PRESIDENT GERALD FORD’S GRANDDAUGHTER

Not many people knew it, but President Gerald Ford’s granddaughter, Heather Vance, was an assistant editor for D Home and its various sister publications including D Weddings.

She left in June for a job in marketing at Conde Nast, after working for us for a couple of years. Now that I’m seeing so many images of her famous grandfather on TV, I see the enormous resemblance. Heather is a beautiful blonde, with lots of charisma, like her grandmother Betty Ford. During the last months she worked for us, I have vivid memories of her coming into my office, which I shared with editor David Feld at the time, worried about the various demands of being First Granddaughter. For the last year or two, Gerald Ford had been in and out of the hospital, and many had expected him to die. Periodically, a badly mannered and ill-informed reporter would call and ask if her grandfather had died yet–it was insult to injury each time that happened, she said. Still, the realities of the situation intruded. Her grandfather would likely die soon, and an official state funeral and ceremonies would ensue. She was told that she would need to have three dark suits ready and to be prepared to jump on a plane at a moment’s notice. She needed to be able to pull this off on a junior editor’s salary. A lot of people expected former First Families to be flush with cash, but for Heather at least this wasn’t the case. She was a working girl fresh out of SMU. David Feld, a former Parsons School of Design student and a fashion designer himself, helped her select three suits from the J Crew catalogue that she had in tow. David had known her mother Susan at college, and I think Heather felt a particular kinship. And so as the state funeral plans for her grandfather are finalized this week, I’m wondering what is going through Heather’s mind. I’m certain it’s not what suit she will be wearing; at least J Crew will have taken care of that. She talked in such adoring terms of her grandparents and how hard it was to see them failing in health. To her, Gerald and Betty Ford were family–to the rest of us, they were legends. And like a lot of Americans, I learned the most about Gerald Ford the legend from the past two days of news broadcasts. I was in high school during his presidency, and I didn’t pay much attention. But he was an honorable, admired president during very troubled times. He pardoned Richard Nixon for all the right reasons, even if many didn’t agree with him. That took courage. Too, it takes courage to be a first granddaughter, making your own way in the magazine business, on your own merits. You won’t find the connection between her and her famous grandparents on her resume. And it wasn’t until she’d been working for us for more than a year that I learned of her background, and even then she didn’t talk about it much. Her grandfather would have certainly approved.