In December of 1981, State Senator Schmitz issued a press release entitled: “Attack of the Bulldykes.” The release described an audience of prochoice supporters as “a sea of hard, Jewish, and (arguably) female faces.” He called Gloria Allred a slick butch lawyeress.
His comments touched off a firestorm of publicity that culminated in his being stripped of committee chairmanships, and receiving the censure of the Republican Party. Gloria Allred filed a $10 million libel suit that would fester for years.
Throughout the publicity, Mary Kay stood up for her father like no one else in the family. One time at lunch with a boyfriend at the Good Earth restaurant, Mary Kay overheard a party at an adjacent table engaged in a lively and very nasty debate about her father and the Allred fracas. It was too much for her to bear. Later she recalled how she stood up and walked over to the group.
“You don't have all the facts,” she told them. “You are talking about John Schmitz and his character in such personal terms and you don't even know him. I know him. He's my father.”
The diners set their forks down and looked embarrassed.
“You're right,” one said. “We don't know him.”
“Yes,” she said before turning away, “and you attacked his character!”
The charges of anti-Semitism were fueled by demonstrations staged by members of the Jewish Defense League in front of the Schmitz home on Spyglass Hill. As always, Mary Kay, then a nineteen-year-old student at Orange Coast College living at home, backed her father to the hilt. Later, some would insist, blindly so. And if her brothers and sisters were less demonstrative in their devotion, she didn't care. She and her father had a special relationship. She went upstairs and cranked up the stereo, releasing earsplitting German marching music from an open window. That'll teach them. Cake didn't like anyone messing with her father.
Chapter 6
CARLA VERNE BOSTROM Stuckle's home in Tustin was on a quiet street nearly out of earshot of the ocean waves of sound that is the Garden Grove/Santa Ana freeway that snakes past her subdivision. It was a Californian ranch-style house with a pool in the backyard that featured a little waterfall. Inside, over a brown linoleum floor, a white couch with red pillows and a piano dominated their respective corners of the house. Carla Stuckle had a library overflowing with books by Taylor Caldwell and Stephen King. She also had a secret. For years she had been carrying on with a married man. A very important, very married, man.
At one time, the Swedish-born Carla Stuckle had been a beautiful woman, but diabetes, too much work, and poor judgment cost her her youth before her time. She had botched two marriages by the time she found herself in the glare of the spotlight. Her first to a Marine officer ended in divorce when the husband returned from a tour of duty to learn from his daughters that their mother had been sharing a bedroom with “Uncle Pete.” Their father raised her two little girls, the oldest named Carla for her mother, born in 1959, and Amy, two years later.
“My mother was the kind of woman who couldn't be without companionship,” said Carla Larson, Carla Stuckle's daughter, many years later. “So she… she got kind of wild, I don't know if it was the times. There were lots of men in the house, my aunt told me she did drugs… but I don't know. My father never confirmed that.”
By 1966, their mother was in California, chasing after “Uncle Pete” and starting over. The two little girls would grow up with scarcely any contact with their mother over the years. Neither really knew if their mother, who took a job at the Marine base in El Toro, missed them.
The only gift they ever received for birthdays or Christmas was a pair of Hollywood star nighties and gold plastic high-heeled shoes.
That was the first year their mother was gone.
A dozen years and a thousand tears later, with only sporadic contact, Carla Larson got a call from her mother. The abandoned daughter had graduated from high school by then and was living in a trailer in Tucson and working as a bookkeeper for a tire store. Her younger sister, Amy, was at a convent school in Indiana. Their mother wanted to reconnect. There were apologies and promises of a better relationship.
Not long after that, Carla Larson bought a 1964 station wagon for $200 and drove west.
There was someone her mother wanted her to meet. It was the late 1970s.
Carla Stuckle insisted that her daughter should meet John Schmitz, her good friend and former community college instructor. She indicated that she and the well-known politician shared ideology and commitment to the conservative cause. Carla Stuckle simply told her eldest daughter that it would be a good idea for the two to get together, and if she was interested, she could enroll in one of his political science classes someday.