Sex. Murder. Mystery. (40 page)

According to Michelle it was all by design. The girls were raised to be homemakers. The boys were going to be lawyers and politicians and the dynasty that Mary Schmitz had nurtured in Orange County would prosper.

From the time that she was a girl, Mary Kay was raised to smile and wave. To look good. To be polite. To be “on.” All the time. Political families are always onstage. Every weekend during a campaign, there was a parade, a fund-raiser, and a dinner. No one could deny that the Schmitzes were a gorgeous family. Handsome boys and adorable little girls all lined up around their charismatic father and perfectly coiffed mother.

“They were a façade family,” said an adult friend of the family. “A Hollywood set.”

Years later some would wonder if Mary Kay Letourneau had paid a price for the deception that was her idyllic California childhood. How had being a public family affected her? How had it affected her to have to smile even when she didn't want to because being “public” was the way her father made his living?

“Maybe she had a mental breakdown? Maybe living that life wasn't healthy? I can just imagine the conversations in that household,” said the friend.
“ 'We're not rich people, but we have values… God has entrusted us with this.' ”

Even as a young girl, Mary Kay Schmitz loved the mirror. No one could really fault her for it. She was, without a doubt, beautiful. The only blonde in her family, when she practiced piano in the normally off-limits living room, she often stopped to dance in front of a large mirror. She dreamed of studying music at Juilliard. She could dance, sing, and act. Maybe a career in musical theater? She was disciplined and enjoyed the control she had over her body.

And because her mother taught her that a girl must always look her best, Mary Kay took the lesson to heart and made certain that she always looked put together.

Primping was one thing, but as they grew into adolescence, Michelle began to find it excessive. As Mary Kay grew older, it seemed to border on the obsessive. There were times when Michelle wanted to take a baseball bat to Mary Kay's head to put her out of the misery of standing in front of the mirror.

“It took her at least two and half hours to get ready to go anywhere. She would mess with one curl on her head for a good twenty minutes before she got it exactly the way she wanted it to be,” Michelle recalled.

After a while, when they were teens, Michelle couldn't take it anymore.

“Why is that one curl so important? How long does it take to get ready?” she asked.

Cake never had an answer. It just
was.

Chapter 4

MARY KAY SCHMITZ and Michelle Rhinehart were two hot girls and they knew it. They had it all. Any guy, any boyfriend. They had yacht clubs and champagne. They had trips to Palm Springs, Catalina, and Mexico. They partied with the heirs to the May Company and Heinz Ketchup fortunes. Although the two best friends never attended the same schools, they were inseparable. Mary Kay went to St. John the Baptist in Costa Mesa and the Roman Catholic prep Cornelia Connelly School in Anaheim. Michelle attended Our Lady Queen of Angels and the local high school in Corona del Mar.

At Cornelia Connelly, Mary Kay made her name by being on the varsity cheerleading squad for three years in a row. Cheerleaders from three Orange County Catholic girls' schools vied for spots on the squad that cheered for Servite, the boys' Catholic school. By her own estimation, Mary Kay was good at cheerleading not only because she knew the routines, but because she actually followed the game. She was nominated at one point for a spot on a national cheerleading team, but dropped the ball on the paperwork and never got her rightful place on the team. Her high school grades, she later said, were as good as she wanted them to be. The classes weren't easy and she gave just enough to keep her grades halfway decent. She had other priorities.

“We just played,” Michelle said years later. “That's all we did. We just had a great time. We didn't care much about school. We didn't have to.”

In fact, Southern California was made for girls who looked like Mary Kay and Michelle—beautiful girls who could put on a pair of shorts over a swimsuit and slip into sandals and look like a million bucks. In cars with the top down, hair tousled by the warm, moist air of the ocean, they were girls who could catch all the looks that came their way. Michelle had blond hair, fine features, and gray-blue eyes. She looked like Mary Kay's sister. Many thought so. And if Mary Kay with her feathered Farrah Fawcett hairdo was a good Catholic schoolgirl by day, she was a completely different sort when she stashed her cheerleading skirt and pom-poms (“She never had any books, never did any homework that I ever saw,” said a friend of Mary Kay's).

