The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (19 page)

Astronaut John Young knew the new NASA protocol. Because Elliot See’s wife lived down the street from the Lovells, he called Marilyn Lovell and told her that there had been an accident. As soon as she was assured it was not Jim, he instructed her to go around the corner to be with Marilyn See.

Marilyn Lovell couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You want me to be the one to tell her that Elliot was killed?”

“No,” he said. “I want you to do something much harder—not tell her. She can’t be told anything until I can come over and tell her officially. We don’t want some overeager newspaperman knocking on her door.”

It was shortly after 9 a.m., and having received similar orders, Jane Conrad dashed across the street, curlers flying out of her hair like plastic tumbleweeds as she ran. She tried to take out the rest and hid them in the pocket of her housecoat as she stood on Marilyn See’s doorstep. Trying to catch her breath, she rang the bell.

Marilyn looked confused to see her this early in the morning. Jane had to pretend she’d just popped in for a friendly visit. Marilyn invited her in for a cup of coffee and the two went back to the kitchen. Soon the doorbell rang again. Jane knew what was about to happen; she had been dreading getting such a visit for years. But it wasn’t John Young at the door. It was Marilyn Lovell, who came into the kitchen, also in curlers (she had just bathed her newborn, Jeffrey, and fortunately the baby nurse was there, so she could leave). She glanced at Jane. They could see they were burdened with the same shattering news. How could they explain both of them visiting this early in the morning?

Marilyn See poured another cup of coffee, but the wait was excruciating. Marilyn Lovell was so nervous, she could barely hold her mug, so she lit another cigarette, forgetting about the one still burning in the ashtray. As she tore off a match, her hands shook as she tried to light it. Staring at her strangely, Marilyn See exclaimed, “Marilyn, you’re a chain-smoker!”

Finally the doorbell rang. John Young looked desolate as he delivered the news. Marilyn See began to cry and the three of them didn’t know what else to do but huddle around and hug her. Still, no time could be wasted. Marilyn Lovell raced out the back door to pick the See children up from school, praying she’d get there before the press got to them.

After the news of Ted Freeman’s death had been so bungled by NASA and the press, Togethersville banded together more than ever, especially protecting its widows and wives from the outside world. Family and neighbors dropped everything and started arriving at Marilyn See’s and Jeannie Bassett’s, ready to stay all day if they had to.

After hours of phone calls informing relatives of the news, Jane started off toward the door, but three-year-old David See hung on to her, needing to escape his mother’s ceaseless crying. Jane took him home with her for the rest of the afternoon and put him into her bed to read him a storybook.

“My daddy’s asleep,” he said to Jane. “And now I’m going to go to sleep, too.”

Over the next few weeks Jane went to Marilyn See’s almost every evening around five, the hour when Jane longed for Pete to return. She also visited Jeannie Bassett. It wasn’t easy for either of the widows. Jeannie, Charlie’s widow, hadn’t been told the gory details until she read about it in
Time
magazine. Her husband had been decapitated. Unfortunately for Marilyn, Elliot had been flying the plane when he and Charlie died. An airplane accident was always seen to be the head pilot’s fault, an opinion that got passed on to some of the wives, so, in addition to heartbreak, there was also an undercurrent of blame.

Women around the country were finally organizing to stand up for their rights. In the three years since
The Feminine Mystique
had been published, the women’s movement had been steadily growing. Its mission, as Betty Friedan had scribbled on a napkin, was “to take action, to bring women into full participation in the mainstream now.” In the summer of 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed, just around the time of the first official meeting of the Astronaut Wives Club. The intent of the latter was, however, quite different from NOW.

The meeting was held in the ballroom of the Lakewood Yacht Club, overlooking the inner harbor of Clear Lake. With over fifty wives in total, there were simply too many members of this exclusive club not to have official, organized meetings. In addition to the Mercury Seven, the New Nine, and the Fourteen, a group of nineteen more astronauts was added in April 1966. The new boys called themselves, tongue in cheek, the “Original Nineteen.” Everybody wore handwritten nametags. Upgraded to sophomore status, one of the Fourteen wives peered down to read the names of the incoming freshmen, like Jan Evans and Gratia Lousma.

