Her refusal to so much as try and play the Laura Bush role of the smart but subdued, more conventional political spouse goes beyond anything Hillary Clinton ever attempted at the height of her “I could have stayed home and baked cookies!’’ insurgency. So far beyond, in fact, that some of Kerry’s friends are nervous. Other high-powered women are aspiring First Ladies, too, of course, including former Vermont governor Howard Dean’s wife, Judith Steinberg Dean, a doctor who doesn’t do campaign events. But it’s Teresa Heinz Kerry–wealthy “venture philanthropist,’’ multilingual former U.N. interpreter and longtime stay-at-home mom, until her three sons were grown–who makes Hillary look downright retiring.
At 64, Mrs. Heinz Kerry is unfiltered, unapologetic and unself-consciously sexy, in a barely made-up, “who cares if I wore this same suit yesterday” kind of way. Her Republican roots often show–she only recently registered as a Democrat–and in many ways, she is the anti-Hillary, reliably revealing more about herself and her husband in five minutes of conversation than Senator Clinton does in the 528 pages of her “Living History.’’ But it’s not yet clear whether Mrs. Heinz Kerry’s authenticity, the kind voters claim to like, will damage her husband or cast him, appealingly, as man enough to prefer a powerhouse.
Kerry, who’s 59, says his mate’s “sassy’’ attitude is one of the things that first attracted him to her. “And no one’s about to’’ ask her to change now, he promises. For the most part, rather than trying to rein in his freewheeling wife, Kerry seems to be trying to emulate her, speaking much more directly in this campaign, PG curse words and all, than in his pre-Teresa (tehr-AY-zuh) days. Whether the Kerrys make it to the White House, they’re already testing the ever-shifting boundaries of the ultimate supporting role in a presidential campaign.
At political events, Mrs. Heinz Kerry seems to enjoy dispensing tips on subjects ranging from which sunscreens contain carcinogens to the immunity-boosting antioxidants in green tea–a sort of Heloise meets Sophia Loren who tells women: “We’ve got to take care of our men,’’ and takes her role as helpmate seriously. When Kerry came home from his most recent yearly checkup crowing about his low cholesterol, she asked to look at his PSA levels, noticed that they were in the normal range but up from last time, and sent him back for more tests. Turns out he had prostate cancer, caught early. “They call her Doctor T,’’ the senator says proudly. Whenever he’s ailing, “I call her from the road and she says, ‘Take this.’ She knows more than some doctors.’'
Yet when Kerry is giving his standard campaign speech, his wife sometimes eats, reads her program or talks while he’s talking, having heard it all before. After one recent joint appearance–OK, a luncheon at the Yale Club in New York, which may or may not be representative–several women in the crowd remarked on what a relief it was to meet a candidate’s wife who didn’t behave as though she were so besotted with her husband that she couldn’t possibly stop grinning, or ever get enough of his speech. Kerry’s friend George Butler, the documentary filmmaker who was once a reporter for NEWSWEEK, says, laughing: “In January ‘68, I reported on a lunch Nixon gave and watched Pat Nixon gaze at him for three hours straight. I don’t foresee Teresa Heinz –doing that under any circumstance, ever.’'
The daughter of a Portuguese doctor, Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira grew up in Mozambique, making the rounds with her father and helping him treat the poorest of the poor. In her speeches, she often says, “How this little girl from Africa got here, I don’t know…” Here’s how: while studying in Geneva, she met her first husband, Jack Heinz, an only child who told her his family made soup back in the States. The heir to the Heinz food empire, he went on to become a Republican senator from Pennsylvania. When he was killed in a plane crash in 1991, she inherited his fortune–$500 million, give or take–and took over the management of his family’s $1.2 billion endowment.
Though devastated by the loss of the husband that even her new handler, Chris Black, calls “the love of her life,’’ she turned what had been a philanthropy funding mostly small projects into a major research and education operation, particularly on women’s health and the environment. She underwrote the plan that became the blueprint for the Massachusetts law providing drug benefits for seniors there.
