The missus.(Teresa Heinz Kerry)

WHEN Teresa Heinz Kerry, as she is now known, first slipped into the public consciousness, we were titillated by the promise of unique copy to come. Here was an older, sophisticated woman, cushioned by enormous wealth and, we hoped, possessed of a grand personal style.

A tip-off to the potential for delicious indiscretion came from Lisa DePaulo's interview in Elle magazine. There Heinz Kerry blithely nattered on about a pre-nup with her second husband, her Botox injections, and how she would happily remove a husband's dangly bits if she caught him cheating. The interview caused a sensation. Reporters drooled at the possibility of future features and flashes. We pictured Kerry's staff calling out for cardiac paddles just to get through the primaries. Here at last was a flamboyant, carefree spirit who could not be tamed; this was going to be better than Martha Mitchell swilling Jack Daniel's on a 2 A.M. phone call. Teresa unplugged was going to be fun. But, as we have sadly come to see, not fun enough.

Teresa Heinz Kerry was a different kind of political wife. She had unfamiliar trappings: the certain ripeness of age, earthy good looks--a kind of throwaway chic, stomping around in sling-back Chanel heels and untucked $600 silk blouses. She also had wads and wads, stacks, piles, mountains of endless money. Money she apparently totally controlled. She had five houses, innumerable cars, presumably green-carded servants, and a private Gulfstream jet. After years of pastel Talbots shirts and Mao suits from lockstep female pols, we were ready for drag-a-sable high nonchalance. We were ready for Ava Gardner in a sarong followed by maracas-shaking cabana boys. Or perhaps--if she was African American, as she claimed early on--a bit of Josephine Baker bananas-and-purple-feathers glam.

We wanted the knowing wisecracks of an Eve Arden, and the toughness of a Margaret Thatcher. We expected--given her life among the rich, powerful, and secure--that accumulation of unembarrassed insolence known as "cool." We were hungry for the drama of a dying American species: the Grande Dame. We wanted someone with that kind of money to spend it on yards and yards of tulle and chiffon and to let them blow in the political winds.

But let's face it: The scarves were wool, and way too short. Teresa whinged when a Georgetown salon wanted an extra $60 to send someone to her house for a $30 manicure; she thereby missed a golden opportunity to go to the salon, over-tip everybody, order out for champagne, and be comped for life just for the publicity. The closest she came to a cutting putdown was a Teamsteresque "shove it" to a Pittsburgh reporter. The gunshot publicity from the comment drove her, a few nights later, to deliver probably the uncoolest political speech ever made: remarks before the Democratic convention that sounded like one long political suicide note.

After months of watching Teresa Kerry, it dawns on the observer that she is being suppressed. She is swallowing her inner Beatrice Lillie, and devolving into just another loopy rich lady who made the wrong decision about a man.

She was born Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, East Africa. The product of convent schools, she was, from all reports, a devout Catholic and a daily communicant up through her college days in South Africa. Beautiful, smart, and from a good family, she graduated and left for interpreter school in Switzerland, where she met John Heinz, scion of one of America's greatest fortunes. On their first encounter, he told her his family was "in the soup business." (Sort of like John Kerry saying, "I was in the Navy.") She came to the States to marry him.