Posted on 10/09/2004 1:22:18 PM PDT by wagglebee
ST.-BRIAC-SUR-MER, France, Oct. 4 - The estate that belonged to John Kerry's grandparents sits high on a bluff in this Brittany resort town, a massive stone house overlooking a stunning landscape of wind-tossed ocean and jagged headlands. Villagers still speak in awed tones about his grandmother, who was known for her generosity and her regal horseback rides along the hilltops.
It was here, on childhood summer visits with his cousins, that Mr. Kerry played on the beach and fished for octopus in the tidal pools. And it was here that the boy from Massachusetts glimpsed a much grander life than he had known back home, and began, perhaps, to acquire the sheen of privilege and sophistication that would become an inescapable part and a persistent liability of his life in politics.
"Look - the best view in all of northern France," said Ian Forbes, Mr. Kerry's maternal uncle, speaking in French, as he led a reporter to the back of the family house in St. Briac with its vast lawn stretching toward the sea.
Today, Mr. Kerry's life is defined against similarly grand settings. In winter, he goes helicopter skiing while staying at his wife's Idaho retreat, a 15th-century farmhouse transported from England and reassembled on the banks of the Big Wood River. In summer, he windsurfs and sails off the coast of Nantucket, where she has another home. The couple have an 18th-century townhouse in Boston where the kitchen is two stories high. There is a 23-room townhouse in Washington, an 88-acre Pittsburgh estate, a private Gulfstream jet and a personal staff of six, including caretakers and a cook.
If Mr. Kerry is elected, he and his wife would be the richest couple ever to live in the White House, said Kevin Phillips, a political commentator and the author of "Wealth and Democracy.''
Even adjusting for inflation, their net worth far surpasses that of such wealthy predecessors as John F. Kennedy and his wife. In an election driven in large part by the candidates' personalities, that extraordinary wealth and the air of privilege Mr. Kerry seems to carry with him have often been a stumbling block, exacerbating the perception that he is an aloof man whose elite tastes separate him from the concerns of ordinary people.
Mr. Kerry's friends and advisers say the patrician label is unfair. Unlike President Bush, he did not grow up rich, and his parents relied on relatives to pay for his education at private boarding school. In college, he worked for two summers loading trucks at a Massachusetts warehouse to earn pocket money. Even as a first-term senator, he was sometimes so short of cash that he slept on friends' couches during weekends in Boston. And before marrying Teresa Heinz in 1995, he told a close friend that her enormous wealth made him uncomfortable.
But Mr. Kerry's elitist reputation goes deeper than his wife's fortune, now estimated at $1 billion. Mr. Bush, despite his own family's legacy of wealth and political power, manages to come off as a simple-hearted Texan who likes to clear brush and go bass fishing in his spare time, a man whose indulgences are barbecue and nonalcoholic beer.
Mr. Kerry, by contrast, exudes a Brahmin reserve. His accent is no longer the upper-class drawl of his youth, but his soft vowels and formal diction still hint at a privileged lineage. On the campaign trail, he sometimes calls people "man,'' a habit that may grow from his 1960's youth but now sounds like a strained effort to connect with ordinary folk.
Mr. Kerry and his wife are also cursed with the kind of good taste that suggests old money. On the walls of his Boston and Washington townhouses hang a collection of Dutch and Flemish still lifes mostly from the 17th century, so precious that the insurance company asks that the artwork not be photographed. Visitors comment on the restrained stylishness of the couple's homes, at least two of which were decorated by Mark Hampton, the New York designer who counted Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Estée Lauder and Pamela Harriman among his clients.
Many of these details reflect the influence of Ms. Heinz Kerry, who owns four of the five homes (the Boston townhouse, acquired after their marriage, is owned jointly). She is the art collector, the wine connoisseur and the gourmet, friends say. Mr. Kerry is happy to enjoy all those things with her, but his own tastes tend to be much simpler. His favorite foods are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies, said his brother, Cameron F. Kerry. He is essentially a man of the outdoors, and his indulgences are much more likely to focus on buying boats, cars, bicycles or windsurfing gear, friends say. "Teresa has all these wine cellars, but John's not a big wine drinker," said Wade Sanders, who has known Mr. Kerry since 1966, and is currently making appearances on behalf of Mr. Kerry. "He'll occasionally bring a bottle or two out to Nantucket, that's about it."
