ONE of America’s wealthiest women is standing in Chanel shoes in a roadside motel amid one of the country’s poorest regions, telling a room full of Democrats with her lilting, faintly exotic Portuguese brogue why she first fell in love with America during her African childhood.

“I got to see Some Like It Hot,” Teresa Heinz Kerry said. “And I thought Americans were funny people, with men going up trains in skirts and this beautiful girl, Marilyn Monroe, who was very funny. And America started to take shape in my mind.”

Quite how Mrs Heinz Kerry is taking shape in the minds of Americans as they start to consider the possibility that she will be their next First Lady is one of this election year’s most fascinating spectacles.

To judge by the reception of voters in the Collinsville Quality Inn in southern Virginia, which, with Tennessee, was one of two Southern states to hold a Democrat primary yesterday, her bluntness, foreign mystique and outsider’s view of America are proving a revelation. John Kerry, the Massachusetts senator and favourite to win the Democrat presidential nomination, said recently that he thought that his wife would make an “extraordinary” First Lady. Few of the Vietnam War hero’s political rivals agree with what he says, but nobody has denied that.

Mrs Heinz Kerry’s life story is a Hollywood scriptwriter’s dream, and little about her fits the stereotype of a candidate’s wife.

Heiress to the Heinz ketchup fortune, fluent in five languages, fiercely independent, often seen fidgeting and yawning during her husband’s speeches, she is unscripted, passionate, unpredictable and has emerged as one of the key factors in rescuing Mr Kerry’s campaign, which was in its death throes six weeks ago.

Last year, Mr Kerry’s aides were privately frantic about the damage that his second wife was doing to his presidential ambitions, after two of the most highly entertaining interviews given by a candidate’s wife landed her with the label of “loose cannon”.

Profiled in Elle, she volunteered information that made Washington’s political strategists shudder: her Botox shots, the prenuptial agreement that she made Mr Kerry sign before their 1995 marriage to protect the $500 million (£294 million) fortune that she inherited from her late husband, the Republican senator John Heinz III, and what she would do to her husband if she caught him cheating (she would maim him).

She also persistently referred to her late husband, who died in a plane crash in 1991, as “my husband”, and refused to use the name Kerry. She appeared to pick an argument with Mr Kerry in front of another interviewer.

Yet, in resurrecting his campaign by gambling all on Iowa, the first contest in January, which Mr Kerry unexpectedly won, the Massachusetts senator also bet that his wife’s eccentricities would appeal to voters and transform his image as an aloof patrician. He was right. “Teresa basically forced undecided voters to take a look at John Kerry,” Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s 2000 campaign manager, said.

Now using the name Kerry and assiduously referring to her first husband as “late”, she flies around the country in a ketchup red-and-white jet with “57” as part of its tail number, telling people her life story and why her present husband — “my late husband was killed, also a senator, also called John” — would make a wonderful president.

Maria Teresa (pronounced teh-RAY-zah) Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira was born and raised in Mozambique, the child of wealthy expatriate Portuguese parents. She told her audience on Monday night in Collinsville, a blue- collar area hit hard by the closure of textile mills and furniture manufacturers, that she studied languages in South Africa and marched against apartheid. She speaks quietly, arms often clasped across her chest, but her audience seems enthralled.

She was studying to be an interpreter in Geneva in 1962 when she met John Heinz, who was on holiday from Harvard Business School. He told her that his family made soup. They married in 1966 at the Heinz Chapel in Pittsburgh. Heinz became a Republican senator and they had three sons — Chris, Andre and John. Chris now campaigns for his stepfather. On Earth Day in 1990, Heinz introduced his wife to Mr Kerry on the steps of the US Capitol. A year later she was widowed.

She met Mr Kerry again at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, seated next to him at dinner. For part of the night they spoke to each other in French. Long divorced, Mr Kerry was linked at the time with a series of glamorous younger women, including the actresses Catherine Oxenberg and Morgan Fairchild.

They did not begin dating until the following year. They found themselves again at a dinner in Washington. Mr Kerry offered her a lift home. On the way he took her to see the Vietnam War memorial, bathed in moonlight.

“It took him a while,” she told her audience in Collinsville. “He was slow. I really wasn’t looking to marry a senator again. And he married me in spite of me being older.” Her husband’s time has come, “whether or not he succeeds”, she said. “I think of him as a late, great maturing wine, just ready for sipping.”

Mrs Heinz Kerry, 65 to her husband’s 60, runs the Heinz family’s $2 billion philanthropic network. She is passionate about the environment and children’s issues, but can reel off the minutiae of her husband’s economic plan or the Bush Administration’s healthcare Bill.

“Man, she was awesome, dynamic. She needs to have a show on national TV,” Sam Gamble, in the audience on Monday night, said. Unlike seasoned political operators, Mrs Heinz Kerry does not seem interested in tailoring her message to parochial concerns. In the cornbelt of Iowa, for example, one hears all the candidates slavishly supporting federal subsidies for corn-based ethanol.

On Tuesday night, Mrs Heinz Kerry spoke with great excitement about her recent visit to the Detroit Motor Show, where she saw an environmentally friendly fuel-efficient hybrid car.

Times Recommends

• Rio Tinto four held as China prepares case
• Diplomats must keep heads down and trousers up
• When in Rome should one make like Berlusconi?