Healey quietly labors to polish an image

For most Republicans, South Boston is terra incognita, a forbidding enclave of urbanites with Democrat in their DNA. But on a dreary late-fall afternoon, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey stepped around rain puddles and through the back door of a three-story brick building along the drab industrial corridor of Old Colony Avenue.

Smartly attired in a herring-bone woolen business suit, she looked out of place entering the converted factory space for a tour of a new wing of Cushing House, a 12-bed transitional home for adolescent girls trying to escape drug addiction's grip. But Healey supported state funding of the treatment program and was no stranger to the people or the issues.

''She comes here, she talks to us, and she knows the issues," said state Representative Brian Wallace, a South Boston Democrat, after the tour.

For nearly three years, Healey has slogged through one small-bore event after another, meeting local pols, glad-handing Republican activists. Most of all, she struggles mightily to shed an image that she is too inexperienced, too aloof, and too Republican to make it in Massachusetts politics.

Now, with most of the political world expecting Governor Mitt Romney to forgo reelection next year, her big opening may be at hand. But after working in Romney's shadow, she remains a mystery and some GOP players still wonder if she can win.

By all accounts highly intelligent, the 45-year-old Healey is academic and wonkish by both training and inclination. Educated at Harvard, she is a former consultant who specialized in criminal justice at Abt Associates in Cambridge and has absorbed the minutiae of state government and public policy.

As lieutenant governor, this expertise has provided Healey with a niche of influence in the lengthening shadow of Romney, who's becoming an increasingly national figure. At the same time, Healey has struggled to master the vagaries of politics, an art that does not come naturally to her.

''I'm a very private person, and this has been a very quick transition for me," Healey said of trying to adapt to the demands of public life since Romney tapped her to be his running mate in 2002. There has been turbulence along the way.

In February, she had State Police flash blue lights to wave her through a traffic jam so she could make a speaking engagement. A month later, she told a reporter that property tax breaks would keep senior citizens ''overhoused" in large suburban homes. Last month, she said the children of illegal immigrants should ''go to private schools" rather than receive in-state tuition discounts at public colleges. Coming from the well-heeled Healey, who has two children at pricey Shore Country Day School, the remark lit up the radio talk-show switchboards.

Her choice of words reinforced an image of a public figure out of touch with her less fortunate constituents.

When their enormous $2 million vacation home is finished in West Windsor, Vt., Kerry Healey and her husband, Sean M. Healey, will own five houses, worth about $9 million total, in three states: the new house and an existing nine-room home on 134 acres in Vermont; a 12-room house, assessed at $1.1 million, at the Palm Island resort in Cape Haze on the West Coast of Florida; and a pair of adjacent ocean-front homes on Curtis Point in Beverly, part of the North Shore's ''gold coast."

In Beverly, Healey and her family live in a sprawling Colonial, valued by the city at $2.5 million. It was built before the Civil War as a summer home for a wealthy merchant, according to Stephen Hall, director of the Beverly Historical Society. Next door, her mother-in-law, Yvonne Healey, lives in a smaller house, purchased for $2 million two years ago.

The couple's wealth is almost entirely the result of the success of her husband of 20 years as president and CEO of Affiliated Managers Group, an asset management company based in Beverly. While the company has made the Healeys rich -- last year, Sean's compensation package was worth $3.4 million -- it has come with a public relations cost. In October, in an effort to end a spate of bad publicity, the publicly traded firm returned a $1.2 million tax break it received from the state in 2001 to move to an old estate in exclusive Prides Crossing.

With AMG stock options worth an estimated $82 million, Sean Healey exercised a portion of them, netting about $13 million earlier this year. At least some of the proceeds are available for a Healey-for-governor campaign. To win in 2002, Healey spent $1.8 million of the couple's money.

Kerry Healey the lieutenant governor bears little resemblance to Kerry Healey the friend, according to Boston lawyer Martha ''Marty" Mazzone, who was Healey's roommate senior year at Harvard and remains close. ''It's unfortunate that her image is of being cold and reserved because she's just the opposite," she said. ''She's a warm and giving person . . . very, very funny, very sharp, and with a lack of pretension or airs."

There's a less-buttoned-down side to the distant, moneyed public persona. Healey owns a Ford F150 pickup truck, listens to a satellite radio station that plays only early punk rock (the music of her college years), and drinks five cans of Coca-Cola a day.

Both Kerry and Sean Healey come from humble circumstances. He was raised on military bases, the son of a career Marine officer. Her family lived in modest houses in and around Daytona Beach, Fla. Healey's mother taught school and her father was in real estate until a heart attack permanently disabled him when Healey was 15. Without any health insurance, the family's savings, including her college funds, were wiped out. They worried about losing their home, she remembers.

As a teenager, Healey worked part-time jobs, selling souvenirs at a beachside stand and working double duty at the local daily newspaper, writing both a column and software programs for the research and development department.

At Seabreeze High School (''Home of the Fighting Sandcrabs"), she was a superstar. After her election in 2002, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported that Healey's high school accomplishments ''were so numerous they had to be printed in small type next to her yearbook picture." She was voted class president, ''most intellectual," and ''most likely to succeed."

''She was a model student in every way -- academically, socially, morally," said the Rev. Richard J. Grasso, a Catholic priest who knew her parents and was Healey's English instructor during a teaching stint at the public high school. ''She was mature beyond her years."

Growing up in rowdy Daytona Beach shaped Healey's views of crime and punishment and contributed to an enduring interest in what she calls ''those unsolvable problems that confront society," drug abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, sexual predators. Then as now, the city was a mecca for raucous college students, bikers, and stock car racing fans.