He remains surprisingly frugal about clothing, friends say, often wearing shoes and jackets until they are nearly worn out. "We were packing clothes for him one time in Boston, and he was deciding which jackets to bring," said Danny Barbiero, who has known Mr. Kerry since high school and has occasionally traveled with him during the campaign. "I said, 'John, when you buy something, why not just buy four, and put one in each house?' He would never do that."
Still, Mr. Kerry has never been able to escape the aroma of class privilege that clings to him. His political enemies have used it against him ever since his first run for public office in 1972, when a Massachusetts cartoonist portrayed him sitting in an armchair at the Yale Club in New York, with a butler visible in the background.
World of Privilege
Class is not a new weapon in American politics.
"The vast majority of our presidents have been wealthy, often very wealthy," said Ted Widmer, a former Clinton speechwriter who teaches American history at Washington College in Maryland. "But they need to find ways to counter the perception that they are effete, that they care about the trappings of wealth for their own sake."
If Mr. Kerry is more vulnerable to such impressions than many other politicians, perhaps that is because of his unusual background. He grew up in a family with little extra money, but he was constantly pressed up against the windows of a more glamorous and wealthy world, thanks to his mother, Rosemary Forbes. (His mother, as one of 11 siblings in the Forbes family that made its fortune in the China trade, inherited little of her own parents' fortune.) As a boy, he often stayed at Groton House, the 300-acre Massachusetts estate owned by a maternal aunt and uncle, Angela and Frederick Winthrop.. And in the summers, he stayed in Brittany at Les Essarts, as the Forbes estate is known.
Mr. Kerry also spent time in the summers on Naushon, a pristine private island off the Massachusetts coast that has been owned by another, more distant set of Forbes cousins since the mid-19th century. Only family members and their guests are allowed onto the island, which is in the Elizabeth Islands chain, near Woods Hole.
Mr. Kerry has revisited both Brittany and Naushon over the years. After his mother died two years ago, he helped scatter some of her ashes in Naushon, said his sister, Peggy Kerry. The rest are to be scattered near the family house in Brittany, she added.
Unlike Mr. Bush, whose family had similar New England roots, Mr. Kerry was drawn to the elite world he glimpsed as a young man, friends say, perhaps because his lack of family money made him something of an outsider. Relatives helped pay for his education at St. Paul's. Later, at Yale, he formed a bond with the college president, Kingman Brewster, another scion of an old New England family and the embodiment of what used to be called the liberal establishment.
"John's drive to succeed came from being surrounded by people who had it all," said George Butler, who has known Mr. Kerry since 1964 and recently released a documentary film about him.
After college, Mr. Kerry continued to orbit a world of unusual privilege, thanks in part to his first wife, Julia Thorne, who came from a very wealthy family with Colonial origins. When the couple divorced in 1988, Mr. Kerry went through some lean years, relying on his government salary as he shuttled back and forth from Washington to Boston, where he was busy helping to raise two young daughters. This was the time later dubbed his "gypsy period" by his second wife - when he sometimes lacked a place to live in one city or another, and had to rely on friends or supporters for help. But all that came to a decisive end in May 1995, when he married Teresa Heinz.
About 100 close friends and relatives attended the ceremony, which took place during a chilly spring afternoon on the lawn outside her Nantucket home. Afterward, the wedding party took over a highly rated island restaurant called the Chanticleer Inn, where every place setting was decorated with a tiny bottle of Heinz ketchup. At one point, the bride's son, Chris Heinz, teasingly daubed Mr. Kerry on the forehead with ketchup, to welcome him into the family and its tomato-based fortune, recalled Mr. Sanders, one of the guests. Later, the guests danced to a band called - inauspiciously, perhaps - the French Millionaires.
Mr. Kerry's life changed at that point, and not just because the marriage made him happier. The couple bought and renovated a five-story 18th-century town house on Louisburg Square in Beacon Hill, giving the senator a permanent home in his home state at last. He also gained a new Washington home, Ms. Heinz Kerry's 23-room townhouse in Georgetown, and the two vacation homes in Idaho and Nantucket.
