“She would have been the grande dame of Orange County,” said a friend of Mary Schmitz's. “She would have been.”
Mary Kay felt sorry for her mother, father, and Carla Stuckle and the invasive publicity that came with the scandal.
“My father has a human side, an intimate side, to him, too. That does not belong in the public. It should be kept private. He has needs—and I don't mean sexual—that are no one's business. I never asked about it and it wasn't my place to ask about it. It was none of my business.”
Carla Stuckle was living a hand-to-mouth existence and wanted child support for her two children. John Schmitz had given his mistress a few dollars on an occasional basis, but it wasn't enough and Carla made no bones about it.
“John offered me the magnificent sum of two hundred dollars a month for them,” she told a reporter when she was threatening to sue. She thought $500 was more reasonable. For God's sake, she was living in a modest home in Tustin while his other kids had been raised in the splendor of Spyglass Hill. She wasn't being greedy, she said. She didn't want to have to work a second job at the answering service in Santa Ana.
John Schmitz had always told Carla that a formal agreement hadn't been possible because Mary Schmitz controlled the purse strings. But with their relationship out in the open, Carla saw no reason why she had to beg for money.
Mary Schmitz reportedly held her ground.
“She was unwilling to change her lifestyle to help him pay,” Carla Stuckle said.
In the end, however, John Schmitz was ordered by the court to pay $275 a month.
The Schmitz family's downward spiral continued after Carla Stuckle's name faded from the headlines. The family focused its attention on Mary Kay's favorite brother, Jerry, a twenty-three-year-old Scientologist living in San Francisco.
In January 1983, Mary Schmitz and her two oldest sons had drawn a line in the sand with a bulldozer, with the Church of Scientology and son Jerry Schmitz on the other side. They said they thought Jerry had been brainwashed by the church. He wouldn't listen to reason. He wouldn't forsake Scientology for Catholicism. He wouldn't leave his staff job for the church in San Francisco.
What was wrong with him? Why won't he come to his senses? they thought.
Mary Schmitz threatened to sue the church and asked political crony Jesse Helms to launch a congressional probe. Her son was a victim. He barely slept and worked all the time on Scientology activities.
“I'd like to get him out of the clutches of this beast. Jerry can't be himself. He seems to be wholly unproductive,” she told a reporter.
Son Joe, then a twenty-six-year-old Navy officer, weighed in, too. He characterized his younger brother's responses to criticism as angry and irrational.
It was clear to those who knew the family that it was Mary Schmitz who led the charge. She just didn't get it. Her son was happy. He wasn't a zombie. Of all the boys, he marched to a drummer none could comprehend. He wasn't like the high-powered John and Joe. He was Jerry. Couldn't she see the difference?
During the Scientology ordeal Mary Kay had been kept in the dark. Her brother, the family member she was closest to—the one she would later say was second in importance in her life only to the boy who would change her life—never mentioned their mother's crusade. Neither did their parents.
“It is something we just never talked about,” she said later.
The “felony child neglect” charges against Carla Stuckle were eventually dropped, and she was put on six months of social-service agency supervision, but the indignities continued. The Schmitz boys and their father had a meeting at Carla's home after the dust had settled and there was no longer any media interest in the case. One of the boys proposed to Carla that the best thing for everyone would be to put the children up for adoption.
“Best for who?” Carla Larson, the oldest daughter, later said when she learned of the plan. “Can you imagine the gall? As if my mother didn't love those children?”
And if that was the Schmitz style, to sweep the mess under the rug and avoid any further embarrassment, it was insulting to the woman John Schmitz had said he loved.
“I nearly threw him out of my house,” Carla Stuckle told her daughter. “John didn't say anything then but later told me he didn't like that idea and knew I wouldn't go for it.”
Chapter 10
BOTH MARY KAY Schmitz Letourneau and Carla Bostrom Stuckle would feel abandoned by John Schmitz at critical times of their lives. Mary Kay needed her father by her side when her world was unraveling and her own personal scandal was sucking her down like a whirlpool; Carla needed John's support when she had the gall to let the world know she'd borne his children, children he ignored. Carla and Mary Kay had barely talked in their entire lives, but they shared something very deep. They both had been hurt by the man they loved more than any other. In little more than ten years' time their lives would end up in devastating tragedy.