The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (12 page)

John Glenn was not about to let the good life provided by
Life
escape without a fight. No
Life
contract meant Annie might be subjected to the bloodhounds of the regular press, who weren’t likely to be as gentlemanly as Loudon Wainwright and who’d have a field day with her stutter. A lot was at stake. LBJ, chairman of the Space Council, let it be known that he didn’t particularly care if the
Life
contract was terminated. Now that he was “bigger than Jesus,” as Gus put it, John worked his insider position with the Kennedys.

The Glenns were invited for a sail on the Kennedy yacht, the
Honey Fitz
. On board, John got right down to business. Losing the
Life
contract was inconceivable for the families. It would mean losing not only their protection from the press, but also their life insurance.

Jack asked for John’s opinion on the
Life
contract. After all, a soldier did not expect any special compensation for risking his life for his country. Right?

True, but what if the worldwide press scrutinized every move of that soldier’s wife, kids, dog? Annie was already practically living under a cake dome.

For all of the astronauts, no more
Life
would mean having to try to live on their military salaries. But the Glenns’ fame made them American icons, and as a result, they wielded considerable political clout. Annie had even let LBJ into the house, finally, for John’s fortieth birthday party (in this case, the Glenns decided to let the vice president into
their
orbit). She’d invited some of the other astronaut couples to Arlington, too.

“What on earth are you going to
serve
?” someone asked Annie.

“My ham loaf.”

“
Ham
loaf?”

“Why not?” Annie smiled calmly. “Everybody likes it. I bet you Lady Bird asks for the recipe, too.”

Sure enough, as Lyndon Johnson gave his hostess a good-night kiss, Lady Bird asked for her ham loaf recipe—two eggs, milk, cracker crumbs, tapioca, fresh ground and smoked ham and ground beef, minced onion optional, put in the oven with brown sugar sauce for two hours at 350°F, basting frequently with a heap of love. Yields eight portions. Annie was like Betty Crocker, the nurturing housewife who left all America feeling warm inside.

Ultimately, John Kennedy agreed that the
Life
contract should continue. Their slice of the $500,000 pie secure, the Glenns finally built their real dream home. The site of the new Manned Spacecraft Center was in Clear Lake City, located on the shores of its eponymous recreational lake. The Glenns preferred the quainter Taylor Lake nearby, and snapped up a lot at the head of the little canal that fed into it. They staked their flag in the brand-new subdivision of Timber Cove.

The banks had offered deeply discounted home loans at 4 percent for astronauts, and with homebuilders promising to build at cost, the Astrowives could splurge on BlueStar kitchens with electric ranges and blenders built right into the countertops. The Glenns’ had sliding glass doors and a patio, which would be perfect for weekend family barbecues.

The Carpenters built next door to the Glenns, and two blocks away the Grissoms and Schirras built their own suburban fortresses. Betty Grissom would no longer have to draw the curtains on the day of a launch, because her house had no front windows. There was even a hole in the backyard fence so that she could slip, unseen by the press, over to Jo’s. Both houses featured turquoise kidney-shaped swimming pools. Finally, Betty thought, Gus would get to swim in peace, far from the eyes of the inevitable space tourists.

The Coopers built a house across Taylor Lake in the subdivision of El Lago Estates. The Slaytons would move into the aptly named Friendswood, a historic Quaker community, also nearby. The Shepards were the only family who opted to live in Houston proper, downtown in the tony neighborhood of River Oaks.

During the summer of 1962, while their houses were being built, the astronaut families were housed in the cabanas at the Lakewood Yacht Club. Since their new houses wouldn’t be ready until the fall, the Lakewood Yacht Club had graciously offered the use of its cabanas, on the beautifully landscaped banks of Clear Lake. There the couples and their kids lived in style, enjoying full access to the clubhouse. All the club expected in return was a Valentine’s Day photo op of America’s favorite sweethearts squeezed together into a rose-red heart.

Houston was abuzz with the arrival of the astronauts and their wives. The
Houston Chronicle
heralded the space ladies as members of “Houston’s most exclusive women’s club,” even more elite than the Junior League or the River Oaks Garden Club, which invited Jo Schirra to be a special guest at the sneak preview of their annual Azalea Trail.

