Los Angeles Times
October 27, 2004 Wednesday
Home Edition
The Nation;
Family Has Seen Share of Turmoil;
Along with power and wealth, the clan Teresa Heinz Kerry first married
into has lived through tragedy and estrangement.
by Ralph Vartabedian, Times Staff Writer
PITTSBURGH
If her husband is elected president, Teresa Heinz Kerry will be among
America’s most recognizable figures. But she already is commander of a
family empire that has been a familiar name to Americans for over a
century — one whose history includes political activism and
philanthropy, but also infighting and tragedy.
The Heinz family history is told all over this riverfront city — at a
stylish museum named for Teresa’s late husband, Sen. H.J. “John” Heinz
III, and in archives at Carnegie Mellon University. The name is stamped
on parks, schools and a magnificent limestone chapel at the University
of Pittsburgh.
The symbols of Heinz wealth, power and patronage in Pittsburgh tell the
public story of a pioneering American industrial family almost as
important to food as the Fords are to autos and the Rockefellers are to
oil.
A closer look reveals a long record of conservative as well as liberal
political activity and philanthropy, mixed with epic battles over money
and personal turmoil such as divorces, suicides and alcoholism.
Within the family, there are painful memories of a schism in the 1930s
that led to a 50-year legal battle and helped shape the modern Heinz
family. To this day, it has left some of the grandchildren and
great-grandchildren of patriarch H.J. Heinz feeling cast out.
“Most of the time, people aren’t talking to each other,” said Nancy
Heinz Russell, a granddaughter of H.J. Heinz. “That’s what happens when
people have money.”
Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira joined the family in 1966, when she
married John Heinz, future Republican senator from Pennsylvania and
great-grandson of H.J. Heinz, the ketchup and pickle king.
She assumed control of the family empire in 1991 after Sen. Heinz died
in a plane crash. Five years later, she married John F. Kerry, a
Democratic senator from Massachusetts.
Even as she made a new life with Kerry, she remained loyal to the
Pittsburgh branch of the family. She is addressed by her staff as Mrs.
Heinz, and her legal residence is the Heinz family estate outside of
town.
She has fought fiercely to protect the family image. Ten years ago,
Heinz Kerry hired an archivist to research the family tree, but has
kept the findings private, even within the family. She declined to be
interviewed for this article.
After a lengthy genealogical investigation, The Times has identified
the other descendants of H.J. Heinz, founder of the pioneering food
company, who died in 1919 at age 74.
He left three wings of the family under daughter Irene and sons Howard
and Clifford. Four generations later, there are more than three dozen
descendants.
The family is spread far and wide, most having severed their
Pennsylvania roots years ago. In several cases, The Times’ reporting
led to members of the Heinz family getting in touch with each for the
first time, including two distant cousins living a few streets apart
near Monterey.
Except for Heinz Kerry and her three sons, most of the family lives in
California. Heinz Kerry, worth at least $1 billion, controls the lion’s
share of the family’s money, but there are other centers of wealth and
sharply varied political views about how it should be used.
Separate Lives
Heinzes pioneered the industrialization of the U.S. food supply, pushed
government reforms to improve food safety and advocated for military
intervention to stop the Armenian genocide.
Heinz Kerry is the family’s largest philanthropist, but other Heinzes
have opened their wallets for public causes from Orange County to New
York. Family money has funded hospitals, assisted the poor and educated
scientists and artists.
The family has also experienced tragedies, most notably the midair
plane collision over a suburban Philadelphia schoolyard that killed
Sen. Heinz and six others. Far less known is the alcoholism, suicide,
eccentric behavior and marital instability that have plagued all three
wings of the family.
Along the way, there were odd encounters with the rich and powerful.
Rock star David Bowie wrote the song “Young Americans” for his good
friend in the celebrity circuit, the late Sharon Heinz Tingle. Sarah
Heinz Waller, whose husband was a maverick Chicago alderman in the
1920s, was personally threatened by mobster Al Capone, friends and
family say.
Many Heinz family members today lead very private lives, tired of jokes
about ketchup and requests for loans. Family members no longer manage
H.J. Heinz Co., and they own less than 4% of the firm’s stock.
Some descendants have no real sense of heritage or kinship.
“I had no idea I had any relationship with this family until I was 12
years old,” said Wilda Northrop, a watercolor artist and a
great-granddaughter of H.J. Heinz. “I was raised that this was a big
secret.”
Northrop, president of the Carmel Art Assn., shook hands this year with
Heinz Kerry at a fundraising event, but didn’t mention she was the
second cousin of Heinz Kerry’s late husband.
Northrop’s son, Lowell, is supporting Sen. Kerry’s campaign, making
videos for MoveOn.org, the liberal activist group. Lowell Northrop says
he knows little about Heinz Kerry.
“It’s an interesting little story that I am a Heinz, but it is not
something I have gone out of my way to tell anybody,” he said in a
phone interview. “Money sometimes brings out the worst in people.”
