Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (2 page)

PROLOGUE

John Glenn was furious. He thought he’d played it just right, made all the right moves, and that he would surely become the first American in space. It’s what they all wanted, all seven men who’d been chosen to vie for the job.

When Glenn wasn’t picked first, or even second, he tried to tell his bosses that they’d made a mistake. You don’t want Alan Shepard, he said. You don’t want this guy, the one we call the Icy Commander, with his egotistical insouciance, his questionable morals, his disregard for authority, and disdain for the press. Glenn moped, fumed, and bitched, wrote letters, and complained to family and friends. But it was no use. NASA ordered him to stop “backbiting” and deal with it.

When the decision finally became public a few months later, on May 2, 1961, the press wanted answers, too. They had adored John Glenn from the start and expected all along he’d be America’s first spaceman. So they pestered NASA’s gruff little spokesman, Shorty Powers, for an explanation. Why Shepard?

Shorty, in his mellifluous and condescending military voice, tried to explain how the Mercury Seven astronauts were all exceptional men and among the nation’s mos
t dauntless test pilots. But one had to go first, and Shepard, he said, “had what all the others had, with just enough to spare to make him the logical man to go first.”

Whatever that meant. The truth, which NASA chose not to acknowledge at the time, was simply this: Alan Shepard was the most capable of the bunch. In 1961—at the height of a seething cold war against a seemingly evil empire, and in the early days of a young president’s tentative new administration—NASA couldn’t take any chances. As one NASA official involved in the Glenn-versus-Shepard decision put it: “We wanted to put our best foot forward.” So they picked the best of the best of the best.

A few minutes past 1 A.M., six hours before launch time, Bill Douglas, the astronauts’ gentle and soft-spoken physician, poked Alan Shepard on the shoulder.

“Come on, Al,” Douglas said. “They’re filling the tanks.”

“I’m ready,” Shepard said, rising and pulling on a white bathrobe. “Is John up?”

“John’s awake,” Douglas said. “We’re all awake. Did you sleep well?”

“Very well,” Shepard said. “No dreams.”

Shepard whistled as he took a brief shower, shaved, then shuffled into an adjacent office where Glenn, already wide awake and wearing an identical terry-cloth robe, sat waiting for him. The cook brought in two nearly identical trays of food.

“Here we go again,” Glenn said. “You ready?”

Shepard nodded. The breakfast menu was the same as it had been for a week: filet mignon wrapped in bacon, toast and jelly, eggs and orange juice—a so-called low-residue diet, so Shepard wouldn’t find himself in need of a toilet in space.

“What a tough life, huh?” Glenn said. “Filet mignon every morning.”

Shepard appreciated that, preferring jokes to any of Glenn’
s “maudlin sentimentality.” He didn’t want to think about the importance of the coming event, only about the technical tasks at hand. When asked later about his feelings at breakfast, Shepard said that when you’re preparing to roost atop many tons of high explosives, “the last thing on your mind is being a page in a history book.”

But May 5, 1961, was a day for the history books. The entire earth was watching. A battle between the world’s superpowers was being fought in strange new nonmilitary ways, and the Soviets had struck first three weeks earlier when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had circled the Earth—a stunning achievement that could have, should have been Shepard’s. Now it was the United States’ turn and they couldn’t afford any mistakes. Shepard kept reminding himself of that:
Don’t fuck up.

To Shepard’s relief, the weather report looked good. No signs of rain.

As he finished eating, Shepard became vaguely aware that people—technicians, photographers, and doctors—were milling around him, watching him. Some were more nervous than he was; they didn’t want to screw up their part of the mission, either. Yet they were amazed that the guy headed for the hot seat appeared so poised and rock-steady.

After breakfast, Glenn rode out to the rocket to make final preparations on the capsule. Shepard strode into Bill Douglas’ exam room, took off his bathrobe, and let the doctor survey every inch of his sinewy, five-foot-eleven, 165-pound, thirty-seven-year-old body. Douglas asked how he felt, and Shepard acknowledged a few butterflies—but happy ones. When he finished looking down Shepard’s throat one last time, Douglas rapped his patient playfully on the chin, and Shepard broke into a toothy smile.

A little past 2 A.M., Shepard went to the astronauts’ office and called his wife, Louise. “I was hoping it was you,” she said. She had wanted to be down at the Cape watchi
ng the launch, but he’d suggested she avoid the hype and the media crush and stay in Virginia Beach. Louise had decided ever since the first days of his Navy career, during the final year of World War II, that it was best to give him space to do his job. Theirs was a relationship built around long distances and lengthy separations; telephone calls had become their lifeline.

Three days earlier—when NASA finally announced that Shepard, not Glenn, had been chosen to ride a Mercury Redstone rocket into space—the press found Louise anyway. Reporters cawed and pecked like a flock of crows outside the squat brick ranch house until Louise, hunkered inside with her daughters, taped a note on the front door:
There are no reporters inside. I
will have a statement for the press after the flight.

When her husband called, Louise had a dozen things to tell him—about their girls, the house, the pesky press, her golf game—but she forgot them all. None of it seemed important now. She knew it could be the last time they spoke. Ever. “We’ll be watching you on TV,” she said. “Be sure to wave when you lift off.”

