READ ENOUGH INTERVIEWS, and you’d half expect Teresa Heinz (now Mrs. John Kerry, though she wisely refrains from using the Massachusetts senator’s name) to enter Washington’s Willard Hotel for the presentation of her Heinz Awards with a communal pacifier dangling from her spare yet tastefully adorned neck.
The $ 800 million pickle-and-tater-tot heiress (after her husband, Pennsylvania Republican Sen. John Heinz, was killed in a 1991 aircraft collision), in all her philanthropic largesse has emerged as “the nurturer of the region” — her words. “It sounds presumptuous in a way, doesn’t it?” she asked. Some would say yes — but not many. She was named Pittsburgher of the year by Pittsburgh magazine, the Utne Reader listed her among its 100 visionaries, Bill Clinton called her “one of the good guys,” W christened her “Saint Teresa,” while George opted for “Mother Teresa.”
All this saintly motherliness has culminated in the Second Annual Heinz Awards. The First Annual Heinz Awards were given out in January of this year, but apparently the event went so swimmingly that Teresa couldn’t go a whole 12 months before again bestowing five no-strings gifts of $ 250,000 apiece on exemplars in the fields of Arts and Humanities, the Environment, the Human Condition, Public Policy, and Technology and the Economy.
Ever wondered what undaunted noblesse oblige looks like? Then come to a Heinz soiree, where it’s worn like rackroom Givenchy. Which is not to say the awards shouldn’t be taken seriously — as seriously as congratulations can get to an honoree who calls herself “Bubbles” (the breathless and retired coloratura Beverly Sills).
The Heinzie is as achievement-lite as the Kennedy Center Honors and as liberally unctuous as the MacArthur “genius grant.” It may exceed the Nobel in prestige, or at least “it’s just as good,” as lucky winner C. Everett Koop says. The awards take account not only of the accomplishments of recipients, but also “less tangible qualities,” like “commitment to making the world a better place” and “a sense of optimism,” embodied by the late John Heinz.
One can understand why” Teresa is so insistent in interviews that this would all be sanctioned by her late husband. Never mind that the Heinz Endowments ( comprising multiple philanthropies) in 1992 only gave $ 400,000 to environmental causes, while under her revised stewardship they now top $ 3 million annually, or that the first Heinz Environmental Award went to Paul Ehrlich, a biologist by trade best known for being wrong about everything. Or her close relationship with Marian Wright Edelman, winner of the $ 250-large this year.
All this is no reflection on her Republicanism, damn it, despite the dastardly Rick Santorum’s suggestion that she was doing her Democratic husband’s bidding when she endorsed Santorum’s Democratic rival, Harris Wofford, in the state’s 1994 Senate race. When Santorum said Clinton’s national service program, on whose board she sits, was intended to turn unsuspecting Americans into people “singing “Kumbaya” around a campfire,” Teresa fired back. She dubbed Santorum “Forrest Gump with an Attitude,” the ” antithesis of John Heinz,” whose “politics amount to cynical and calculating appeal to our fears and weaknesses.” Santorum won.
And it’s not as if this Kerry thing matters, even if cynics are waiting to see if her largest endowment of all will be to help her husband to victory against the somewhat less loaded William Weld in next year’s Massachusetts Senate race. Or perhaps this political iconoclasm is simply in keeping with what she calls “the maverick spirit of John Heinz, who never accepted conventional wisdom, whether on public policy or how to make a ski turn.”
Hardly a sounder bite of wisdom could be culled, except for one more quote by the very same Teresa Heinz, toasting the opening of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, when she said, “One of the worst things the living do to the dead is to presume to speak for them.” Heinz couldn’t have said it better himself.
by Matt Labash
