2 Women, Friends Who Shared a Goal, Now Share Political Spotlight

More than a decade ago they called themselves the “dynamic duo,” two thirtysomething women with New York power addresses who shared a dream about having it all--husband, kids and a successful career.

The mother of five yearned for a profession; the international bestselling author wanted a husband and family. Together, they joined forces and turned their similar hopes and contrasting experiences into a lecture tour about the different routes women might follow to reach the same life goal.

Today, they both have it all--the careers and families. But it must rank as one of the oddest coincidences in this election year that their separate courses led them both to California’s two biggest political campaigns of 1994.

The mother of five who once thought she might never have a career is Kathleen Brown, California’s state treasurer and the leading Democrat for governor. And her New York friend, the author who dreamed about motherhood, is Arianna Stassinopoulos, now a mother and married to the Republican front-runner in California’s U.S. Senate race, Rep. Michael Huffington (R-Santa Barbara).

“Life is funny sometimes,” Arianna Huffington said recently as she flew home from a Central Valley campaign speech for her husband. “It is an amazing coincidence.”

Brown said they had no idea where they would end up when they lectured in New York and Illinois. “I regard it as just serendipity,” Brown said last week.

Her contrarian brother, former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., offers another interpretation. It may be surprising, he said, but it shouldn’t be.

“Politics is a very small world, more so than you folks in the media ever think,” he said. “This political class is more tightly integrated than the two-party system would like to admit.”

Jerry Brown himself is part of that small world. In this story, he played the role of facilitator between Huffington and his sister.

The two women met in 1981 when Huffington was assigned to write a free-lance story for People magazine about California’s governor. At the time, Gov. Brown was running for the same U.S. Senate seat that Huffington’s husband is after today.

Huffington’s November, 1981, article, headlined “California’s Jerry Brown Runs for the Senate--and Away From His Flaky Image,” was an intimate sketch of a week in the candidate’s life that included a peek inside his barely stocked bachelor refrigerator and a nod to the books about poetry, economic theory and philosophy strewn about his bedroom.

Huffington also noted the role of art and religion in Brown’s life. She has written biographies of Pablo Picasso and Maria Callas and a new book that reviews her own unconventional search for spiritual meaning.

Kathleen Brown’s contribution to the magazine story was a single quote about her brother: “He’s a larger-than-life presence in our family.” But she and Huffington, both fresh, popular arrivals in New York society, hit it off.

“She was someone who could chitchat, talk about life, talk about men,” Huffington said.

The friendship came during a three-year period that Brown has called a private part of her often public life.

She had just arrived in New York City, newly married to the president of CBS Sports and later CBS News, Van Gordon Sauter. Brown had three children from a previous marriage and Sauter had two when the family moved into a Park Avenue apartment. They lived downstairs from NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and his wife, Meredith, who became a close friend of Brown.

By 1983, Brown decided to seek the career she had talked about, enrolling in law school at Fordham University. She graduated at age 40 as a corporate bond lawyer and soon returned to California after Sauter was fired by CBS.

Huffington arrived in New York in 1981. Born in Greece and educated at Cambridge University in England, she came to the United States to promote her third book, the biography of Callas, which became an international bestseller.

Her first book, “The Female Woman,” written when she was 22, championed working roles for women, but it was attacked as anti-feminist for its suggestion that women should not suppress their desires to be mothers.

“When I met Kathleen and the two of them together, that’s how I got the idea” for the speaking tour, said Nancy Nelson, the lecture agent who booked their appearances. “The first time that Arianna and Kathleen spoke together . . . they were absolutely thrilled to death. Here they were, these two young, articulate, beautiful women.”

Nelson said she no longer has records of their speaking events, but recalls at least three speeches. Brown said she could only recall two, one to a women’s group in New York’s art community and another at the University of Illinois Women’s Day in May, 1983. Nelson said there was at least one more speech, to the University of Pennsylvania Alumni Assn.

The speech was called “Working It Out” and it began with one of the two speaking about her life experiences, followed by the other offering a contrast.

“It was just the personal stories of two women . . . approaching life, career and marriage from the opposite direction,” Brown said. “And the message, basically, was that there is no right way or wrong way. . . .

“Actually, I think at the beginning, both of us probably imagined we would not have the other’s life,” she said. “I thought, starting my family so young, that having a professional career was foreclosed. And I think that she thought, as a professional writer and intellectual, she would not ever have a family. And there was a crossing at which point both of us moved into different phases.”

Huffington, who lectured frequently in those days on topics related to her books, said their hope was to show that there are different routes to the same end: family and career.

“The message was one of empowering working women,” she said. “If you are a wife and a mother, it’s never too late to integrate (a career) into your life--that was Kathleen’s message. If you are a career woman, don’t lose hope, don’t pretend you don’t want those things.”

They were presented as models for women considering career and family. But their lives were certainly not common, because their social status spared them much of the normal worry about climbing a corporate ladder as well as some of the compromises forced by day-care choices.

Huffington said they did not try to imply that their experience was universal. Instead, she said their hope was to highlight an option available to women: starting a career or a family later in life.

“The point was you could do both,” Brown said. “But my line has always been to women that you can have it all, but you can’t have it all at once.”

Huffington agreed, saying the speech was intended to debunk the 1970s “myth of the super woman. . . . She was 5 feet, 8 inches tall, 115 pounds, perfectly organized, has a wonderfully glamorized career and comes home and waits for her husband with a chilled wine.”

Today, the candidate and surrogate candidate from California’s two biggest campaigns of the 1994 season said they have not talked about their shared irony since they entered the political field. They last saw each other briefly in 1992 when Huffington’s husband was campaigning for Congress and Brown was visiting Santa Barbara one afternoon.

They say they are still friends, but don’t confuse that with politics.

Huffington said she will vote against Brown for governor because the Democrat supports too much government. After recalling the days in New York, Brown also ended an interview by saying: “Let me make one thing clear. With all respect to Michael and Arianna, I am wholeheartedly supporting Dianne Feinstein.”