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.