These days, it must be a lot of fun being a member of the John F. Kerry/Teresa Heinz Kerry blended brood.

Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette At last week's John Kerry rally at the University of Pittsburgh, Christopher, left, and Andre Heinz joined their mother, Teresa Heinz Kerry, in boosting their stepfather's presidential campaign. Singer Jon Bon Jovi is behind and between the Heinz brothers. Click photo for larger image.

Consider the scene on a hot spring day last week, when four-sevenths of what might be America's next first family lined up on a stage at a rally at the University of Pittsburgh. There was, of course, Kerry, tall and serious-looking in crisp blue shirtsleeves, standing shoulder to shoulder with his stepsons Chris and Andre Heinz, both of them movie-star hip and handsome in blue jeans and dark sunglasses. Jon Bon Jovi was there, too, and Tom DeLonge -- the so-geeky-he's-hip lead singer for Blink-182. Andre was alternately serious and silly -- "how yinz doin'?" he asked the crowd in bad Pittsburghese -- while Chris allowed himself to be the foil to DeLonge's jokes about Heinz's suave good looks ("Yoww!" someone shrieked in the audience).

The raucous atmosphere quieted only slightly when a small woman in a soft brown suit and daffodil-yellow sweater draped around her shoulders stepped to the microphone and began to speak.

"This is a little eerie," Teresa Heinz Kerry said in a soft, slightly gravelly voice, as she gazed over the crowd of 5,000 students and other onlookers and described the strange sensation of coming back to her hometown in a Secret Service motorcade, passing Magee-Womens Hospital "where I had my babies."

Her babies -- two of them, at least -- listened respectfully as their mother went on to describe how she met her second husband (through her first husband, on Earth Day in 1990), her life growing up in Africa, her experiences on the campaign trail and her declaration that, despite all the Secret Service protection and the hoopla, "I will remain humble, I promise you."

It was yet another sweet, funny performance by John Kerry's extended family, which promises to considerably lighten and invigorate the presumptive Democratic nominee's stiff, stodgy image in the coming months -- not to mention provide some very good copy for the likes of Vogue, Salon and the New York Post's Page Six Column.

A family of achievers

At age 31, Chris Heinz -- already a veteran of the gossip columns, having dated Gwyneth Paltrow in 2000 -- is pondering a career in politics, possibly in the Pittsburgh region. Andre Heinz, 34, known for his dead-on characterizations of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bob Dole and Bill Clinton, speaks three languages and works as an environmental consultant in Stockholm when not dividing his time between Paris and Pittsburgh. Vanessa Kerry, 27, a blond replica of her father, is in her third year of medical school and is planning to augment that with a master's degree in international relations, economics and health policy. John Heinz IV, 37, married with a child, runs a school in Eastern Pennsylvania. Alexandra Kerry, 30, is a student at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.

So what kind of family is this? Is the Heinz-Kerry story about how two fractured families came together under rough circumstances -- divorce on his side, widowhood on hers -- only to be bonded together by the demands of a presidential campaign?

Not at all, says Andre, Heinz Kerry's second son. "I don't think the campaign helped in healing, because what was there was already in place beforehand. There's no trajectory to this story. Maybe there would have been if this had happened when we were much younger, but not now."

"We're not the Brady Bunch," says Heinz Kerry in a phone interview the day after the rally. "It's not about taking them to school, or, 'Oh, here's your lunch.' " Rather, she stresses, it's about a family of grown-ups who have their own lives and who up until now saw each other mostly on holidays.

For her part, though, Vanessa describes the group as "very much your typical family. For the most part, it's great and funny and lovely, but -- trust me -- there are moments when the dinner table gets very heated up. And there are moments where somebody has borrowed something and you're just so annoyed."

Working on the blend

	Courtesy of John Kerry Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., is seen in 1996 with his daughters Alexandra, top, and Vanessa, in Boston, Mass. Click photo for larger image.

When Kerry and Heinz married in 1995, all of the children were either away at school or on their own, but they consciously tried to get to know one another as siblings, she adds. If anything, it was easier for the three younger members of the family, who found themselves in New Haven together, with Andre a graduate student at Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Science while his younger brother Chris and stepsister Vanessa were undergraduates at Yale.

"Because Vanessa, Chris and Andre were at the same school together, she got to become a sister in a real way," says Heinz Kerry, adding, with a trace of pride, that "whenever something big happens, Vanessa and Andre are on the phone with each other even before they call us."

On the other hand, Alexandra already had graduated from college and was out on her own when the couple married, so she never got to be in the normal daily routine. While describing her as artistic and sensitive, "I know her much less" than Vanessa, Heinz Kerry adds.

Still, the relationship with Vanessa and Alexandra is a good one, she says, despite the inevitable tensions when Heinz Kerry married their father. While the girls lived with their mother, Julia Thorne, they felt, as many teenage girls do, a special claim on their father's time, Heinz Kerry noted, a feeling intensified by the divorce and the separation. "And all of a sudden there's a new woman, and they have to share. And it's at a time when they're teenagers anyway, and they're having a harder time with their moms, and so they turn to their dad for attention."

"I never had girls," she added, "and my friends who have daughters tell me that once they turn 14, there's nothing a mother does right, and it's the father who saves the day. So, yes, it must have been hard on them."

Bonded by a mission

Today, that's past history, and for Vanessa, at least, the campaign has something to do with it.

Vanessa says she and Chris have become particularly close and were a constant campaign duo throughout the fall and winter -- particularly in their sweep through Iowa for the Kerry "Dorm Storm."

"We started calling it 'The Chris and Vanessa Show' because we were entertaining ourselves," recalls Vanessa. "Chris and I could be very easily just walking down a random hallway and we will have each other just busting out laughing. ... I think if you had asked any of us, would this be a bonding process, we would have thought no. But the truth is that it's been extraordinarily bonding."

