The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (22 page)

First they went to Greece, then Italy, then Spain. If Betty had mapped out the trip herself, she would’ve picked the same countries. They shared rooms in charming hotels, enjoyed ordering breakfast for two, and together studied their travel guides and plotted their plans for the day.

“You always get up in the morning in a good mood,” Marilyn told Betty.

That made Betty glow. She enjoyed having a companion. Gus had hardly been around enough to know what she was like in the morning.

At the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome, Betty spotted La Mendola, a world-famous boutique. Rita Hayworth and Anita Ekberg wore La Mendola’s custom print dresses. They came in sherbet colors, and bore images of Roman emperors. One shift was printed with the folds of a toga, another a fabric of flames. It was of Rome burning.

Betty ignored the daunting price tags and picked out a screaming pink coatdress lined in psychedelic silk with slits high up the sides. She even bought the matching headscarf. Amazingly, who should walk into the boutique while they were shopping but Nancy Dickerson. The TV reporter inspiration for Primly Stable was the only person who recognized Betty during the entire trip.

In Spain, Betty bought a carved wooden Don Quixote statue, which she called “my little man.” She didn’t give a second thought to how much money she spent. When she returned to Timber Cove she even bought Gus’s share of Performance Unlimited and looked forward to going to the Daytona 500 with the Rathmanns. She loved car racing. She could buy anything she wanted now. Gus had left her with that $100,000
Life
insurance policy, some investments, and around six hundred dollars a month from his military pension. Of course, it wouldn’t last forever, but it was enough to kick-start Betty’s new life. She was becoming almost a textbook “liberated woman,” just as women were taking up the idea across America.

In the evening, driving her twelve-year-old son, Kent, back from his afterschool activities, Marge would see the bright lights of the cold, clinical, male-centric Manned Spacecraft Center. Sometimes Marge felt ready to storm the place. The MSC stood out against the flat horizon, a flush of petrochemical red streaked across the sky with ominous-looking clouds hanging above. The exhaust from nearby oil plants, which often prevented the wives from having a private moment alone with the Moon, created the most stunning sunsets.

If someone had asked Marge (or any of the Astrowives, for that matter) what her relationship to the nascent feminist movement was, she’d probably laugh, thinking she had nothing to do with it. But in her own way, she did. Marge was trying to create a haven for women in a world of men. The Astronaut Wives Club was the closest thing the space burbs had to a NOW chapter.

And besides, there weren’t many card-carrying members in NOW who could say they’d had a heart-to-heart with Janis Joplin. Marge had been attracted to the young woman, who was also from Texas, not because she was a famous R & B singer, but because she recognized a floundering soul in need.

At a social gathering in Washington, Marge had found herself seated on a sofa next to Janis, and though she didn’t know that Joplin had been the star of that summer’s Monterey Pop Festival, she heard the broken heart in her smoky, Southern Comfort–cured voice.

Marge dosed out some peppy, upbeat advice. There were easy steps that could be accomplished right away. Janis might not have been conventionally beautiful, but Marge could tell she had a wonderful soul. How about pulling her frizzy hair back from her eyes? A little lipstick, maybe even a frost…

Alas, there were so many souls to save. Even Marge herself had a blues song to sing. She may have had the sweetest smile in Togethersville, but it hadn’t been easy growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Los Angeles, on “skid row,” with a drunken railroad detective father. Her family was so poor that young Marge would actually peel warm asphalt from the ground and chew it like bubblegum. Finally her mother, Nanabelle, left the drunkard father, taking her two daughters with her.

“We had to go on the dole,” said Marge, but Mama would never let Marge and her sister go with her to pick up the food stamps. She was a proud lady and wanted better things for her girls.

Marge had seen a lot of the world, and though she wanted her ashes to be sprinkled over Mount Fuji, it was Friendswood, Texas, that claimed her heart. Marge’s home on a heavily wooded bayou in the Quaker community of Friendswood had an open-door policy. She welcomed all the wives to visit at any hour, especially the younger ones. Marge’s mother, Nanabelle, lived with the Slaytons to help take care of their son, Kent, who was fast growing up.

