WHEN she first visited California as a child on a family camping trip Meg Whitman thought she would come back for only one thing: the fishing.

Now “Blondie”, as she was known at eBay, the internet auction house she helped to build into a global powerhouse, wants to run the state after Arnold Schwarzenegger steps down in two years – and still go fly fishing with her sons.

Last week Whitman, 52, cleared the decks for her gubernatorial campaign by retiring from the boards of several companies, including eBay and Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks film studio, although she hopes he will back her for governor of California in 2010.

Hollywood may become a factor in her prospects. Having elected Ronald Reagan and Schwarzenegger to high office, Californians like a flash of drama in their candidates. Supporters worry that Whitman may be reluctant to play.

The test of her style will come next month if, as expected, she announces her candidature. Advisers want her to follow Schwarzenegger by going on a programme such as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, but friends say she rarely watches television and does not entirely trust it.

Raised in the affluent Long Island hamlet of Cold Spring Harbor (which Lindsay Lohan, the actress, once described as “dead from 6pm up and the neck down”) Margaret Cushing Whitman originally planned to become a doctor. Frustrated with chemistry she married a medic instead – Griffith Rutherford Harsh IV, now a neurologist at Stanford University near San Francisco.

Galvanised by a friend of her mother, the actress Shirley MacLaine, she went into business. In 1998 she joined an internet start-up company called AuctionWeb, which she helped transform into eBay.

Supporters say she now has all the qualifications to run California. She is smart, friendly and, with a fortune of $1.4 billion (£920m), rich enough to find $100m or more to fund a two-year campaign against both Republican rivals and Democrats who argue that she is too right wing for California.

Last November she supported proposition 8, which banned homosexual marriage in the state. That will cost her Hollywood support.

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