Mary Kay liked to party, and she liked boys. And with a few exceptions, boyfriends didn't last long. Even so, they were kept on a string of steel and shoved aside when something better came along. Something better was someone cuter, or richer. Moving on was easy. A broken heart was the price of admission. As far as Michelle could determine, those were talents Mary Kay honed to perfection.

“We knew the power we had over men and we were very aware of it and we used it,” Michelle recalled of their high school days.

Sometimes the pair got in the car and just headed south where they'd end up partying for the weekend in Mexico. Ensenada was a favorite destination. So was Catalina Island. The two best friends were lovely and blond and that meant they didn't need money. Guys were always willing to shell out for a pretty girl. It didn't matter that they were high school students or supposedly had a curfew. Mary Kay didn't seem to worry about much beyond having a good time. While others might have been concerned about their school work or their jobs, Mary Kay focussed on her hair and getting to the next party to meet the next guy. There were no obstacles. She was invincible. It was never too late, too far, too expensive. She lived for the moment.

“Mary Kay always liked to live on the edge and do dangerous things,” Michelle said later.

During that period Mary Kay held a succession of jobs, working the counter at the Snack Shack in Corona del Mar or hostessing and waitressing at restaurants Casa Maria, Gulliver's, or the Good Earth. At most of those jobs, Michelle worked alongside Mary Kay. When it was time to quit for greener pastures or because they couldn't get the time off they needed to party, they quit together.

They were then, as they always imagined, friends forever.

Greek Row at the University of Southern California campus was only a short drive from Corona del Mar, and it became a magnet for Mary Kay and Michelle. When they were sixteen, the pair was on campus every week partying. Sometimes things got out of hand. On one occasion a friend of Michelle's told her that Mary Kay's party-girl antics got her mentioned in the
Row Run,
the newspaper for fraternity boys and sorority girls.

“It was just well-known that she was the girl to party with.” 'For a good time, call Mary Kay.' It's sad. I don't know that my reputation was much better, but I never read about myself in the
Row Run
, that's for sure.”

Michelle worried about Mary Kay when she went out to party. It seemed Mary Kay lived to tally the number of boyfriends she had. She measured her worth by how many guys had
wanted
her. Popularity was everything. She made the same mistakes over and over, and if she had been looking for love, it was like the words in the country song:
She was looking for love in all the wrong places
.

“There were some very traumatic things that happened in her high school and college years,” Michelle said later. “The promiscuity is a classic symptom of somebody who has been molested. She was sexually used by men she dated, too. She was physically hurt. I know that she was. As much as she keeps denying it by saying that it doesn't matter, I know that it does.”

Mary Kay had an on-and-off-again boyfriend during much of her teen years, but Michelle never considered that relationship exclusive or really that important. Mary Kay seemed to feed off the guy's adulation. It was almost as if he were star-struck by the girl from Spyglass Hill and she liked that aspect more than she liked him. The relationship was based on how he viewed her.

“We had way more power than we should have had. We basically did what we wanted to do. Our life was basically whatever we wanted it to be. We worked when we wanted to work, where we wanted to work. We played where we wanted to play and when we wanted to play,” recalled Michelle.

When Mary Kay was seventeen, her mother pushed her into running for Miss Newport Beach, even though she wasn't old enough to enter. The headstrong eldest Schmitz daughter thought the whole thing was a big joke, almost an embarrassment. But she did what was asked. For the good of the family name. It turned out later that the joke was on John and Mary Schmitz. Mary Kay told Michelle that a man associated with the pageant was doing everything he could to get into her pants.

“He was a dog,” Michelle said of the man. “It would have been really fun to see how her parents would have reacted if they could see what he was all about.”

Mary Kay didn't win, but one of the sponsors told her that she placed “in the top five.”

The response was classic Mary Schmitz. Jerry Schmitz announced he was getting married to another Scientologist, and his ultra-Catholic mother refused to support the wedding with her attendance. That also meant none of her children or her husband could attend. Mary Kay was the only one to break ranks. She loved her brother, and no matter what her mother said, she was going to be at the wedding in San Francisco. She and Michelle drove north in the Schmitz family's Oldsmobile. The engine blew in Bakersfield.

