The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (13 page)

On the day Pete had been announced as one of America’s new astronauts, Jane had answered a ring at the door and found a peppery little reporter named Regis Philbin asking for her reaction to the news. The press was already calling her husband the “tattooed Ivy League astronaut,” making a big deal about the contrast of his bad-boy attitude with his preppy look. “Princeton Pete” dressed in typical Princeton attire—dirty white bucks, button-down Brooks Brothers shirt, khaki pants. Towering over Regis, Jane said this was just another day in the life of being Pete Conrad’s wife. Totally surreal.

All of the wives of the new astronauts were eager to join the exclusive Astronaut Wives Club. Conrad Hilton had personally invited the ladies to be his guests for a long weekend at the Shamrock Hilton in Houston so they could attend the Glenns’ party. The girls at the front desk were effusive in their welcome. Jane could certainly get used to this!

In her room, a heavy glass ashtray held a book of matches inscribed
JANE
&
JIM
. Jane grinned at the mix-up—Jim was Jim Lovell, the husband of her dear friend Marilyn from Pax River. The two attractive brunettes—Jane being tall and model thin and Marilyn a more sultry Liz Taylor type—were always being confused with each other.

At the Shamrock, Jane freshened up and went down to the lobby to find Marilyn, who’d experienced the same matchbook mismatch—her box said
MARILYN
&
PETE
. Then the two went to the hotel beauty parlor. They wanted to look their best when they met the Mercury wives at Annie Glenn’s tonight.

The gals had no idea what was in store for them personally as astronaut wives, but they were convinced it would be fabulous. They’d seen the first generation on TV and in magazines. And to think, they’d now be in the same league with Jo, their old friend from test pilot school. Still, they were nervous about being accepted.

When their husbands, Pete and Jim, had gone down to the Cape to witness their old test pilot school classmate Wally’s launch, they’d gotten an eye-opening initiation into astronaut life. Trolling the Holiday Inn, Jim and Pete happened to enter a room where Bob Hope was talking with some of the Mercury wives.

The group turned and looked at the boys like,
Just who the hell do you think you are?
Clearly the Mercury Wives were territorial. Bryn Mawr–educated Jane didn’t need her Seven Sisters breeding to read between the lines of that cream-colored congratulatory card from Jo. Jo was a living doll, of course, but she was
terribly
busy with Wally’s shot. All the grueling post-flight events: ticker-tape parades; the obligatory visit to Wally’s hometown of Hackensack; the White House visit with Jackie. Jane would obviously understand.

Jane and Marilyn gabbed away as the hairdressers worked on them, piling their hair higher and higher into the beehive do that was all the rage with the stylish Houston ladies. “Gorgeous,” pronounced the hairdresser when she was finished.

Balancing their new sky-high hairdos, they went to meet their husbands at NASA’s temporary offices in downtown Houston. A secretary went to collect the boys.

As Jim strode toward Marilyn, he looked over his shoulder, to make sure no one was around. “Marilyn, what the hell did you do to your hair?” he whispered.

After all these years, Jim still carried in his billfold a photo of Marilyn at seventeen, wearing Bermuda shorts and a tight sweater, with her dark curly hair tousled. And that’s how he liked her.

Pete was used to Jane’s fashion daring, so he just laughed. He found it hilarious that his buddy Jim got all riled up over such trivial matters. Jim was an utterly competent pilot, but Pete nicknamed him “Shaky.”

Finally Jim asked, “What is that?” as he nodded at the girls’ heads.

Jane and Marilyn answered in unison, “It’s a beehive.”

That night the couples drove out to Timber Cove, where old-fashioned gas lamps flickered along the gently curving roads. Ranch houses lined the streets with names like Whispering Oaks Drive and Pine Shadows Drive. Finally they arrived at the Glenns’, on the right of Sleepy Hollow Court. The house looked sweet with its low-hanging shingled roof. The most pleasant aroma greeted them when they entered. Something savory was baking in the oven.

Everything in the house was perfect—the cozy rugs, the fireplace. Annie was a wonderful hostess, going out of her way to make her guests feel at home. Jane and Marilyn hadn’t known about Annie’s stutter. They’d read all about her in
Life
, but she didn’t speak to the public very often. Annie just smiled and checked the ladies off her list. There were so many new wives to meet—Pat White, who looked like a porcelain doll; Faye Stafford, a big-haired Oklahoma girl; Susan Borman, with her blonde bob perfectly flipped up. There was also Pat McDivitt, Marilyn See, and Barbara Young.

