Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (49 page)

Shepard once reprimanded O’Leary for accepting a faculty position at the University of Texas, telling O’Leary that he was an astronaut “24 hours a day . . . and I want to know about these things.” O’Leary felt burned by the “strange double standard.” He eventually quit the program, claiming that “flying just wasn’t my cup of tea.”

“I didn’t deliberately try to intimidate him,” Shepard said later when asked about O’Leary’s gripes. “Perhaps I did
because I could see that he really wasn’t going to work out, he just wasn’t our breed of person. But there wasn’t any attempt to intimidate him—any more than I do anybody else.”

Complaints and rumors eventually wafted toward the top levels of NASA, whose officials carefully questioned Shepard about running his small empire on government time. In a private letter in late 1963 NASA administrator James Webb said he’d been informed of Shepard’s growing role at Baytown National, and asked Shepard to “consider it with great care” before sinking deeper roots into the bank. Webb asked him to consider “the image that would be created in Houston” if astronauts began aligning with banks and financiers. Webb also requested that, in the future, Shepard submit an “official r
equest for approval.” But it was hardly a letter of reprimand. In fact, Webb closed by offering to “stretch my discretion a long way to help you.”

The letter had little effect on Shepard’s business activities. He went right on mixing astro-life, business life, and social life. Other astronauts tried to follow the example of the man astronaut Michael Collins called “the shrewdest of the bunch.” As astronaut Walt Cunningham learned from Shepard, “The astronaut hero image was directly convertible to dollars if handled right.” But none had the same success. Gus Grissom and Gordo Cooper partnered in a boat repair and retail business south of Houston but lost $16,000 each. Scott Carpenter made similarly bad business choices—
a wasp-breeding venture among them. “There was Shepard, operating out there with the captains and kings of industry,” Cunningham once said. “And here were the rest of us, losing our lunch money.”

Such failures eventually bred deep resentment of Shepard’s business successes, and the whispers again reached NASA’s ears. Two years after his first letter to Shepard in 1963, NASA administrator Webb wrote again after reading in the newspaper that Shepard had agreed to become president of Baytown Bank. Webb was furious that “a person who is doing a full-time
job with the government, and particularly one who is in such a prominent position as you are,” would think it was acceptable to also be a bank president. Webb urged Shepard to “put the interest of NASA ahead of” his personal interests.

Despite a tiny blurb in a Houston paper on Shepard’s promotion to bank president, few national reporters knew of Shepard’s business life. And those who did know a few details considered it none of their business and steered clear. But Oriana Fallaci dug in. How could he buy a bank on an astronaut’s salary? she asked. “All you need is to be ambitious,” he said, without explanation. Fallaci said she suspected he had a “very earthly hunger,” and Shepard concurred, locking his eyes on hers, a faint grin on his big lips. “One day I’ll be very rich,” he told her. And what about the stars? she as
ked. Didn’t he want to reach the stars like the others do? Or was he more interested in banks and cows and horses? “All of it,” he said. But shouldn’t the stars come first? “You’re a very romantic woman—too much so,” Shepard said, signaling the end of the interview. “There’s nothing romantic about going to the stars, believe me.”

Fallaci left Shepard’s office feeling a little sorry for him. She had heard he sought out women, money, cars, and “applause.” But she liked him anyway. She was confused as she continued researching her book in future months, when she’d meet different versions of Shepard. She’d see him in a bar, at a missile launch, or lying beside a hotel pool at the Cape, sometimes “friendly,” other times “standoffish,” sometimes “confident,” sometimes “shy.” She wondered if he’d been burned by the “sickness of celebrity.” Burned out, maybe. How else to explain a man who found no romance in
the pursuit of the heavens? The truth, however, was not burnout. Not even close.

Shepard knew he had an incurable disease and was often disgusted and demoralized by it. But he was also disciplined and self-confident enough to lie in wait, stalking tigerlike for a chance to cure himself. He may not have considered space exploration
a romantic pursuit, but it was an important one and he wouldn’t give up. So the real answer to the question “Why are you here?” was that Shepard was absolutely, intractably determined to reach the stars once more.

When Shepard’s illness sidelined him, NASA gave his Gemini flight to Gus Grissom who, along with John Young, one of the Next Nine, took off in late March of 1965 aboard Gemini 3, ending a two-year hiatus since the final Project Mercury flight. That inaugural Gemini flight was overshadowed, however—as many U.S. flights had been in the early years of the space race—by another Soviet first. Just five days before Grissom’s flight, a Soviet cosmonaut crawled through a hatch in his capsule and floated freely in the empty blackness of space, connected to his spaceship by a tether. The first
space walk came five months after the Soviets’ first three-person space mission, which made Grissom’s two-man Gemini flight seem archaic. But the days of Russian dominance in space were about to end. The space walk flight would be the last Soviet space launch for two years. During that lull the United States would send sixteen men into space—four of them twice—and begin racking up many firsts of its own.

Grissom’s flight would be quickly followed by another Gemini flight, and then another, turning 1965 into NASA’s most productive year. Thirty astronauts were now training for upcoming Gemini and Apol
lo flights; the number would grow to thirty-five in mid-1965 when NASA selected five more astronauts to join its growing ranks. Shepard’s role was helping his astronauts get to training facilities and stick to a tight schedule. To help the men zip back and forth across the land, Shepard and Slayton convinced NASA to replace its older jets with a new fleet that the astronauts could borrow for their many travels. The sleek, two-seater supersonic T-38s could soar to forty thousand feet in ninety seconds.

