IN REALITY IT was the tony homes of Lemon Heights perched on the scorched hills above Tustin that gave the city the nickname The Beverly Hills of Orange County. The majority of Tustin was Middle America with neighborhoods of mostly unpretentious tracts of stucco and tile-roofed houses filled with children freckled, tanned, or burned by the sun. The wealthy living on Lemon Heights looked down on Tustin, or rather past it, to the waters of the Pacific. When John and Mary Schmitz and their sons Johnny, Joey, and baby Jerry moved into a one-story house with a lone palm tree on Brittany Woods Drive in Tustin in the early 1960s, on the surface they were a good Catholic family with moderate means.

Yet if there was anything to distinguish the family from others in Tustin, it was the indisputable appeal of the parents. John was dark and dashing with the rigid posture of a military man. Mary, with her soft eyes and sweet smile, could play demure, but she was sure of herself in ways that few women allowed themselves at the time. John Schmitz and Mary Suehr had met at a college graduation party at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where both had earned degrees. She was a chemist who set aside a promising career to support the man she loved. But it was more than love. It was also the marriage of conservative and religious ideals that made them such a good fit. John and Mary were a team in life, the afterlife, and, in time, the purgatory that was California politics.

An eight-year stint in the Marine Corps in El Toro where John was a pilot and helicopter aviator brought them to California. Like so many others who made the military migration during the forties and fifties, they saw California as a golden hope for a life of opportunity. When John left the Marines, like his father and father-in-law, he became a teacher. He taught philosophy and government at Santa Ana College.

"I'm a good teacher," he once told a reporter. "I've always been able to make a subject interesting. No one falls asleep in my class."

Part of what made that a true statement was that the man had an undeniable charisma and wit. He was brash, brilliant, and handsome with dark hair, dark eyes, and a pencil-thin mustache. John G. Schmitz was onstage whether his audience was a single student or a roomful. He was the center of the world. In the beginning, the lightning rod for attention presided over a family that was the envy of friends and neighbors.

"They were a devoted family," said one neighbor who still keeps in touch with John and Mary. "The kids all loved each other. It was sort of like, the family that prayed together, stayed together."

Indeed, prayer was an important ritual at the Schmitz home. Visitors to the house then--or any other place the family lived--never recalled a single meal when prayer wasn't a prelude to dining. Life revolved around the church. John sang in the choir at St. Cecelia's and Mary hauled the children in their station wagon ("our Catholic Cadillac") to class each day.

To supplement his college instructor's wages, John worked part-time at Disneyland as a Cobblestone Cop.

"That made him a real hero among the kids," the neighbor said.

Although Mary Kay has memories of her father as that Disney character, she would later tell a friend she wasn't certain if she actually remembered it or had been told about it so often that she had kept it as memory. "It is a glimpse," she told a friend many years later, "when I was three years old. Like a Mary Poppins doll I had, or putting my father's hair in curlers at our first house, just a glimpse of my childhood."

It was a lovely beginning to what everyone thought would be a wonderful life. Summer nights were filled with the laughter of the boys playing kick the can, hide-and-seek. Summer days they played baseball or football games that stretched for hours. In time, the family would get a German shepherd that John named Kaiser.

In the early 1960s there were still orange groves off Irvine Boulevard, not far from houses lined up in the sun along Brittany Woods Drive. It was a beautiful place and time. California was challenging the East Coast as the center of the universe. The Beach Boys had just released "Surfin' Safari"--their first big hit. It was sunshine and beaches. And on January 30, 1962, Mary Katherine Schmitz was born. She would be her father's staunchest ally and, some would say later, her mother's greatest disappointment.

No one wanted to talk about it years later, and no one wanted to put much importance on the fact. What would happen later with Mary Kay was not a bonding problem. But the fact was that Mary Schmitz had an injury that made it impossible to care for her new baby daughter for several weeks. As the baby stayed with the neighbors across the street, her mother convalesced in her bedroom.

Later, the woman who cared for the Schmitzs' firstborn daughter refused to talk about the cause of Mrs. Schmitz's need for convalescence. She believed it had no influence on their daughter.

