The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (21 page)

W
ith Deke still grounded, Marge was no longer an astronaut wife like the others, but she was Mother Marge to her girls, as she thought of the Astrowives. Her girls were going through such heartache. She knew that Betty was tough and would be all right, but what about poor pretty Martha Chaffee, and dear Pat White? Marge wanted to bring as much comfort as she could to her girls. The monthly coffees and teas of the Astronaut Wives Club served the same purpose she did: “If you need us, come.”

They’d lost Jeannie Bassett to San Francisco, but Marge considered the A.W.C. a lifetime membership. Regardless of how NASA treated the space widows, considering them excess baggage, as far as Marge was concerned, Faith Freeman, Marilyn See, Betty Grissom, Martha Chaffee, Pat White, and Jeannie Bassett would always be astronaut wives.

Marge had imagined the Astronaut Wives Club as a port in a storm: the wives would see each other through trying times, offering homemade casseroles, a stiff drink, or a shoulder to cry on. But somehow, after that first meeting, her baby was failing to thrive. Nobody really opened up; they carefully skirted the big issues, and only talked about safe things.

The meetings had become routine—discussing launch parties, sharing recipes, and planning bake sales to raise money for the POW/MIA wives whose husbands were missing in action in Vietnam. The taboo subjects of depression and alcoholism, T-38 crashes and fatal fires, were strenuously avoided. So was pretty much anything that had to do with their husbands’ competition and extramarital activities. And the Cape Cookies, who presented a much-loathed rival group to the astronaut wives.

One morning, with the assistance of Lady Louise, who drove in from Houston for every meeting, Marge drew up a phone tree on a blackboard that she wheeled in. She explained how, in case of another terrible emergency, they should first call the women in their respective groups who lived nearest them. She described how the wives should be dispatched to care for the woman and her children, until an astronaut arrived to officially inform her she was now a widow. God forbid it should happen again.

The women nodded—didn’t they
know
this already? But Marge knew they were scared, all of them, especially the younger ones, and she wanted to put it front and center.

“Ever since the accident,” said Marilyn Lovell, “I’ve been telling Jim I want him to be a postman. Can you imagine him delivering mail?” She added, “Nobody chases a postman but dogs.” As Barbara Cernan put it, “When I’m reincarnated, I want to marry a nine-to-five man, not an astronaut.”

“I think it’s a wonder this hasn’t happened before,” said another. “Do you know how many miles they fly, all the time? And all the other things they do? It’s a wonder.”

The Apollo deaths haunted not just the astronaut wives, but the entire nation. LBJ was too dragged down by Vietnam to send NASA budgets unquestioned through Congress, where the term “Moondoggle” now echoed down the marble halls. The Apollo program was stalled for eighteen months as the Apollo capsule underwent redesign, and until NASA could come up with some answers to what had happened.

Gene Cernan figured that if he had to sit out on the bench for a year and a half, he might as well put his T-38 skills to good use. He was sick of hearing about the antiwar protest movements raging around the country. It made him angry. He loved his old college pal Roger Chaffee and mourned his loss, but he also was getting leery of hearing about astronaut heroism all the time when his old Navy buddies, good soldiers all, were out there in Nam getting shot at every day, dying and being thrown into POW camps. That “hairy furball of guilt,” as he called it, was lodged in his throat, and Geno had a powerful urge to hack it out by roaring over North Vietnam and carpet-bombing the godforsaken place back to the Stone Age. He marched over to Deke Slayton in the Astronaut Office to tell him what was on his mind.

“You can go,” said Deke, “but I won’t guarantee a job when you come back.”

Geno stayed put.

Ten days after the fire, one of the wives was amazed to see Betty at a party, sitting in a chair, sparkling. Betty had loved and lived for Gus, but when he died, she said to herself, “Betty, you’re on your own now. You have to start looking out for yourself from this moment forward.”

People would call up worried that she was alone now, but Betty had to admit that things weren’t all that different. “Well, I’m going to miss the phone calls,” she said. “That’s mostly what I had of him. The phone calls.”

Some of the wives thought now that Gus was gone, Betty felt he truly belonged to her. She didn’t have to share him with the program or his hobbies.