''There was definitely a high level of transience, and, to some degree, a fairly high level of violent crime," Healey recalled during a series of Globe interviews. A friend from her church was murdered in 1980 by a serial killer who was later executed, said Healey, who supports capital punishment.

As an only child of only children, she grew up without siblings, cousins, aunts, or uncles. Her parents wouldn't let her go to Walt Disney World, only an hour away, because they considered it frivolous, Healey said. (She's taken her own children there two or three times.) Instead, the family spent summer vacations before her father's disability visiting archeological sites in Greece, Turkey, Mexico, and Guatemala. Both parents had an interest in ancient civilizations; they met during a dig at an Indian mound in Florida's panhandle.

Healey's father, Edward Murphy, who died last January, was Irish-Catholic, and she was baptized Catholic but as an adult embraced Episcopalianism, the religion of her mother, Shirley, whose parents were German and Scottish-Canadian immigrants. As a child, Healey said, she attended services at each parent's churches on alternating weeks.

She settled on the Episcopal faith after reading ''a massive amount" about the teachings of the Catholic Church while studying at Trinity College in Dublin for a doctorate in political science and law. ''I was for the death penalty, for contraception and legalized abortion. I thought about it deeply and came to the conclusion I am not Catholic," Healey said.

In supporting abortion rights and civil unions for same-sex couples, she differs not only with the Catholic Church but also Romney, who holds much more conservative views on many social issues.

Healey said she and her husband, who was raised Catholic, ''are nominally [affiliated] with the Episcopalian church." She describes herself as ''a spiritual person; I don't know that I'm a religious person."

Her future husband was a year behind her at Harvard, where they took one class together but didn't really know each other. ''He noticed her, but she didn't really notice him," said Regan Healey, one of Sean's two younger sisters and who is close to her sister-in-law. They did hit it off in Ireland, however, where both attended Trinity on Rotary International scholarships.

What they had in common, Regan Healey said, was a similar background. ''Both came from humble beginnings and schools where not a lot of kids went to Ivy League schools," she said. ''They worked incredibly hard. . . . Both are completely self-made."

They returned to Cambridge when Sean attended Harvard Law School, but then lived in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., for seven years, while he worked in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs. During this period, their son, Alexander, and daughter, Averill, were born and Kerry Healey consulted part time for Abt. In 1995, he accepted a position at AMG, and they came back to Massachusetts, settling in Beverly.

Kerry Healey, long interested in politics, soon found an outlet for her ambition. In 1998 and 2000, she twice challenged an incumbent Democratic state representative and lost badly. The transition from academic to politics was awkward at times, she confessed. ''It didn't come easily to me, certainly."

But late in 2001, she became chairwoman of the Republican State Committee. A few months later, Romney plucked her from relative obscurity to be his running mate.

As lieutenant governor, she became liaison to cities and towns, a difficult indoctrination in 2003, her rookie year, because she had to defend deep cuts in local aid to close a budget gap. She considers it a major credential if she runs for governor.

''Having sat down literally with hundreds of local officials over the course of the last three years, in good times and bad, has given me just an intensively detailed knowledge of what's going right and wrong in communities across Massachusetts," she said. ''That's certainly something that would qualify me to be governor."

The road trips continue. In the past year, she visited about 70 of the state's 351 communities, many multiple times, her schedules show.

In a highly centralized administration, structured as a vehicle for Romney and his agenda, Healey's subordinate role includes a portfolio restricted primarily to being the policy maven on issues involving municipalities, criminal justice, homelessness, and substance abuse. Romney said his lieutenant briefs him about issues in her bailiwick. ''She's able to convince me on a number of these," he said.

Several local officials give Healey an ''A" for effort but are critical of administration policies she is charged with defending.

''I do think she cares about the issues that affect local government, and she's been a pretty quick learner, but I don't think she has a lot of authority," said Mayor Mary Clare Higgins of Northampton, who will become president of the Massachusetts Municipal Association next month.

Past and present aides say Healey works long hours. Yet, a review of her schedule shows she clocked 11 weeks of vacation over the last two years, far more than Romney, potentially fueling questions about the level of her involvement in the workings of government under Romney. One week included a Department of Defense trip to tour Pacific bases.

Of more practical use in burnishing political skills has been the day-to-day demands of her office. A former college instructor, she has become a polished public speaker, able to deliver remarks while rarely referring to a text. Yet the missteps, which even some admirers fear reflect a tin ear, have received more attention.

Healey believes that publicity was overblown. ''You're talking about a very small number of instances out of probably hundreds of hours of on-the-record public meetings," many of them freewheeling, she said.

The attention shouldn't have surprised her. Last year, according to a newspaper account, when Healey spoke to high school students back in Daytona Beach, she advised them: ''I can assure you, if you become successful, every dumb thing you've ever done will be on the front page."

Romney is sympathetic. ''We always commiserate over the 'gotchas' " -- hers and his -- he said. ''Most of the time you feel it was unfair, that it was out of context or not what you meant, but the truth of the matter is that it's just part of public life."

''She's not going to come across as a hale-fellow-well-met, backslapping, you know, a Rudy Giuliani, handing out cigars and having a great walk down the North End," Romney said. ''But that doesn't mean she's not a caring, empathetic person who's very bright and committed to doing a great job."

Healey said she recognizes that media scrutiny has intensified as Romney's presidential explorations have increased and it became more likely she may be a candidate for governor next year. She and her family are willing to pay that price.

''We've had enough taste of it during the last campaign, and in the past few months," Healey said. ''We don't think we're naive about what this might entail, so, yeah, I think we're ready."