Taken by surprise. (romance between
Senator John Kerry and Teresa Heinz)
Democrat Senator Kerry and Heinz, a Republican and heiress to the H.J. Heinz
food company fortune, seem like an unlikely couple but are very much in love.
The two began dating in 1994, and friends and family of the married couple
confess that they are very happy together.
When it comes to discussing their relationship, Massachusetts Sen. John
Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz, gush like the newlyweds they are. "I knew
from the beginning we wanted to be together," says Heinz. Adds Kerry: "We
have found friendship as well as those things that go with being lovers."
But when a photographer asks the pair--holding hands and giggling in a booth
at a Boston restaurant--to kiss for the camera, they flinch. "No PDA--no
public displays of affection," says Kerry. "I don't want people to feel that
what we have is contrived."
As two of Washington's highest-profile eligibles--and now one of its most
glamorous couples--Kerry, 52, and Heinz, 57, know all about having their
every move analyzed. A two-term Democrat, Kerry briefly dated actress Morgan
Fairchild after he and writer Julia Thorne divorced in 1988 after 18 years.
Heinz, a liberal Republican and prominent philanthropist (Women's Wear Daily
once dubbed her Saint Teresa), inherited the $760 million H. J. Heinz food
company fortune following the death of her husband of 25 years, U.S. Sen.
John Heinz III of Pennsylvania, in a midair collision near Philadelphia
International Airport in 1991. Now in a tight reelection bid against popular
Republican Gov. William Weld, a multimillionaire, Kerry--whose assets
totaled less than $100,000 before he married Heinz--has had to contend with
cynics who insinuate he married for more than love. "I know there are people
who are saying, 'Oh, sure,' " says Kerry, who, under federal election law,
is allowed to use up to half of his and Heinz's shared assets--an amount he
won't reveal-- to finance his campaign. "I don't care. What is important is
that we enjoy being together, sharing our lives."
Friends don't doubt it. "Before he married Teresa, he was lonely," says
Kerry pal Tommy Vallely, director of the IndoChina program at the Harvard
Institute for International Development. "Now he's bubbly. He's in love."
To be sure, neither Kerry nor Heinz jumped headlong into the relationship. A
casual acquaintance of the Heinzes' when the late senator was in Congress,
Kerry was at the same Washington dinner as Teresa one night in February
1994. Impulsively, Kerry, a decorated Vietnam vet, asked her to accompany
him on a stroll to the nearby Vietnam Veterans Memorial. "The farthest thing
from our minds was dating," says Heinz. But by evening's end they realized,
to their surprise, that they wanted to see each other again. "Both of us
were wary and unprepared," says Kerry. Recalls Heinz: "I had been married to
the love of my life. It was very hard to then think of going out with
someone else."
Gradually, cautiously, the pair began a romance. One weekend they would
rendezvous at Heinz's retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho (one of her four homes);
the next, they would cook to classical music at Kerry's Boston apartment. By
October, says Kerry, "it began to be very important to me to make it work--it
hurt not to be together." After a brief discussion one night over plates of
homemade risotto, they decided to marry.
Seven months later, surrounded by 100 guests--including Kerry's daughters,
Alexandra, 22, and Vanessa, 19, and Heinz's three sons, John, 29, Andre, 26,
and Christopher, 22--the couple wed at Heinz's $4 million Nantucket, Mass.,
estate. "It's wonderful seeing Teresa happy again," says longtime friend
Wren Wirth, an environmentalist and the wife of State Department
undersecretary Tim Wirth. "John Kerry and John Heinz are actually quite
similar. Both are exceedingly bright and committed to social issues."
The second of three children, Kerry was born in Denver but later raised in
Oslo, Paris and Berlin after his father, Richard, an Air Force pilot turned
diplomat (mother Rosemary was a homemaker), was named legal adviser to the
high commissioner of West Germany after World War II. He attended boarding
school in Switzerland and the exclusive St. Paul's School in New Hampshire
and went on to graduate from Yale with a political science degree in 1966.
Kerry then joined the Navy, volunteering for Vietnam, where he commanded the
"swift boats" that patrolled rivers, flushing out Vietcong. "I believed I
owed my country something," he says. But his enthusiasm soon evaporated. "I
began to see how totally weird it was," he says. "I was getting angry as I
saw good friends killed in absurdly conceived missions."
Returning home in 1969 with three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver
Star (awarded for his courageous leadership against the enemy), he became
one of the organizers of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, making headlines
at a Washington protest rally in 1971 by disposing of his medals on the lawn
of the Capitol. "I was brash and impatient," Kerry says. "I wanted
everything to change now." Seeing politics as the way to make a difference,
he ran for a U.S. House of Representatives seat in Lowell, Mass., in 1972
but lost. Graduating from Boston College Law School in 1976, he became an
assistant district attorney in Boston. With an impressive record prosecuting
high-profile cases, he was elected Michael Dukakis's lieutenant governor in
1982. Two years later he successfully ran for the Senate, where he headed
the Select Committee on POW/MIA affairs and lobbied for medical coverage for
veterans affected by Agent Orange.
Heinz, the second of three children, was born and raised in Mozambique, then
a Portuguese colony, by her Portuguese father, Jose Simoes-Ferreira, a
doctor, and his Mozambique-born wife, Irene Thierstein. Educated at boarding
schools in South Africa, Teresa participated in student protests against
apartheid while studying romance languages and literature at the University
of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. "My father begged me to become a doctor,"
she says regretfully. "But I thought I'd be married and have children."
Fluent in five languages, she graduated in 1959 and went on to the
Interpreters School of the University of Geneva. There she met John Heinz,
then working at a bank as part of his training to take over the family
empire. In 1966, two years after she moved to New York City as a consultant
to the United Nations, they wed.
As her husband grew in political prominence--he was elected to the House of
Representatives in 1971 and the Senate five years later--Teresa, who had
quit work to raise her children, lobbied against destruction of the rain
forest, nuclear arms and lead paint in low-income housing. Following her
husband's death, she was considered the natural candidate to fill his seat,
but she declined. With a family business to oversee and three children to
comfort, she was emotionally shattered. "Her sorrow was so deep, I wondered
what would happen," says a friend. "Now she seems crazy about Kerry, and we
are all so happy."
Hitting the campaign trail together, the pair shuttle between their two
primary residences: Heinz's $2.2 million Georgetown home and their newly
purchased $2 million, five-story house on Boston's Beacon Hill. A daredevil
who thrives on paragliding and acrobatic flying, Kerry has recently helped
Heinz unwind by teaching her to Rollerblade. "I put pads on all over," she
says, laughing. Most of all, they spend their free time reveling in each
other. "Until we met, I was sort of stumbling along and so was Teresa," says
Kerry. Now, he adds, smiling broadly, "we both love the moonrise, the
sunrise, the wind and the water. We love everything about life."