Back at Langley, the formal event of the year had been the Air Force Ball, but down here the social calendar offered frequent fêtes, supported by Houston’s deep reservoirs of oil money. The doyennes of high society vied to have astronaut wives at their parties, and Jo was much in demand and getting plenty of coverage now that her Wally was to be the next man to go up into space. His nine-hour
Sigma 7
flight was scheduled to take off on October 3, 1962.

Though she had begun as one of the shier of the wives, Jo was finally coming into her own down here in Texas. She radiated such a healthy glow that Wally called her Sunray. She’d taken to pulling her hair back into a sporty headband, far different from her conservative “before” look in her first
Life
profile. Now the
Chronicle
featured sophisticated, blue-eyed blonde “Josephine,” a regular on the Houston social circuit.

On one occasion, Jo and Wally were flown via private plane to the Coffield Ranch, an oil-bought haven for rich sportsmen who had a taste for hunting quail. Touching down on the palm-lined runway, the token Astrowife fit seamlessly into this socialite preserve. In a feature in the fashion pages of the
Chronicle
that followed, Jo looked fabulous in a cashmere sweater, checked wool pants, camel coat, cat-eye glasses, and her signature headband.

Now the Astrowife was about to host the most exclusive party in town—her launch party. Jo wouldn’t have to draw the curtains because her house, like the Grissoms’ next door, had been custom-built with no front windows. Joining the other wives, Betty arrived through the rabbit hole, just like the two cats, Miss Priss and Gus. Jo had named the latter for her grouchy astronaut neighbor, who hated cats.

Outside, a pack of neighborhood dogs played on the lawn among the teeming reporters. There were more newsmen than ever, rejuvenated by the Texas-style fanfare of the space program moving to Houston. Jo fixed her carrot-topped twelve-year-old Marty some gelatin salad to snack on, hoping to distract him from the chaos outside. To no avail—the little rascal wouldn’t quit playing peekaboo over the fence with the photographers.

“This tower is a real
sayonara
!” Wally said as he took off. After a few corny jokes, Jo’s thirty-nine-year-old husband got down to dutiful space flying. He called it “chimp mode.” No taking snapshots like a space tourist. No wasting fuel.

After Wally’s successful splashdown in the Pacific, Jo stepped outside for her post-flight press conference. “It was a perfect landing, especially,” she said, underscoring how her husband hadn’t overshot his mark (like one astronaut whom she did not mention). Wally had landed within five miles of the recovery ship.

“Are you going to feed Wally steak and cake when he gets home?” asked the hungry press.

Jo just stared at the newsmen in bewilderment. She didn’t even bake. All Wally wanted when he got to Earth was a smoke.

Nevertheless, “Astronaut’s Wife Will Bake a Cake” ran the headline in the
Houston Chronicle
, the accompanying article detailing how upon her astronaut’s return to his new dream home, Jo was planning to serve him an extra-special meal. The press was determined to keep her in the kitchen.

Dropped off on the
Kearsarge
carrier in the Pacific, Wally was flown to Hawaii, where he was met by dancing hula girls. He didn’t arrive back in Houston till one o’clock in the morning. The mayor and the governor were on hand to welcome him back to Texas. Six police cars escorted the Schirras on the drive to Timber Cove. Jo’s mother, Mrs. Admiral Holloway, was there to greet her hero son-in-law in proper form.

Finally Wally got a first look at his new California-style ranch house. He’d been training at the Cape all summer and had left Jo to deal with the movers. (“He planned that very well!” she told her friends.) Jo had furnished the house with a modern Oriental flair. Wally, who had served in World War II aboard the USS
Alaska
in Japan, and had met Jo at the train station carrying a samurai sword upon his arrival back in the States, felt immediately at home.

“My view of the Moon was so much better than what you can see from Earth,” he explained to his mother-in-law. He happily reported to Marty, his pride and joy, “The Moon is
not
made out of green cheese.”

It had been a long, long day, and now it was almost morning and Wally was in his pajamas, finally ready for bed. Jo asked him, “Wally, will you please take out the garbage?” He was fully down to Earth at last.