Since she and Kerry married in 1995, most of the speculation about their relationship has centered on her money, and jokes like the one about how every time Kerry sleeps with his wife, it’s a fund-raiser. But because most of her holdings remain in her name, federal campaign law would seem to bar her from bankrolling his campaign. In the past Kerry has repeatedly said he might tap into her money in extremis, “if I were attacked.’’ It might still be possible for her to contribute to his campaign indirectly, through an independent group, or to pay for ads in her own defense.
But friends suggest that Kerry’s wife has in any case already given him something else he needed: the emotional immediacy he lacked as a young–and, later, not-so-young–man. By the time he began seeing Teresa Heinz, Kerry was long divorced from his first wife, Julia Thorne, a poet, and the mother of his two daughters. Kerry, the son of a Foreign Service officer, was often alone growing up, at a series of boarding schools. As an adult he had a circle of old friends, some from his college days at Yale, others who were fellow Vietnam vets. But he was so focused on work that he’d usually run in halfway through their dinners, and was forever on the phone. With Teresa Heinz, though, that changed.
“You really have to be there to be involved with Teresa Heinz”–present in a way he hadn’t always been before–says Kerry’s friend and former aide Jonathan Winer. “She doesn’t need more power or money because she’s had those things for a very long time. With her, it’s carpe diem, and what she needs, what she demands, is real interaction every day of her life, which has been very good for someone who used to just withdraw into his head. She gets frustrated with bulls–t, and if she’s annoyed–she wouldn’t say annoyed, she would say p—-d off–she lets you know. What she’s done is made him more loosey-goosey, and able to be closer to more people.''
In a joint interview on a soft June evening in the rose garden of the Georgetown home –where Mrs. Heinz Kerry and her first husband raised their family, Kerry states the obvious about his wife’s position, in or out of the White House: “Teresa doesn’t need a job.’’ But if he won this race, both Kerrys suggest Nancy Reagan as a surprise role model for her. The senator speaks admiringly of Mrs. Reagan’s “Just say no’’ anti-drug campaign. Which, of course, was widely derided–unfairly, according to Teresa. “People out there need simple things,’’ she says. “Like, ‘Mrs. Reagan says, Just say no, so maybe I can.’ She was also a good wife–a good spouse, I mean–in terms of pushing the president, or, not pushing,’’ she corrects herself again, but encouraging him in the right direction. Plainly, Mrs. Heinz Kerry, who often refers to herself as a shy person, not only admires but relates to Mrs. Reagan. “She was so shy she was misconstrued, and also because she wore pretty clothes and was so feminine.’'
She is not shy in expressing her view that some aspects of the feminist movement did women no favors: “A lot of women left for the work force because they felt like dolts if they didn’t.’’ Asked how she thinks her bluntness will play, she at first waves off the question. “I’ve always had good press,’’ she says, “except in some of the–what do you call it?–the chitchat press.’’ True, reporters can’t get enough of her, especially after she recently joked to Elle magazine that she’d maim any husband of hers who fooled around, and that they could resist temptation if she could, even if “maybe I’m into 18-year-olds.’’ Her admissions that she’s gotten Botox shots and has a prenup were news only because women in her position are expected to lie about such things.
Still, even a thrill seeker like the skiing, windsurfing, small-plane-flying Kerry could probably do without the excitement of wondering what his not unconfident wife will say next, as when she tells me how she once dreamed of becoming a singer “like Edith Piaf’’ or might have choreographed ballets, though “I don’t even know the steps.’’ Or… when she volunteers that when they saw the movie “Chicago,’’ Kerry much preferred Renee Zellweger’s physique to that of her costar, Catherine Zeta-Jones. “You thought she was…” and here Teresa laughs and holds her hands out wide.
