The Astronaut Wives Club Part 1

THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB.

by Lily Koppel.

Author's Note

To be an astronaut wife meant tea with Jackie Kennedy, high-society galas, and instant celebrity. It meant smiling perfectly after a makeover by Life magazine, balancing an extravagantly lacquered rocket-style hairdo, and teetering in high heels at the crux of the s.p.a.ce age.

The astronaut wives were ordinary housewives, most all of them military wives living in drab housing on Navy and Air Force bases. When their husbands, the best test pilots in the country, were chosen to man America's audacious adventure to beat the Russians in the s.p.a.ce race, they suddenly found themselves very much in the public eye.

As her husband trained for every possible aspect of s.p.a.ceflight, each woman had to prepare for the day when she would have to face the television cameras, when the world would be scrutinizing her hair, her complexion, her outfit, her figure, her poise, her parenting skills, her diction, her charm, and most of all, her patriotism. She had to appear calm and composed while her husband was strapped atop what was essentially the world's largest stick of dynamite, seconds away from being blasted off into s.p.a.ce.

To help cope with the astronomical pressures of publicity, the wives couldn't turn to their husbands, who were too busy training, or to NASA, which was too busy figuring out how to get their husbands to the Moon. So the wives turned to each other.

Louise Shepard, wife of the first American to go into s.p.a.ce, had learned the hard way that she needed to prevent overeager photographers from pressing a lens to her window and sneaking a shot of her living room. Drawing curtains against the press was only the first of many tips, tactics, and secrets that would be pa.s.sed among the astronaut wives, for enduring what was known to the public as the launch report, but which one of the wives renamed the Death Watch.

Years later, by the time NASA put a man on the Moon, this excruciating pageant, with the wives' photogenic children, helpful neighbors, and publicity-seeking preachers, had evolved into a gathering somewhere between a celebration and a wake. In a singular Houston neighborhood known as Togethersville, this diverse group of women-over coffee and cigarettes, champagne and c.o.c.ktails, tea and Tupperware, society b.a.l.l.s and splashdown parties-shared laughter and tears, triumph and tragedy, as their husbands streaked through s.p.a.ce.

The Astrowives learned that they needed to comfort each other during the agonizing minutes, hours, and days they had to wait at home for their husbands' safe return to Earth. They brought potluck spreads-Jell-O molds, ca.s.seroles, frosted cupcakes stuck with little American flags, lasagna, deviled eggs, pigs in blankets, strawberry angel cake, marshmallow brownies, and homemade "Moon Cake," a coconut cream pie topped with meringue swirled to look like the lunar surface. There was always champagne on hand, ready to be popped upon a successful splashdown. The wives dressed in their fas.h.i.+onable best: Doris Daylike finery for the Mercury missions, '60s mod for Gemini, and '70s suburban psychedelic for Apollo. Life magazine had been awarded exclusive coverage of the astronauts, and always sent its top photographers to cover them.

In the home of the lucky woman whose husband was "going up," each wife was a.s.signed her duty. One manned the coffeepot while another dumped out heaping ashtrays, chain-smoking being the occupational hazard of the Astrowives. Solidarity was essential; who but another Astrowife could understand what the wife of the moment was enduring? Of course the harrowing worry and stress was the wife's alone. If she did ever care to share it, newsmen were stationed right outside, eager for a quote.

The ever-growing group of astronaut wives relied on each other more and more to negotiate their own roles at the forefront of history. As next-door neighbors in the s.p.a.ce burbs, they kept each other grounded while their husbands headed to the Moon.

"We formed our own traditions as we went along," said Marge Slayton, who was essential in organizing the wives' get-togethers, "and they were good traditions."

The astronaut wives inst.i.tuted official monthly coffees and teas; everyone knew their unspoken promise: "If you need us, come."

The story of the astronauts is well known, but this is the first time the wives' story has been told. We have heard and seen so much about the technological aspects of the s.p.a.ce race, but not enough about the extraordinary day-to-day lives the wives experienced behind the scenes.

This book tells the story of the women behind the s.p.a.cemen, from Project Mercury of the Kennedy Camelot years (1959 to 1963, which launched the first American into s.p.a.ce and eventually into orbit around the Earth), to the Gemini missions (1962 to 1966, notable for two-man s.p.a.ce travel and the first U.S. s.p.a.ce walk), through the Apollo program (1961 to 1972), which finally landed a man on the Moon.

Ultimately, the wives' story is about female friends.h.i.+ps and American ident.i.ty. While their husbands were launched into s.p.a.ce, they were being launched as modern American women. If not for the wives, the strong women in the background who provided essential support to their husbands, man might never have walked on the Moon.

Introducing the Wives

They had endured years of waking up alone, making their kids breakfast, taking them to school and picking them up, fixing dinner and kissing them good night, promising that Daddy was thinking of them all the time. There had been lonely nights when they fell asleep wondering how they were going to get by on their husbands' measly pay for another month. During tours of duty in World War II or Korea or both, their husbands had nearly become mirages. Navy deployments had taken their men away on six- to nine-month cruises to the far corners of the Earth. They'd each wait for half a year imagining their man, trying not to forget what he looked like, only to have him come home hungry and tired. They'd miss him even before he left.

