If Loving You Is Wrong (3 page)

By 1970, three more siblings had joined Mary Kay and her three older brothers. When Mary Kay was three, her sister Terry was born, followed by Elizabeth and, lastly, Philip, born in March 1970.

“John and Mary loved having three boys, then three girls, then a boy. It was so wonderful. And so tragic later,” the close family friend and neighbor later said.

In the years of his heyday as the king of the quip, John Schmitz became beloved by reporters looking for a loose-cannon quote that could guarantee outrage and increased readership. John Schmitz became known more for what he said than what he did. Whenever he opened his mouth, John Schmitz supporters cheered and his foes wondered if he'd left enough room for his foot.

“They like to be called gays,” he once said of homosexuals in search of political clout. “I prefer to call them queers.”

Sometimes charm was slipped into the mix and his remarks came off as one-liners, given like a political Johnny Carson.

“I may not be Hispanic, but I'm pretty close. I'm a Catholic with a mustache,” he said.

When the Schmitz family left for Sacramento or later for Washington, D.C., their good Brittany Woods Drive neighbors' joy for the family was tempered with personal sadness. Though they kept in touch and saw old friends and neighbors whenever they came to town and attended fund-raisers—for which Mary Schmitz had made her daughters' dresses—it wasn't the same.

“When we got to Washington, John took us to the White House and everything. I got to sit in Tip O'Neill's chair,” said the neighbor. “We were so happy for them.”

It was June 1970 when John Schmitz moved his family to Washington, D.C., to fulfill the time remaining on a congressional seat won in a special election. Mary Kay would later say she made the transition easily, basking in the attention reflected from her father's admirers. There were parties to host, Easter eggs to roll on the White House lawn, and photographers to smile for at every turn.
Heady stuff for an eight-year-old girl
. Her father was at the top of his game at that time and he knew it. Things were happening for her mother, too. Mary Schmitz was more than a wife; she was a savvy political partner. She was passionate about her political and religious beliefs and every bit as adept—many felt more so—as her husband when it came to tapping into the strengths of the conservative constituency. She attracted a following by campaigning against the ERA and was dubbed a “West Coast Phyllis Schafly.” Like her husband, she was a fervent right-to-lifer who considered abortion nothing short of murder.

If John Schmitz was the leader of the band when it came to Orange County Republican politics, as one adversary later characterized him, his wife was equally powerful and accomplished. Mary Schmitz was a captivating public speaker, and an articulate crusader for conservative causes. She was more than just a woman standing behind her man—though she espoused the ideal that that's where women belonged.

Some friends of the family felt sorry for Mary Kay, and her sisters Terry and Elizabeth. The emphasis in that household was always on the sons. It was a man's world and John and Mary Schmitz made no bones about it and the fact that they wanted to
keep
it that way. When the Equal Rights Amendment died, Mary Schmitz had a cardboard tombstone put up in her front yard as a cheeky reminder of her greatest achievement.

“Their prejudice extended down to the women in their family,” said a friend and political adversary of the Schmitzes many years later. “Women were low on the social scale. Here was this woman espousing antiwoman values. Her own daughter, who was as bright as hell, could have gone to Stanford like her brother did, but didn't.”

It wasn't the money, though most people knew that the Schmitz family wasn't rich. The truth was that John Schmitz, political gadfly extraordinare, could have gotten his daughters into any school in the country. If he had wanted to. If his wife had wanted to.

But Mary Kay was a girl.

“What was she going to do?” the friend asked. “Go off and get married and have kids.”

Chapter 2

IT HAD BEEN foggy every morning for a week before the sun burned off the milky haze to reveal the sparkling waters of the Orange County coastline. In the afternoon the temperatures would rise near eighty degrees and air mattresses were rolled out, beach balls pumped up. But half the summer was gone before the new house at 10 Mission Bay Drive in Corona del Mar would be Southern California—complete with a swimming pool. A pool was as necessary on Spyglass Hill as orthodontics for a perfect smile, a shiny new car, and a pretty wife who made weekly visits to the hair salon. It was
de rigueur.
When the Schmitz family moved back to California from Washington, D.C., they did not return to Tustin. Instead, they moved up.
Way up.
Just south of Newport Beach, Corona del Mar was an area of affluence and power. It was hibiscus and bird-of-paradise. John and Mary built a beautiful new home in the hills high above the Pacific. While it was true that only one room in the house had an ocean view—Mary Kay's—they could see the blue when they drove toward town and the coast highway.

On Saturday, August 11, 1973, John and Mary hosted a barbecue party to celebrate summer and the completion of the pool just two days before. It was a pleasant mix of a few political cronies and friends, including the family from the old Brittany Woods neighborhood in Tustin. It was the year after John Schmitz ran for president of the United States on the American Independent Party ticket. He didn't win, of course. He hadn't expected to. He ran to keep the dream alive.

Mary Kay, eleven, and her baby brother, Philip, three, joined the other Schmitz children—John, eighteen, Joe, sixteen, Jerry, fourteen, Terry, seven, and Elizabeth, five—and kids from the neighborhood in the water as the adults enjoyed cold drinks and the perfect vision of a California summer day: the blue water of the pool, the orange of the sun, and the sound of happy children. Nothing could be lovelier. Those who were there that day recalled the event as being a typical Schmitz affair—devoted friends presided over by the charming John and, of course, Mary, the mother of his children, the soldier for her husband's dreams.

By Monday afternoon all of the joy of the pool would be drained forever. Its blue shimmering surface would always be a backyard reminder, silent and still, of a family tragedy. Just after three-thirty that afternoon, Mary Schmitz removed the plastic life preserver from her toddler son's slender body and sent him to the bathroom. She went inside to work in her office while Mary Kay and her brother Jerry played in the shallow end.

