by Gregg Olsen
Mary Kay said she wanted to call Bob Huff to ask why he would say such a thing.
“But I can't. He doesn't have a phone that works… at least one that I know of. Can you imagine having a lawyer who doesn't have a phone number?” she asked.
In January 1999, Mary Kay spoke on a Seattle radio show hosted by a DJ known as the “T-man.” A few days after she told the world how much she loved Vili, a letter was dispatched to the station. The prison considered the radio interview third-party contact with the victim, a violation of Mary Kay's sentence. Vili hadn't been on the show at the same time—not even on the same day—but the prison saw it as Mary using the media to get her message of love and hope for marriage out to the teenage father of two.
According to Mary, Bob Huff was livid. “Any time you speak to any sector of the media, the less value your name has,” she recalled him telling her in a fit after the radio broadcast.
The TV movie announced by USA Network also occupied Mary Kay's time and though she didn't have a direct financial interest in it, she was ever hopeful that money would be funneled to her children. Casting was a source of amusement. Tatum O'Neal, Darryl Hannah, Gail O'Grady, even Calista Flockart were mentioned as possible Mary Kays. They were too old, not pretty enough, or too unknown to play the role, but Mary Kay acted as though she didn't care one way or another. It was New York producer Sonny Grosso's and loyal friend Susan Gehrke's project and whatever it was, would be out of her control anyway.
“I very much trust Sonny Grosso. He's like a favorite uncle,” she said. “He would make sure it was true, whatever the movie is… it will be true.”
Mary Kay spent five hours a day in the clinic expressing milk for her baby and storing it in a freezer that the prison bought for her use. “I know other nursing mothers could use it, too. But I feel like it's mine, my own little freezer.” Susan Gehrke made several trips a week to pick up frozen breast milk for baby Georgia. Baby Alexis. Whatever name she was called.
According to what Mary Kay told a friend, after the first of the year, the Fualaaus had found a video of her teaching class and wanted to sell it to Inside Edition. They needed the money. For a family who had once lived on next to nothing, who had been on welfare and made do, they needed the cash that Mary Kay's name could bring. Mary was upset about the suggestion of airing the video and said it could not be used. There were students of hers in the video and it was out of the question to get them involved in something like that.
The turning point, if there could be one for Mary Kay, came during the February 1999 television broadcast “sweeps” when Vili Fualaau went before the cameras on Inside Edition with a fistful of letters written to him by the mother of his two children. It was an appearance for money.
It was also evident that the rift between Mary Kay and Soona had widened. In one of the five letters, Mary Kay accused Audrey and Georgia's grandmother of “stealing our babies and not caring enough” about Vili.
She also sounded like a girl obsessed with her boyfriend.
“The only kids you're having are mine… I'll give you 18 if that's what you want, but your babies are mine… ” she wrote.
Eighteen was the number of children that Vili's imprisoned father had sired—the man Vili had once told sixth-grade classmate Katie Hogden he had never wanted to emulate.
But it was the letter with the heading “Test Time” that brought the most attention. She wrote how she threatened “automatic castration” if he even looked at another girl. He thought she sounded a little “crazy,” but he liked the fact that she wanted him to be true to her. After the Inside Edition show aired, Mary Kay told friends she was shocked and appalled about the betrayal.
“I told them no and I guess they had to find something else to sell. It is okay for Vili to sell me out,” she said shortly after the program aired. Her voice caught in her throat a bit, indicating that maybe it wasn't so okay after all. “I guess they needed the income,” she said.
Steve Letourneau also found dollars as reason to weigh in and slam his wife once more during the sweeps-rating period. He appeared on the low-rated Extra telling the world that Mary Kay had to take responsibility for what she did before he could forgive her. During the tumultuous last two years of Steve and Mary Kay Letourneau's marriage, a total of four children were born of their extramarital relationships.
But what of Mary Kay's children, her six “angels”? The four in Alaska were off-limits because baggage handler Steve Letourneau had decided that was best. But what of the youngest? Even during her long summer of waiting for the sentencing, Mary Kay had been allowed to have baby Audrey. She had also seen Audrey in the King County Regional Justice Center. But not at the prison. Mary Kay told friends that the paperwork for which Soona was responsible was the big hold-up in arranging visits with Audrey and Georgia. When the weeks melted into months, through a “third party” Mary Kay confronted the “Samoan Queen.”
“Why is it taking you [Soona] nearly three months for to comply?” Mary Kay had asked.
The purported response from the forty-year-old grandmother was chilling: “Have you finished the English manuscript?”
“Those were her exact words. I almost didn't believe it,” Mary Kay later said. “But others have said the same thing.”
Tensions between Mary, her lawyers, and the Fualaaus escalated in the months since Georgia's birth. Mary told friends that she certainly understood where Vili's mother stood when it came to caring for the two babies. Soona Fualaau deserved respect for taking the children in and, more importantly, for standing up and saying that Mary Kay Letourneau wasn't an evil predator, but a part of their family. But why wasn't she getting the babies down to the prison?
Though for most, Mary Kay kept a brave face and a smile so indelible a Sharpie could have drawn it, there were times when it seemed things were sinking in.
