“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.