The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (15 page)

Scott Carpenter was still working for NASA and took part in the training, but it was clear he wasn’t going to get another flight assignment. Scott was on the outs. He might be John Glenn’s next-door neighbor, but they were worlds apart. The artisan Mexican door that opened up to Scott’s home said as much.

In Timber Cove, Scott got busy in the backyard digging a hole wide enough to accommodate a trampoline. He was adamant: he wanted his trampoline ground level. It would make it not only pleasing to the eye, but also very safe.

His gymnastics coach from his Navy preflight training was a trampoline pioneer, and had taught Scott all about doing flips. Scott loved teaching the neighborhood kids in turn. He’d even made some headway with NASA, convincing the agency to use trampolines in its training, sort of like simulating zero gravity. But NASA still reminded Scott at every turn that it could do without him.

At a lecture at MIT, Scott met underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau and was totally inspired by the Frenchman’s passion for the magical life under the sea. Scott asked Cousteau if he could please come aboard his research vessel and join
Calypso
’s red-capped aquatic team. There were just a few problems, as the Frenchman saw it—for one, he had a limited budget to pay Scott a salary, and the astronaut unfortunately didn’t speak French. Scott was also not an experienced diver.

In the autumn of 1963, NASA gave Scott leave to train for Sealab, the Navy’s man-in-the-sea project, where he would become an “aquanaut,” living in an experimental underwater habitat. He committed himself to being an underwater guinea pig, allowing scientists to study his physical and psychological changes while living for long, isolated periods below the sea. It was sort of like being in space, only far away from the NASA bureaucracy.

As a debutante and now a Junior Leaguer, Jane Conrad had plenty of experience with formal balls. Her fellow New Nine wives had finally gotten used to black-tie events, but the upcoming Galaxy Ball in Fort Worth was to be the grandest of the grand. Unfortunately, the wives didn’t have the money for the sort of gowns they felt they needed—couture, not off-the-rack dresses. Jane took it upon herself to find a consignment shop in downtown Houston, and rallied her troops into station wagons to go dress hunting. The Second Hand Rose turned out to be a major find, filled with designer clothes—Givenchy, Balenciaga, Chanel. All the wives found something that fit perfectly; Jane only prayed that they wouldn’t bump into the society ladies who had originally worn their dresses. Jane found a green satin frock by none other than Oleg Cassini, Jackie’s designer.

On the big night, the astronauts and their wives were given free rooms at the Six Flags Hotel in Fort Worth. They were driven to the ball in limousines with a full police escort. In the sumptuous ballroom strung with tiny white lights, shimmering into infinity in the gilt mirrors, each couple was introduced as if they were royalty.

They drank and danced the night away, leaving the ballroom well after midnight. But when they wandered outside, tipsy and dreamy, their limos and police escorts were nowhere to be seen.

A Volkswagen bus pulled up before the couples, shivering in their finery.

“Y’all looking for a ride?” the driver called out.

All nine couples crammed into the minibus.

“We’ve turned into a bunch of pumpkins,” said Pete, looking at Jane.

On September 20, 1963, John F. Kennedy addressed the United Nations and proposed the unthinkable—a joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. mission to go to the Moon. JFK and Khrushchev had managed to figure out how to avoid blowing up the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Why not forge ahead and explore the new world together?

“Those were anxious days for mankind,” said Kennedy before the UN. “Today the clouds have lifted so that new rays of hope can break through.”

A new spirit of optimism rose over Clear Lake. The Mercury and Gemini astronauts welcomed the idea of a joint mission with the cosmonauts. The thought of working hand in hand with the Russians made it a little easier for the wives to accept that NASA had just chosen a brand-new group of astronauts, “the Fourteen,” to help crew the upcoming Gemini and Apollo missions. This meant
another
gang of gals would be moving in, ready to take their share of the Astro-goodies. Oh dear.

A few months later, the infinite possibilities, from the sublime to the ridiculous, fueled the excited chatter at an Astrowives luncheon in the home of Del Berry, the wife of Dr. Berry, the “astronauts’ doctor.” When the telephone rang, Del, who was Trudy’s best friend, answered. She gasped in shock and began urgently pointing to the television. One of the wives ran over to turn it on. Hands flew to mouths and cries filled the room. They couldn’t believe it. The president had been shot.

