Quotes of the Day
Santa Fe, N.M., has its share of hangouts for the megarich. The Guadalajara Grill, a strip-mall cafe decorated with balloons in the shape of beer bottles, isn't one of them. But places like that are part of the territory if your husband is running for President. That is how Teresa Heinz Kerry, conservatively estimated to be worth $500 million or so, happened to find herself there last Friday afternoon, inhaling the heavy aroma of frying tortillas and trying to persuade a mixed group of 30 Democrats, including some undecideds and former Deanites, to vote for her husband. Nearly two hours into it, she had just about wrapped up when a latecomer arrived. Not wanting to miss a single potential supporter, Teresa took Francesca Lobato aside and started all over again, spending an additional half an hour answering her questions about education, taxes and health care. By the time Teresa was finished, she had converted even restaurant owner Pedro Solis, who was waiting tables and running the cash register.
Although Teresa has made countless campaign stops like this — having twice been married to lanky, blue-blooded, Yale-educated Senators named John — very little about her fits the stereotype of the political wife. Not even Hillary Clinton strayed so far from the dutiful, adoring Stepford spouse as Teresa. She has the independence that comes with a personal fortune and one of the nation's biggest philanthropies, a life story that sounds like a screenplay and a bluntness that could never be scripted.
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As dogged and earnest as she is when she is campaigning for Kerry on her own, Teresa (pronounced Tuh-ray-za), 65, does not function nearly so well as a prop. Onstage beside her husband during yet another recitation of his stump speech, she stands with her wavy hair falling over her eyes, looking preoccupied or, worse, bored. Only recently did she begin using Kerry's last name, switch her party registration from Republican and quit referring to the late Senator Heinz in the present tense as "my husband." She still has a tendency to volunteer what another political spouse might lie about — her Botox shots, her prenuptial agreement, what she would do if she ever caught her husband cheating and the fact that Kerry was in the bathroom when he found out he had won the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.
All of which is why voters don't quite know what to make of her. To some, she brings a badly needed dose of authenticity and passion to a candidate who struggles to convey both. "I don't understand Kerry, but I'm nuts about her, because she talks about health care and children's issues," says Eileen Waterman, 57, a nurse in Albuquerque, N.M. To others, she embodies everything that doesn't work about Kerry. Baer Woodrum, who runs a Shoney's in Aiken, S.C., says he can't imagine Kerry doing well in this Tuesday's primary, in part because "his wife, I hear she's really ..."--he pauses to find a polite word--"Northeastern."
Actually, she hails from just about as far south as you can go: the southeastern edge of Africa. Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira grew up in the capital of Mozambique, a city now called Maputo but then known as Lourenco Marques. The daughter of a Portuguese doctor, she was part of a pampered colonial class, playing tennis on the grass lawns of private clubs and spending her days sipping tea and coffee with her friends. One of the country's best-known painters, Malangatana Valente, recalls serving "Terezinha" when he worked as a waiter in a coffee shop. "She was always smiling and talking to everyone nicely," says Malangatana. "She was always a happy girl."
But when she went on calls with her father into the bush, where people would gather before sunrise to await them, Teresa saw what were the grim realities of life for most people in the country. To swim at dawn or dusk was to risk malaria; the slightest malady, left untreated, could become a death sentence. And she knew the menacing side of even a privileged existence under a dictatorship. Her father wouldn't let his criticisms of the government's repressive economic and racial policies go beyond the family dinner table. She went away to college in South Africa, where a classmate from the University of Witwatersrand recalls her as a devout Catholic who attended early-morning Mass at the university chapel on most days. She also marched with the nascent antiapartheid movement, giving her worried mother "a fit," Teresa says.
It's her outsider's view of America that captivates the crowds in places like the Ruby Elephant Coffee Shop in Kalona, Iowa. "People die around the world wanting to have freedom of speech and the right to vote," she told them. "The idea of America — more than geography or more than a flag, even — when you are far away, is an idea of possibility. It's an idea of hope. It's an idea of trust. It's an idea of trying and succeeding if you want to." She is a halting, sincere speaker, and even when she has a microphone, you have to strain to hear her. But those very qualities are what draw listeners in.
Teresa came by her fortune with her marriage to Heinz, the heir to the Pittsburgh, Pa., ketchup-and-pickle conglomerate, whom she met when she was studying at the University of Geneva to be an interpreter. (She's fluent in five languages.) Heinz told her his family made soup back in the States. She still calls him "the love of my life." When Heinz died in a 1991 plane crash, she turned down a chance to run for his Senate seat and poured her energy instead into refocusing how the Heinz family's philanthropic network deploys its $2 billion in assets. One of her primary causes is the environment. When she was serving as a delegate to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, she struck up a friendship with one of the other delegates, to whom her husband had once introduced her on the Senate steps — and three years later, she and John Kerry were married at her house on Nantucket.
As Kerry rails about "George Bush and his economy of privilege," his wife flies across the country in a ketchup-red-and-white jet sporting "57" as part of its tail number. But there is also an earthiness to Teresa. During a flight with a TIME correspondent a few years ago, she had eggs from her Pennsylvania farm carted aboard and scrambled them herself in the cramped galley of the plane, whistling Give My Regards to Broadway and making bawdy jokes about her chickens. "I think she'd be quite extraordinary as First Lady," Kerry says.
It took a while for him to convince her of that — or that it was worth it to try. She went for long walks in the summer of 2002 near her place in Sun Valley to turn over the possibility in her mind. "I actually told him on the phone that I was coming to a place where I accepted it," she told TIME. "Then, as you get involved in the campaigning, you get excited about the idea of really helping people. Before, it was just theoretical. Now, my bones get sore, but my mind is stoked."
- Karen Tumulty