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).