by Gregg Olsen
“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.
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.
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br /> 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.
Carla Larson had no idea what had been going on, though later she gathered from things her mother told her that she and John Schmitz had been “involved” for quite some time.
An early clue was the ringing of the telephone.
“Sometimes the phone would ring and it would only ring once and my mother would say, 'Don't answer it! Don't ever answer the phone unless it rings more than once or twice!' ” Carla Larson recalled many years later.
It was only after things were more out in the open between the politician and his “favorite campaign worker” that her mother told her what the single rings meant to her.
“It was his code to let her know that he was thinking of her, when he couldn't talk—like when he was at home. It worked. But I was really annoyed by it. She knew that it was him. He told her that when he couldn't talk he'd let her know,” she said.
Carla Larson told her mother that she objected because John had a family and a wife.
“My mother never cared if anyone was married or not. Not a big issue with her,” she said.
John Schmitz often visited Carla Stuckle's home on Drayton Way in Tustin. So often that Carla Larson's suspicions increased. He spent so much time with her mother, something had to be going on. The young woman noticed how they talked to each other in ways that seemed more intimate than a mere friendship. The suspicions were confirmed one afternoon when she arrived home and went inside her mother's bedroom to find her in bed with the state senator.
“My mother told me that they weren't having sex. They just liked to lie there naked together,” she remembered later.
Carla told her daughter how she had become involved in politics, mostly behind the scenes, though she did make a losing bid for a seat on the Tustin School Board. She was one of John Schmitz's most ardent supporters and considered him of tremendous intellect and ability. She invited her daughter to get involved in John's latest campaign and she agreed. She stuffed envelopes, made phone calls, ran errands, and watched her mother get closer and closer to her candidate.
Young Carla liked Schmitz, but she knew that politics was a sham. His brochure showed pictures of his wife and children—and yet he was sleeping with Carla's mother.
“It just confirmed my belief that all politicians were liars,” she said.
Carla Stuckle had a dream, a plan. She was going to be Mrs. John G. Schmitz, because she had a right to be. She saw herself as smarter, more beautiful, and certainly more of a political asset than Mary Schmitz. Once she had stolen the handsome dark-eyed politician's heart, once she had him in her bed, she was determined to get the rest of him.
All of him. She would not be denied what she had coveted, her ego would not allow it.
“My mother liked to be the center of attention,” Carla Larson said many years later. “I think in her fantasy world John was going to leave Mary for her, marry my mother, and she was going to be Mrs. Senator John Schmitz.”
Whenever the relationship seemed strained and Carla Stuckle thought she might be losing her lover, she did whatever she could to keep him.
“He would tell my mother, 'I can't see you anymore, Carla. We need to distance ourselves. That's where I belong—with my family. I'm not with my kids, I'm here with you. This is wrong.' And she would manipulate him back into it.”
One time Carla told her daughter that she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills in a mock suicide attempt to keep John from leaving. She called the doctor right after she made the attempt. She wanted to keep John, she didn't intend to die.
John Schmitz came back to her. He couldn't let go.
There were numerous times when Carla Stuckle threatened to tell Mary Schmitz the truth. She threatened to expose him during the campaign. Her mother's tactics disgusted her daughter. As much as she wanted to love her, it turned her stomach to think that her mother could be so evil to the man she purportedly loved.
“She blackmailed him. She taped their phone conversations. She had one of those little suction-cup things and a tape recorder. I saw her do it. And I listened to the tapes. Typical lovers' talk. 'I miss you. I wish I was with you… ' ”
Carla Larson considered John a victim of his own mistakes and of his involvement with her conniving mother. She saw how he had tried to break it off several times. Carla told her how John said he was violating his marital vows, he was putting his political future at great risk. But Carla wouldn't let him go.
Carla also taunted John. She'd show up at the Catholic church in Costa Mesa where the Schmitz family celebrated Mass. She'd run into him at fund-raisers and walk up to him and his wife simply to unnerve him. It was a kind of game for her. And maybe for him, too. Maybe the risk of being found out was as exciting to him as it was to her?