A few minutes later—maybe a half hour, no one could pinpoint how much time had passed—someone noticed that the three-year-old was missing. It took only an instant to find him at the bottom of the swimming pool. Somehow, though Mary Kay and Jerry were in the same waters, neither had seen Philip slip into the water and splash.

No one saw him struggle. He just slipped under and was gone.

Hurd Armstrong, a thirty-two-year-old Newport Beach motorcycle cop, was the first on the scene. A distraught Mary Schmitz, who kept repeating the same sentence, met him.

“
I only left him for a minute. Just a minute.
”

She led him through the house to the pool where he found little Philip, who was as blue as the water, tiny and lifeless, lying in the sun on the edge of the pool. Water matted his dark blond hair to his small head. His eyes were closed. The other Schmitz children watched from the inside of the house as their mother and the motorcycle cop hovered over the baby. Everything was spinning. Everything was happening so fast.

Newport Beach firemen arrived moments later and tried to revive him with oxygen and heart massage, but the effort appeared futile. Seconds later, a tornado of helicopter blades fanned the brush in the vacant land behind 10 Mission Bay Drive. A police helicopter landed. Hurd Armstrong cradled the little boy in his arms and handed him over the fence that cordoned off the wild of the hills from the groomed yard. The hospital was only four or five miles away. No one said whether the boy would make it or not, but most already knew that it was bad.

“That night when I got home my wife knew that my day had involved a tragedy with a child. She always knew,” Hurd Armstrong said many years later. “Whenever something happened with a child it lingered for days. I wasn't myself.”

The doctors at the intensive care unit at Hoag Memorial in Newport Beach couldn't save the baby. He was pronounced dead eighteen hours later.

“We were all there,” Mary Schmitz said to a reporter. “I don't know how it could have happened.”

The headline on Tuesday in the Corona del Mar
Pilot
was marked in letters more than an inch high:

JOHN SCHMITZ' SON DIES IN NEWPORT

Those who knew him then—and later—would all agree that it was the most devastating time John Schmitz would find his name on the front page, though there were many, many times when the press was less than kind or when scandal would riddle his image, his world.

Richard Kulda, the choir director from St. Cecelia in Tustin, was devastated by the news of the drowning. His wife and Mary Schmitz had been pregnant at the same time with their last babies. He prayed for the Schmitz family, but he knew that they'd be able to get through the tragedy because their Catholic faith was so strong.

“Mary and John were good troupers,” Richard said later. “They have to carry on. You have a duty. Mary's face was so drawn she obviously suffered just horribly when he died. When you have a lot of children it is a comfort.”

Philip James Schmitz was buried in a little white casket in a grave in Ascension Cemetery near El Toro. Tourists now tromp past the child's grave to pay their respects to Nicole Brown Simpson and to remember her tragic life. They know nothing of the boy buried in the same cemetery and the impact of his death on another woman, a sister.

Years later, people would look back at Philip's drowning to search for answers as to its possible effect on his oldest sister and what happened to her more than twenty years later. How did it weigh on Mary Kay's mind? Did she feel responsible? Was she?

Willard Voit, a family friend and a political supporter of John Schmitz's, understood through his conversations with the family that Mary Kay had, in fact, been in charge of watching Philip.

“I don't know if it triggered what [mental illness] she got. I know it had to be a very heavy item.” Willard stumbled for words. “I'm saying it could be related,” he said. “I know that the event could be the source of some of Mary Kay's disorder. Jerry might have been there at the same time,” he said later. “But I know that Mary Kay had been given the responsibility of watching Philip. It was horrible. Horrible.”

It was shortly after the drowning that a girl named Michelle Rhinehart met Mary Kay Schmitz. Over the years the subject would come up and there was no doubt that Mary Kay's heart was broken when Philip died that August afternoon, but she never told Michelle that she felt responsible.

“She adored her little brother. She said he had more life at three than most people have... he was really a bright spirit. It wasn't her fault. She had nothing to do with it.”

Even so, Michelle would later admit that the three-year-old's death did have a profound impact on Mary Kay. There were times when Mary Kay didn't want her children near the water, especially a pool; she was even reluctant to let her kids take lessons. The drowning was a piece of the puzzle that, when put together with other traumas, explained how Mary Kay ended up where she did.

“The thing that is so phenomenally amazing is how she continues to deny that any of these things had any impact on her,” Michelle said later.

The drowning also had an impact of incredible consequence to John Schmitz.

“That's when we feel that John really lost it,” said a neighbor from Tustin, alluding to events that would take place a decade later.

Mary Schmitz was stoic about the loss of her baby. It wasn't her style to make a scene, to toss her body on the casket, or even to shed a tear. Not in public, anyway.

“They took it better than most people. I would have been very emotional,” said a friend.

It was a family tragedy, the kind many families must deal with. The Schmitzes were the kind that could deal with it. Years later Mary Kay would tell a friend that her family never blamed her for the drowning. The whole idea of blaming someone for an accident was an unnecessary hurt.

“I am upset if anyone blamed anyone,” Mary Kay said. “It is such a sacred, private tragedy. No blame should be put on anyone and none ever was. Not on me. Not on my mother.”

The day before Philip drowned Mary Kay was out by the pool. Her baby brother, fearless and determined, wanted to show his sister that he could swim. As she watched, the three-year-old stepped to the edge of the pool and jumped in. He sank to the bottom like a stone and Mary Kay went to get him.

“It wasn't but a second, but I looked through the water at him. He was standing on the bottom of the pool looking up at me. I can still see his eyes. Looking at me and saying so much.
I thought I could, but I guess I can't. Save me.
And I did. It wasn't but a second when I reached down for him and pulled him from the water. His eyes had said so much to me then. And they speak to me now. His eyes haunt me now.”