If Loving You Is Wrong (4 page)

Chapter 3

IT DIDN'T HAPPEN every time, but sometimes when Michelle Rhinehart Jarvis drove her white VW convertible “Lamby” up the hills above the ocean near Corona del Mar, she'd catch a whiff of a fragrance that would send her back, way back to the time when she and Mary Kay Schmitz were young girls. When a little moisture from the Pacific mixed with the fragrance of the wildflowers, the bougainvillea, and the eucalyptus, it would come back to her. It was 1998 and like Mary Kay, Michelle was a mother. She had two little girls—Danielle and Kylie—and a son, Michael, named for her husband, a multi-media developer and designer. Michelle's life in Southern California was the busy-working-mother-with-never-enough-time routine she had once imagined Mary Kay's life had been up in Seattle.

She pulled her car to the side of a canyon road and looked around.

Bleached white condominiums and gated communities of pink stucco had obliterated much of the visual beauty of a raw landscape. There had been a time when hawks circled and coyotes sometimes made it down to where the houses lined up in glistening rows on Spyglass Hill. There had been a time when two girls slid down the hills on paper bags, or spent all day following a coyote's trail. Time had marched on and all of that was gone now.

But even all of the progress couldn't mask the scent that brought back memories. The sweet, salty smell of ocean and canyon. The smell of summertime and youth.

In a moment, Michelle could feel the wind blowing through the open windows of Mary Kay's bedroom on the nights when she'd sleep over on the floor next to her friend. She could hear the water of the swimming pool splashing against its tiled walls while the two of them pretended to flee from sharks.

“
Jaws is coming!
”

Years later when everyone in the world would have an opinion about her friend, Michelle would sometimes roll down her window and breathe it all in and remember. And she'd think how far Mary Kay had tumbled from Spyglass Hill and how inevitable she believed it all had been.

Mary Schmitz had priorities and none of her children felt the need to make excuses for it. It was the way they lived. The enormous house at 10 Mission Bay on Spyglass Hill had marble floors and carpeting that cost more than forty dollars a yard. The furnishings on the main level were exquisite. Years later, Mary Kay still marveled over a couch her mother had selected and how stunning the silk organza fabric covering its cushions had been. To be sure, upstairs was another world. There was no matching furniture, no gorgeous crystal, and no exquisite figurines. No family photos lined the walls. The children's bedrooms were spare in their furnishings to say the least. Mary Kay's bed had no frame. Her windows went without curtains or screens. Facing west, her corner bedroom would fill with the hot air of the California sun. Some of the Schmitz children used drawers set on the floor to hold their underwear and socks.

“There was so much mold and mildew in the bathroom that I couldn't even use it,” Michelle Jarvis recalled.

But downstairs everything was picture perfect.

Mary Kay would later say that it didn't bother her. She was happy to sprawl out on the forty-dollar-a-yard carpet or flop on a beanbag chair when she watched TV.

“What do those kinds of things matter?” she asked later. “My mother's priorities were elsewhere. We were in private school. She entertained downstairs. We weren't put upon. So what if our couch in the TV room was given to us? We were very happy indeed.”

Michelle and Mary Kay met through their mothers, who were casual acquaintances and played tennis together. With Mary Kay's school friends in Costa Mesa at St. John the Baptist, she was isolated from kids outside of her siblings. Michelle lived in East Bluff just down the road from Spyglass.

Mary Schmitz was the one who suggested getting the girls together. They were in grade school at the time. It seemed a good idea to have a friend close by. It was an idea, however, some would later suggest, that Mrs. Schmitz would have liked to reconsider. Mary Kay and Michelle became inseparable.

“I practically lived there. I annoyed her mother to no end,” Michelle said later. “She always called me
that
Michelle. She was dismissive to anyone whose last name wasn't Schmitz and who couldn't help her husband's political career. I couldn't help her in her quest to be mother of the year or whatever her pet project was that time.”

Michelle and Mary Kay's mother didn't hit it off because as far as Michelle could tell, Mary Schmitz cared more about herself and her husband's career. The kids appeared to be window dressing.