“I hope one day we don’t need the nametags anymore,” she said sweetly.

It was 10:30 a.m. on the first Tuesday of the month, which would be the day for all future meetings. Though the wives would take turns acting as hostess, everybody knew that it was Marge Slayton who was really in charge. The “A.W.C.” was Marge’s baby, and along with Louise Shepard, she coordinated it. It was only fitting since their husbands, Deke and Alan, were running the Astronaut Office together over at the Manned Spacecraft Center. The younger wives called them Mother Marge and Lady Louise. Marge had chosen Tuesdays because it was usually such a drab day, with husbands gone until Friday. The A.W.C. was something for all of the wives to look forward to, especially the younger ones. After doing some bits of business, welcomes, announcements, updates on the last Gemini flights and the upcoming Apollo program, Marge asked if there were any questions before they settled down for coffee.

The new wives had plenty of questions. Perky Nineteen wife Jan Evans had attended a tea party at Marge’s when she’d first arrived in Togethersville, where she’d seen a recent picture of the Mercury wives next to a photo taken of them at the beginning. Marge had arranged them in their frames side by side as a conversation piece. It was amazing how different the two photos looked—from babes in the woods, some a little chubby or a little frumpy, to strong, confident women in full command of their position as astronaut wives—as dramatic a change as the “before” and “after” pictures in a magazine makeover. How did the Mercury wives do it? The new wives were itching to know, but in a group of fifty women, each of whose husbands was jockeying for the upcoming Apollo missions, they were afraid of asking the wrong questions. What if a gal said something that might reflect badly upon her husband? The ballroom fell silent. There were no questions.

On her own time, Rene Carpenter visited newcomers, who were often in awe of how glamorous she was. Rene dropped by one new wife’s house wearing a chic pale blue blouse. Waving her hand in a circle, Rene told her, “You only get to go around once.” The moral the new wife took from these words was: savor every minute of it because you only get one life to live.

Rene was beginning an exciting new career. Gus Grissom had caught wind in the
Houston Chronicle
that Rene had been offered a syndicated newspaper column. After going to the trouble of having no windows put on the front of his house, Gus didn’t want to worry about the press coming in through the back door.

“So, you gonna write about me?” he asked.

“No,” Rene assured him. “You’re not interesting enough.”

Her woman’s column would be exploring what it meant to be a wife, a mother—friendships, relationships, that sort of thing. (She first had to come up with twenty sample columns to prove her writing prowess.) Rene also let Gus know that having a job was something she needed to consider, especially now that her and Scott’s marriage was beginning to dissolve.

Gus was relieved. Ever since it had been insinuated that he had “screwed the pooch” on his Mercury shot, Gus had come back with a vengeance. He’d piloted the first Gemini mission and now he was going to command the first Apollo mission. “I didn’t give a good goddamn about the White House, but my boys did, and Betty did.” Gus laughed. “Look at her, she’s still mad.”

Rene had come up with a name for her new column, A Woman Still, inspired by a verse from an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem: “A flutterer in the wind, a woman still: I tell you I am what I was and more.”

In one of her columns, Rene tackled the dynamic of the original group of seven wives. “Now at a call we run across lawns with uncombed hair, drive at unsafe speeds to hug and hold, make coffee, fix a drink and wipe the kitchen counter.”

The Mercury wives liked Rene’s columns, which Jo cut out religiously and pasted into her scrapbook. Fan letters started pouring into Rene’s mailbox. She was writing three columns a week. It was hard, rewarding work. Editors around the country admired her unique voice. Soon thirty-five papers picked up her column. There was a thumbnail-size picture of her next to her byline.

Talk show host David Susskind invited Rene to be on his show. Susskind was known for flicking his cigarette ashes over his shoulder and stopping the evening’s show when he was bored or too tired to continue. Guests were ushered onto his acid green and purple felt–lined set, and sat in one of his big chartreuse lounge chairs. He asked Rene about being an astronaut wife, how she’d coped.

Rene slipped into her Primly Stable role, and Susskind loved it. She was such a smash that people wondered if she might host her own show. Certainly her personality could carry one. In December 1966, Neil Simon’s
The Star-Spangled Girl
opened on Broadway. The title character had actually been inspired by Rene, whom he’d met at a New Year’s Eve party in New York.

