The teenage girls had no money, nowhere to stay. Mary Kay called her father and he said he'd drive up and trade cars in the morning. He still wouldn't go to the wedding. Mary Schmitz had laid down the law. The girls ended up talking a trucker out of his truck for the night and they curled up in the cab.
“She gets herself into trouble, she manages to weasel out of it. No matter what happens,” Michelle said later.
Years later, when the world would hear of their classmate, a small group of women from Cornelia Connelly gathered after the connection was made between Mary Kay Letourneau and Mary Kay Schmitz. One who knew her from the Catholic school in Anaheim had never considered the former classmate a mental giant, calling her “simple-minded.” It was an opinion that held up when they met again when Mary Kay was grown and the mother of four. She was a sad, tragic figure. The former classmate wondered if she was a victim of her childhood.
“She never really got the love she needed,” a friend recalled.
Chapter 5
KNBC, THE LOS Angeles NBC affiliate, had a locally produced issues show that was not only a ratings winner, it provided fodder for water-cooler commentary. Among the panelists were Mary Schmitz, lawyer Gloria Allred, and the president of United Teachers of Los Angeles, Hank Springer. Free for All, with its roundtable format, was taped on Friday nights and aired on Saturday afternoons. It was at the height of its popularity in the mid- to late 1970s.
Sometimes after the taping, Mary Schmitz would join the others for a drink or a meal at a Mexican restaurant off Olive in Burbank. Hank Springer was surprised that Mary would go out with them; she seemed so uptight on the show.
A fuckin' right-wing cunt, Hank thought at first.
But somehow Mary Schmitz, “to the right of Attila the Hun,” and Hank Springer, “to the left of Jane Fonda,” developed respect and a friendship.
“Mary Schmitz was elegant,” he said later when he thought of the wife of the California state senator. “Very beautifully dressed. Never a hair out of place. I wouldn't call her strident, but next to strident. She didn't let her hair down much. On camera she was very, very professional.”
And predictable, too.
“Almost like she was a cookie cutter,” Hank said of her on-camera persona and her defense of her causes, the anti-ERA, antiabortion movements. “You stamp her out, like a Stepford wife.”
Hank Springer found things to like about Mary Schmitz outside of her politics, which he loathed. But he found little tolerance for her husband. Mary was alone a lot during those years. Her husband was in Sacramento most of the week. If Mary could relax a little and be a person, John Schmitz could not. At least, Hank didn't think so. Once in a great while John—always on, always in a suit and tie—would join the group after the tapings.
“A very uptight man, so self-righteous. He believes in his ideas so virulently—to me it's a virus—horribly negative, homophobic, antiunion , antiabortion. Everything that had to do with people, he was against it. His homophobia was almost off the Richter scale,” Hank recalled later.
Mary Schmitz worked the same political agenda. Although she never held an elected office, she was named to a number of panels and committees and carried considerable clout. She was always at the ready to present her views. Sometimes getting the message out was all that seemed to matter.
One night Lois Lundberg, Orange County Republican Party chairwoman, invited Mary Schmitz to speak at a meeting. Mary was highly regarded as a knowledgeable speaker, articulate and quick. Though sometimes, her critics felt, she would go off on a tangent. She was a good speaker, though not as humorous or as warm as John Schmitz. The same night, the party secretary informed Lois that a local Brownie troop would be attending.
Later, Lois wished she would have asked Mary Schmitz the topic of her talk. As the little fresh faces of the Brownies looked on, Mary proceeded with a graphic discussion against abortion. A frantic Lois tried to get the speaker to modulate her message, or even better, to get her off the stage. But Mary Schmitz wouldn't budge. She was there for the night.
“She gave a long and detailed speech, talking about every form of abortion. The vacuum cleaner was the one where I had a heart attack. I was hopeful the kids were small enough that they didn't know what she was talking about.”
Los Angeles lawyer Gloria Allred not only worked alongside Mary Schmitz on the weekly television show, she worked tirelessly in the support of feminist and human rights causes. That meant she was in frequent and direct opposition to John Schmitz and his right-wing agenda. Whether stumping on television's Merv Griffin Show or presenting Schmitz with a “chastity belt” when she fought him on prochoice issues, she was a woman of undeniable power. John Schmitz knew it, and as some would later suggest, it irritated him. He joked about her surname: All-Red.