“A Rose Kennedy wannabe,” Michelle said later.

While that could have been true, it was also true that Mary Schmitz was not interested in any of Mary Kay's friends, especially Michelle, whom Mary Kay said her mother found “abrupt and crass.” Mary Schmitz was a righteous and busy woman with no time for children that weren't her own. She was the type of woman who would look past a kid in a room and address her own child: “Don't you think it is time for Michelle to go home?” She didn't say, “Michelle, we have some things we need to do. Do you need a ride home?”

It was something they didn't talk about at first. But in time it was the basis for the bond that only strengthened over time. From the darkness of a shared childhood trauma came the light of their friendship. Michelle and Mary Kay shared a common experience that ensured a unique closeness. Both had been molested by a relative.

“I think back on when we first talked about it,” Michelle later said. “[One of her brothers] molested her, but I don't think he actually had sex with her. I think for her it was the fear and the betrayal from somebody that she loved. It happened. I knew about it. I was ten or eleven years old and dealing with my own.”

Mary Kay told Michelle how as a nine- and ten-year-old she used to search for new places in which she could hide when their parents were away.

“Can you imagine her cowering in some closet praying to God that her brother didn't find her?” Michelle asked later. “And nobody there to protect her! Where the hell were her parents?”

On the campaign trail Accepting an award. Appearing on television.

Michelle didn't fault John Schmitz as much as she blamed Mary Schmitz. A daughter needs a mother to talk to. John Schmitz was running around Washington, D.C., or Sacramento trying to change the world. Mary Schmitz was yammering on television about the virtues of taking care of children and keeping the home fires burning. The hypocrisy of it all still angered Michelle more than two decades later.

“She's never been accepted by her mother.
Never.
Mary Kay couldn't even tell her mother what her brother had done at that age. She knew how her mother would react. She knew her mother would probably blame her.”

Mary Kay would later describe Michelle's recollections as an “exaggeration” and dismissed the sexual abuse as nothing more than “fondling.”

“I don't even feel I was violated. Not my body. I was not forced into anything, but when I decided it was wrong, I said no. And guess what? It stopped.”

John Schmitz wasn't home much. But when he was, he always gave the girls a hug and a kiss. He joked with his sons. He made them laugh. He had a way of taking a song and twisting it around and making it his own and his children loved him for it. But no one in the family would argue that he didn't have a favorite. His first daughter, all blond and brown-eyed, was the apple of her father's eye from the first moment he held her. She could sit for hours still and quiet as he read, just to be near him. He called his adoring and most beautiful daughter Mary O'Cake, Mary Cake, finally just Cake. No one else in the family adopted the nickname.

“No one dared to,” Mary Kay said later. “It was something only for my father to say.”

In Mary Kay's eyes, her dad could do no wrong. Her mother was always in the way; always the killjoy.

When John Schmitz became interested in learning more about his genealogical background, he made several trips to Europe. An excited Mary Kay told Michelle one time that through her father's research, he'd discovered that he was related to the Romanian royal family through an illegitimate son of one of the kings.

“Mary Schmitz did not want the story out because it was too embarrassing to the family,” Michelle said later. “She forbade them to talk about it.”

Mary Schmitz was not a demonstrative mother. She was not hovering in the kitchen with a pan of brownies in the oven and a piñata to be finished on the table—not like her eldest daughter would grow up to be before her world would crash. Yet Mary Kay, like any young girl, coveted the attention of her mother. But few saw any.

“I never ever in all those years saw her mother hug or kiss her or show her any type of affection in any way.
Ever.
I never heard her say I love you. Nothing,” Michelle said later.

To the outside world, the family was golden. John, the oldest, was the all-American, smart and good looking. Joe was overshadowed a bit by John, but he was also bright and political-brochure-ready. Jerry was intelligent, sensitive, and certainly the most caring and protective of Mary Kay. The girls—Mary Kay, Terri, and Liz—were cute, quiet, and relegated to the background.

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).