At one point in the interview, Kerry does playfully try to gag his wife by reaching over and wrapping one long arm around her ankles and the other around her wrists–a maneuver he seems to have performed before. Another time, just as I’m asking a question, he cries, “Look at the baby robin eating berries!” in a nearby Amelanchier tree. But if that’s a signal, his wife chooses to ignore it, and is not deterred from answering: “You know what? I’m just a normal person, though people may not think so. I happen to be well-off, but I cook, I care about making the world a better place, like a lot of people. I could be in the south of France and buy a castle, but that doesn’t interest me.” Kerry pretends to perk up at this idea. “Let’s go! I’m stopping running.” But then, oh, he remembers that France is out in America just now. “But not the south of France,” he amends.
Though friends have said she does fear hurting her husband’s chances, she says that isn’t likely: “I think the American people desperately want real people” in public life. “They don’t want pretense. No one has ever told me I had to be someone other than myself.” Then, as if to prove it, she veers off into a deeply felt defense of the rich: “To put limits just because someone is wealthy is just as bad as if someone is poor!” Not exactly a rallying cry for Democrats, and as her husband hears this, he rubs his fingertips across his lips, then begins biting his nails. Still, it says something about Kerry that he’s more or less willing to see where all this is going. So how did he get here?
Their first meeting was a quick hello on the Capitol steps, where Jack Heinz himself introduced them. Several years later, after she had been widowed (and he was dating women like Morgan Fairchild) they met again in Rio, where the first President Bush had sent her for the Earth Summit. They laugh uproariously as they recount their first, raucous dinner there, over who knows how many caipirinhas, she says, with New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg along as unwitting chaperone. (Lautenberg says he doesn’t remember the meal as all that amusing, but of course, watching other people discover they have so much in common is not everybody’s idea of a great night.) During dinner, Mrs. Heinz muttered “Pas possible!” under her breath, and was kind of impressed when Kerry answered her in French. Later, he asked if he might accompany her to mass the next morning, and then surprised her by singing along with the hymns in Portuguese. But when jokingly asked if he regularly attends mass or just wanted to see Mrs. Heinz –again, Kerry stops laughing and seems truly offended: “I was an altar boy, and there was a point in my life when I thought I might even be–I was very serious.”
This, of course, is the uptight, reactive John Kerry familiar to those who have followed his career over the years. He himself raises and then argues against the “aloofness” charge that has long dogged him: “People closest to me will tell you I laugh and cry and can be exuberant.” And he’s still at his best giving the Bush administration hell, especially on the issues thought to be weak spots for his party–national security and terrorism, the subject of a book he wrote five years ago. “I can be serious,” he says, finishing off his iced tea. “But it’s a serious world we live in.”
There’s one phrase Kerry uses often to describe his reaction to George W. Bush’s policies, his politics and the way he became president: “It rankles.” Of course, it was the Bush family who brought the Kerrys together, wasn’t it, by sending Mrs. Heinz to the meetings in Rio? “I love George–Big George,” his wife says, referring to the first President Bush. “He was so sweet and wonderful to me when Jack died.” When Kerry quietly asserts that George W. is a nice man, too, Teresa says, so coolly that it is impossible to mistake her meaning, “I don’t know this president.”
Kerry and his wife are not far apart politically, though “we can differ,” he says. And the two men Teresa Heinz Kerry married are more similar than one might suppose. “It’s a little counterintuitive, but they are alike” in their enthusiasms and intensity, says Wren Wirth, a close friend. One thing that seems to draw the Kerrys together as a couple is that both are born fighters. She certainly does not hide the fact that she grieves for both her late husband and his now virtually extinct brand of centrist Republicanism.
She finally left the Republican Party, she says, not only to support her new husband but because she was revolted by the GOP campaign against former Georgia senator Max Cleland, a Vietnam vet who lost both legs and an arm in that war but was defeated last year after his commitment to country was questioned. (“That they could think of doing that to a guy who left three limbs on the ground in Vietnam,” Kerry said in a separate conversation. “It rankles.”) His wife was even more pointed. “Whoever did that,” she says, “will one day rue the day.” She is in Mommy Lion mode now–as she is much of the time, beyond the diversion of her whole diva shtik. And this race is a twofer for her as a wife who believes in John Kerry–and who would not exactly mind torpedoing what her former party has turned into, in memory of Jack Heinz.