All of the Mercury wives had met Jack and Jackie. The First Couple hadn’t yet blessed the New Nine, but they’d met Governor Connally and his wife, Nellie, who were riding in the convertible with the Kennedys in the motorcade in Dallas. The wives were frightened and horrified—Kennedy had just been in Houston the night before, following a visit with the astronauts at the Cape! As the shock sank in, they couldn’t avoid thinking about their own situation. Would the country still be committed to going to the Moon now that the president was dead? That gamble had been Kennedy’s big idea.

Later that day, many of the Mercury and Gemini families gathered at the boat slip in Timber Cove, rolling their barbecue grills from their backyards down the streets to the landing. Somehow it just didn’t seem right staying at home. The Glenns would soon be off to Washington; they were the only astronaut couple that had been invited to the funeral.

Continuing full steam ahead on Kennedy’s dream of going to the Moon by the end of the decade, President Johnson renamed Cape Canaveral as Cape Kennedy a week later. A month and a half after Kennedy’s death, John Glenn resigned from NASA to run as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate in his home state of Ohio. Robert Kennedy had suggested he do so two years before, and JFK had felt that Glenn was too valuable an American to risk his hide riding on a rocket again. Running for office now seemed like the right thing to do. America needed leadership more than ever. John knew it would be hard on Annie, who wouldn’t be able to hide from the spotlight. Part of him felt guilty about constantly putting her in the firing line, but Annie always said she’d be up for whatever he was, a hundred percent.

Unfortunately, John slipped in the bathroom of his rented apartment in Columbus on a new throw rug Annie had laid down to soften the place. He hit his head on the bathtub and was laid up for weeks, leaving Rene to become the voice of his campaign. Rene had volunteered to help out on the stump, driving home John’s message that politics didn’t have to be a dirty enterprise, but could be as exciting and inspirational as sending a man into orbit.

In every town and city on the campaign trail, Annie would say to the crowds, “Hello, I’m Annie Glenn.” Then there would be a pause as she struggled to form her sentence. “You know I stutter,” she’d continue. “So here’s Rene.”

The daily avalanche of mail was stacked in piles at the Glenns’ in Timber Cove, where Annie would type replies.

“I thought it was wonderful for her to campaign for you while you were recovering,” one woman wrote to the Glenns about Rene.

To this letter, John replied: “Rene’s doing such a good job that she could probably run for office herself.”

Ultimately, the injury forced John to withdraw from the Senate race. His neighbor was soon to join him in infirmity. During Sealab training in Bermuda, Scott hopped onto his motorbike and crashed into a coral wall, smashing his left arm and foot, crushing his big toe. It was no use. Scott was just not going to be able to make it for the underwater mission, although there was hope for Sealab II.

Togethersville

“T
ogethersville” was the ironic name journalists gave to the space burb of Clear Lake City, the “City of the Future,” with its subdivisions of Timber Cove, El Lago Estates, and the newest community, Nassau Bay. As if adhering to the social hierarchies of the astronauts, this was where most of the new group of fourteen astronauts chose to build their dream homes. Cocky young Gene Cernan had a bird’s-eye view of the developments from the cockpit of his sleek T-38 Talon jet fighter, nicknamed the “White Rocket.” The space agency had chosen the plane, which boasted a cruising speed of 600 mph, to be its official astronaut trainer. All the astronauts were given one to fly to and from the Cape. Though, if you asked Gene, or “Geno” as the boys called him, he’d tell you the rest of the astronauts couldn’t handle it quite the way he did.

From up high, Togethersville looked like Disneyland, complete with its own space-age fortress—the Manned Spacecraft Center on NASA Road 1, a complex of white, mostly windowless buildings in a quad housing gigantic, state-of-the-art computers. The astronauts loved to water-ski on Clear Lake, but none of them could compete with newly arrived Fourteen wife Beth Williams, who had been one of the beloved AquaMaids, the professional water-skiers who stood on top of one another’s shoulders in pyramid formation at the Cypress Gardens theme park in Florida.

When Gene was flying below in Timber Cove, at the end of the cul-de-sac on Sleepy Hollow Court, he could make out the Glenn-Carpenter compound with Scott’s big trampoline in the backyard. The neighborhood kids swung onto it from a tree rope. They were much better at it than Gene’s colleague Walt Cunningham, who had volunteered for the NASA trampoline instruction program and promptly broken his neck. Luckily, he not only lived, but was soon back in the astronaut training rotation.