Seen from the outside, those houses are not especially grand or ostentatious. The Sun Valley house, for instance, at the end of a 100-yard driveway about a mile north of town, is smaller than many of its neighbors, and rendered invisible from the road by landscaping. The Nantucket house is also relatively simple and set on a small lot, with a screened-in porch, and a green and white loveseat swing on the front lawn.
It is the neighbors who are unusual. In Idaho, the billionaire financier George Soros lives next door. Just across the river is Steve Wynn, the billionaire Las Vegas casino executive; also nearby are the actor Tom Hanks, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California. The Nantucket house is on Brant Point, an area so sought-after that a vacant lot there sold last year for $8 million after the house on it burned down, said Dalton Frazier, an island real-estate agent.
Inside, the Heinz-Kerry houses are elegantly decorated but comfortable and unpretentious, and full of details that express the personalities of their owners, visitors say. "There are not huge bathrooms with Jacuzzis," said Wren Wirth, an old friend of Ms. Heinz Kerry's whose husband is the former Senator Tim Wirth. "They are modest by current standards, and sensible and cozy."
The Boston house, Mr. Kerry's main residence, is full of curious nautical items, including a telescope and a model 19th-century sailing ship, that reflect his love of the sea. In a library near the entrance is a striking painting of Herman Melville, whose writings, friends say, Mr. Kerry treasures. (He also loves the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot, and can recite many poems from memory.) On the wall in the master bedroom is a framed original letter written by Abigail Adams, the wife of the second president - about the influence women can exert in politics, Mr. Barbiero recalled.
Although they employ a cook, both Mr. Kerry and his wife take great pleasure in cooking, several friends said, and do so whenever they have time.
"The kitchen is where everybody spends their time," Ms. Wirth said of the Boston house. "There's somebody chopping, somebody answering the phone, somebody mixing."
Mr. Kerry and his wife guard their privacy scrupulously, friends say, in part because they do not want to burden their children or other relatives with their celebrity. Some of the people who work for Ms. Heinz Kerry, including a caterer who often cooks for her and the caretaker of her Idaho house, said they had signed confidentiality agreements barring them from disclosing details about their employer. A number of friends declined to answer questions about the way Ms. Heinz Kerry and her husband live, saying they feared the details could give the wrong impression.
However, the couple are anything but reclusive, and like to give dinner parties.
"They are wonderful entertainers," said Jessica Catto, who has been friendly with Ms. Heinz Kerry for several years and served on an environmental board with her. "They make you feel at home and relaxed; it's an atmosphere that is bubbly and fun and conducive to great discussions."
Mr. Kerry mostly ignored the social world in Washington before getting remarried, said David McKean, his Senate chief of staff. Starting in the mid-1990's, the couple began having salon-style gatherings at their Georgetown home, where policy experts, politicians and diplomats would be invited for freewheeling discussions over dinner on subjects ranging from climate change to China policy. Their social life often crosses party lines, and in 2001 they gave a dinner party for Paul O'Neill after he became treasury secretary.
An Indelible Image
Some aspects of Ms. Heinz Kerry's wealth have been exaggerated in news reports. Her private jet, for instance, is often described as a "$35 million Gulfstream V" model. In fact, said a broker with knowledge of the sale, it is a Gulfstream II, bought used in 1993 for about $3 million, the low end of the scale for private jets. It is hardly a cheap item, costing about $1.5 million a year to operate. Mr. Kerry rarely flies on it, preferring to take commercial flights on his routine trips to and from Washington, said David Wade, a Kerry spokesman.
Ms. Heinz Kerry bought the jet in the wake of her husband's death in a charter plane crash in 1991, because she believed owning their own plane would make her and her family members safer, said Grant Oliphant, the associate director of the Heinz Endowments.
Mr. Kerry and his wife also have at least eight cars, including three sport utility vehicles at the Idaho house. He also has a Harley Davidson motorcycle. The cars are not flashy; there are two Chrysler sedans, and Mr. Kerry still drives his 1985 Dodge convertible.
Another area where Ms. Heinz Kerry's wealth has left a visible imprint is sports. Mr. Kerry had always been an outdoorsman and a superb athlete who went skiing, biking and boating whenever he could.