Flying the T-38 was one of the better perks of astronaut life. The astronauts’ training schedule resembled the one Shepard had experienced during Project Mercury: long, dizzy sessions in the MASTIF, body-slamming spins in the centrifuge, many hours of simulated practice sessions, visits to aerospace factories. The jets became trusted companions during the many rootless, grueling days of crisscrossing the nation.

The cockpit of a T-38 offered respite from the public’s unrelenting love affair with the astronauts (which was emboldened, in no small part, by the surprising success of a new TV show in which Captain Kirk and the crew of the USS
Enterprise
explored strange new worlds in outer space). Shepard, as their keeper, tried to protect the astronauts from the demands of NASA’s public affairs office, which was swamped with fan mail and requests for astronaut appearances. Reaching the moon was still a magical, powerful national goal, and the public wanted access to the men who were right on sched
ule to achieve Kennedy’s commitment to putting men on the moon before 1970.

Shepard had the distasteful task of assigning his underlings to the dreaded “week in the barrel,” as he had dubbed the dog-and-pony gigs astronauts served visiting schools and congressmen. The “barrel” referred to one of Shepard’s favorite obscene jokes, a story about a weary traveler who staggers into an Alaskan mining camp looking for love and is directed to a back room where there’s a large barrel with a hole in the side.

During such weeks, an astronaut might make thirty appearances, giving the same speech to thirty different audiences, in five days. With so much flying, a law of astronaut life evolved: When two or more astronauts are involved in the same activity, it becomes a contest. A race.

Gus Grissom earned notoriety for his “hot refuelings.” In an effort to gain a few minutes on the other guy, he’d leave his engine running during a refueling stop and cut the record refueling time of ten minutes in half. That prompted som
e to try nonstop flights from, say, Los Angeles to Houston. The trick was to reach a safe altitude, catch a tailwind, and fly on just one of the two engines. Wally Schirra once landed in Houston with less than five minutes of fuel left and with his partner, Walt Cunningham, sitting nervously in the back, ready to punch the eject button. Shepard often joined the others on such flights, but some of his colleagues found it painful to watch the former crack test pilot climb into the
rear
seat as a passenger.

“He never talked about it, he never showed it. But you could just tell at times it bothered him,” said Chuck Friedlander, who worked as Shepard’s assistant at the Cape. “When Al climbed into the back seat of a T-38 and some young guy was flying it, nothing was said, but you could just tell by his face he was feeling the inability to fly.” At such times, they all felt his frustration, and that empathy sometimes tempered their reaction to his Icy Commander days.

Jim Lovell flew with Shepard many times through the 1960s, sometimes straight across the country, from the Cape to California. Shepard loved stopping to refuel in El Paso, crossing the border into Mexico to get cut-rate bottles of tequila. In the rear seat, Shepard would often insist on taking the controls and flying the lion’s share of each flight.

Still, Shepard operated on the fringes of the astronaut lifestyle he had so recently defined. As the boss of all astronauts, he was their teacher, not their classmate. His job was to corral them, get them places, make sure they didn’t take advantage of their easy-access, government-funded jets. Like a camp counselor, he had to make sure no one wandered off into the woods. He was the taskmaster. And he was good at it.

Among Shepard’s unique management techniques was the silent treatment. He’d call an astronaut into his office, and the other man would stand in front of his desk while he looked up at them “with those bulging eyes” and “stare right through you,”
recalled Lovell. “A very cold person,” remembered astronaut secretary Lola Morrow. “He knew he could use his eyes as a weapon.”

Shepard would then sit there, feet on the desk, and wait for the astronaut to speak first. The new guy would get scared, turn red, look down, look away, speak in mumbles. Finally, after letting him twist, Shepard would get to the point and ream him out. He was especially hard on the younger guys and on the scientists NASA had begun selecting to become astronauts. He was somewhat less harsh with his fellow Navy men. Slayton sometimes intervened as the good cop, but mostly he let Shepard handle things his way. He knew Shepard’s intentions were to hone his men into perfect astronauts.

Even so, with so many astronauts—a total of thirty-five by mid-1965—flying and racing across the skies, it was probably inevitable that someone would die. The first was Ted Freeman, who had been selected in 1963 and was training for an early Apollo flight. Freeman’s T-38 plowed into a gaggle of snow geese at five thousand feet, which smashed his windshield; shards of Plexiglas were sucked into the engines, which both flamed out. Freeman tried to wrestle the crippled jet back to Ellington. When he realized it was no good, he ejected, but he was too close to the ground. He died six mile
s from his home. After that, Shepard imposed the “snow goose rule”—no flying during migration season.

A few months later the two-man crew assigned to the Gemini 9 flight—Elliot See and Charlie Bassett—attempted to land one stormy night in St. Louis, where they were scheduled for a few weeks of training in a simulator capsule. See, who was flying the T-38, approached the runway too low and too fast. He tried to pull up and away to attempt another approach but clipped the top of the McDonnell Aircraft plant—the same building where their Gemini 9 capsule was being assembled. More funerals would follow.

On the heels of Grissom’s one-day launch with John Young in March 1965, Gemini flights began soaring every month or two. From the spring of 1965 to the fall of 1966, ten flights lifted off— sixteen more men flew higher, longer, and faster than Shepard. Four of them flew twice, and five walked in space. Each flight was designed as another technical step toward the moon, and each flight put more and more distance—finally—between the United States and the Soviets.