Jane and Marilyn immediately ran to Jo. She looked fabulous. Perhaps it was the afterglow of her White House visit.

As the wives chatted away, the men of Mercury made it pretty clear to the new astronauts that they were not too thrilled about having to cut the
Life
pie into another nine slivers. And they would
not
be sharing “Big Daddy,” a.k.a. Leo the Lawyer, the expert who had gotten them all their perks. In case there was any question of rank, some of the New Nine wives were calling Annie and Jo “ma’am,” and their husbands were referring to the Mercury astronauts as “sir.”

New Nine astronaut Jim Lovell had proudly picked out a lot in El Lago Estates, the development across Taylor Lake from Timber Cove—where most of the Mercury Seven lived, just “a holler” away from each other. The newer development of El Lago was where many of the other New Nine families were building their charming dream homes, because the lots were more plentiful and less expensive. But when Jim took his wife, Marilyn, to see the lot, she wasn’t too crazy about it. She told Jim that she’d prefer to be on the water in Timber Cove. That’s where Annie Glenn lived, and besides, that’s where their best friends, Jane and Pete Conrad, were building. Marilyn, needless to say, got her way.

Marilyn had met Jim in the cafeteria at Juneau High School in Milwaukee, where she was washing dishes and Jim was serving hot lunch. They had gotten together after Jim’s date for the prom dumped him at the last minute because he wasn’t nominated for prom king. (Marilyn wondered how that girl felt now.) Marilyn had always wanted a life of glamorous adventure, ever since she had packed her trunk and left her home in Milwaukee to move to the East Coast, where Jim was attending the Naval Academy in Annapolis. Jim was very handsome and ever so bright. He seemed to know a little something about everything. And now he was an astronaut!

And she’d get to live on Lazywood Lane in Timber Cove, which was very, very glamorous because all of the men in the neighborhood were going into space, and then to the Moon. There was, however, one catch.

“You have to build the house,” Jim told her. “I’m going to be too busy training.”

Jim went off to the Cape and left Marilyn with the blueprints. The same builder was also constructing Jane’s house around the corner on Whispering Oaks Drive, and he frequently confused the two brunettes. He’d walk with his drill into Marilyn’s and start putting something up that Jane had ordered, and Marilyn would have to correct it. The builder was not the only one in the neighborhood who had trouble keeping Marilyn and Jane straight. So did the butcher, and even the gynecologist. Once, with Jane on his examining table, peering into her nether regions, he said, “You remind me so much of Mrs. Lovell.”

“Inside or out?” quipped Jane, fast on the uptake.

Despite the little annoyances along the way, both women loved their new homes. Marilyn had the builder copy the design for her family room from a magazine, and the result was exactly as she’d imagined it. Connected by a bar to the brick kitchen, with big exposed ceiling beams and a brick fireplace, the family room was Marilyn’s pride and joy. The walls featured paintings by a Navy wife friend of Marilyn’s of the Spanish Steps in Rome and a Utrillo-style Parisian cityscape, but the pièce de résistance was an oil portrait of Jim. Though critics would be critics (not a very good painting, noted one reporter), Marilyn adored it. To her, this beautiful family room was the apotheosis of the American dream.

Life in Timber Cove seemed blessedly
normal
, and after years of following Jim from Navy base to Navy base, normal was how Marilyn wanted to live. Only one thing wasn’t. When the house was finally completed, it somehow seemed a little—off. The builder had miscalculated and built some extra steps and levels. From the family room, steps led up to the front door, and down to the bedrooms, all on slightly different planes. They christened it “Lovells’ Levels.” Marilyn kept on staring at the brick fireplace in her family room, and it finally hit her that, like the house, it was also cockeyed. She later learned that the man she had hired was a one-eyed bricklayer.

Jane often came over, and so did another New Nine wife who was also named Marilyn—Marilyn See. Susan Borman, Pat White, or Faye Stafford would drive over from El Lago to drop in to Lovells’ Levels for coffee or a cigarette. Marilyn was always grateful for the company.

