The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (25 page)

The newest arrivals to the ever-expanding confederation were the “scientist-astronaut” wives, who seemed too busy calibrating their husbands’ slide rules to understand the code of behavior. But the rest of the wives, the ones who counted, knew just as well as Susan did that an astronaut’s wife did not disclose her fears to anyone. They all knew fear was contagious. Even though most of the ladies harbored the exact same dark thoughts, they couldn’t risk sharing them.

All the astronauts would give an arm and a leg to be where Frank Borman was, flying to the Moon. It was ironic. Susan had always longed for something like the A.W.C. so that she and the other women wouldn’t always be stuck at home alone. She still showed up to meetings, but she kept her mouth shut about the things that really mattered to her, quietly waiting for the day when Frank would leave the program, as he always said he would “after the Moon.”

She worried a lot about Pat White and visited her often. She couldn’t help but imagine that what had happened to Pat was going to happen to her. Pat’s questions echoed in her mind, “Who am I? What do I do now?” “My God, this could be me,” thought Susan.

Frank had gotten to know a hell of a lot about the fire when he was on the Apollo 1 Review Board. It turned out that all the Gemini astronauts had flown under the same combustible pure oxygen conditions. The big joke was how he and Jim Lovell had actually carried paperbacks on their two-week Gemini 7 flight, which could have acted as
kindling
! for Chrissakes.

“You just worry about the custard, and I’ll worry about the flying,” Frank reassured his anxious wife. It was the Bormans’ version of the Glenns’ “chewing gum” routine.

Susan dreaded the Apollo 8 mission. Along with his crewmates Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, her Frank would be the first human to orbit the Moon, ten times around, a death-defying feat if there ever was one. Susan was convinced that Frank was going to die on his six-day mission. If he didn’t explode in a ball of fire at liftoff, he’d circle the Moon for eternity. Susan wasn’t sure she’d be able to go to the Cape for the countdown. To her new pal Dodie Hamblin of
Life
, whom the wives had discovered could knock down a stiff martini with the best of them, Susan confessed, “Some of us aren’t at our best before a launch, so it’s important to know us as we really are.”

Her apprehension about Apollo 8 was compounded when flight director Chris Kraft paid her a visit. Kraft was the head honcho of Mission Control. There was no question that it was
he
who decided who was going to get to go up into space. “I am Flight and Flight is God” went Kraft’s credo. It was Kraft who had clipped Scott Carpenter’s wings. He’d sworn that Scott would never fly again after overshooting his landing on
Aurora 7
, and sure enough, Scott was now scuttling across the bottom of the ocean.

What if Kraft caught a whiff of fear in an astronaut’s home, especially the home of the one who was about to take two of his boys on a trip around the Moon? Susan surely didn’t want to think about what that could mean for her Frank. “They didn’t want an oddball,” Susan said later. “We kept it like
Leave It to Beaver
.”

Chris Kraft had come out of his cave at the Manned Spacecraft Center on a rare visit to see a
wife
personally. He was here at the Bormans’ to discuss the risks of Frank’s flight, NASA’s most dangerous mission to date.

Susan knew the code of the military wife. Her whole life revolved around supporting Frank’s career.

“Hey, Chris, I’d really appreciate if you would level with me. I really, really, want to know what you think their chances are of getting home.”

“Okay, how’s fifty-fifty?”

Susan wasn’t sure if that made her more or less worried.

Marilyn Lovell had been planning for Jim to take the family on a long overdue vacation to Acapulco for Christmas. Having spent more time in space than any man alive (first on his two-week Gemini 7 mission and then on Gemini 12, which had closed out the program), he hadn’t been around much to enjoy the comforts of Lovells’ Levels. Marilyn was looking forward to bouncing along the high cliffs in one of those adorable pink jeeps at the Las Brisas Resort, where Frank “Brandy” Brandstetter offered free R & R for astronauts. Until Jim mentioned that he wasn’t sure he’d make it.

“Well, just where do you think you are going to be?” asked Marilyn.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jim, proceeding cautiously. “Maybe the Moon?”

Obviously, Marilyn couldn’t argue with that. It was such an immense triumph for his career, let alone for all of humanity. Her husband’s flight on Apollo 8 was going to beat the Russians. It would be American astronauts who would be the first to orbit the Moon.

