Running mate: Teresa Heinz Kerry brings her outspoken style to her husband's campaign
WASHINGTON -- That Teresa Heinz Kerry married two men named John is a well-known fact. What's more, both her husbands had a lot in common. Each sprang from a prominent family and had a wealth of opportunity. Each attended Yale, became a member of the US Senate, and aspired to the presidency.
Both men were telegenic. And both flew airplanes and liked to ride motorcycles. But when it came to the ski slopes, current husband Senator John Kerry and the late Senator John Heinz were not equal.
''John [Kerry] is a very good skier. But I know in one race one John will beat the other,'' Heinz Kerry says with a mischievous smile. ''John the First beats John the Second.''
Kerry, the junior senator from Massachusetts, is running for president. Although widely believed to be a front-runner, he also has a number of liabilities -- andsome worry that his outspoken wife may become one of them. Comparing husbands, for example, is not considered particularly politic, especially when the current one comes up short. At 64, one of the richest women in the country, Heinz Kerry is not your standard-issue political spouse. She has called campaigns ''the graveyard of real ideas and the birthplace of empty promises'' and once described the prospect of being first lady as ''worse than going to a Carmelite convent.''
A lifelong Republican, she declared on marrying Kerry, a Democrat, that she would ''go down the aisle, but I won't cross the aisle.'' Yet Heinz Kerry switched to her husband's party in January, shortly after he announced his run for the White House.
Although insinuations that Heinz Kerry is still in love with her first husband have made her handlers squeamish about comparisons, she does not hesitate to line up John the First against John the Second. What's more, she rarely talks in smiling sound bites, giving longresponses -- sometimes rambling, sometimes perceptive.
She is famously impolitic. When a fire hydrant in front of the couple's Beacon Hill mansion interfered with her parking several years ago, she had the city move it. And while the couple's legion of spokespeople (she has her own chief of staff) downplay unflattering news accounts about Heinz Kerry and insist she'll join her husband on the campaign trail, Heinz Kerry -- in typically blunt fashion -- says that's not necessarily so.
She is far more candid about herself than most of those around her. ''I have to figure out and [campaign staffers] have to tell me initially what it is they feel comfortable with,'' Heinz Kerry says of her role in the campaign. ''And if I think it is too handicapping of being myself, I'd rather not go certain places or talk about certain things because then I'll be phony, and I can't be phony. The last thing I want is someone to say, `You blew it for John.' ''
It's also possible that Heinz Kerry might actually boost Kerry's bid for the White House, that voters might actually warm to a straight-talking woman who is openly skeptical about the political process. If one of Kerry's vulnerabilities is that he is a cool fish, Heinz Kerry most definitely is not.
Beyond the image Born Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes Ferreira in the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique, Heinz Kerry is ebullient where her husband is stiff, dramatic where he is reserved. The mother of three adult sons, she coos over her first granddaughter, nurtures yellow and white orchids in her plush Beacon Hill living room, distributes herbal treatments to staffers and friends alike. She fretted over Kerry's health long before he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, urging him to drink protein shakes. Although she likes to talk and her stories can wander like rogue sheep, she is also able to listen.
''She is not a conventional person,'' explains Frank Gannon, Heinz Kerry's speechwriter and a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon. ''She is not so much a loose cannon as she is mobile heavy artillery. She is very deliberate in what she says.''
Five years older than Kerry, she is a smallish rounded figure whom one Boston writer describes as ''the sexiest 60-year-old I've ever seen.'' She hikes in Sun Valley, exercises regularly at Pilates studios in Washington, D.C., and Boston, and speaks a melodic English heavily flavored by her native Portuguese. She favors Hermes and Chanel, yet has been known to wear the same jacket two days in a row. She wears just a hint of makeup on her freckled skin.
And then there is her money.
When John Heinz III died in a plane crash in 1991, his widow was catapulted to the helm of the Heinz family food fortune, now valued at $550 million, ranking her number 391 on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans. (Kerry, largely due to her money, is ranked the richest member of Congress.) She does not live small.
There are five residences: the Heinz family farm in Pittsburgh, homes in Nantucket, Georgetown, and Beacon Hill, and a ski retreat in Idaho -- a 15th-century barn that she and Heinz had imported from England and then reassembled. There is a combined domestic staff of more than half a dozen people and a private 10-seat Gulfstream jet.
