Ms. Right: ANN COULTER

She is quite possibly the most divisive figure in the public eye. But love her or hate her, you don't know the real Ann Coulter

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Coulter--who likes to shock reporters by wondering aloud whether America might be better off if women lost the right to vote--howls at the idea that she was a college feminist. But even today, she can write about gender issues with particular sensitivity. In 2002, after Halle Berry won her Oscar, Coulter said in her column, "Berry's unseemly enthusiasm for displaying 'these babies,' as she genteelly refers to her breasts, reduces the number of roles for any women who lack Berry's beauty-queen features."

And of course the biggest case Coulter ever helped handle as an attorney (she got her law degree from the University of Michigan in 1988) was a sexual-harassment claim of an unsophisticated woman against her powerful former boss. Coulter was one of a handful of informal legal advisers quietly helping Paula Jones, who had alleged in a 1994 lawsuit that she suffered distress and retaliation at her state job after refusing Arkansas Governor Clinton's request for oral sex in 1991. Coulter interviewed Jones and helped write her legal briefs.

Meanwhile, Coulter had emerged as a star in the 24-hour news culture that flowered in the mid-'90s. In 1995, giddy after Republicans took Congress for the first time in 40 years, she had moved from an anonymous corporate-law job in Manhattan to the Washington office of a freshman Republican Senator, Spencer Abraham. Flirty and quick-witted and fun--ex-conservative David Brock says in his book Blinded by the Right that "Ann seemed to live on nothing but chardonnay and cigarettes"--Coulter charmed both Democrats and Republicans. She already knew (or had dated) many young conservatives in college and law school, and just 10 weeks after she arrived in Washington, National Journal named her one of its conservatives under 40 who were "likely to have an impact."

In 1996, a new cable-news channel asked Coulter to audition for a spot as a commentator. She appeared on MSNBC its first day and quickly became one of its most loved and hated contributors. A few months later, she began writing for Human Events, among the oldest conservative publications in the country. (Coulter jokes in How to Talk to a Liberal that the journal "had to break a half-century 'no girls' rule to hire me.") In 1998, John Kennedy Jr. asked her to write a regular column for George.

Washington wasn't quite sure what to make of the spindle-shanked blond. "When I first met her," says a fellow conservative, "she was walking around with a black miniskirt and a mink stole, making out with Bob Guccione Jr. in the stairwell." (Coulter dated publisher Guccione, son of the porn mogul, for six months. She says the stairwell story "could be" true, although "I make out in public less often now that I'm publicly recognizable." As for living on chardonnay and cigarettes, Coulter says that's "definitely true.")

Except for a brief stint in Missouri, where she clerked for a federal judge, Coulter has never lived in a so-called red state; in fact she obliterates the overcooked red-blue distinction. Although beloved in Bush country, Coulter lives in a New York City apartment, loves expensive Manhattan restaurants, chews Nicorette in church and hardly ever misses the drag queens' Halloween parade in Greenwich Village. She likes to tell people, "I get up at noon and work in my underwear," but it's not actually true--Coulter is rarely up before 1.

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