“Right,” he said, and laughed. “I’ll open the hatch and stick my arm out.”

Shepard, uncharacteristically, didn’t have much else to say that morning, either. Finally, Louise told him to “hurry home.”

“I will,” he said.

“I love you.”

Shepard hung up, then walked into the suit-up room. Technicians and engineers avoided any conversation with him. If he wanted to talk, he’d have to be the one to start. Suit technician Joe Schmitt barely shared a dozen words with Shepard as Schmitt worked himself into a sweat squeezing Shepard into the tight, silvery space suit.

Just before leaving the hangar that housed the astronauts’ quarters and exam rooms, Shepard winked at Dee O’Hara, the astronauts’ kewpie-doll-cute and devoted nurse, who st
ood near the exit clutching her rosary beads. “Well, here I go, Dee,” he said, and Dee just waved, fighting back tears.

Shepard climbed into a transport van, leaned back in a reclining chair, and placed a portable oxygen tank on the floor beside him. He looked and acted like a space-alien businessman riding a commuter bus, with his silvery briefcase by his side.

The van pulled up at the foot of the Redstone rocket, bathed in floodlights, plumes of blue and white oxygen fumes venting from its wafer-thin sides. At eighty-three feet, the rocket was no taller than a mature birch tree. It would take nearly seven of them stacked end to end to reach the height of the Washington Monument. But Shepard was proud of his little capsule-topped rocket and called her “that little rascal.” As he approached the rocket, he asked Mission Control for permission to exit the transport van ahead of schedule. He knew he’d never see the “bird” again, so he stopped to symbol
ically kick the tires.

She’s got an air of expectancy,
he thought.
A lovely sight . . . long
and slender.

Suddenly the crewmen behind him broke into applause, and for a moment the emotions of the day caught up with Shepard.
Life
magazine photographer Ralph Morse, the scrappy little New Yorker who had become a good friend, began snapping away, and one of his shots would occupy half a page in the
New
York Times.
Shepard turned to speak to the crew but his throat choked up and he just waved.

On the elevator ride to the top, Douglas gave him a box of crayons—“So you’ll have something to do up there.” Shepard laughed loudly, almost fogging his visor, but grateful for the tension breaker. He handed the box to Douglas, telling him he was going to be a little busy. At the top of the gantry—in an antechamber whose translucent green walls, like those of a beach-side motel, earned it the nickname Surfside 5—stood Glenn.

Glenn wore sterile white coveralls and a paper cap like a butcher’s. He greeted Shepard as he exited the elevator, then
helped him squeeze through the two-foot-square opening of the capsule Shepard had named
Freedom 7.
As Shepard settled into the couch that had been contoured to his body, he looked up at the instrument panel and laughed into his visor. Taped there was a sign that read No Handball Playing in This Area. Beside that was a centerfold ripped from a girlie magazine. Shepard took one look at Glenn’s giggling face, impressed that the Boy Scout was capable of such a crafty gotcha.

Right from the start—in 1959, when NASA had chosen seven test pilots to train to become the first astronauts—it was clear the two front-runners and competing leaders of the group would be Shepard and Glenn. The bad boy and the altar boy.

Glenn, the silver-tongued, freckle-faced all-American, spoke eloquently to the press about God and family and serving his country. The others just shook their heads at him, disgusted at his pandering but secretly impressed by his locution.

Shepard, on the other hand, epitomized the cynical, smart-ass fighter jock. You could see it in the strutting, superior way he carried himself. He didn’t grin like Glenn; he smirked. Instead of cloying the press, he snapped at them; when asked why he wanted to be the first astronaut, he quipped, “I want to be first because I want to be first.”

The opposing personalities of Shepard and Glenn reflected the duality of veteran military men who emerged from cloistered military fraternities to become overnight celebrities. They were, as John Kennedy called them, men of a “new generation” who would compete in “a race for the mastery of the sky.” They were also adventurous, combative, indulgent thrill-seekers who performed ludicrous, death-taunting feats in supersonic jets, then rewarded themselves with whiskey, women, and fast cars.

Tensions between Shepard and Glenn came to a notorious head in late 1960. Glenn was sound asleep early on
e morning in his San Diego hotel room when the phone rang. Shepard, calling from nearby Tijuana, Mexico, explained that he’d been out drinking, spending time with a female friend, and had let his guard down, allowing a reporter and photographer to tail him. “I need your help,” he told Glenn.

Glenn handled the situation with a frenetic round of phone calls that kept the story from ever reaching newsprint. The next day he told the other six astronauts they had dodged a bullet and should start thinking about keeping their pants zipped. A few weeks later the astronauts were asked to cast a vote for the man— besides themself—they’d like to see become the first American in space.

Glenn knew who the others would pick—the bad-ass, not the kiss-ass. He was right, and when NASA made it official—on January 19, at a secret meeting the night before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration—Shepard just stared at the floor, trying not to smirk and offend the other six as their boss announced that he would get the first flight. In the toughest competition of his contest-filled life, Shepard had won—the bad boy had prevailed. And Glenn had no choice but to take an enormous gulp of pride and serve as Shepard’s sidekick.

Shepard, meanwhile, just loved calling Glenn “my backup.”