"Chris and Vanessa care deeply about John and the issues in this campaign and are personally vested, both emotionally and otherwise" in it, says Heinz Kerry. Andre, "my citizen of the world," she adds fondly, comes in when he can. About her eldest son, John, she is more circumspect. "He's shy. He's a very serious person, and he does not like his privacy meddled with."

This is not to say the eldest son is a cipher; John Heinz IV is on the board of one of the family's two foundations and is intensely involved in the work of Sarah Heinz House, which provides after-school programs for disadvantaged youth on the North Side and is funded by the Heinz Endowment.

"He has a really strong social conscience and a probing, analytical mind, with a particular interest in children, youth and health issues," says Max King, president of the Heinz Endowments. "But he is reclusive about publicity."

And in political campaigning, a certain kind of toughness and "ability to be vulnerable" is necessary, says Heinz Kerry. "Campaigning is a totally personal avenue. You have to be disciplined, have a sense of humor, be vulnerable and have fun doing it."

Vulnerable?

"Yes, you have to be vulnerable, which means being open to others, because if you don't, then you shut people out. And what people want is people who are open, frank and not afraid, not to be guarded and not to make mistakes."

The political life

Heinz Kerry is well-known for her self-confidence and ease with strangers, something honed during a 25-year marriage to her first husband, Pennsylvania's Sen. H. John Heinz III.

It's a marked contrast to what John Kerry's first wife had to go through during her marriage. Julia Thorne, who is now happily remarried, wrote two books published in the 1990s about her struggles with depression and divorce. In her 1996 book, "A Change of Heart: Words of Experience and Hope for the Journey Through Divorce," Thorne described how difficult it was to be happy about her husband's political accomplishments because she associated politics "only with anger, fear and loneliness."

"Politics had robbed me of privacy and the right to an autonomous life," Thorne wrote. "As long as I was a political wife, I had to be on guard, carefully monitoring my behavior and appearance in an effort to avoid 'bad press,' gossip, or the loss of votes. I felt as if I were not just supporting my husband but selling my soul for the sake of his career. I wanted out."

And when Teresa Heinz Kerry first started giving interviews -- in a famous Washington Post story she bickered affectionately but pointedly with her husband -- some Kerry supporters worried that her outspokenness might cause him trouble. But that hasn't happened, and today, Vanessa says her stepmother's experience with the prying nature of politics may have made the campaign experience easier for her father.

"I think it certainly has helped," Vanessa says, "because you don't need to transition someone into that world. ... And I think [Heinz Kerry] deals with it with great grace. Even if you're used to it, it's still hard."

Though Chris is considering a run for office, Vanessa seems almost to choke when asked whether she'd ever considered going into politics. "Oh God, no," laughs the third-year medical student. Vanessa says her passions always have been medicine and science, even from her childhood days stirring up anthills in the garden and bringing frogs inside the house. Her decision to work on her father's campaign grew out of her frustration while training in Ghana and in Boston, where critically ill patients told her they didn't know if they could pay for prescriptions and for medical care. She was determined to shake more voters her age out of their apathetic state. And when she told her father she wanted to work for him over one of their Sunday dinners, she says he dropped his fork in surprise.

"My father and mother have both encouraged us enormously to go about our own paths, so that was always expected," says Vanessa. "But I realized I was really upset about the direction that the world was going in. I loved my dad and believed in him enormously. ... I felt like I had to be a part of change."

For Andre, campaigning with his stepfather has been "eye-opening," he says. As a boy growing up in Georgetown (the boys spent the summers at Rosemont, the family home in Fox Chapel), he never went out on the campaign trail with his father, "but I was always exposed to it in Washington. It was much more about seeing people come to the house when my parents gave fund-raisers."

There were passionate political debates around the dinner table. "It was nuclear fission," he laughs. "Both of my parents had hot tempers."

In fact, Andre, who works as a consultant to Natural Step, a Stockholm-based environmental organization promoting sustainable development, was the one people most expected to follow in his father's footsteps, especially given John IV's penchant for privacy and Chris' youth, but today he says he never had much interest in it, "although I was always proud of the political legacy of the family."

He also feels keenly that the Republican Party of his father's time "has changed. Decisions are being made based on ideology rather than with respect to policy. My father looked facts in the eye and asked, what is the right thing to do. That's not happening anymore."

His pride in Kerry as a candidate is palpable -- but he shies away from describing him as any kind of a replacement for his own father, whom, he says, "I miss terribly."

A 'graceful' dad

Kerry has "always respected boundaries and family dynamics skillfully and wonderfully," Andre says, sentiments echoed by Chris, who credits his stepfather with creating a smooth transition. Though Kerry and Chris bonded over "guy stuff" like motorcycles and on the ski slopes, he says he most admired the way the senator assimilated himself into the family in a "graceful" way.

"That was how he earned my trust and respect up front," says Chris. "He didn't try to come into our family and make lots of changes. [He] understood that we were all young adults and our own people."

If any new kind of family dynamic has evolved within this extended family since the campaign began, says Heinz Kerry, it's "an awareness by all the kids about how hard their father, their mom, their stepmom have worked, how seriously committed, disciplined and focused we are."

And sometimes, her own children have surprised her with their insights, she adds, recalling remarks Chris made at a Philadelphia rally Friday night.

"He told the crowd, 'When my dad died, the lights went out, and my mom's world shrank. And when John [Kerry] came into her life, it expanded again.' And then Chris went on to say that now that he's older, he's realized, too, that John had made his own life expand, and that of the family, and that John had enabled him through all of this to open up again.

"It was very moving."