She couldn’t believe how lucky she was, to be able to have the girls in her kitchen where she could gaze over the bar into that wonderful family room. At night, after reading her three small children their bedtime stories and tucking them in, she’d slink into bed and open up her own book. She’d read, then try to fall asleep, but she’d just start thinking, thinking, thinking. Her house was so cozy, and beautifully decorated to boot—she was very talented in that regard, and she had a great eye for art. In the weeks to come, Marilyn realized there was something more than the levels of her house that was off-kilter. One thing, essential for her happy home, seemed always to be missing—Jim.

Across America, women were falling asleep with Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
on the bedside table, which detailed a world of suburban malaise and the underlying causes of the dreaded “Housewife’s Headache” that aspirin ads in
Life
offered a remedy for. “The problem with no name” seemed to require more than a pill to cure. The book offered some tantalizing ideas about what life beyond cooking, cleaning, and housekeeping could be. But the clarion call of the beginnings of “women’s liberation” was not heard on the shores of Taylor Lake, a place that seemed so very, very far away.

As one by one the new wives got settled into Timber Cove and El Lago, they began to feel rather unmoored, or just the opposite, trapped inside a giant “goldfish bowl,” as Marilyn put it. Each of the new Astrowives tried to live up to the gold standard of what the public expected of them.

NASA had a protocol officer conduct a New Nine wife orientation, where he prattled on about how astronauts needed a good breakfast before flying off to work—eggs, bacon, hell, why not steak or fried chicken? Feed him well. Praise his efforts. Create a place of refuge. Adjusting to normal conditions after a week in the pure oxygen bubble of a space-training capsule could knock a husband out, so he shouldn’t be expected to do menial chores around the home. And for God’s sake, keep the astronaut away from stress. He should never have to worry about the plumbing, or the dental bills, and he should never be nagged about his lack of initiative in the bedroom.

New Nine wife Susan Borman knew the drill. She’d heard it all before in her military days back at Edwards Air Force Base when the commanding officer’s wife would scare the daylights out of her young minions by declaring that a woman’s mastery of the 5 a.m. breakfast was a matter of life and death for her man in the air. Susan did exactly as ordered. She lived to support Frank, and, like any good Air Force wife, fully subscribed to the protocol of visiting her commanding officer’s wife once a week.

Gung ho as all get out, she intended to take her Frank to the stars, because everyone knew that the tighter the marriage, the better the flight position. Just look at the Glenns. That was the sort of family NASA wanted, and that’s exactly what NASA was going to get from the Bormans.

One of the first things Susan did when she moved into her new home on Bayou Drive in El Lago was to open up her closet and organize her clothes like soldiers in formation. She had outfits for every occasion. But then she discovered that there was no official wives’ organization here in NASA-land! Where was she going to wear all of these outfits? At every Air Force base she’d ever been, there had been an Officers Wives Club.

No wonder the rest of the ladies in El Lago were feeling a little out to sea. There was no organization! No structure, no discipline! A self-described do-gooder, the former Susan Bugbee decided to do something about it.

Unlike most of the Mercury wives, who found Susan a little too
enthusiastic
, Marge appreciated her energy. Marge was already thinking she should probably get something going for the wives, especially because of Deke’s new position. Disqualified from flying because of his heart murmur, Deke had been given the job of Coordinator of Astronaut Activities. Well, that made Marge the unofficial Coordinator of Astronaut Wife Activities. Except that if there was one word the ladies of Mercury abhorred, it was “organized.” They’d finally escaped the dingy quarters of base life and the required Officers Wives Club gatherings, and they had no intention of repeating those awful days in their glamorous new lives.

But Marge met Susan halfway and organized a luncheon to welcome the New Nine at Louise Shepard’s swank Houston apartment in an elegant new high-rise called the Mayfair.

Like in the old Langley days, the Mercury wives carpooled to Louise’s. They all wanted the meeting with these “younger ones” to go smoothly, but they were worried.

Betty’s husband, Gus, had already butted heads with some of the rookies who were strutting around the Cape as if they owned the place. That kind of attitude might work with the NASA higher-ups, but not with old Gus. He made this clear to the new guys by telling them, “Don’t feel so smart. You’re just an astronaut trainee” and “You’re not an astronaut until you
fly
.” Gus wasn’t about to let these newbies roll in and act like top guns. Neither was Betty.