The teenage girls had no money, nowhere to stay. Mary Kay called her father and he said he'd drive up and trade cars in the morning. He still wouldn't go to the wedding. Mary Schmitz had laid down the law. The girls ended up talking a trucker out of his truck for the night and they curled up in the cab.

“She gets herself into trouble, she manages to weasel out of it. No matter what happens,” Michelle said later.

Years later, when the world would hear of their classmate, a small group of women from Cornelia Connelly gathered after the connection was made between Mary Kay Letourneau and Mary Kay Schmitz. One who knew her from the Catholic school in Anaheim had never considered the former classmate a mental giant, calling her “simple-minded.” It was an opinion that held up when they met again when Mary Kay was grown and the mother of four. She was a sad, tragic figure. The former classmate wondered if she was a victim of her childhood.

“She never really got the love she needed,” a friend recalled.

Chapter 5

KNBC, THE LOS Angeles NBC affiliate, had a locally produced issues show that was not only a ratings winner, it provided fodder for water-cooler commentary. Among the panelists were Mary Schmitz, lawyer Gloria Allred, and the president of United Teachers of Los Angeles, Hank Springer.
Free for All,
with its roundtable format, was taped on Friday nights and aired on Saturday afternoons. It was at the height of its popularity in the mid- to late 1970s.

Sometimes after the taping, Mary Schmitz would join the others for a drink or a meal at a Mexican restaurant off Olive in Burbank. Hank Springer was surprised that Mary would go out with them; she seemed so uptight on the show.

A fuckin' right-wing cunt, Hank thought at first.

But somehow Mary Schmitz, “to the right of Attila the Hun,” and Hank Springer, “to the left of Jane Fonda,” developed respect and a friendship.

“Mary Schmitz was elegant,” he said later when he thought of the wife of the California state senator. “Very beautifully dressed. Never a hair out of place. I wouldn't call her strident, but next to strident. She didn't let her hair down much. On camera she was very, very professional.”

And predictable, too.

“Almost like she was a cookie cutter,” Hank said of her on-camera persona and her defense of her causes, the anti-ERA, antiabortion movements. “You stamp her out, like a Stepford wife.”

Hank Springer found things to like about Mary Schmitz outside of her politics, which he loathed. But he found little tolerance for her husband. Mary was alone a lot during those years. Her husband was in Sacramento most of the week. If Mary could relax a little and be a person, John Schmitz could not. At least, Hank didn't think so. Once in a great while John—always on, always in a suit and tie—would join the group after the tapings.

“A very uptight man, so self-righteous. He believes in his ideas so virulently—to me it's a virus—horribly negative, homophobic, antiunion, antiabortion. Everything that had to do with people, he was against it. His homophobia was almost off the Richter scale,” Hank recalled later.

Mary Schmitz worked the same political agenda. Although she never held an elected office, she was named to a number of panels and committees and carried considerable clout. She was always at the ready to present her views. Sometimes getting the message out was all that seemed to matter.

One night Lois Lundberg, Orange County Republican Party chairwoman, invited Mary Schmitz to speak at a meeting. Mary was highly regarded as a knowledgeable speaker, articulate and quick. Though sometimes, her critics felt, she would go off on a tangent. She was a good speaker, though not as humorous or as warm as John Schmitz. The same night, the party secretary informed Lois that a local Brownie troop would be attending.

Later, Lois wished she would have asked Mary Schmitz the topic of her talk. As the little fresh faces of the Brownies looked on, Mary proceeded with a graphic discussion against abortion. A frantic Lois tried to get the speaker to modulate her message, or even better, to get her off the stage. But Mary Schmitz wouldn't budge. She was there for the night.

“She gave a long and detailed speech, talking about every form of abortion. The vacuum cleaner was the one where I had a heart attack. I was hopeful the kids were small enough that they didn't know what she was talking about.”

Los Angeles lawyer Gloria Allred not only worked alongside Mary Schmitz on the weekly television show, she worked tirelessly in the support of feminist and human rights causes. That meant she was in frequent and direct opposition to John Schmitz and his right-wing agenda. Whether stumping on television's
Merv Griffin Show
or presenting Schmitz with a “chastity belt” when she fought him on prochoice issues, she was a woman of undeniable power. John Schmitz knew it, and as some would later suggest, it irritated him. He joked about her surname: All-Red.