One day, Kent asked his mother about the strange name on the Army footlocker in his bedroom, and Marge had to hedge. He wasn’t quite old enough to hear about her ex-husband, but Marge laughed about this story with her friends. Apart from the occasional bump, it was smooth sailing in Marge’s neck of Friendswood.

“Those beautiful Quakers!” she’d say. “I’ve lived in a lot of places, but if I’m from anywhere, I’m from Friendswood.”

Every morning she went for coffee at the town’s drugstore. Sometimes her smoking buddy Jo Schirra would drive over from Timber Cove and they’d share a Danish and cig at the counter.

“It will never be the same again, the friendship of the first Seven,” Jo would complain. But Marge was hopeful for the new generation.

Taking advantage of Marge’s open-door policy, Nineteen wife Gratia Lousma came to seek counsel and comfort. Things were so different in Togethersville, and the astronaut life was so intimidating, and, to make matters worse, her dog had just died. Marge was more than sympathetic. She always said that her weakness was that bladder behind her eyes. They sat on her couch hugging each other and crying—Gratia for her pup, Marge for her long-gone Acey.

One night, perhaps thinking about the A.W.C., Marge had the strangest dream that she’d had a baby, but, right after she’d given birth, she’d rushed off and left the baby at the hospital. When she finally remembered to pick her baby up, it had already learned to talk.

It was horrible.

Her dream was fresh in her mind when she walked into Togethersville’s new gym, the Bayshore Club, on Monday morning. The endless launch parties had added weight gain to the worries shared at A.W.C. meetings, and while some of the wives concluded that the bigger the hair, the slimmer the body would look, others hit the shiny machines and piles of mats.

Jo Schirra, who was a faithful exerciser, was depressed. “They keep telling me muscle weighs more than fat,” she said, but they’d been in exercise class for a month now and she wasn’t losing girth. Indeed, she had gained three pounds. Marge sympathized. Though she’d lost eight pounds herself, she was still way overweight. She’d gained thirty when they’d moved to Texas five short years ago.
All that barbecue brisket and those trays of deviled eggs.

After their workout Marge stopped at the club’s juice bar, where Bonita, the pregnant bar and massage girl, whipped her up one of the club’s signature milk-and-cucumber shakes. On the walls of the health bar were little mimeographed signs for the Bayshore Club Quick Rejuvenation Diet, which would make you look like Venus:
AMERICANS
ARE
BECOMING
MORE
AND
MORE
HEALTH
CONSCIOUS
.
WE
BELIEVE
IT
IS
PARTICULARLY
TRUE
IN
THE
LAND
OF
THE
ASTRONAUTS
. “
FIRST
CLASS
PROTEINS
”
YOU
SHOULD
EAT
:
BRAINS
2
MED
.
PIECES
;
FOODS
PROHIBITED
:
ANGEL
CAKE
. (That was before nutritionists figured out that a pound of sautéed beef brains contains more cholesterol than one needs in a year.)

Martha Chaffee joined Marge for a shake. She’d lost twenty pounds, down from a size eight to a four. Exercise was very good for pounding out all the nervous energy Roger’s death had left her with. Though looking girlish and lovely as usual, Martha was feeling blue.

The two women were soon talking and crying, their arms around each other.

Martha finally told Mother Marge about the man she was dating. “He’s convinced me there’s another life for me, in time.”

“Why, honey,” said Marge, “just as sure as there are stars in the sky and that the sun comes up in the morning, there’s another life for you.”

It became clear to Marge that her baby, the Astronaut Wives Club, was alive and well here at the Bayshore Club, where the wives grunted and groaned their way to health.

After her workout, Pat White changed into a pretty dress, instead of the slacks or dungarees the other busy mothers wore. It was amazing how Pat always managed to leave the Bayshore looking as clean and lovely as she had coming in. Some of the gals still couldn’t figure out what she did all day, not knowing that she was studying Greek literature at the University of Houston–Clear Lake. Pat had majored in psychology at school but had never finished. Now she was learning all about classical mythology, the gods and goddesses and their fate-bending desires.

Pat continued coming to exercise class, but as the months wore on, she became pale and thin. Telltale signs of stress were in the shadows around her faraway eyes. She still wasn’t sleeping. It was going around that Susan Borman, who was big on religion, had been working on Pat about being Mrs. Ed White in the next life.

