Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (37 page)

But what dwelled behind that beatific façade? many acquaintances wondered. Like Alan, Louise maintained
an emotional barrier beyond which few people were allowed. Louise’s constant smile, her optimistic demeanor and heavy reliance on her church seemed to be covering up some deeper unease. Some friends said it was the media glare that rankled Louise. But other friends knew it wasn’t just the media.

Louise saw little of her husband during 1959 and 1960. He’d be gone for weeks at a time—St. Louis, Pensacola, Los Angeles, the Cape—while she stayed home at Virginia Beach with the two younger girls, Julie and Alice. (Laura, the eldest, was sent to Louise’s alma mater, Principia.) One summer weekend Alan returned home for a short break, but instead of a quiet night at home, they attended a Navy friend’s party, where Alan stunned the guests by water-skiing barefoot, a trick he’d worked hard to perfect. He ended the night by drag-racing in the new Corvette he had purchased, beating
the seven other competitors, and then flew off in a jet with an old Navy buddy, leaving a sonic boom in his wake. It wasn’t exactly the life Louise had envisioned.

Opinions regarding Shepard’s fidelity to Louise varied wildly. At the time, indisputable facts were hard to come by, a testimony to either Shepard’s carefulness or the protection offered him by loyal friends and an obliging press. But in time it became clear that Alan and Louise, either tacitly or explicitly, operated under a marital understanding.

Some friends thought Shepard had a “compulsion” to be around other women. “He had a beautiful wife and family. I just never quite understood it,” said Al Blackburn, a Naval Academy classmate and fellow test pilot. Others, like Bill Dana, maintain that Shepard may have been “a bit of a rascal” but that “there was a lot of mythology about it.” Dana believes that if Alan Shepard did all the fooling around that was attributed to him, “his dick would have fallen off.”

NBC reporter Jay Barbree, who covered the Mercury Seven and years later would collaborate with Shepard and Slayton on a book about the space race, recalled the story of
a pretty folk singer named Trish who performed regularly at the Cape. Rumors began circulating that Trish had slept with all seven of the astronauts. Barbree said that in truth, she had slept with only one of the seven—and it wasn’t Shepard.

Barbree recalled seeing Shepard take Trish home one night and, Shepard told him later, stay for a drink—but nothing more. “It was the appearance they were after,” Barbree said. “Shepard wanted his buddies to believe he was seeing Trish.”

Not that flings weren’t happening. Barbree said the Cape oozed sexuality. An attractive woman once offered him sex in exchange for the sports car he drove. Barbree later learned that the young woman was dating one of the astronauts. “I see you met Diane,” Gordo Cooper told Barbree one night in his lazy Oklahoma twang.

Still, like Dana, Barbree thinks that if the astronauts had all the sex they got credit for, “they would have never gone to the moon. They’d have been in bed all the time.”

One of Louise’s closest friends, Loraine Meyer, with whom she would one day open a needlepoint shop, said Louise never discussed Alan’s promiscuity with her. “We were best friends, but that was one thing we didn’t discuss,” Meyer recalled. She believes Alan and Louise were “very much in love” and that if they did have any marital woes, they worked them out in private.

Whatever deeper truths lay beneath Alan and Louise’s complicated marriage, one thing was certain to all who knew them at the time: Alan did not practice fidelity. But he was not the only unfaithful astronaut, and the risks of skirt chasing while the press was watching began to create growing conflict among the Mercury Seven.

12

“I think I got myself in trouble”

Back in 1959, to commemorate his graduation from test pilot to spaceman, Shepard had traded his peppy little oil-spewing green MG ragtop for one of the sexiest American vehicles ever produced. The glossy white Corvette flaunted whitewall tires and a menacing chrome grille that looked like some wild animal’s snarling teeth. At first America didn’t know what to make of Chevy’s new sports cars, and less than ten thousand were sold in the first few years of production. But to Shepard, his secondhand Corvette was worth every bit of the $3,000 price tag. He would drive ’Vettes for the next t
hirty years, and the car would become an accoutrement for many future astronauts, a jet-shaped and sensual symbol of their coming of age.

Shortly after purchasing his new toy, Shepard invited
Life
photographer Ralph Morse for a ride. He wanted to show Ralph how fast it could fly, with its huge eight-cylinder, 230-horsepower engine. “Goes like a bat out of hell,” Shepard promised.

Morse asked how they’d find a straightaway around Langley that was long enough to get up any speed. And, if they did, how would they avoid getting arrested? Despite a nose for a good story, Morse didn’t want to be implicated with the first jailed
astronaut. Shepard solved both problems by calling the tower at Langley’s airfield to get permission to use their runway. Then he roared at a hundred miles an hour down the tarmac, with Morse scrunched in his seat.

