“My mother just wasn't that way,” Mary Kay said later. “When I'm with my children, they are in my arms and I'm with them. I sat at my mother's side. That was the way she was. She was the queen, and I was just her daughter. That we're not close doesn't mean that I don't love her and that she doesn't love me.”
Teri Simmons wasn't just off the turnip truck. She had been raised in Dallas, for goodness' sake. But the woman across the way from Corona del Mar had a sense of style that took her breath away. No matter how scant funds were, Mary Kay Letourneau always looked like a million bucks. Even with her hair up in a simple ponytail and her lips tinted with bright pink lipstick, there was no one lovelier. Teri admired that style so much, for a while she even emulated Mary Kay. When they were taken for sisters it was the greatest compliment Teri had ever known.
Mary Kay was a firm believer in the idea that it was better to have one fine thing than a half-dozen average items. Quality over quantity. Clothes were a key example. She'd save up her money and splurge on a garment from Ann Taylor or I. Magnin and wear it until it disintegrated. A green wool short skirt was a particular favorite during the early days at Carriage Row.
“I'll never forget it. It must have cost a fortune. She wore it all the time. It was better to wear something that was perfect and nice, than trash,” Teri recalled.
Her husband was not that way—at least at that time.
“Steve would rather have three pairs of blue jeans from Target than one pair of chinos from the Gap.”
The Letourneaus' town house also demonstrated Mary Kay's ideal that a little of the best was better than a lot of the mundane. The furniture was ratty, but some of the accessories were exquisite. Crystal and porcelain befitting a family of wealth, not a young couple just starting out in life. Appliances were first-rate, too. The vacuum cleaner in particular impressed Teri.
“You could ride that sucker, it was so neat. It was top of the line. Had every attachment.”
And so in the world according to Mary Kay, there was a lesson that Teri Simmons would take to heart and retain for the rest of her life.
“You don't have to have everything the best. You can take one piece, one item and it sort of uplifts everything around it. It was sort of like her. She could walk into a room and the elegance level would sort of rise.”
It was the cruelest kind of payback that Teri Simmons could have imagined. Why hadn't the Schmitz family-Mary Schmitz in particular—stepped in to help? Mary Kay and Steve Letourneau weren't starving to death, but things were so tight that Mary Kay went most of the winter in a windbreaker because she couldn't afford a warmer coat.
Her parents could probably do a little more than they are now, with this struggling family. It's awful, Teri thought. They have the money.
But as Mary Kay explained it, though she certainly didn't whine about it, her family, some thought, had written her off after she married Steve. Her family had expected better things of her. A better husband. Someone more in line with their socioeconomic status.
“They were sort of punishing her,” Teri said later. “I don't know what they hoped to gain from that.”
Teri would never forget the time when Mary Kay got a notice that the post office was holding a package for her. The two went together to get the parcel, addressed to Mary Kay by astrologer and close Schmitz family friend Jeanne Dixon. Opened at the Carriage Row town house, the box held a gorgeous brown wool coat with a trim of sleek black fur. Enclosed was a touching letter from Jeanne.
“Mary Kay was so excited,” Teri recalled. “I don't think it was the coat, I think it was that somebody had mothered her. She loved Jeanne. Jeanne Dixon was the only connection she had with anyone on a parental level.”
Years later people went looking for answers to why things had turned out as they had. For some, like friend Teri Simmons, it was easy to point to the Schmitz family. She viewed Mary Kay as the tragic product of a family that largely ignored their daughter because she disappointed them by settling for Steve Letourneau. In time, something dire was bound to emerge.
“I'm surprised it took this long for something to happen,” Teri said.
With the exception of her brothers and the mention of her estrangement with her mother, Mary Kay seldom discussed the Schmitzes. Tears came when she spoke about Philip and how the family “never got over” his death. But she never talked about her sisters. Most peculiar of all was Mary Kay's representation of her father.
“I could swear that she told me he was dead,” Teri said later, puzzled because by then she knew it was not true. “She would tell me how close they were when she was little. But for some reason, I had it in my head that he was gone. I don't think I would have made it up. I thought in my head all this time that he was dead.”