2004 Race

Hurry, Kerry

No candidate’s wife has gotten as much press attention, most of it negative, as Teresa Heinz, who just this year adopted the last name Kerry for the campaign. As the widow of former Pennsylvania Republican senator John Heinz, killed in a plane crash in 1991, she has a ketchup fortune estimated at more than a half-billion dollars; as a philanthropist, she has given away tens of millions of charitable dollars, with special attention to the environment and women’s-health issues. Married to Kerry in 1995, she has five homes (Georgetown, Nantucket, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Idaho), an exotically lilting accent (a residue of her childhood in Mozambique, the daughter of a Portuguese physician father and European mother), and a tendency to speak her mind with minimal editing. A damaging Washington Post profile in June 2002 portrayed her as an outspoken, needy diva and her husband as a stoic wimp; an Elle story this spring revealed that she uses Botox and insisted Kerry sign a prenup.

“I’m more of a personality than a person to some people,” she tells me during a September interview at the Grand Hyatt Hotel near Grand Central. “I just have to be myself, and if it’s not good enough . . . ” She pauses, laughs, and then gives the punch line: “I get my freedom back.”

What’s appealing about Teresa, and what gets her into trouble, is her honesty. Ask her about the challenges of a second marriage and she replies, “It’s harder to adapt. When you marry at a later stage, you inherit their friends, their good habits, and their bad habits, and they do yours.” Inquire why she thinks Kerry has the reputation of being aloof, and she theorizes that his withdrawn nature stems from being shipped off to boarding school at a young age. “He had great affection from his mom. His dad was not the same kind of sweet personality, but very brilliant, with high standards. John lived away from his parents a lot. It sets you free in some ways, makes you independent, but robs you of some things.”

Teresa first met Kerry at an Earth Day event in Washington in 1990; they were introduced by John Heinz. Two years later, by then a widow with three sons, she ran into Kerry again at the Earth Summit in Rio. “It’s tough to be a single mom of boys,” she says. “They shouldn’t become your source of emotional support. They’re not your husband, they’re not your boyfriend, they’re not an adult, they’re needy. I needed a husband and a friend. I was aware of that pretty quickly.” For a very wealthy and good-looking woman who was widowed at the age of 52, she then makes a comment that is remarkably insecure. “First of all, how many men in Washington are there of my age who would want to date me? I don’t know. I never saw any. That’s why I ended up marrying someone in the mutual field of work”—environmental issues.

Kerry separated from his first wife, Julia Thorne, in 1983, and they finalized their divorce in 1988. Thorne, who has since remarried an architect, has written an affecting book about depression, You Are Not Alone, which describes her breakdown in 1980 while married to Kerry: “My mind ravaged by corroding voices, my body defeated by bone-rattling panics, I sat on the edge of my bed minutes from taking my life.” After the divorce, the couple’s two daughters (Alexandra, 29, is an actress and film student based in L.A.) stayed in Boston with their mother, who in her book credits her recovery to therapy and antidepressants. Meanwhile, Kerry commuted weekly from Washington to be with the girls.

Kerry, who played the eligible-Washington-bachelor game for many years, says he wasn’t eager to remarry because he felt protective of his daughters and the failure of his first marriage made him unwilling to commit again. “I was feeling a little burned and a little wary,” he says, describing his state of mind when he met Teresa. “I wasn’t sure how it would all work. But then we spent time together and it grew.” Kerry has become particularly close to Teresa’s motorcycle-loving youngest son, Chris, 30, a Harvard M.B.A. who left a private equity firm to join the campaign. “I hope people understand that it’s not a slam-dunk to work for your stepfather after losing your dad,” says Heinz. “I really love the guy and believe in him, and I’m happy to help.”

The combination of Teresa Heinz’s money and Kerry’s long-simmering presidential ambitions has led to much skepticism and gossiping in Washington about their relationship. “She’s a powerful, wealthy woman, and we live in a country where people are often measured by what they have, not who they are,” Kerry says. Then he laughs wryly, adding, “Both of us have really learned not to worry about other people. She’s a very nurturing, grounded person with a lot of practical intelligence.”

Those qualities were invaluable to Kerry during this past year; it was his wife, not his doctor, who diagnosed his prostate cancer. Kerry had a physical examination last fall and came home crowing about his low cholesterol count. Teresa is a doctor’s daughter who reads up on cancer. She asked Kerry for his PSA test—“It was a lowish number but too high compared to where it had been. I remembered the two before”—and insisted he alert his doctor. “John was stunned at first,” she says, “since he didn’t feel anything was wrong.”

Kerry may not be rolling up his sleeves for this battle, but he seems, if anything, invigorated by his new role as underdog. He’s amping up his rhetoric, and he gleefully joined the seven-to-one attack on Dean for his poorly phrased Confederate-flag remarks. “You never like to be behind,” says John Hurley, a Boston lawyer and longtime friend now organizing veterans to back Kerry, “but the election doesn’t ride on polls taken now, when people are just starting to pay attention.”

For all the candidates but Dean, raising money has become tough; one well-placed New York socialite lamented recently that her friends kept turning down her requests for Kerry donations, saying they didn’t want to invest in Kerry because he didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Now that Dean has chosen to opt out of campaign-spending restrictions—using his Internet largesse rather than take federal matching funds—Kerry is widely expected to follow suit in order to remain competitive.

“He’s hurt by these stories, but he’s going to soldier on,” says new campaign manager Cahill. The campaign purge may quell some of the infighting. “We are certainly sad and upset that Jim left,” said one Jordan partisan who’s staying on, “but we don’t have time to wallow in it. It’s done.” Cahill is expected to be a calming force, “I don’t feel like I have to be a peacemaker,” she says, “We have a lot of people working their hearts out.”

Many Democrats worry that the fiery Dean can’t beat cool-hand Bush, and Clark has lost some of his momentum thanks to early stumbles. After Dean, Kerry has raised the most money, he’s running a national campaign and has popular former New Hampshire governor Jeanne Shaheen onboard. A Kerry strategist notes that when supporters of other candidates are asked for their second choice, “Kerry is everyone’s No. 2.” And there are moments when it all seems doable. At an outdoor speech in front of a bookstore in Warner, New Hampshire, Kerry beamed at the sight of a supporter waving a bumper sticker that read DATED DEAN, MARRIED KERRY. “That sentiment really describes what’s going on now,” he enthused. Well, not entirely, but he does have real, committed fans. Now all Kerry’s got to do is get the rest of the country to fall in love with him, and, better yet, stay faithful until next November.