The other wives also noticed that Susan, conspicuously absent from the Bayshore, was often high-strung and raging about something or other when she’d drop over for a cup of coffee. Then she’d beg off and go nap for the rest of the afternoon.

Hopefully she was doing some good for Pat White, but it seemed that Pat needed a little more Beth Williams in her. Beth was the latest space widow along with Nineteen wife Ada Givens, whose husband, Ed, had crashed his VW Bug in what was rumored to be a drunk driving accident. Beth’s husband, C.C., had bought the farm in a T-38 crash in October 1967 near Tallahassee, Florida. The astronaut was flying home to pregnant Beth and their one-year-old daughter.

“He died doing what he loved,” the NASA administrator said when he came to make a courtesy call on Beth.

The feisty strawberry blonde didn’t want his visit any more than she wanted the loaves of banana nut bread—the loaf of choice for a grieving astronaut widow. The southern belle swore like a sailor, telling NASA where they could shove their goddamn sympathy. “He didn’t love NASA. He loved me. If he died doing what he loved, he would’ve been in bed with me.”

Beth couldn’t stand smothering Togethersville in the first place, and that’s why she and C.C. had chosen to live in Dickinson, Texas, ten miles away. Unlike the Corvette boys, C.C. had driven a green Chevrolet pickup, which everybody made fun of when he parked it in the lot of the Manned Spacecraft Center. He had gotten several parking tickets because no cop could believe that an astronaut would drive a pickup truck with
SELMA
OR
BUST
painted on the rear. C.C. wasn’t like the other astronauts, and Beth wasn’t like their wives. She let it be known that if she received one more copy of
The Prophet
, Kahlil Gibran’s eternal best seller, she might throw it at the well-wisher.

Even to the funeral, she’d never worn black. She’d gone wearing a sharp new suit and a gaucho hat C.C. liked.

Like Betty, Beth would be just fine. On the other hand, the wives couldn’t help but notice that Pat White usually spoke of her Ed in the present tense. Pat said she often dreamed of Ed, and when she awoke in the morning she could hardly believe he was gone. She’d just
seen
him. It worried the wives how Pat clung to Ed’s image as an American hero, and hers as the hero’s wife. They thought that after almost a year, it was time for her to move on.

And that morbid Karmann Ghia rotting in Pat’s garage? The wives couldn’t imagine
that
was helping her outlook and mental health. Ed had wanted to give it to his son, but until young Eddie III was old enough to drive it in three or four years, the sports car sat up on blocks in the garage. Pat liked having the Karmann Ghia there. She found Ed’s car somehow comforting.

What about dating, Pat?

The wives urged her to get out—give it a whirl again, like Martha Chaffee, whom the Cernans had been setting up on blind dates. Martha had even let someone buy her a nice fur. But Pat seemed to be drifting ghostlike through life.

One morning Clare Schweickart went over to visit her and Pat offered to fix lunch. After they finished their meal, Pat gathered up the dirty dishes and the glass of milk she’d served Clare, and poured the half-drunk contents of the lipstick-stained glass back into the carton in her fridge. She looked to Clare like a zombie. That’s when Clare vowed she would build a life for herself so that if anything happened to her redheaded astronaut husband, Rusty, she would never be like that. Clare thought it one of the most frightening things she’d ever seen.

When Pat failed to show up at exercise class, the other wives knew something was terribly wrong, especially when nobody could reach her on the phone. Someone called a neighbor, who had to break into Pat’s house. Pat was found clutching a bottle of pills, which had to be wrestled from her hands.

How many did she take? What was she
thinking
? the wives asked each other. Then they helped Pat cover up what she’d done.

13

Susie

T
he Mercury Seven wives hosted a farewell lunch for Rene at Jo’s house out by the pool. They took lots of pictures. This time, they felt, the group was really breaking up for good. Early one of the following mornings in August 1967, the Carpenters pulled away from their brick ranch house. Annie and John came out in their bathrobes to see their neighbors off. Two of the Carpenter kids, peering out from the back of the station wagon, watched the disappearing Glenns waving good-bye from their driveway. They were off to Bethesda and their new home.