When GM officials learned that a famous astronaut was a loyal ’Vette fan, they smelled a publicity opportunity for the struggling model and arranged a meeting between Shepard and the Corvette’s chief engineer, Zora Arkus-Duntov. The two men hit it off and Arkus-Duntov convinced a reluctant GM management to donate a brand-new Corvette to Shepard, which was of course even faster.

Mickey Kapp, who produced the José Jiménez albums, recalled that his first encounter with Shepard was an illegally speedy Corvette sprint down Route A1A, weaving through traffic at eighty miles an hour. Kapp was sure Shepard was trying to scare him. It was Shepard’s way of checking to see if Kapp had any guts. But Kapp, a car collector, had driven his share of fast cars, and he just sat there smiling and enjoying the ride.

The astronauts’ training schedule left Shepard with little spare time to fly, and his velocious Corvette offered a modest substitute for such thrills. Just as he had with jets, Shepard was constantly trying to squeeze a little more horsepower from his car, which one day led him to Jim Rathmann.

Rathmann was a handsome race car driver who, after two second-place finishes in the Indianapolis 500, finally won the race in 1960 in a back-and-forth contest that would go down as one of the most exciting races in Indianapolis history. Rathmann also owned a Chevrolet dealership and an adjacent mechanics’ shop near Cocoa Beach. Shepard was always bringing his car into Rathmann’s shop, asking him to tweak this or that, trying to get a little extra speed out of the big V-8.

When Rathmann learned of Shepard’s love of his Corvette, he called his boss and friend, Ed Cole, Chevrolet’s chief engineer (soon to become president of General Motors). Cole ha
d been an early believer in Chevy’s first true sports car and agreed to Rathmann’s plan to give
all
the astronauts special deals on Corvettes— and, they hoped, boost sales in the process.

Cooper and Grissom accepted GM’s offer and began driving brand-new Corvettes. Schirra swapped his Austin Healy for one but later switched back to European cars (and was punished for it by Cooper, who once hid a rotting fish in Schirra’s Maserati). Carpenter turned down the Corvette offer, preferring his souped-up Shelby Cobra. Slayton at the time drove a beat-up station wagon that, compared to the sports car crowd, made his family feel like “a bunch of Okies.” He was happy to trade the wagon for a ’Vette.

Glenn, on the other hand, turned down the offer. He had recently traded his secondhand Studebaker for an obscure little German thing called an NSU Prinz, which he bought for $1,400 because of its great gas mileage. It got fifty miles to the gallon, and he could drive from his home in Arlington, Virginia, to Langley and back for less than a dollar. Scorning the others’ infatuation with race cars, Glenn one day copied on a classroom blackboard a quote he’d found in Reader’s Digest: “Definition of a sports car: a hedge against male menopause.”

In the end, four astronauts—Shepard, Cooper, Grissom, and Slayton—accepted GM’s “executive lease” offer. They could lease a new Corvette for $1 a year, then trade it in at year’s end for a new model. Rathmann had no problem selling the slightly used astro- ’Vettes.

At the end of a day’s training, Shepard, Cooper, and Grissom loved to race each other down some rural stretch of A1A. Sometimes they drove right on the hard-packed beach, and once used one of their Corvettes for water-skiing—they hooked a tow rope to the back and cruised down the beach, pulling the skier through the surf.

The cars had wide tires that sometimes hydroplaned on wet pavement, and a few of the watching reporters c
ringed as the astronauts sped through Cocoa Beach, swerving and fishtailing. Shepard once spun out on a rain-slicked bridge, narrowly missing an oncoming car. Grissom once let Rathmann drive his ’Vette and, sitting in the passenger seat, dared Rathmann to take a tight corner at eighty miles an hour. He did, but the car spun out and slid two hundred feet off the road into a mud pit, where it had to be yanked free by a tow truck. The reporters couldn’t write about all they saw, but privately they expected one of the country’s new heroes to slam into a tree. “Some of us were concerned they’d kill th
emselves—and lose a big investment on the government’s part. Or maybe knock off some kid,” recalled Bill Hines, a writer with the former
Washington Star
and, later, the
Chicago Sun-Times.

At first Shepard won many of the three-way races against Cooper and Grissom. But suddenly, after one of his tune-ups at Rathmann’s place, Shepard began losing the races, badly. And it drove him crazy.

“What the hell’s going on?” he complained one day.

“You lost, Alan,” Grissom told him. “Guess you lost your touch.”

“My ass. There’s something wrong with this car,” Shepard insisted.

Often he would get out and kick the car after losing. After a few more lost races, Grissom and Cooper let him in on the joke. Rathmann had adjusted the gear ratios on Shepard’s car so that it accelerated more slowly than normal.

“Gotcha,” Cooper said, and slapped Shepard on the back. But Shepard had never been much of a sport when he found himself on the losing end of a gotcha, and had to force himself to keep his hands off Cooper’s neck.

