Family Has Seen Share of Turmoil

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.