Wives would run into her in the grocery store and Betty would stop them just to chat, talking a blue streak. She told everyone that she and the boys could go right on living the way they had. “Gus always said he’d take care of us, and he did.” The change was evident in Betty. There was no doubt she was coming out of her shell, turning into an extrovert. She said to one wife, “All my life, ever since I married Gus, I’ve felt as if I were sitting on top of a volcano.”

Now the volcano had erupted, and she was free to live as she wanted. She joined a bowling league in La Porte, Texas, just up the highway, and was having her teeth capped. She had to make weekly visits to the dentist. All those years as a test pilot wife and worrying about Gus had wrecked havoc on her jaw. One day, in the window of a local antique store, she saw the sort of player piano she’d wanted all her life. Its front featured a carving of wizened old men and trees and queer little Oriental dwellings. It was made of mahogany inlaid with iridescent pink-and-green mother-of-pearl. Betty bought it.

Her fellow space widows didn’t seem to be faring as well. Unable to sleep through the night, Pat White was consoled a bit by the books of Catherine Marshall, the widow of the chaplain of the U.S. Senate. Mrs. Marshall’s books, touching on the afterlife, helped her during her time of need. She insisted that reading
To Live Again
might also help Martha Chaffee.

One thing in the book bugged Martha, how Mrs. Marshall said that after death there is no time. Martha considered the possibility of an afterlife reunion with Roger. “If there’s no time then I’ll be seventy-six and Roger will still be young—that won’t be right!”

A huge framed color photo of eternally young Roger hung over the piano in the Chaffee family room. There weren’t many books at Martha’s save for the one Pat had lent her. Feeling like a guest in her own home, she’d walk around past the color TV and the big blowup color photo Ed White had sent her months ago of the Apollo 1 crew. She loved that one of Roger smiling, Ed laughing behind him, Gus by his side.

“They were so happy, they loved what they were doing,” she thought.

Martha had never been to a funeral before Roger’s at Arlington. She never did get to see her husband’s charred remains; she didn’t even know if he had been buried in his military uniform. During the funeral, she had just followed NASA’s orders. Thirty-one-year-old Roger was the rookie, the youngest and least known of the three dead astronauts.

After the funeral, Martha worried about his headstone. Was there one? The burial had been such a blur that she couldn’t recall the details.

She went to visit Roger’s grave. NASA gave her a driver. There was her love. NASA had taken care of the headstone, which looked just like the rest at Arlington, white and official. She hadn’t even realized that Roger and Gus were buried side by side. Seeing that made her feel better. She visited Ted Freeman’s grave, Charlie Bassett’s and Elliot See’s. Then JFK’s. There were a lot of people standing before the Eternal Flame. An older woman muttered to Martha that she used to come to Arlington to read because it was so peaceful, but now there were just too many tourists.

Frank Borman, the only astronaut assigned to the Apollo 1 Fire Review Board, visited Martha’s home on Barbuda Lane several times, offering to answer any questions she wanted to ask about what had happened. Frank gave Martha the report of the investigation, all three thousand pages of it. It described a scream in the capsule, “Hey, we’re burning up!” and implied that it was Roger’s.

Her five-year-old Stephen hadn’t talked about the accident after it happened, but that summer, a few months later, he had some questions. He obviously was trying to come to terms with his father’s death.

“Why weren’t the suits fireproof? Did they burn up?”

“Your daddy didn’t burn up, he suffocated,” Martha said, explaining that the fire had burned up all the oxygen in the capsule, and the men couldn’t breathe without oxygen.

The day after, she bought Stephen Mexican jumping beans, but they stopped jumping.

“Are they dead?” he asked.

“Well, if they are,” she said, “we’ll make them a present for Daddy.”

What would she do when school started? Like Roger, Martha hated just sitting around. She needed to be busy. She considered joining the Clear Creek Community Theatre, which Buzz Aldrin’s wife, Joan, was heavily involved in. Martha applied for a job in television, but she didn’t get it. Then she went to Los Angeles with a friend who had quite a lot of money. They went to lots of “in” parties. L.A. was really a happening place in 1967, its music scene exploding with Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Byrds, who sang, “Hey, Mr. Spaceman.” They visited movie sets and met movie stars.

Martha’s friend wanted her to move there. “You’ll get in a rut in Houston, Martha,” she warned.