"Now he carries those on in more places," Cameron Kerry said.
The senator owns two bicycles made by Serotta, including an Otrott model, which usually sells for about $8,000. In summer, he goes windsurfing and kite-boarding off the coast of Nantucket. He has had a number of boats over the years, but about three years ago he bought a more opulent one: a 42-foot Little Harbor powerboat, purchased for about $500,000. The boat has sleeping berths for two, and Mr. Kerry mostly uses it to cruise along the Massachusetts coast, or to ride with friends out to Nantucket.
It is on the water, Mr. Kerry's friends and relatives all say, that he is most at ease. Seven or eight years ago, Mr. Sanders recalled, Mr. Kerry invited him to Cape Cod, where the two men got into Mr. Kerry's boat to ride out to Nantucket. As the boat reached open water, Mr. Kerry took the throttle up to full speed. Flicking on the boat's stereo system, he shouted, "Check it out!" and a broad grin lit up his face. The music blasting from the speakers was Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries," the same sequence played by Robert Duvall's character in the Vietnam movie "Apocalypse Now."
Images of Mr. Kerry windsurfing off Nantucket have become a staple for his Republican critics, who sometimes deride it as an elitist hobby. Windsurfers say this is not fair: The basic equipment for the sport can be had for about $1,000. Mr. Kerry's total investment is about $6,000, said Nevin Sayre, the former American windsurfing champion, who often sails with him.
Last month, Mr. Kerry visited his old windsurfing pal John Chao, founder of American Windsurfer magazine, near the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon. The weather was calm, forcing them to cancel their windsurfing jaunt, and Mr. Kerry said he would fly back in a few days if the breeze picked up. Mr. Chao, sensing that a flight across country just to go windsurfing might play into the rich sportsman stereotype, advised him against it.
Mr. Kerry agreed not to fly back, but added that he did not want to change his lifestyle for the sake of appearances. Mr. Chao recalled, "He said: 'I'm not going to live my life in fear. I'm going to be who I am.' ''
BTW..did you read the long article o Kerry in this week's NY Times magazine?..Fairly objective...
Yes, Kerry is definitely the champion of the average Joe. (Hurlll)
The NYT is very firmly behind BJ and Hitlery, there have been an amazing number of stories and editorials the past few months that are very unfavorable to sKerry. I think they're doing their part to give Hitlery the easiest possible shot in 2008.
True..interesting take...
LOL! Only a child would believe that whopper! At any rate his butler makes his pb&j sandwiches. Undoubtedly Teresa pays the butler's salary.
I've been wishing I had bookmarked that hysterical article about Kerry's manservant, always "at the ready." When Sean Hannity read that on the air, I thought I would die laughing.
Wow a real life George Washington.
Is it any wonder he appeals so much to the "working class". (Double hurl)
Was it the HOwie Carr article?..there were several..just type "Kerry" and "butler" into SEARCH..then click on "search older articles"..you should find the one you want..
And remember the Wendy's lunch with the Breck Girl and his wife that turned out to be a photo op while Ben Affleck was out picking up lunch at a five-star restaurant. They might have pulled it off except Teeeraaayzaa can only order "peasant food" by pointing at the pictures.
Kerry and his wife are "cursed with good taste"?? I haven't seen any clue of it. They married each other, and I wouldn't call that good taste on either part.
Also, his next-door neighbor is george soros?? gee, who'd a thunk it?
This reads like a thinly-disguised hit piece designed to make people hate kerry as a clueless, elitist buffoon. I sure hope it works. I've never said this before, but good for the NYT! Even though they're obviously doing hillary's bidding, anybody that trashes jean-pierre kerry is OK by me.
Here it is on from NYT via IHT
http://www.iht.com/articles/517579.html
Interestingly enough, John FORBES Kerry is the man who makes George W. Bush look like a man of the people.
Elite is not a question of money or background, it is a state of mind.
If having expensive homes and toys equals "good taste," they should go live with Saddam Hussein.
John F. Kerry, Man of the People:
http://www.citizensunited.org/kerry.mpg
Kerry is a pseudo-French, smarmy elitist, Euro-trash, hero-wannabe, anti-American prig.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.