Just before Christmas, Marilyn and her four children stayed in a beach cottage near the Cape to spend some time with Jim before he blasted off.

Two nights before his launch, Jim drove Marilyn to a lookout on the beach so she could behold, off in the distance, the floodlit Saturn V rocket. The 363-foot whopper was bigger than any rocket ever launched, fueled with fifteen hundred tons of liquid oxygen, enough thrust to shoot Jim up to the Moon.

“Don’t get frightened when it takes off, because the rocket is going to lean to one side,” Jim warned her. “And the ground will shake for miles!”

Jim began laughing, but Marilyn had no idea what private joke he was enjoying.

Suddenly he took out a large black-and-white photo of the Moon, taken by a satellite, which he’d used in training. He showed her a pert little triangle-shaped mountain near
Mare Tranquillitatis
, the Sea of Tranquility, where the first lunar landing was supposed to take place with Apollo 11. Tapping his finger on it, he said, “I’m going to name that mountain for you.” For all eternity, it would be known as Mount Marilyn.

Jim had always maintained there was a certain amount of romance in his job, and now he was including Marilyn in it. What could be more romantic than a Moon mountain named after you?

In El Lago, Susan Borman remained curled up on her bed, watching the hours tick away on the clock. She could do nothing but be the vigilant wife waiting till dawn. With each hour that passed, she just knew that Frank was going to die.

Finally it was time to get up, dress, and greet the wives who’d been invited for her Death Watch. Most of them were from the New Nine cohort, and they arrived not only with deviled eggs but also bottles of champagne. “Standard operating procedure,” Susan called it. All she had to do on launch day was sit back, surrounded by women who knew what she was going through, and watch her husband ride a Saturn V rocket into the unknown on national television.

On the outside, Susan was a model astronaut wife. As always, she was beautifully dressed, literally for the pages of
Life
magazine: pearls on, buttery blonde bob flipped up. After the successful liftoff, Susan finally stepped out onto her lawn. “I’ve always been known as a person who had something to say,” she said to the waiting reporters. “Today I am speechless.”

After that she returned to her kitchen and lit another cigarette. Her sons, Ed and Fred, had been begging her to quit, and Susan had promised she would right after their father landed safely home.

The day after liftoff was a Sunday and Susan sat for services at St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church, her hands composed in her lap, and her strapping boys by her side. Only a few hours earlier, she’d gotten a call from the NASA doctors. “Does Frank often have trouble sleeping?” they wanted to know.

It turned out that Frank had radioed in to Mission Control asking permission to take a Seconal sleeping pill. Frank had always been adamant about never taking pills. But at one in the morning on his first night in space, Frank had found it impossible to sleep, and he knew it was important to get some shut-eye on such a mission as this. He radioed down to Mission Control, who gave him the A-OK, and Frank swallowed the pill with a squirt of liquid from a water gun. He tried to get to sleep in the lower level of the spacecraft, but soon he started to vomit, and green particles floated into other parts of the spaceship. A big gelatinous sphere sailed by his crewmate Bill Anders, the rookie. It splashed onto Jim, “like a fried egg.” Unfortunately it wasn’t only vomit floating by, but diarrhea as well.

Susan came home from church to find plenty of food brought by the wives. She wasn’t hungry, but her boys insisted she eat. The squawk box transmitted Frank’s voice from space. Susan snuck into her bedroom, curled up in bed, and listened to her private squawk box.

Marilyn flew back from the Cape to Timber Cove that morning. She and her son Jay watched Jim’s first television appearance from space. “This is known as preparing lunch and doing P23 at the same time,” said Jim on the small screen.

Posing before the state-of-the-art black-and-white video camera, built specifically for NASA by RCA, Jim showed how to make chocolate pudding by squirting a shot of water into a bag of brown powder. The crew had been offered new and improved food, but commander Frank had declined, wanting to keep things as meat and potatoes as possible. So they were stuck eating mostly space kibble. Focusing the camera on a floating toothbrush, Frank told the world that he knew the rookie on board, Bill, had been “brushing regularly.” In a subsequent broadcast, the camera captured Earth through the spacecraft’s window. Jim described the bright blue marble as being “about as big as the end of my thumb.” It was terrifying how small home was, but its beauty enthralled him.