Back in Nassau Bay, Martha was a night owl. She’d gotten so used to Roger being away from home to begin with, it wasn’t hard to pretend he was just away again, training for Apollo. Whenever she couldn’t stand being alone in the house at night and had to get out, Martha would call Gene and Barbara Cernan next door and say, “I have to have a drink,” then go across the lawn to their house.

Sometimes when she came home, she still couldn’t shake her insomnia. It was hell, just hell.

Finally she went to the family medical center at the Manned Spacecraft Center and talked to Dee O’Hara, the astronauts’ nurse. Dee cut quite a figure. She drove an electric blue Mustang, which she parked alongside the guys’ hot rods. She wore her signature pink-grape lipstick and a white cap with the small red cross over her short black hair. She was friendly with the wives, but would never give away the guys’ secrets. She called Martha “hon” and “dear.”

“At 3 a.m., I’m still wide awake, like this,” Martha emphasized with wild eyes, heavily outlined in mascara. “I’m so lonely, Dee, I’m just so lonely.”

There were nights she tossed and turned for hours, holding on to her American flag like a security blanket, the one that had been handed to her at Arlington after being draped over Roger’s casket. When she really couldn’t sleep, she’d go out and sit on the edge of the diving board over her pool and look up at the stars and feel so close to Roger. He had wanted to go up there so badly. One night, staring at the Moon, she completely lost it.

Since her husband Elliot’s death in the T-38 crash over a year before, Marilyn See had traveled to Acapulco and Mexico City, and now she was about to take off on a grand European tour. She’d been studying to be a court reporter, not just to keep occupied but to make some money to get on with her life. Before he’d joined the Navy as a pilot, Elliot had been at General Electric. That was where they’d met. Marilyn had been his secretary. Now Marilyn was ready to spread her wings and fly a little. The wives organized a bon voyage party to send her off. They gathered around, insisting she open her presents. She held up a lacy corset with a quizzical expression. The wives had sewn a padded behind onto it as a joke.

“It’s because those Italian men like to pinch!” squealed Jane Conrad.

Betty was there to see off Marilyn, too. She thought Marilyn had gotten a raw deal with all of Deke’s gossiping about Elliot flying like an old woman. Alan Shepard had been even worse. Marilyn had told Betty that when she had gone to the Manned Spacecraft Center to pick up some of Elliot’s things from the Astronaut Office, Shepard had tried to bar her from entering. She had to drive home and call a NASA higher-up to help sort things out. Then when she went to Ellington Air Force Base to pick up her dead husband’s car, the guards gave her the runaround.

While the two women were having a private chat that evening, Marilyn had a sudden idea: “Why don’t you come with me?” she asked Betty.

“Shoot,” said Betty. “I don’t even have a passport.” She started making her usual excuses but then shifted gears. Well, why not? Her sister Mary Lou could come stay with the boys, Mark and Scott; and besides, Scott, who was seventeen, was practically old enough to stay on his own.

“I think,” said Betty, “I might just take you up on that offer.”

The party was on Saturday night, and come Monday morning Betty was downtown filling out the forms for her passport. As the youngest space widow, Martha Chaffee seemed to be traveling around in her own circuit, off to Los Angeles and all, but Marilyn asked the newly widowed Pat White to come to Europe, too. Pat was still grieving, and refused the invitation with a simple “I can’t plan that far ahead. One day at a time.”

Betty thought about Marilyn See as she packed—if Betty hadn’t accepted the invitation, Marilyn would’ve gone to Europe alone. “I wouldn’t have done that myself,” thought Betty, “but then again, maybe I would.”

They started their trip in New York, where they spent a few days taking in the Big Apple.
The Unsinkable Molly Brown
had long sunk on Broadway, as had
The Star-Spangled Girl
.
Hello, Dolly!
was still going strong, although now it was an all-black cast starring Pearl Bailey as the irrepressible widow, as well as Cab Calloway and a young Morgan Freeman.

Then they took off for Europe. Betty wasn’t sure that they would get along. At thirty-five, Marilyn was still one of those “younger ones.” Forty-year-old Betty was pleasantly surprised. Marilyn had planned the trip brilliantly, and the two did not have the usual sorts of trivial arguments both were used to having with their husbands on their rare family vacations.