‘Just Johnny Heinz’
The man Heinz Kerry married was the child of Joan Diehl Heinz and H.J.
“Jack” Heinz II. The couple’s marriage did not last long, and they
played very different roles in their son’s upbringing.
After their divorce, Joan moved to San Francisco with her young son in
tow and, an aviation pioneer herself, married naval pilot Monty
McCauley.
“No one in San Francisco knew where he came from,” said a family
friend, Ted Stebbins, referring to the future senator. “He was just
Johnny Heinz.”
Meanwhile, Jack Heinz, the father, was a consummate jet-setter. He
owned a dozen homes and had two more wives after Joan. Suave and
imperious, he hobnobbed with British royalty and Greek shipping tycoons
while running the family company from Pittsburgh.
By most accounts, Jack Heinz had a distant relationship with his only
son, and was none too happy when he learned that the main heir to the
family fortune wanted to marry the daughter of a Mozambique doctor.
“His dad disapproved of his marriage…. The story was that his dad
felt he had been hoodwinked by a fortune-seeking European woman,”
recalls Cliff Shannon, who headed John Heinz’s Senate staff in the
1980s. “Eventually, he made his peace with Teresa.”
Jack Heinz underwrote the performance hall for the highly regarded
Pittsburgh Symphony. Less well known is the philanthropy of his
ex-wives.
Drue Heinz, the last of Jack Heinz’s wives, had bit parts in film, and
still controls a foundation with assets of $32 million that supports
some of the top fiction writers in America.
His first wife, Joan McCauley, who died in 1999, left the bulk of her
$31-million estate in the Bay Area, contributing to the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art and the ARCS Foundation, which supports the
nation’s elite students in science and engineering.
Progressive Legacy
The progressive views of family patriarch H.J. Heinz were out of sync
with early 20th century capitalism. He provided employees with medical
care and adult education. Some of his factories had rooftop gardens
where workers could relax.
It was in this era that armed guards for U.S. Steel killed 10 employees
during the infamous 1892 Homestead strike at a plant in Pittsburgh. In
a move laden with symbolism, Heinz Kerry would later purchase the
abandoned U.S. Steel plant and turn it into a public park.
“He treated his workers better than anybody I have seen in the early
20th century,” Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School,
said of H.J. Heinz. “He was the real deal.”
H.J. Heinz was branded a traitor in some sectors of the food industry
because he supported government intervention to ensure minimum safety
standards. As food-processing scandals raged in the background, he
pushed hard for the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which created the
Food and Drug Administration.
His son Howard, also deeply involved in public service, was sent to the
Middle East by the Wilson administration after World War I to head
famine-relief efforts. On the day H.J. Heinz died, Howard was
delivering 30,000 tons of food to the region, where he witnessed the
unfolding genocide that took the lives of 1.5 million Armenians.
Howard tried to get Wilson to send troops to halt the slaughter in
harsh, remote areas of eastern Turkey and Armenia. In a dispatch to the
president, he wrote, “I do not believe America, when she knows the
truth, will be satisfied to have all our ideals of humanity thrown to
one side while these people are murdered.”
His pleas were ignored.
It was Howard’s grandson, John Heinz, who became a U.S. senator and
came to personify a moderate Republicanism similar to his
grandfather’s.
John Heinz tried working in the family business but left unsatisfied
after five years. He became a college professor, and in 1971 was
elected to Congress, six years after marrying Heinz Kerry.
Sen. Heinz drew an unusual mix of support. Steelworkers liked his
protectionist policies, and he tirelessly promoted the coal industry.
But he also backed environmentalists’ efforts to clean up the state’s
air and water. On the campaign trail, he successfully masked his
blue-blood pedigree.
“He had a common touch,” said Louis Pagnotti, whose family owns a
Pennsylvania coal mine. “And Teresa was a big hit in the ethnic
communities up here.”
Since the death of her husband, Heinz Kerry has kept tight control over
family documents. About 10 years ago, she began collecting detailed
personal information from distant relatives, recalled Robert Heinz, a
great-grandson of H.J. Heinz.
After meeting the family archivist for lunch in San Francisco, Robert
Heinz said, he repeatedly asked to see the family tree — with no
success. “The archivist finally told me that Teresa has not authorized
it,” Heinz said in a phone interview.
A Conservative Side
If Sen. John Heinz represented the family’s moderate politics and
public policy, Clifford Heinz represents a different outlook.
A grandson of H.J. Heinz, Clifford has long — and quietly —
underwritten conservative causes from his base in Orange County. He has
acquired a wealth, celebrity and power separate and apart from the
Pennsylvania wing of the family.
When the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, he was awakened
with the news at Clifford’s mansion in Newport Beach, where he was a
guest.
Heinz has helped fund the Free Congress Foundation, a Washington-based
think tank, and has underwritten the campaigns of various Republicans,
including Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of Huntington Beach. He has long funded
ethics programs and endowed a chair for peace studies at UC Irvine.