“Eclipsing the Astronauts,” headlined a
Newsweek
feature. “There may be a rising TV star in the family of astronauts—Rene Carpenter, wife of spaceman Scott Carpenter. She is witty, strikingly blonde and the author of a highly personal column…”

There was a fuss over Rene, but her home was in Houston. Her kids needed her. Still, her days in television were far from over. She would later get to appear twice on
The
Tonight Show
as a guest of Johnny Carson, and cohost for one night the top-billed
Mike Douglas Show
. One of her guests was producer/director Mel Brooks. Rene talked about the columns she’d written on high-pressure schools and sex ed, and in the cooking segment, shared her recipe for taco pie.

A year after the T-38 accident, both Charlie Bassett’s and Elliot See’s widows were still lingering in Togethersville. Military custom dictated that when a man gets killed, his wife leaves right away. Her presence alone is an unwelcome reminder to the troops. But the two widows didn’t want to uproot their kids from school. Besides, neither had finished college or had any job experience. At least they had their $100,000
Life
insurance policies.

Everybody kept on telling Jeannie that she could afford to wait a year before making a decision about whether she should go or stay. Meanwhile, snide remarks bounced around Togethersville like, “They’re coddled in this program. If they were Air Force, they’d have thirty days to get out and nobody would ever have heard of them.” From tough former Air Force wives, “Bitterness, of course, is a part of grief…but people are supposed to get over it after a while.”

The men were even worse. Deke claimed that “Elliot See flew like an old woman,” and that’s why he crashed the plane and got himself and Charlie killed. Nevertheless, Marilyn See stuck it out through a year of dirty looks and hushed silences. It was Jeannie Bassett who first decided to get the hell out of Togethersville. As she put it, “When you’re in the program, you’re
in in in
. Then something happens and you’re out. I don’t want to hang around and be the big happy fifth wheel.” She packed up and headed off to San Francisco. Besides, as
Life
quoted Jeannie, “My daughter has two great dreams. One is to meet the Monkees, the other is to have a new father.” Actually, ten-year-old Karen wanted her old daddy back. Without knowing it, Jeannie was moving into the teeth of the 1960s, the Summer of Love just around the corner. The wives gave her a coffee before she left—and the gift of a golden whistle with the message: “If you need us, whistle.”

The Apollo program seemed to be beyond any individual’s control. The space program was going corporate. Gus didn’t get the same sort of input into the design of his capsule that he’d had with the Gusmobile. NASA was still determined to get a man on the Moon before the decade was out. One of the workers at the NASA contractor North American Aviation, which was building the Apollo capsule, told Gus the deadlines were so draconian, they’d ship the spacecraft “ready or not.” No one was listening to Gus’s complaint—not only was the Apollo ship not a Corvette, it was worse than a Volkswagen.

Coming into the kitchen one morning before he left for the Cape, Gus held up a giant Texas lemon he’d picked from the tree in their front yard.

“What are you going to do with that lemon?” asked Betty.

“I’m going to hang it on that spacecraft,” said Gus, kissing her good-bye. Considering the slapdash way he thought North American was assembling his ship, he figured that’s what it was.

A lemon.

After he left, Betty considered the situation. Gus was down in the dumps. There was no humor in his voice, which just wasn’t like him. He liked to be havin’ “a ball,” but he made no effort to hide his disapproval of Apollo 1.

There was some good news. His upcoming Apollo 1 mission would only be testing the new lunar spacecraft in orbit, but soon enough, he’d also be going on another Apollo mission, the one that really counted. Gus had told Betty that Deke, who was now in charge of flight assignments, had tapped ole Gus to be the first man to land on the Moon.

On the Cape’s Launch Pad 34, the lemon was perched on top of the giant Saturn IB rocket, a 141-foot behemoth that in a month’s time, on February 21, 1967, was scheduled to take off with 1.6 million pounds of explosive liquid oxygen thrust. Betty didn’t know exactly what about that capsule worried him, since she always told him not to bother her with the technical details, just tell her as much as she needed to know.