“Where are my babies?” she asked. “All I hear is, 'Are you done with the book?' But I have to play along. What choice do I have?”
But she couldn't finish it. The book was such a shambles, such a farce, that she couldn't fix it fast enough. It was her life, not theirs, after all.
“At best I think I can make it a C+, but doesn't our story deserve better than that?”
Even a year after she traded her baggy jeans and layers of oversize T-shirts for prison garb, Mary Kay Letourneau wasn't “over” insofar as the media was concerned. Personally, however, she was running out of steam despite the fact that the public was still interested. She was still news. She appeared over the phone on Oprah during the winter 1999 television advertising “Sweeps”.
“I didn't know what Sweeps was,” she told a friend with an exaggerated sigh, “now I know that when they want to boost their ratings it means putting me on the air.”
According to Mary Kay, Bob Huff sent a letter in early 1999 stating that he found her entirely responsible for the delay of the American edition of the book. Nothing, Mary Kay believed from everyone around her, but the book mattered.
“You seem to be totally out of touch with the reality with the… book… in completing your part. You have a million and one excuses… ”
According to Mary Kay's interpretation of the missive, Bob Huff was going to demand Vili's share of the advance and cut her out because she was in violation of the contract.
“Vili is the golden egg to Huff,” Mary Kay told a friend not long after the ultimatum was made. “Through my name he gets that title, he gets the money because of it. If Vili and I were married, Bob doesn't get his twenty-percent because we don't need him.”
All she could do was dial phone numbers and wait for a jaded world to right a wrong, for her lawyers to drop off the face of the earth, for Vili to make good on his promise to love her forever. The problem was that Vili was still a boy, unable to make adult decisions for himself. His mother and his lawyer Bob Huff needed him. And as Mary saw it, it was better for those players that she was confined to a cell at the Washington Corrections Center for Women.
“For a while she kept thinking that she was getting out of here any day now,” a fellow prisoner said a year after Mary Kay became an inmate there. “She kept saying that Vili was working on getting her out of here. I felt sorry for her. I wouldn't count on Vili for anything. He's just a kid. He's not working on getting her out. As long as she's in here, she's worth something to them. Sad, isn't it? Isn't she something more than a way to make money?”
Yes, she was more. This teenager in a woman's body was a friend, a teacher, a mother, a felon. To some she was also a predator, a child rapist. To Mary Kay herself, when soaring with manic enthusiasm, she was a goddess. Among the notes Steve Letourneau turned over to King County Detective Pat Maley was a list of attributes that Mary Kay had once written about herself. It was crafted in a diagram format, with circles and arrows leading from one word to the next as she raced to reach the definition of who and what she was.
“Strong, smart, passion in life, beautiful, look young, loving, faithful… sunsets, a family, giver… sunny days, kissing and lots of sex-love.”
“Me.”
Vili Fualaau, on the other hand, is still trying to figure out who he is and how he fits into the world. His body has morphed from a boy's to a young man's since he first kissed his sixth-grade teacher. His mustache has grown from a shaky C to a solid B. He's taller. He smokes. He attends school sporadically and girls flock to him in greater numbers than they might have before all of this happened. He alternates between seemingly shy and push-the-envelope outrageous. A father of two, he's a teenager trapped with a grown man's responsibility. He's seen the world's highs and lows and is connecting the dots in between.
Lawyer Bob Huff isn't sure about the kid's prospects; he's only sure of what might have been. The whirlwind of the Mary Kay Letourneau story both lifted Vili up and pulled him down.
“Besides a trip to Paris, a little money in a trust—which ain't that much—he's not better off. When we were promoting the story in France, there was the brush with celebrity, the world of art, maybe some scholarships would come his way, then the big bubble burst. And nothing. The English version of the book didn't happen. It could have happened. I wanted that for Vili. I wanted him to be able to make the rounds here to tell his story. But Mary Kay ruined that.”
In the end, neither got what they wanted. Mary Kay had wanted her book to reach out and drain the venom from all the naysayers who dismissed her love for the boy and tagged her a rapist. Caught up in the heady mirage of media dollars, Vili and his family had simply wanted a better future, a piece of the pie.
Depressed over the outcome—a cancelled American edition of the French book, a stalled TV movie because the subject matter made television executives queasy—the lawyer charged with spinning the scandal into gold felt sorriest for the Fualaaus.
“It's like people who win the lottery and are penniless the next year. That's what happened to Vili and his family,” Bob Huff said. “Pretty unbelievable. Pretty sad story.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND NOTES
ALTHOUGH THERE WOULD be hours upon hours spent on the telephone, a face-to-face meeting with Mary Kay Letourneau would come only weeks before If Loving You Is Wrong was sent to the publisher in New York. The chance to see Mary arrived in the first week in February 1999—in fact, on the first anniversary of the night when she was found in her car with the steamed-up windows.
In that year's time, so much had happened to her, and to my view of her story.
I arrived at the Washington Corrections Center for Women around 6:30 P.M., filled out the forms, had my photo taken, and stood in line with another fellow who was there to see his someone: his wife, his girlfriend, his mother. I didn't know who.