“What I keep on imagining is, if I were a traveler from another planet,” mused Jim, “what would I think about the Earth at this altitude—would I think it was inhabited?”

Using two hand controls, Frank put the ship in “barbecue” mode with the spacecraft slowly spinning like a rotisserie once an hour, distributing the heat of the sun.

On Monday, Marilyn drove over to Mission Control. With its bleacher seating behind soundproof glass, walls lined in felt to absorb all sound, the VIP section was set up like a crying room in an old-time movie theater, overlooking the high-octane operations. The spacecraft was at the tipping point between the Earth’s and Moon’s gravities. Then Apollo 8 slipped away from Earth’s gravity and was pulled in by the Moon.

“Have you seen Susan yet?” astronaut John Young asked. He’d been assigned to Marilyn to explain everything that was going on during the flight.

“No,” said Marilyn. “Would you like to go over there?”

“Well, why don’t we both go.”

When they arrived at Susan’s house in El Lago, they found a few people in the living room, milling around the tinsel-draped Christmas tree, having drinks, sipping coffee, munching on holiday candy and peanuts. The boys had snuck off to go duck hunting earlier that day. Susan was holed up in her bedroom. Marilyn decided she would wait for Susan to come out and greet her, but it became apparent that Susan wasn’t coming out and Marilyn wasn’t being invited in. After waiting an hour to see her, Marilyn asked John to take her home.

When Marilyn returned to Lovells’ Levels, she fixed herself a scotch on the rocks. She sat at the brick bar in the family room and cried her eyes out, the tears literally streaming down her face into her scotch. It was humiliating. Their husbands were on their way to the Moon together, and Susan couldn’t come out and say hello? Marilyn felt like they, too, were on a mission together.

Jim was going into lunar orbit very early the next morning, Christmas Eve, which meant the space capsule would disappear around the far side of the Moon (Jim and the astronauts were sticklers about calling it the far side instead of the dark side because it was permanently turned away from the Earth; it wasn’t always in shadow). On the far side, all radio contact with Earth would be cut off.
Would he make it back?

Marilyn couldn’t allow herself to go there, couldn’t bear to consider the question. Of course he’d come back. He had to. She always told her friends she couldn’t live without Jim.

Soon she had some company with teenage Betsy Benware from next door coming over to give her and the kids a home-cooked meal. Betsy’s father was the head of a company that supported Mission Control, and her mother was Marilyn’s best friend. Marilyn could tell Betty Benware things that she wouldn’t dare say to another Astrowife, even Jane Conrad.

Betsy handed over the tray that her mother had prepared, but Marilyn wasn’t very hungry. The girl quickly realized how upset she was.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Lovell?”

“Oh, yes,” Marilyn replied, but Betsy didn’t believe her.

Betsy headed home, and within minutes, her mother took over as Marilyn’s Mission Control. Soon other close friends began arriving, called over to Lovells’ Levels because Betty Benware had decided they were going to come over to support Marilyn and cheer her up. Now that she was relaxed after some food and a few cigarettes and laughs, Betty told her she better get some sleep before Jim went around the far side of the Moon. She laid a gentle hand on Marilyn’s shoulder and led her back to her bedroom.

“Lie down. I am not leaving this room until you lie down.”

At first Marilyn resisted, but soon she let her body settle onto the bed. She awoke a few hours later around 2 a.m. on Christmas Eve.

Padding down the hall to the family room, where the TV was on, Marilyn found one friend sleeping in a big chair, another on the sofa, and a couple on the carpeted floor. It really touched her how they’d all made themselves beds just so that they could be there for her.

Over in El Lago, Frank squawked through Susan’s box. “As a matter of interest, we have as yet to see the Moon.” The astronauts were about to arrive at the Moon. NASA gave Apollo 8 a “Go” for lunar orbit, and just before the Apollo 8 crew went over to the far side, Susan asked Mission Control to pass along a message to her husband: “Frank. The custard is in the oven at 350.”

“No comprendo,” Frank replied. He’d forgotten the reference that was so important to his wife—“You just worry about the custard, and I’ll worry about the flying.” After that, her squawk box went silent.