YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP ... 07-26-03

For both of them, a Before and an After seemed inevitable. For both of them, it might have been Before and After they were married, in 1986. He was the alienated son of a Texas oil tycoon who had made his own fortune in banking. She was a beautiful Greek intellectual who came to the United States via London for a career as a writer. His fortune gave her security and she brought him a brilliant, glamorous alliance and gave him two daughters.

After liquidating his family's oil investments, he spent over $5,000,000 to win a California congressional seat in 1992 and, only two years later, he spent over $24,000,000 to lose a race for the United States Senate. It was, then, the most expensive non-presidential race in American history and 1994 wasn't a year when Republicans were losing congressional races. It only got worse. In 1995, Paula Poundstone compared her to a guinea pig and her long-time support of this is a little scary.

It's the Huffingtons, of course, and their Before and After came, not in 1986, but in 1997, when they were quietly divorced. He came out of his heterosexual closet to become one of America's most