Things were no easier in peacetime when he was back home on base serving as a test pilot. There were times when squadrons would lose as many as two men in a week. The wives couldn't do a thing about it but pray for their prowess over the 5 a.m. skillet, hoping they'd cooked their husbands a good breakfast of steak and eggs before they left to go fly, so they'd be alert up in the air. They went to friends' funerals, sang the Navy hymn, and wore white gloves and clutched a handkerchief to catch the tears. They'd become conditioned to living with the daily fear that their men might not be back for dinner, or ever.

For Marge Slayton, whose wide, pale Irish face and expressive eyes made you want to hug her, it was the sound of a helicopter that sent her into a tailspin of fear and nausea. Hearing the blades of a chopper whirring overhead almost always meant that the men were searching for a plane that had gone down. Long after she stopped living on remote air bases, such as Edwards in the Mojave Desert, the sound of a helicopter still struck fear in her heart.

If a husband was out testing a new experimental plane and didn't come home by five o'clock, almost all of the wives experienced the same waking nightmare, imagining the dark figure of the base chaplain ringing the doorbell, telling her she was now a widow. They had rehea.r.s.ed that awful scene in their minds, over and over. Such was the life of a test pilot wife. They could not possibly have imagined all that would be in store for them as astronauts' wives.

The United States was well behind in the s.p.a.ce race. Soon after launching Sputnik in 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik II with its pa.s.senger Laika ("Barker," also known as Little Curly), the Soviet s.p.a.ce dog. She was a female stray found on the streets of Moscow (and those G.o.dless Soviets let her die in orbit). The United States had responded by trying to send up its own satellite on a Vanguard rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, but it disastrously exploded on the launch pad, leading the press to call it "Kaputnik." In the following months and years the United States tried to send up bigger rockets, such as the Atlas, but nearly every one of them had exploded before reaching outer s.p.a.ce. Now the United States was determined not only to catch up but to pull ahead. It was a national priority in those fervent days of the Cold War.

America's s.p.a.ce age was officially announced on April 9, 1959. In Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., at the b.u.t.tercup-yellow Dolley Madison House, across Lafayette Square from the White House, the seven men who'd been chosen to be the nation's first astronauts were officially presented to the world. They sat onstage at a blue feltdraped banquet table under NASA's round red-and-blue logo of a planet and stars, nicknamed the Meatball. Onstage with them was a model of the tiny Mercury capsule on top of an Atlas rocket, which would fall off once the capsule had pa.s.sed through the Earth's atmosphere and entered outer s.p.a.ce. At promptly 10 a.m., the press conference began. T. Keith Glennan took the podium. A natural-born showman who had previously worked at Paramount and Samuel Goldwyn, he was now the administrator of the National Aeronautics and s.p.a.ce Administration.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced, "today we are introducing to you and to the world these seven men who have been selected to begin training for orbital s.p.a.ceflight. These men, the nation's Mercury astronauts, are here after a long and perhaps unprecedented series of evaluations which told our medical consultants and scientists of their superb adaptability to their upcoming flight. It is my pleasure to introduce to you-and I consider it a very real honor, gentlemen-Malcolm S. Carpenter, Leroy G. Cooper, John H. Glenn Jr., Virgil I. Grissom, Walter M. Schirra Jr., Alan B. Shepard Jr., and Donald K. Slayton...the nation's Mercury astronauts!"

The ballroom burst into applause. The Mercury Seven astronauts were instantly beloved, embodying the country's optimism and excitement. s.p.a.ce capsules and rocket launchers and men in silver suits in outer s.p.a.ce; it was a brave new world. The stuff of science-fiction novels was now coming true. These seven young flyboy test pilots, with their strong jaws and military buzz-cuts, were the best America had to offer. Glennan explained how the seven were chosen out of 110 test pilots considered for the job. Most of all they were healthy small-town Americans. None was older than forty.

Glennan touched on how fierce the compet.i.tion had been. The Mercury Seven had been exhaustively tested and checked out down to their innermost orifices at the famed Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, selected for its secluded location. There were all kinds of "wild theories" about zero gravity, as one NASA doctor later put it. "Some people said the astronauts' hearts would explode, or that their blood pressure would fall to nothing. Some said they would never be able to urinate, and others said they'd never be able to stop urinating." Physicians did a complete medical, psychological, and social evaluation of the astronauts. NASA looked into the backgrounds of not only the men but also their wives.

Since all of America's new astronauts were drawn from the test pilot world, they were military men who would retain their rank while on loan to the new civilian s.p.a.ce agency. They would work together now, so rank would no longer be important. They wouldn't wear uniforms besides their silver s.p.a.ce suits. And they wouldn't only be pilots. Each would be in charge of a particular ingredient of s.p.a.ceflight, such as the capsule, communications, recovery, or navigation.

When it was question time, the reporters shot up their hands and leaped out of their seats. It turned out they were mostly interested in what the astronauts' wives had to say about their men being blasted into s.p.a.ce. It was insanity, wasn't it? Or was it the American dream? Didn't their wives want to bring the country down to earth, say there had been some mistake? No, you cannot send my husband to the Moon. What kind of woman would actually let her husband be blasted into s.p.a.ce on a rocket? The newly christened astronauts were in the process of formulating answers when John Glenn piped up.