There is also a Heinz ''family office'' in Pittsburgh and Washington that manages her personal philanthropic work and the properties and personal matters for Heinz Kerry and her sons, Christopher, Andre, and John IV. (They declined to be interviewed for this story; so did Vanessa and Alex Kerry, John Kerry's daughters from a previous marriage.) The offices have about 23 people, two of whom do nothing but pay bills. Roughly half of them worked for Heinz, one of the most popular politicians in Pennsylvania, and they seem almost as devoted to his widow as she was to him.
''I have worked for three senators and one governor, and I can tell you they don't come any better than her,'' said Jeff Lewis, Heinz's chief of staff and director of the Heinz Family Philanthropies. ''She is kind, considerate, and loving. In my life, it doesn't get any better.''
Besides inheriting a vast fortune, Heinz Kerry also assumed the chair of the $1 billion Heinz Endowments, which distributes millions in grants for economic development, the environment, and the arts, mostly in western Pennsylvania. She also heads the Heinz Family Philanthropies, which spends roughly $4 million a year on smaller projects such as helping to develop programs that assist states in managing their own prescription drug plans.
Although she works largely from her Georgetown home, she is closely involved in the development of many of the undertakings spawned by her mini-empire and can talk in arcane detail and often does. She is an ardent environmentalist as well as a keen supporter of the arts, both interests she shared with John the First. She is generally credited with revamping the endowments to make them more results-oriented and takes a personal interest in the recipients of the annual Heinz Awards -- five $250,000 grants, given to leaders in their fields, that she created in her late husband's memory.
And when she shows up in the lemon-colored corridors of her Washington office or at the Pittsburgh headquarters, gold-rimmed glasses perched on her nose, she invariably has a lot of questions.
''I think my greatest virtue is that . . . I ask a lot of questions,'' declares Heinz Kerry. ''Questions I don't have answers for sometimes. And I think one of the biggest missing things in our society today is a value of questioning, a Socratic discussion of the roundtable. I do that for people. Nobody has to tell me I am good or bad at it. I know I do that. Because when I speak, they shut up. It is dead quiet. Then it is questions, questions, questions.''
It is a trait that was not particularly in vogue in 1950s Mozambique, where the dictatorship silenced virtually all public political discussion. The daughter of a prominent Portuguese doctor, Heinz Kerry was raised a proper girl in prosperous colonial surroundings, the second of three children.
Although she sometimes accompanied her father on his rounds, she was largely isolated from the native population, not to mention the turbulent events of the time. At 13 she traveled to Durban, South Africa, to attend boarding school and recalls with a giggle ''these wonderful African guys, big guys, you know. Our guys weren't so black and so big. In the south of Mozambique there was a different tribe. I thought all this was like some of the films I had seen.''
An early lesson Heinz Kerry, who did not learn English until she was 14 and now speaks five languages, went on to work at the Interpreters School of the University of Geneva in Switzerland. It was there in 1962 that she met a handsome young American doing a stint at a Swiss bank to learn about ''his family's soup business.''
Four years later she married John Heinz and took up residence on the Heinz's 90-acre Pittsburgh farm, a lavish estate with luxurious gardens and walls heavy with artwork of the masters. Despite its beauty, the house was an isolated place for a young pregnant wife in a new country.
''When Fridays came, [John] knew that I was sad and lonely,'' recalls Heinz Kerry. ''So he kind of forced me into a tete-a-tete that burst the bubble, and then I'd cry. And then I'd feel better. I remember him hugging me one day when I first got things out, and he said, `Good, I've created a monster.' ''
Nor did the couple's entrance into Republican politics in 1970 make her feel particularly welcome. Heinz's opponent in his first bid for Congress, curiously attempting to taint Heinz as an outsider in a city where his family had lived for generations, referred to Teresa as Heinz's ''African bride.''
The phrase was apparently never publicly reported, and Heinz Kerry, when asked about it, says sharply that at the time she ''never read it, never heard of it.'' But Russ Martz, John Heinz's press secretary in the early 1970s, remembers it well and says that in response the campaign urged Teresa to meet with voters so they could get to know her.