Such juvenile and combative head-butting rituals reflected the surging intensity of the competition for the first space ride. Working out the many kinks in its troubled rockets had forced NASA to delay its tentative plans for a manned launch in 1960. But things were looking good for early the
following year, and the astronauts knew NASA would decide soon who’d ride that historic flight.

At times Henri Landwirth felt caught between his two favorite astronauts: Alan Shepard and John Glenn. He knew they were two very different men, but there were qualities in each that, Landwirth felt, strangely complemented the other.

He heard the gripes about Glenn from others. There was the friend of Glenn’s who told a
Life
reporter that “John tries to behave as if every impressionable youngster in the country were watching him every moment of the day.” And there was the time Schirra gave Glenn a boatload of grief after watching him return to the Holiday Inn from an alleged run on the beach, then splash water on his face so it looked like sweat. But Landwirth generally got along well with Glenn, who could “make me laugh.”

Shepard, on the other hand, could infuriate Landwirth with his sarcasm. “I could have choked him at times in the old days,” he recalled. And he thought Shepard’s pranks could be mean-spirited. One time Shepard and Leo D’Orsey made plans to meet with Landwirth at a hotel in Miami. They told Landwirth the hotel didn’t allow Jews, so they would have to sneak him in. Putting a raincoat over Landwirth’s head, they scuttled him through the lobby and into a service elevator, where they confessed that they were just messing with him, and both busted out laughing.

Landwirth came to learn, however, that if you put up with Shepard’s sharp edges, his antagonism and unpredictable moods, and earned his trust, the payoff was a loyal friend and “a great charmer and a gentleman.”

He was always impressed when he’d watch Shepard work a crowd. Though with colleagues or fans, Shepard could so often be icily antisocial, at certain social events he could “charm a whole room by himself—I don’t care how many people were there,” Landwirth recalled. “Especially the women.”

Freed from wearing the required Navy uniform each day, a latent predilection for style also emerged, and Shepard established himself as the best-dressed of the astronauts.

Different as Shepard and Glenn were, Landwirth saw qualities the other astronauts didn’t seem to possess. Also, each seemed to be planning far sooner than the others for their life after space. In time, Landwirth would help each of them in different ways. For Shepard, Landwirth would boost him toward riches. Glenn would get a boost toward political power. And one day Shepard and Glenn would repay Landwirth handsomely.

But in 1960, Landwirth’s friendship with Shepard and Glenn put him in a tricky spot between the two most aggressive competitors among the Mercury Seven. While Landwirth had the luxury of befriending them both, the other astronauts would have to choose. And deciding between Shepard and Glenn would lead to fissures between the seven, deep and complicated divisions that would break the team apart.

Glenn tried diplomatically to divert the media’s attention from the competition for the first flight, claiming to one reporter that the space race was “bigger than one individual.” But Shepard, in an interview at the time, made no such pretensions. He told a reporter that he had always been competitive—still was. “I want to be first because I want to be first,” he said. “There are lots of ways to answer why I want to be first in space,” he continued, “but the short answer would be this: the flight obviously is a challenge, and I feel that the more severe challenge will occur
on the first flight and I signed up to accept this challenge. And that’s why I want to be first.”

Among the many small pieces of Shepard’s larger game plan was an effort to finally quit smoking. Shepard sometimes dropped his pack of cigarettes on the desk of the pretty new secretary, Lola Morrow, with instructions to give him only one cigarette
at a time, and only when it was an emergency. Lola, who herself was trying to quit, soon had a drawer full of cigarette packs from Shepard and the other smokers.

He didn’t ease up much on the syrupy thick coffee he loved, or the regular cocktails, but quitting the smokes was a step toward reclaiming the strong and wiry rower’s body he’d once doted on back at Annapolis, the one he’d honed as a teen by swimming with a boat in tow behind him. After taking up Glenn’s habit of early morning jogging, and in addition to playing feisty games of handball with Grissom and Slayton, Shepard began lifting weights in the gym NASA had built for the astronauts at the Cape.

If NASA wanted a perfect specimen to become the first American in space, he intended to work harder than the other six in every way—in academics, in training exercises, and in matters of fitness and health.

Intense as the competition among the Mercury Seven was, they all knew that their toughest competitors were the Russians. By the summer of 1960, the Russians had launched four more Sputnik satellites and three other satellites. In the three years since the first Sputnik, subsequent Soviet satellites had carried rabbits and mice into orbit. The United States had actually put up many more satellites than the Russians—two dozen between 1958 and 1960—and, by that tally, seemed way ahead of its communist competitors. But the Russians always seemed to find a way to achieve the more impressive “f
irsts” of the space race— first satellite in space (1957), first dog in space (1957), first man-made object to strike the surface of the moon (1959), first photographs of the unseen far side of the moon (1959).