“First time in?” the young man asked. I nodded. “Lots of famous people in there,” he said as we walked outside into the damp February air, chain link and razor wire as far as the eye could see, on our way to the building where visits were conducted.
“Really?” I said.
He smiled. “Yeah, I saw at the desk that someone is going to be seeing Mary Letourneau tonight.”
I sat down in a cafeteria-like visiting room and waited with the others for the visit to start. And I waited. As she always was, according to just about everyone who knew her, Mary was running late. I looked around and saw the women and their men, their children, playing cards and laughing. An old man set up a place for his daughter with all of her vending machine favorites: a Coke, a bag of chips, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, a Hershey bar, and three napkins fanned out in a place-setting.
When Mary finally arrived, I had been there for a half hour.
The voice on the phone all those weeks was now a person. She was small, so thin, and her childlike demeanor startled me. She had come from the kitchen where she worked folding napkins. It was a job, she said, she didn't mind because she was still expressing milk for her baby. “I need to eat a little extra,” she said.
We talked about her life in prison and she told me that it had been difficult, but she knew it wasn't forever. She chatted with a kind of exuberance that didn't fit her circumstances. I asked her about it and she told me that she never gets depressed, she's an “up” person and always had been. What had happened to her after she fell in love with her student was an inconvenience, but not the end of her world.
I noticed her silver ring and I asked to see the inscription. She tugged on the band for a second, then stopped herself because it might be a violation of the rules, she wasn't sure. It was inscribed with “I'll Be There,” she said. She told me how she and Vili had searched the Seattle area over in hopes of finding the perfect ring. Vili had even sketched out a design he had in mind; he also sketched the letters for the inscription. Everything, Mary said, was created for their perfect union.
“I didn't know you could wear jewelry here,” I said.
“Only a wedding band,” she answered. Her smile was coy.
“Then you are married to Vili?” I asked.
“Yes, and it is blessed,” she said.
I asked for details, but she didn't feel like giving any. I didn't want to bring up the fact that she was already married to Steve and marrying Vili was another crime. She told me they had exchanged vows of eternal love on Mercer Island, an affluent suburb just east of Seattle—a world from White Center.
She told me she could make it in prison another year, but she was fearful that she could not really survive her full sentence. “I'm willing to do a fair amount of time,” she said, “but I don't think I really can make it here much longer than a year more.”
She wanted to be out so she could be with Vili. The teenager, the father of her youngest children, was not an enigma to Mary, but a masterful warrior who had captured her heart. He was younger than she by more than twenty years, but in some ways, he was her superior.
“It blows my mind,” she said of the boy's character. “He's truly amazing. He dominated me in the most masculine way that any man, any leader could do. I trusted him and believed in him and in our future.”
Interestingly, while she talked about Vili at length, she barely mentioned her four oldest children, except to blame Steve for keeping them from her as they battled over custody issues in their divorce.
Mary had given up everything—her family, her freedom, and her profession for the love of a thirteen-year-old. He was an artistic genius, the old soul. He was the leader; she followed him. He was the master. He was the adoring object of her affections. That's how she saw it. The roles they embodied, she said, were from another era. He dominated her.
“I am with Vili. If you are truly in love, the roles are natural.”
She never felt that way with Steve because he was not, she said, her equal.
Like a teenager who refuses to do the dishes, Mary had been unyielding in her defiance and did nothing to bend to the rules of prison life. Inmates who had befriended her watched her dig herself in deeper. She didn't seem to realize going with the flow gets you out sooner. Pissing off the guards only leads to trouble; trouble
leads to a loss of good time. She learned how to do a few things—“to bend, twist, and turn to do my little dance”—when guards demanded a strip search.
She also learned how to blow smoke rings and sometimes, like a lovesick teenager, would blow them into the sky with a wish they'd waft over the razor wire and find their way to White Center and Vili. Vili, she thought, was standing by her. He was Zeus. He was the man of her dreams, a godlike boy-man whose love would hold them together no matter the bars between them. Or so she repeatedly said to inmates, guards, and visitors.
She was younger than her years in nearly every way. She was charming, wide-eyed, and prone to a quick laugh. It struck me that she seemed so happy. No matter that she was in prison and away from the love of her life and her children and she would never teach school again. At times she spoke in the exaggerated manner of a schoolteacher reciting a story, in which she was the main character. Of course, others had told me that she acted “young.” Some were convinced that she was so good at teaching grade school because she identified with her students. Others had been harsh in their assessments. They saw her as a case of arrested development—stuck as an adolescent. I know Mary (no one but those who knew her in childhood or through media exposure calls her Mary Kay) would argue that nothing could be more beautiful than seeing the world through the eyes of a child. What is wrong with the giddy enthusiasm of youth?
I left the prison that night with more questions than answers. Oddly, the questions had little to do with Mary. Instead, I wondered about those who knew her in the years and months before she became involved with her student. If her manner had not changed dramatically from those days to what I saw in prison, why hadn't anyone helped her? I recalled one of the psychiatrists saying that she had liked Mary a great deal, but was exasperated by her actions and words. She wanted to reach out and “shake some sense” into her. I understood that completely.