"They loved Mary Kay then, and they love her now," she said.

When John Schmitz returned to Brittany Woods Drive, he always made a beeline for the neighbors' to hold his daughter in his arms. Every day. Mary Kay's blond hair was but a faint downy glow around her little head. But her brown eyes were enormous. No father could have been more pleased.

"Sons are wonderful," said the neighbor who took care of Mary Kay. "But to a father, a daughter is extra special."

If mother and daughter didn't bond, as had been suggested, those closest to the family in those early years didn't see it. It appeared that the little blond-haired girl was her mother's pride. It was true that Mary Schmitz expected a lot from her children, and probably more so from her sons.

"When Mary Kay was a little girl," said the neighbor, "... I can still see that front bedroom fixed like she was a little princess or something. Mary always seemed to be there to help her and Mary Kay went right along with it. So she had to be very happy with her mother."

No matter how busy they became, no matter where they would live, the Schmitz children were always foremost in their parents' minds, according to the neighbor.

"They never forgot the kids," she said.

The tide was moving in the direction of conservative upstarts in Orange County--more so than just about anywhere in the country. John Schmitz, with his David Niven mustache and sharp-as-carbide-blades wit, was in the right place at the right time in 1964. It didn't matter that he was a card-carrying member of the right-wing John Birch Society, the anticommunist organization founded in 1958 to promote conservative causes. In 1964, when Mary Kay was two, her father found his arena. He was elected state senator.

None were more proud of John's victory than those in Tustin and at St. Cecelia's. He was the pride of the congregation. Choir director Richard Kulda, a conservative, though no John Bircher, admired John Schmitz as a legislator and a man. A reelection followed two years later, and by the end of the decade, a bid for the U.S. Congress. His campaign bumper sticker read: "When you're out of Schmitz, you're out of gear."

"John has a brilliant mind, witty, conscientious. Good-humored. He was not easily ruffled, a fighter pilot. In mortal combat you cannot get ruffled, you have to be thinking every instant. You've got to use every bit of brainpower you have," Richard Kulda remembered.

During his six years in the California legislature many argued that his finest achievements were in curtailing sex education in the classroom and limiting the availability of condoms where young people might get their hands on them.

"More self-discipline is needed," he said.

By 1970, three more siblings had joined Mary Kay and her three older brothers. When Mary Kay was three, her sister Terry was born, followed by Elizabeth and, lastly, Philip, born in March 1970.

"John and Mary loved having three boys, then three girls, then a boy. It was so wonderful. And so tragic later," the close family friend and neighbor later said.

In the years of his heyday as the king of the quip, John Schmitz became beloved by reporters looking for a loose-cannon quote that could guarantee outrage and increased readership. John Schmitz became known more for what he said than what he did. Whenever he opened his mouth, John Schmitz supporters cheered and his foes wondered if he'd left enough room for his foot.

"They like to be called gays," he once said of homosexuals in search of political clout. "I prefer to call them queers."

Sometimes charm was slipped into the mix and his remarks came off as one-liners, given like a political Johnny Carson.

"I may not be Hispanic, but I'm pretty close. I'm a Catholic with a mustache," he said.

When the Schmitz family left for Sacramento or later for Washington, D.C., their good Brittany Woods Drive neighbors' joy for the family was tempered with personal sadness. Though they kept in touch and saw old friends and neighbors whenever they came to town and attended fund-raisers--for which Mary Schmitz had made her daughters' dresses--it wasn't the same.

"When we got to Washington, John took us to the White House and everything. I got to sit in Tip O'Neill's chair," said the neighbor. "We were so happy for them."

It was June 1970 when John Schmitz moved his family to Washington, D.C., to fulfill the time remaining on a congressional seat won in a special election. Mary Kay would later say she made the transition easily, basking in the attention reflected from her father's admirers. There were parties to host, Easter eggs to roll on the White House lawn, and photographers to smile for at every turn. Heady stuff for an eight-year-old girl. Her father was at the top of his game at that time and he knew it. Things were happening for her mother, too. Mary Schmitz was more than a wife; she was a savvy political partner. She was passionate about her political and religious beliefs...