Skip to content
News
Link copied to clipboard

Holly Werth, daughter of former congresswoman, leaves a legacy filled with laughter

Holly Thi Werth was never without words. At weddings, at funerals, at family dinners and raucous parties, she would walk into a room, assess the situation, and say something that cut right to the crux of things. She gave speeches at memorials that made everyone cry and laugh in the same breath. She gave toasts that prompted acquaintances to ask whether she was a stand-up comedian. She made jokes that had half the room gasping in shock, the other half gasping with laughter.

Holly Thi Werth met her husband, Doug, when a job with a software company took her to Idaho. They had two sons, Jude and Trent. Doug Werth said Holly didn't talk much about her childhood in Saigon.
Holly Thi Werth met her husband, Doug, when a job with a software company took her to Idaho. They had two sons, Jude and Trent. Doug Werth said Holly didn't talk much about her childhood in Saigon.Read more

Holly Thi Werth was never without words.

At weddings, at funerals, at family dinners and raucous parties, she would walk into a room, assess the situation, and say something that cut right to the crux of things. She gave speeches at memorials that made everyone cry and laugh in the same breath. She gave toasts that prompted acquaintances to ask whether she was a stand-up comedian. She made jokes that had half the room gasping in shock, the other half gasping with laughter.

Earlier this month, in hospice care, at the end of a long battle with cervical cancer, she found words when no one else could. She told her adoptive mother, the former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Margolies, how to begin her eulogy: "Tell them, 'She was always my favorite child.' "

Werth died May 3 at her home in Boise, Idaho, at age 48. She was born Ho Thi Thu Nga in Nha Trang, Vietnam, to a Vietnamese woman and an American serviceman. Terrified by rumors that North Vietnamese soldiers would kill children like her daughter as they pushed into Saigon, her mother sent her to an orphanage. Holly was 5 at the time.

Margolies was then a television reporter for NBC Philadelphia, and, a few years earlier, had become the first single American woman to adopt a foreign child: Lee Heh, from South Korea. In 1973, an adoption agency sent her a photo of the 6-year-old she would name Holly, staring into the camera with a slight smile, holding a placard with her name and birth date.

"I had done lots of stories on hard-to-place kids," Margolies said - kids from war zones, kids who had grown up on the streets. "I knew it could be hard. I knew some kids were sent back. But I knew that in a million years, I would never, ever, do that."

Holly arrived sickly. She arrived angry, convinced her birth mother had abandoned her. She arrived stubborn, a street kid from Saigon on the sidewalks of the Upper East Side, where Margolies rented an apartment for a time.

"She would see something she wanted in a restaurant window, and lie down in front of the door until we went in," Margolies said. "When she wanted something, she would get it - but then she would share."

Slowly, Holly adjusted. She learned English fast, and comedic timing faster. She went to Quaker school in Wynnewood and threw herself into athletics. She never lost her stubborn streak - "If she wanted to do something, she got an A+. If she didn't, she just didn't do it," Margolies said - but was unmistakably bright, and went to the University of Pennsylvania, her mother's alma mater, on a lacrosse scholarship.

Two years after she adopted Holly, in 1975, Margolies married former U.S. Rep. Edward Mezvinsky. Between them, they had 11 children. The youngest children flocked to Holly.

"Going on vacation when we were young, we would always want to sit next to Holly - we would fight over who got to share her room," her brother Vu Pham said, laughing. "She had this great energy. She was always the most fun to be around."

Holly changed professions frequently - writing for television, radio production, office management for an architectural firm, and once, writing letters to irate guests at an Arizona luxury ranch, the latter job a vessel for her scathing wit.

In the late 1990s, a job with a software company took her to Idaho, where she met her husband, Doug Werth. The brash girl from the big city and the soft-spoken lawyer from the rural Midwest clicked, unexpectedly.

One morning, Holly called Margolies out of the blue. "Can you get together a wedding in a couple of weeks?" she asked.

Holly didn't talk much to Werth about her childhood in Saigon, he said. There was anger there, still, and fear. But eventually she decided, as she had children of her own - Trent, 10, and Jude, 12 - that she wanted to meet her birth family. In 2007, Doug traveled to Vietnam by himself - "kind of a scout trip," he said - and found family members who spoke of a tough little girl with a sharp sense of humor.

Thirty-nine years after she left, Holly went to Vietnam in 2012, with Margolies.

Though her birth mother, Ho Thi Hieu, had died 10 years before, Holly "learned her mother loved her and didn't want to give her away," Margolies said. She met her half-brother, who recognized a scar on her leg from a long-forgotten motorcycle ride. She met babysitters who told stories of her cajoling candy from American GIs, and family members who remembered hiding under the bed with an infant Holly as bombs fell on a nearby Army base in Nha Trang.

Surrounded by family members she was meeting for the first time, Holly, a bit nervous, turned to humor.

"Can you talk to me about how I was as a little girl?" she asked drily on a video Margolies took of that trip. "Were there any redeeming qualities?"

Then, that trademark laugh.

"Holly had a very traumatic early childhood," Werth said. "And a lot of those feelings she put in jars, figuratively speaking, and left them there."

When she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2013, he said, his wife began, at last, to open those jars.

"She was forced to sort of quiet her life - and really become at peace with herself," he said.

She quit working to spend more time with her sons. She endured grueling chemotherapy sessions. She tried to rest after a life spent on the go.

Friends and relatives filed through Holly's room in hospice care during the last months of her life. She joked that now, they would have no choice but to cherish all the tacky gifts she had given them over the years. She tried to get up and leave with them sometimes, even toward the end.

After Holly died, Margolies, tying up loose ends, called the hospice service that had cared for her daughter in her last days. The nurse on the other end gasped when Margolies introduced herself.

"Holly was our favorite patient," the nurse told Margolies. She was kind, the nurse said. She was brave. She had fought to the end. And she was very, very funny.

"And that," Margolies said, through tears, "was Holly."

awhelan@philly.com

215-854-2961@aubreyjwhelan

A memorial service will be Sunday, June 5, in the Amado Recital Hall in the Irvine Auditorium at 3401 Spruce St. on the University of Pennsylvania campus.