Carla Larson even joined her mother on a couple of visits to the Schmitz home on Spyglass Hill. The outside was beautiful, she thought, but the inside of the residence was cold. She saw how it matched her mother's description of John Schmitz's wife.
“It lacked any personality, charm. It lacked familyness. It was formal, cold. Wintry, icy. Mary was a cold woman.”
Going there was extremely uncomfortable for Carla Larson.
“I didn't want to betray my mother, and I liked John, but it didn't feel right. I wasn't comfortable being around Mary, because I knew.”
Years later, when reporters would once again search the archives for tidbits about John Schmitz and his affair with Carla Stuckle, the daughter she left behind when she was just a little girl would consider once more if it had been a love affair or a convenience.
At least on her mother's side, Carla Larson concluded, it hadn't been about love.
“She admired him, respected him, was drawn to his power. I don't think my mother's capable of truly loving anyone. It is not in her nature. She's too selfish a person.”
* * *
It was the oldest trick in the book. Carla Stuckle became pregnant to hang on to her man. She gave birth to a son in June 1981. One afternoon at her home in Drayton Way, Carla Stuckle sucked on a More menthol and flatly stated to her daughter she had become pregnant on purpose.
“To replace Philip,” she said.
Getting pregnant and having a son was something that Carla Stuckle wanted to do for John Schmitz. She told her daughter of how she had been visiting at the Schmitzes' home in Corona del Mar when she passed out.
“In the exact spot where Philip fell into the pool,” she said.
Carla Larson found her mother's story suspect. As she understood it, Mary Schmitz was inside and Mary Kay and an older brother were in the water playing. No one had seen where the little one had gone in. Carla Stuckle told her daughter that if Mary Schmitz had been more mindful of her children, the little boy would never have drowned.
John Schmitz's mistress also confided that she had had an amniocentesis performed during her pregnancy. She had done so not because she was concerned that giving birth in her forties would have jeopardized her chances for a healthy baby. She did it because if it had been a girl she would have aborted the baby.
“It has to be a perfect boy,” she said.
She was giving him the son he lost.
She chose the name—John George Bostrom—to irritate Mary Schmitz, if she ever found out.
“John was not real thrilled that I put his name on the birth certificate, but I'm not going to lie,” she told her daughter.
“Birth certificates are public record, Mother.”
The older woman smoked and sighed. “Oh, well.”
Chapter 7
BY THE SUMMER of 1982, things had changed dramatically for both Carlas, mother and daughter. At age forty-three, Carla Stuckle had given birth to her second child by John Schmitz, a baby girl she named Eugenie or Genie. She told no one at El Toro who the father was, nor did she reveal it to the women she worked with at the Santa Ana answering service where she took messages on the weekend.
Carla Stuckle's daughter, Carla Larson, had a child of her own by then, a son, the same age as John George Bostrom. For a time, the twenty-three-year-old cared for her half brother and half sister in her base housing, but it became too much and she told her mother she needed to make child-care arrangements. Her mother was angry at first, complaining bitterly that baby-sitter's fees would send her to the poorhouse. She was already late on her mortgage and other bills were piling up.
One afternoon in late July, Carla Larson got a phone call from her mother, who was crying and saying something about her son's penis being injured.
“What? How in the hell did that happen?” the younger woman asked. She was in shock. “Did it get caught in something?”
Carla Stuckle didn't have any answers. She sobbed some words into the phone and told her daughter that the baby was in microsurgery to repair the damage.
“Mother, tell me what happened,” the younger woman asked once more, this time using more soothing tones in an attempt to calm her mother.
“I took him to the doctor,” Carla Stuckle said. “He said the baby has a hair wrapped around his penis and it had been there for some time.”
“Oh, my God. Don't you ever bathe him? How could this have happened?”
Carla didn't have an answer. She muttered a quiet, “I don't know.”
Carla Larson hung up the phone and made quick plans to go see her baby brother at Children's Hospital. When she arrived she found the boy asleep in a little crib, unaware of the problem that had brought him there. He was bandaged. Carla Larson couldn't get a look at him to see what in the world her mother was talking about. The nurses said nothing.