"I don't think any of us could really go on with something like this if we didn't have pretty good backing at home, really," he said, speaking of his Annie. "My wife's att.i.tude toward this has been the same as it has been all along through my flying. If it is what I want to do, she is behind it, and the kids are, too, a hundred percent."

When the press conference ended, reporters dashed from the room to instruct their editors to dispatch their minions to track down the Astrowives. John Glenn, who would remain very protective of his wife throughout the s.p.a.ce race, always did his best to s.h.i.+eld her from the press. The other wives, however, were open game. There were seven of them scattered across the country: Air Force and Navy wives, and Annie the lone Marine wife. They had spent the best years of their lives raising kids and supporting their husbands' careers and moving their families from one end of the country to the other, from one dismal base to the next. Now their husbands were astronauts, and they, too, were instant celebrities.

NASA didn't provide the wives with any instructions. No NASA public relations spokesmen contacted them with tips on how to deal with the press that day. The wives would have to handle the reporters the way they'd handled all the ups and downs of service life-with slightly knitted eyebrows, perfectly applied lipstick, and well-practiced aplomb.

The reporters hunted down the wives, showing up at their doorsteps and even chasing them at the grocery store. Out in Enon, Ohio, Betty, new astronaut Gus Grissom's wife, was having a h.e.l.lish time dealing with the journalists, who were practically crawling through the curtains into her house. Gus had vastly underestimated the new situation the night before, when he'd called from Was.h.i.+ngton to warn her, "It's a good bet you'll be pounced on by the press." She'd been sick, running a temperature of 102. Her curly brown hair was a mess. So was the house.

Betty Grissom had never thought of Gus as a potential hero. They'd met back in Mitch.e.l.l, Indiana, where Gus, too short to make the basketball team, had to be satisfied with being the leader of the Boy Scout honor guard. Betty played the snare drum in the pep band. "The first time I saw you I decided you were the girl I was going to marry," he'd tell her.

Betty had put Gus through engineering school at Purdue, slaving away on the 5 to 11 p.m. s.h.i.+ft at Indiana Bell in a room full of exhausted working girls plugging in telephone connections. Her graveyard s.h.i.+ft gave her husband some quiet to study. She had to work hard in those days because they lived off her pay. Betty didn't have any education beyond high school, but she often joked about her hard-earned "P.H.T." degree-Putting Hubby Through.

She had sweated out Gus's tour of duty in Korea, where he flew an F-86 Sabre on one hundred combat missions. Gus was promoted, but Betty was devastated when he actually volunteered to stay in Korea to fly another twenty-five missions.

After the war, Gus was stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Enon, Ohio. He was now a test pilot, and they were finally living under one roof, with their two little boys. Even though Gus was home, he was often off flying. Betty knew flying was Gus's life, and she supported him without question.

"If I die, have a party," Gus once told her after one of their test pilot friends crashed and burned.

"Okay," she promised. "We'll have a party."

"If something happens to me, I don't want people sitting over here, crying."

In January 1959 Gus had received the top-secret telegram. Gus wasn't much for words, but Betty usually knew before he did what was on his mind. In fact, they both figured that she was a little psychic. That night, as the Moon hung over Enon, Ohio, and the two boys were finally in bed, he read the telegram aloud. A couple of sentences long, with the usual confusing military acronyms, it "invited" Captain Virgil I. Grissom to come to Was.h.i.+ngton, wear civilian clothes, and not utter a word of this to anyone. Neither of them had any idea what it meant, so Betty blurted out the craziest thing that popped into her head. "What are they going to do, Gus, shoot you up in the nose cone of an Atlas rocket?"

She had heard Gus talk about the Atlas rocket, which was being tested in secret at Cape Canaveral in Florida. It wasn't much of a secret, seeing as reporters had watched it blow up from the nearby town of Cocoa Beach. The rocket was unstable, and kept on exploding at liftoff after liftoff. Did men in the government really reckon someone was supposed to ride that thing?

Gus laughed. Soon Betty began to feel like a spy girl in a James Bond thriller. Federal investigators were canva.s.sing Enon, making inquiries into the character of the Grissoms: How patriotic was his wife? How many times a week did she make home-cooked meals? Did she drink too much? Did communists regularly appear on their doorstep?

Finally, Gus asked Betty's permission to accept the dangerous mission. She looked at him and said, "Is it something you really want to do?"

"Yes, it is."

"Then do you even need to ask me?"

On the day of the astronauts' press conference, Betty had gone to the doctor and gotten a shot of penicillin. She stopped at the grocery store on the way home to pick up a few things for her and her boys, eight-year-old Scotty and five-year-old Mark, who were still at school. A reporter-photographer team from Life had interviewed her neighbor and tracked Betty's trail to the store. They came right up to her as she was wheeling her shopping cart through the vegetable aisle. Being a polite midwesterner, Betty invited the duo to her home, though they would have followed her through her door whether she wanted them to or not.