Only a week and a half later, Earth would seem almost as dangerous a place as outer space. For fourteen days the world teetered on the edge of nuclear war. Though the Russians were still ahead in the space race, America was winning the arms race. Nikita Khrushchev made a bold move to even the score: he began building a missile installation in Cuba, from which his medium-range missiles could easily target the United States. When Kennedy learned of the site on October 15, he knew he had to stop him. He set up a naval blockade around Cuba. As Russian ships grew closer and closer to Cuba, the world held its breath. Finally Khrushchev blinked. He agreed to remove his missiles from Cuba. In exchange, the United States agreed never to invade Cuba. The world breathed a sigh of relief.

Kennedy was more determined than ever to win the space race. “We choose to go to the Moon!” Kennedy had told a sweltering crowd at Rice University in Houston in September 1962. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things—not because they are easy but because they are hard.”

A new group of astronauts was announced to redouble his efforts. Along with the Mercury Seven, the New Nine astronauts would be manning the next phase of the space program. Named Gemini, it would feature two-man space capsules, the first American space walk, and rendezvous, a critical maneuver where two craft joined in orbit. All of this was preliminary to the Apollo program that would take America all the way to the Moon.

The New Nine were Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jim Lovell, Jim McDivitt, Elliot See, Tom Stafford, Ed White, and John Young. The test pilot world was a small one, so the Mercury wives knew some of the New Nine who would soon be moving to Clear Lake. Pete Conrad and Jim Lovell had been in the same flight training class as Wally Schirra at Pax River in Maryland, so Jo was already friendly with Jane Conrad and Marilyn Lovell. She had sent each of them an elegant cream-colored welcome card, and even offered to show them around the neighborhood and help find a builder, too, although the girls probably
wouldn’t
get the great at-cost deal the Mercury families had been given.

As it turned out, they did, which gave the Mercury wives some reason for concern. At a get-together, the seven ladies discussed what they should and should
not
do for the incoming “Gemini wives” about to invade their turf.

As always, Betty was conspicuously missing from the group. She wanted to make sure she finished all her chores before she went anywhere, even next door to Jo’s house. She even did the sweaty chores that Jo reserved for Wally when he came home on weekends from the Cape. Betty proudly mowed her own lawn, and expertly fished out hard-to-reach leaves and floating dead bugs from her pool. She wanted Gus to have maximum relaxation time with her and the boys when he got home, to feel like the king of his castle.

“Well, I don’t intend to let them run all over me,” said Betty when she finally arrived.

Would the goodies be spread too thin with the addition of these new wives? The
Life
deal wasn’t due to end until the following year, when Gordo would make the final Mercury flight. A new contract was to be negotiated for the Gemini program. The new deal, rumored to be for a million dollars, would have to be divided into sixteen slices this time—the Mercury Seven plus the New Nine.

The Mercury wives looked to Jo. Wasn’t Jane Conrad married to New Nine astronaut “Princeton Pete”? Didn’t she already have enough goodies?

Well, the wives simply couldn’t manage without all the perks their new Texas lifestyle demanded.

Out in the garage, Wally’s blue Corvette convertible (he’d later get a cherry red Maserati, which just happened to have been previously owned by blonde sex kitten Brigitte Bardot), was getting lonely. Jo had her eye on a sleek, sexy car to keep it company, a car she expected to purchase at a deep discount.

Jo had long ago chucked the archaic ways of
The Navy Wife
. Jo and Wally loved taking their new sailboat out on breezy Sunday mornings, so much that they eventually stopped going to church. Heaven would have to wait, because Jo simply couldn’t get enough of the Texas sunshine. Soon she had acquired her new Toronado and was following adventuresome Trudy’s lead, driving well above the speed limit. Jo and Wally would even race their cars down the highway, Jo’s muscle car against Wally’s sexy Corvette. Who was going to ticket an astronaut, or his wife, in Houston? They even had CB nicknames for each other: Skyray and Sunray.

The Glenns were throwing a welcoming party for the New Nine in their Timber Cove home. The new silver-suited cold warriors had been training at the Cape for a few months while their own dream homes were being built, courtesy of their share of the
Life
money. The rookies left it up to their wives to settle things on the home front—specifically, to begin building their new homes. New Nine astronaut wife Jane Conrad was still trying to sell their old home in Rancho Santa Fe, near the Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego, where her real-estate broker put an ad in the local newspaper: “House for Sale. Owner Going to the Moon.”