Arianna Huffington's About Face

Arianna Huffington grew up in Greece, calling her childhood a "little, incredibly awkward, overweight, far too tall girl with terrible skin and glasses and very curly hair." She hoped to become either an actress or journalist.

Today she is an author, blogger, one-time conservative and now liberal commentator and political gadfly. Huffington's ability to transform herself is the key to her character and to her career. She calls it becoming fearless, and now at age 56 she's written a book about it.

"I write in the book we're always going to have fears," she told Sunday Morning correspondent Rita Braver. "Fearlessness is not literally a state without fear. It's the mastery of fear."

Huffington has definitely mastered her own fears and her own life. After stints in New York and Washington, she now lives in Los Angeles. Last year she created a Web site and blog called "The Huffington Post" to dispense news and views from herself, celebrity pals like writer Nora Ephron, actor Alec Baldwin, and everyday people, too.

The operation is run out of Huffington's Brentwood home with a handful of employees. And the fact that business is going well lets her chortle over some of the early critiques that came in, like the one by the critic from LA Weekly.

"She said 'The Madonna of the political world has re-invented herself one time too many. This is a failure that is simply unsurvivabable,'" Huffington read.

That critic now sends items to the "Huffington Post."

Huffington honed her skills as president of the debate society at Cambridge University, then came to the United States in 1980.

Along with her writing career — 11 books in all — and her Web site, Huffington is also a well-known political pundit. She co-hosts a weekly public radio show, "Left, Right and Center," where she is on the left.

But 10 years ago, she had a remarkable political conversion. She started out as a conservative, even a confidante of Republican theorist Newt Gingrich. In 1994, she was considered a key force when her husband Michael Huffington, a Republican congressman, spent $28 million of his own money in an unsuccessful run for the Senate.

During the 1996 conventions, she was the conservative half of a comedy sketch with Al Franken. She says in those days she believed the private sector could handle social problems.

"And then I saw this wasn't working so I realized that we needed an active government," she said.

So she jumped ship and is now known as a liberal Democrat, which has raised more than a few eyebrows.

"I write about the importance of not being afraid of changing our minds, not being afraid of losing friends because we change our minds," she said. "I definitely lost friends."

Huffington says that through her new book, she is trying to teach her teenage daughters not to be afraid of change. She dedicated the book to her two daughters, Christina, 17, and Isabella, 15. They say they've learned to deal with the attention that's sometimes focused on them because of their famous mother.

"Ignore it, stay away from it, have my own sort of life," Christina said.

But the publicity was especially glaring in the wake of revelations that came after Huffington's divorce from her husband Michael. Two years after the divorce, he admitted he was gay.

"That was one of the toughest things in our post-divorce life," she said. "Because we had to tell our children. We had to make them understand what it meant and it was very, very hard on them."

For her daughters' sake, Huffington said she and her former husband are determined to stay friends, but she argues that her own experiences tell her that in many cases it's better for the whole family if parents split up.

"What I say in the book is, looking at my own mother for example, who left my father who was a major philanderer, who actually said to her once when she complained, that she should not interfere in his private life so she left and she was fearless about it," she said. "So I speak about her as a role model in that — that we can make it work."

Huffington has definitely made it work but not everyone is a fan. Political strategist Ed Rollins says Huffington charmed him into working on her former husband's Senate campaign. He charges that she is driven by a desire for fame and fortune, rather than ideals:

"She's a power in her own right and she's a seductress and she can be very charming," he said. "It's a matter of opportunity. I don't think there's an ideology there. I think it's when she first came to this country, lived in New York, she ran around in a very social circle. And basically, she always had an amazing ability to find the most powerful man or woman in a room and cater around that person."

There's no question that Huffington has an ability to attract glamorous and powerful friends. When she made a run for governor of California in 2003, her fundraiser attracted everyone from Dustin Hoffman to Larry David. Her reputation for seeking out important friends has dogged her for years. One writer called her "the Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbers."

"I think a lot of those observations are reserved for women and you rarely hear them about men," Huffington said. "Because for a man, you have adjectives like 'driven,' or 'accomplished,' or 'wanted to achieve things' or whatever it is. There's a very different way that we look at what men do than what women do."

But Rollins said criticism of Huffington has nothing to do with her gender.

"A man who played like she did would have his lights punched out every other day by other men," Rollins said. "I mean a perfect example was when she jumped into the governor's race on the recall. She jumps in front of Arnold Schwarzenegger — it's his press conference, she's getting no attention, he's having his big announcement. You know, no man would ever be allowed to do something like that."

Huffington insists that she jumped into the 2003 governor's race, and into Schwarzenegger's announcement, not to get attention for herself but for issues that she thinks are important, like education and fuel conservation. Despite her controversial reputation, just this year, Time magazine dubbed her one of the 100 people who shape our world.

"It was definitely an affirmation," Huffington said. "You know, you have been through my life here in the interview, and there were obviously an enormous amount of down — an enormous amount of moments in my life when what I was doing was misrepresented, criticized, attacked. So the lesson for me, and the lesson that I certainly want my daughters and anyone listening to take, is keep going."