“Clifford is a very principled, conservative Republican,” Rohrabacher
said.
Clifford Heinz, 85, declined to be interviewed. His attorney, Bernard
I. Segal, said his client had no desire to be drawn into a public
controversy with Heinz Kerry. To put it mildly, the two have little in
common politically.
Clifford Heinz was a key financial supporter of Oliver North,
contributing $25,000 to his unsuccessful Senate campaign in 1994 — the
same year Teresa Heinz sharply attacked the former U.S. Marine colonel
and his role in the Iran-Contra matter in a speech before the National
Assn. of Christians and Jews.
“It is difficult to imagine anything more cynical than Oliver North
running for Congress,” she said in her speech. “This is a man who used
his moment in the public eye to spit not just on politicians, but on
the institution of Congress itself.”
Geographic Schism
Not long after the death of patriarch H.J. Heinz in 1919, his
descendants began migrating to California, and a Western branch of the
family came to outnumber the Eastern branch. By the Depression, a
full-blown schism had occurred, centered around who would get the
family wealth held by the senior Clifford Heinz.
A director and vice president for labor relations, Clifford had always
been second fiddle to his older brother, Howard. And by the Depression,
Howard’s son Jack was playing an influential role in the family
business.
The battle began in March 1935, when the senior Clifford Heinz died of
pneumonia at a Palm Springs hotel. He had left Pittsburgh three months
earlier, hoping the dry desert air could cure him. Clifford’s third
wife, Vira Ingham, was by his side when he died.
But the three children from his second marriage — Clifford, Nancy and
Dorothy — were never informed of their father’s illness, even though
they lived only a few hours away in Beverly Hills. Their mother was
socialite Sara Moliere Young, who had run afoul of the Pittsburgh
family.
After their father’s death, the teenage children received a second
jolt, discovering that in Clifford’s final will, they had been
disinherited. They came to believe that decision was made on his
deathbed under pressure from the elders of the Pittsburgh clan.
“They tried to cut us out of the will,” recalled Nancy Heinz Russell.
“Dad was not a strong, forceful man … and the Heinz family hated my
mother. The Eastern family hated the Western family.”
The resulting lawsuit dragged on for decades, ultimately resulting in
the children getting a large share of key Heinz trust funds.
It wasn’t the only time the family played tough when it came to money.
Rust Heinz, grandson to the company founder, moved to Pasadena in the
1930s and married Helen Clay Goodloe, daughter of a prominent family
from Kentucky that included a U.S. senator and an ambassador.
When Rust was killed in a 1939 car accident, Heinz family attorneys
persuaded his wife to take $25,000 and forfeit any claim to the family
money. The couple had separated, but they were still legally married.
The inside story of what had happened was detailed in a newspaper
article 16 years later in the Pittsburgh Press. The headline: “Heinz
widow traded fortune for $25,000.”
After a second unhappy marriage, Helen Heinz took her life, according
to her daughter, Margot Pierrong, a convention planner who lives in
Anaheim.
“She was so young,” Pierrong said. “I am not bitter, but what the Heinz
family did to my mother will come around.”
Out of Public View
Irene Heinz, the eldest child of the company founder, married and moved
to Manhattan, and her branch of the family virtually disappeared from
public view.
Irene’s husband, John LaPorte Given, suffered a nervous breakdown —
under the harsh treatment of the Heinz family, according to his
granddaughter. He retired early to play golf, and gave away tens of
millions of dollars to Harvard University and other schools.
A daughter, Sarah Given, came to distrust the family money, saying it
destroyed personal character. She married twice, the second time to a
firefighter.
Sarah’s younger brother, John Given, became estranged from the family
and was known for eccentric behavior. New York City police arrested him
in 1948 on allegations that he beat a man with his cane.
When police examined the cane, they found a 28-inch dagger in its
shaft. Four years later, after he fired a pistol at a neighbor’s
birthday party, he was ordered by a New Jersey magistrate to leave
town.
Given, who never married and suffered from alcoholism, died in 1957. In
his will, he instructed executors at Chase Manhattan Bank to find
deserving beneficiaries for his estate.
They gave more than $4.5 million to charity.
GRAPHIC: GRAPHIC: Heinz family tree CREDIT: Lorena Iniguez Los Angeles
Times PHOTO: ‘BIG SECRET’: Wilda Northrop, an artist living in Pacific
Grove, didn’t know she was related to the Heinzes until she was 12.
PHOTOGRAPHER: David Paul Morris For The Times PHOTO: FUTURE SENATOR:
John Heinz and his wife, Teresa, in 1976, upon hearing that he won the
GOP nomination for the Senate. PHOTOGRAPHER: Associated Press PHOTO:
MATRIARCH: Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of John F. Kerry, remains deeply
involved in the Heinz family. PHOTOGRAPHER: Pablo Martinez Monsivais
Associated Press