The community pool in Timber Cove was obviously designed to be admired from the sky. It was supposed to look like a Mercury capsule. Over at the Keys Club in El Lago, where most of the New Nine families lived, there was a synchronized swim team for the kids called the Aquanauts. They performed in aviator-style swim caps. Their best routine was a swim-dance to “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” Another of the Aquanauts’ big hits was set to “Goldfinger,” the theme song from the latest James Bond movie. Gordo’s teenage daughters, Cam and Jan, were the stars of that routine, covering themselves in gold paint they’d bought at the hardware store. Trudy was horrified when she saw her painted-up girls, perhaps taking too seriously the warning in the movie that gold paint suffocates the skin and could cause death if the full body were painted.

Over there was Nassau Bay. Some of the stuffier types in Togethersville thought it the gaudiest of the space burbs. It had the biggest houses, but from where Gene was flying, square in the catbird seat, they looked A-OK.

He could decipher quite clearly the Bean-Bassett-Aldrin compound on the corner of Point Lookout Drive. Hell, you probably couldn’t miss that one if you were in orbit. The backyards were daisy-chained, and the three families were very friendly. A prizewinning local architect had designed the Bassetts’ house, a sandy-colored castle. The Beans built a pink brick chateau-style house. Sue Bean decorated it with imitation Louis XIV furniture, describing her taste as “almost French.” The Aldrins’ house was a two-story English Tudor. Joan Aldrin decorated Buzz’s study in mahogany and midnight blue, with plush carpeting and heavy curtains, so that Buzz could have a home refuge in something resembling space.

The Chaffees’ was coming into sight. Roger and his wife, Martha, had attended Purdue University with Gene. Purdue, with its advanced-technology aviation program, came to be known as “the cradle of the astronauts.” In all, twenty-two of the astronauts were Purdue graduates. The Mercury astronauts had been picked for their physical stamina, but as the program progressed and technology became more important, the astronauts’ IQs and educations became more and more important, with many of them holding advanced degrees in engineering. Gene and Roger had both been in fraternities. Not long after Martha had been named homecoming queen and “Eternal Sweetheart” by a rival frat, Roger nabbed her. Lucky dog. That girl was drop-dead gorgeous, but no more so than his own wife, Barbara.

Gene had first noticed her at LAX, when he was a Navy pilot on leave. She was a big-haired, green-eyed Texas blonde, and beautifully filled out her snug navy blue Continental Airlines stewardess uniform (“We really move our tail for you” was the airline’s slogan). Continental’s signature red beret and white gloves captured his attention. Gene eavesdropped when she gave her last name at check-in—Atchley. She was flying out for a girls’ weekend in Vegas. Pulling out his little black book, Gene wrote down the vitals along with the note
Continental
. He didn’t even try to talk to her, but on his flight home to Chicago he got the girl’s first name from the stewardess. After telling his immigrant father that he’d seen the woman he wanted to marry, Geno used so-called “devious means” to ring the girl up and insist that she knew him. She didn’t believe him, but she made a date with him anyway. Lucky guy.

Gene took his T-38 down to buzz the roof of his low, cream-colored ranch house on Barbuda Lane, making the whole place vibrate. It was his way of saying to his wife, “Barbara, I’m home.” After zooming overhead, he landed at Ellington Air Force Base and parked along the line of astronauts’ T-38s. Here, NASA prepared its boys for weightless spaceflight in KC-135 airplanes, dubbed “Vomit Comets.” They would take off and fly in parabolas that included thirty seconds of zero G. Floating in orange and blue NASA flight suits and black combat boots, the men squeezed meal bags of condensed beef with gravy and shrimp with cocktail sauce into their mouths. They tried not to throw up from “space sickness.” They brought home their food as homework. Once, a six-year-old named Sandy asked his father, “Are you eating space food, Daddy? When are you going to start floating around?” An astronaut son playing house with his kid sister was overheard by a
Life
reporter as saying, “I’m going to work, I’ll be back in a week.”

Geno was back from his week at the Cape, where the rookie astronauts were training for the Gemini flights. It was a pain in the ass of a thousand-mile commute to go home as often as he did, but it wasn’t like he was some schmo in a Ford clanking down the Gulf Freeway. He was burning it out in his sleek T-38. And was ready to enjoy the pleasures of home. His fully stocked walk-in bar would be open for business and the hi-fi would play rock and roll all weekend long, baby.