first-name terms with the entire planet.) She's recreated herself so many times that she makes David Bowie look like a slacker. Even her hair has 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 $315m 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 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".
But then, that's 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's a pat answer. But she insists it's also true. It's not that she's impervious to criticism. It's more that she's 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's 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's 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's a lot that has gone Arianna's way. But there's 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 learned 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 unlovable 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's 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 to drink wine; 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's the new curly kale superfood and cure for cancer combined, and, if evidence were needed that it's 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's 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.
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."
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's off. "Do you have my personal email?" she asks, opening the car door. "I'll give you my card."
I don't feel that's such a privilege having seen you scattering them around the ladies' lavatories, I say. And she laughs, but she's 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.
Source;Carole Cadwalladr, The Observer 30 March 2014:
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