Maria Teresa My Kind of Woman
Corry, John
LET THEM EAT PUMPKIN SPICE COOKIES Maria Teresa My Kind of Woman BY JOHN CORRY C ALL ME A ROMANTIC, a dreamer, or just a schlemiel. I still can't help myself. I've got a thing on Teresa Heinz...
...And grad school, as well...
...Her face goes blank when John Kerry gives a speech...
...But Maria Teresa—she was Mrs...
...i4 John Corry is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...Say what you will about her, but this is no Stepford Wife...
...But Maria Teresa and I, I am sure, would have had a nice time while it lasted...
...Yes, in Geneva," Maria Teresa said...
...Meanwhile I do not mean to be flippant or to diss, as we now say, the institution of marriage, but I suspect she still thinks of herself as Maria Teresa and not as Mrs...
...Gorbachev asked, no doubt disdainfully...
...if Ted Kennedy holds onto that marriage just for the Catholic vote...
...I'll maim you...
...Meanwhile I think Mrs...
...I've got a thing on Teresa Heinz Kerry, nee Maria Teresa Thierstein SimoesFerreira, a name I much prefer to the one she is known by now...
...Y INTEREST IN MARIA TERESA, however, has absolutely nothing to do with politics...
...Gorbachev one-up her...
...Mrs...
...She visited Jews in Moscow, and at a luncheon in Washington had a run-in with Raisa Gorbachev...
...ennui comes upon her...
...Maria Teresa, never one to hide her light under a bushel, would not let Mrs...
...At university...
...She once called him "unpatriotic" for avoiding military service during the Vietnam War years...
...also, you know instinctively that she's just not his kind of woman...
...But I can see myself in a smoky cafe with a tousle-haired Maria Teresa while a tinkling piano does something moody, and we size one another up...
...As a student in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the late 1950s, she joined in anti-apartheid demonstrations...
...Gorbachev, presumably under the impression that she was dealing with just another rich lady dilettante, said, "I'm a philosophy teacher...
...Gorbachev if the US...
...She considered him small potatoes...
...You could sell tickets to a match-up between them...
...It is her womanliness that gets me...
...She really should debate Laura Bush...
...OCTOBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 29...
...Maria Teresa, of course, is nothing at all like that...
...Mind you now, not an SOB, a rat, or a louse, but "a perfect bastard...
...She once said she had told John Heinz what she would do to him if he strayed: "I'll maim you...
...In the 1980s, as co-chairwoman of Congressional Wives for Soviet Jewry, she went up against the Commies...
...For one thing, John Kerry would probably come bounding in...
...She is not being disloyal, but she has politics in perspective, and anyway she's heard her husband before...
...This was elegant and pithy, and ladylike, too...
...The New York Times reported that Mrs...
...Heinz then—persisted...
...Women don't think that way in Stepford, Connecticut, although life there would be a lot more interesting if they did...
...the campaign has dulled her soul...
...and the SovietUnion might work more closely together on mutual problems...
...What did you study, Mrs...
...then I think he's a perfect bastard...
...The kicker, of course, is in "and grad school, as well...
...Heinz Kerry...
...She told a creepy reporter to "Shove it," but that was only badinage, and in years past she was more incisive...
...But if a Stepford or semi-Stepford Wife is your thing, that's fine, too...
...She asked Mrs...
...I am not at all sure she would win, and in fact, I think she would do better going one-on-one with President Bush, or better yet, Dick Cheney...
...I won't kill you...
...Bush is very pretty, and Lynne Cheney isn't bad, either, but I can't imagine myself ever flirting with either one...
...What would happen then...
...In the 1970s, for example, when married to Senator John Heinz, she told an interviewer that she didn't trust Richard Nixon, and added: "Ted Kennedy I don't trust either...
...Gorbachev, however, was evasive...
...At the same time it's clear she feels constrained...
...I imagine Maria Teresa dismissing Teddy with a wave of her hand when she said it...
...There's something to be said for an adoring woman who is sure you can do no wrong, and hangs on your every word...
...Political science and literature," she replied...
...It is one of a kind and even a little intimidating, rather like the lady herself, and it hints at far away places, sultry scenes, and tempestuous entanglements, just as she does, too...
...Nothing, of course...
Vol. 37 • October 2004 • No. 8