Teresa Heinz, according to Martz, campaigned well for her husband and won people over quickly. But even then, her outspokenness generated smoke. In an interview with The Washington Post, just days after Heinz was elected to his first term in Congress in 1971, Teresa Heinz declared, ''Ted Kennedy I don't trust, like I don't trust Nixon, although I think Nixon's done a helluva lot better than I thought he would.'' The remark did not sit well with the White House, and John Heinz, according to some political veterans, suffered the consequences.
Today, Heinz Kerry says Nixon was ''one of our greatest presidents,'' although she personally did not trust him. As for her remark about Kennedy, Heinz Kerry says it was in reference to what she felt was his poor treatment of his former wife, Joan, who is her friend. Heinz Kerry says she ''felt badly for [Joan]. And so I spoke my heart about that and not my knowledge of him back then. I regret I said that, because I was talking about [personal] feelings.''
John Heinz was as headstrong and inquisitive as his wife, and their marriage was, by virtually any account, a singular one. Ron Davenport, a Pittsburgh radio station owner and member of the ''Pickle Mafia'' -- John Heinz's inner circle of supporters -- recalls that ''John could overwhelm some people in his way of being, but she could face up to him. She would not back down to his personality.''
Dealing with tragedy When Heinz's plane crashed in 1991, Teresa Heinz's life plunged into turmoil. She resolutely assumed the vast responsibilities that his death thrust upon her, including not just the management of his family's fortune but the solo parenting of their three boys. She considered running for his seat. But she was also very quiet.
''Teresa has some solid religious beliefs that were helpful, but I believe that she was lonely,'' says Suzy McIntosh, a vice president with Mellon Financial Corp. in Pittsburgh and a childhood friend of John Heinz's. ''I think a lot of us got calls to come out to the farm for tea during that time.''
It was John the First, coincidentally, who introduced Heinz Kerry to John the Second the year before he died. In 1992, Heinz Kerry became reacquainted with Kerry, who had been divorced for several years. They dated for a few years before marrying in 1995. The media and Beltway crowd have long snickered that both were motivated more by ambition than by love, despite Heinz Kerry's oft-stated refusal to contribute financially to his races unless their ''personal honor'' was at stake.
It is true that Heinz remains a large presence in his widow's life. She refers to him frequently, sometimes calls him ''my husband,'' and still wears his blue sapphire engagement ring.
Heinz's death was not the first loss in her life. Years earlier, her sister died at 19 in a car crash. Three other family members also died in car crashes. Her father, who was behind the wheel in one of those incidents, wore a black tie for 33 years afterward until the eve of her wedding to Kerry, when Heinz Kerry gave him a blue tie she had bought in Paris and asked him to wear it at the wedding. He did. And the next day he put his black tie on again. ''I just wanted to try to get him out of that thing,'' says Heinz Kerry. ''You can't stay there. You have to put it in a place and get on with life.''
Which in many ways she seems to have done herself. That Heinz Kerry and Kerry are two complex and strong-willed people who might not have the simplest of relationships seems self-evident. Those who continue to wonder at the substance of their relationship might consider the observation of Joe Klein, who, mulling over the issue in The New Yorker a few months ago, wrote that Heinz Kerry ''is a flagrantly impolitic human being. . . . It is not the sort of marriage that an ambitious politician, in his right mind, would want. . . . One can only conclude, it must be love.''
And so, in the name, perhaps, of love, Heinz Kerry is preparing to do something that she has made quite clear over the years that she did not want to do: help her husband run for president. When Heinz considered running for the White House, she declared he would do so ''over my dead body.'' When Kerry started talking about it last year, she said the same thing and a little more. But now, with Kerry in the ring, Heinz Kerry is ready to stand by her man.
Although she has not joined Kerry on the road much yet, staffers say she will start doing so soon, once her role is determined. She strategizes with Kerry daily. She has switched party registration, declaring that Republicans have grown too intolerant. Heinz Kerry, who when marrying Kerry was adamant that she would not change her name, has even started using Kerry's name, although she does not intend to legally change hers. But for a woman who has lived close to the political fires for three decades, and who has seen many of them go out, it is still just another race.
''Washington,'' she says, ''is not quite the bellybutton of the world.''
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Every time I've seen her at a campaign event, she seems so disinterested and detached. She's gonna be some fun to watch.