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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Dad may come off like a stiff, but Mom and the kids are a whole other story.
Feb 3, 2004 | Take my wife ... please.
It has been the recent borscht-belt refrain on the campaign trail, as Democratic front-runners Howard Dean and John Kerry have unexpectedly put their controversial spouses front and center. For Dean, the need to showcase his reclusive partner, Dr. Judy Steinberg Dean, was a matter of tempering what had turned into his major stumbling block -- a reputation for fiery unorthodoxy. After yelling through his loss in Iowa, and with voters clearly under the impression that his stay-at-home doctor wife was some sort of militant careerist trying to torpedo his Big Fat Presidential Bid, the Deans did a round of press in which they demonstrated just how peaceful and normal they were: ranch house, rhododendrons, shag carpet... "We are the most boring people on earth!" they shouted -- quietly -- at anyone who would listen.
But on the other side of the polling numbers was John Kerry, the lantern-jawed New Englander whose expressions of enthusiasm make Al Gore look like Animal from the Muppets. Kerry too, brought his family out in late January, but their aesthetic purpose seems to be the exact opposite of the Rockwellian stability that Dean -- and many past presidential hopefuls before him -- have been forced to parade in front of Diane Sawyer and her ilk. The Heinz-Kerrys are nuts! A roiling mass of beauty, brains and bad temper, the Kerry brood is the stuff that America's infatuation with nighttime drama is made of.
Kerry's wife Teresa has become a staple on the stump, along with two of her three hot sons with late husband John Heinz -- banker-heartthrob Chris and environmentalist-hambone Andre -- and Kerry's Snow White/Rose Red daughters from his first marriage, filmmaker Alexandra and medical student Vanessa. The past week has seen the Heinz-Kerrys caught up in a gossip whirlwind over whether he got Botox injections, hot on the heels of the campaign-advisor-being-edged-out-by-Teresa story line, which followed the Kerry-saying-"fuck"-in-Rolling-Stone plot, which followed the Teresa-saying-"shit"-in-Elle arc, which followed that time when Chris dated Gwyneth. I, for one, am eating it up.
Kerry's willingness to show off his eccentric clan may mean that he has figured out what appeals to America. Hint: It's not just an aggressive stance on the Iraq war or tax cuts; it's a family that rivals the Carringtons for glamorous skeletons, the Fishers for melancholy, and the Sopranos for operatic temper. The Kerry family -- unlike the dorky Deans or the aw-shucks Arkansas Clintons before them -- is a dysfunctional group deliciously ready for prime time. They provide a parade of history, tragedy and dramatic turns that 20 years ago would have landed them in South Fork and today would get them a Sunday nighttime slot on HBO.
To be fair, John Kerry himself cuts a dramatic figure worthy of Hemingway, Cheever or O'Hara -- at least on paper. And we've read it -- again and again. A Vietnam veteran, he was wounded three times and received Silver and Bronze stars for bravery while patrolling the Mekong Delta before his return to the States, where he founded Vietnam Veterans Against the War. A Boston Brahmin whose old (Forbes) family money had dripped dry over the generations, Kerry's family name and reputation got him through boarding school and Yale, where he became a member of that self-congratulatory society of machers, Skull and Bones.
Just as Virginia Clinton's dropping her first kitten "in a town called Hope" seemed almost too made-for-TV to be believed, much of Kerry's youth feels preordained, even Gumpian, as if God had decided that this baby would someday run for president, and damn if he didn't need a breathtaking story to tell on the campaign trail. After Kerry posed his famous question, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, Sen. Claiborne Pell suggested that the 27-year-old war veteran "might one day be a colleague of ours in this body." Later that year, "60 Minutes" correspondent Morley Safer asked the young man if he would like one day to become president; he said no. Married from 1970 to 1982 to Pennsylvania heiress Julia Thorne, Kerry fathered two daughters before divorcing her. Thorne later wrote "You Are Not Alone," a book about severe depression.
It all sounds intriguing. But John Kerry is the country's stiffest, most entitled-looking politician, no matter how much time he puts into activities like drinking, windsurfing, or catting around, as he did in the years following his divorce. It was during that period that he had flirtations with the gossip columns -- dating actual nighttime soap stars like Morgan Fairchild (Jordan Roberts on "Falcon Crest") and Catherine Oxenberg (Amanda Carrington Bedford von Moldavia Carrington on "Dynasty"), as well as C.Z. Guest's daughter Cornelia Guest and Ronald Reagan's daughter Patti Davis.
He was on to something. It's all well and good to be the straight man with hidden depths of history and experience. But those deep-running waters don't amount to squat until you have a drama queen to gussy you up, to light your fire. He needed a catalytic partner. The depressive Thorne -- by all accounts a lovely woman who is now happily remarried in Montana -- had not done the trick.
A round of applause for the 65-year-old Portuguese-accented, party-switching, stump-shaking, nervous-making philanthropist widow Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry, more commonly known as "Ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz." "When you're from Pittsburgh, you've got to do something," as Auntie Mame said of her frowsy, English-accented friend Vera Charles.
Not that Heinz is from Pittsburgh, though she did spend the bulk of her adult life there. She's from Mozambique, went to college at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, then to Interpreter's school in Switzerland, and had never been to the United States before her 1966 marriage to John "57 Varieties" Heinz, who would go on to become a Republican senator from Pennsylvania. They had three sons before Heinz's death in a plane crash over a Philadelphia schoolyard in 1991. A hothouse African orchid transplanted into steely western Pennsylvania, Teresa inherited the Heinz fortune and a year after her husband's death bonded with Kerry at an environmental conference in Rio. They were married three years later.
