Heidi Cruz Didn’t Plan for This
A whole new world—that is what Ted Cruz wanted to give her.
It was the spring of 2001, and Heidi Nelson was planning her nuptials to the man she’d met just over a year earlier. On Christmas break from Harvard Business School, she’d encountered the cocky and cerebral Cruz in Austin, Texas, where they were both working on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. He was “super-smart” and “really fun” and looked like a “1950s movie star.” “It was love at first sight,” she told me.
They filled those three weeks with movies and dinners and drives. Then he took her to the airport, where she’d get on a plane back to Boston. Call me every day when your day is done, she instructed him. And he did call her, every day that spring, at about 3 or 4 a.m. Later that summer, Ted gave her a strand of pearls. Probably fake, she still thinks, but they were from Bergdorf Goodman. And this was special: She’d mentioned once that she liked to go to Bergdorf’s, to look at the china and other delicate things behind glass, and he’d listened.
Which is how Heidi found herself planning a May wedding to a man who, for all his pretension, insisted they play “A Whole New World,” the popular Disney song, at the end of the ceremony. She didn’t understand: They had a band, she told him—a violinist, no less! Why on earth would they play a CD? “Because no one can do Aladdin,” he said. She relented, and it became a theme of sorts. Or that’s how she remembers it, anyway. On a magic carpet ride.
That was 17 years ago. Since then, as Ted’s wife, the mother of their two daughters, and the family breadwinner, Heidi has helped see him through roles as Texas solicitor general, U.S. senator, and, most recently, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. In 2015, she took unpaid leave from her job as the managing director of Goldman Sachs in Houston to campaign for her husband. Suddenly, the curtain was pulled back on the woman who professed to love one of the most polarizing figures in American politics. While Ted struggled to find character witnesses within his own party—his colleague Lindsey Graham once joked about someone murdering him on the Senate floor—Heidi collected fans wherever she went. “Everyone loves Heidi,” a prominent Houston Democrat told me. “Every time I talk to her I think, You should be running for office, not your husband.”
Heidi Cruz is indeed easy to like. I met her on an August afternoon at her home, where she’d invited me for lunch. The Cruzes live in precisely the house you’d envision—white brick with black shutters and a door framed by gas lanterns—in the neighborhood you’d expect, leafy and palatial, in the center of Houston.
If some people look like their dogs, Heidi Cruz looks like her house: longer than I thought it would!”—wearing a light-blue silk dress, a slightly darker blue scarf, and a knotted strand of pearls (not the ones from Ted). As we sat down to eat, she said what I imagine all women who wear these things must say, her voice warm and conspiratorial: “We’re gonna have some champagne. Yes, we are.” She leaned to grab a bottle off the dining-room table, and the crystal chandelier reflected her hair and turned gold.
