The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (30 page)

After the launch, both wives returned home. Barbara Cernan was grateful this was the last mission, describing Apollo 17 like the final chapter in a good book. She was ready for it to be over. “I’m going to take the phone off the hook, take a bath, and go to bed,” she told reporters.

As her nine-year-old daughter, Tracy, slept—she’d told the host of the
Today
show how her daddy promised to bring back “Moonbeams” for her—Barbara sat in the dark by the squawk box. On his previous Apollo 10 mission, a “dry run” for Apollo 11, Geno had radioed back to Houston that riding around the Moon was a piece of cake.

“It was definitely not a piece of cake for me,” said Barbara. “If you think going to the Moon is hard, try staying at home.”

She knew “a million things could go wrong” on Gene’s final flight. One night when her house was filled with people, she had to escape—but to where? Taking a hot shower, Barbara felt her façade begin to melt away. The pressure was pounding in her ears, and she let out a terrifying scream (which she hoped no one heard). The red, white, and blue excitement that had been following the astronauts since the Mercury days had ballooned to intolerable proportions. It was simply getting to be too much to handle, like the Secret Service men Barbara had to be accompanied by because of the Black September threat.

No one in Togethersville knew what would come next. On the surface, things looked the same. The astronauts still pitched each other into swimming pools at neighborhood parties and still got the perks. All their cigars were courtesy of the American Cigar Institute. Along with Mrs. Nixon, some lucky Apollo wives wore Lunar Module rubies gifted by Van Cleef & Arpels. And if NASA would just provide a few Moon rocks for polishing to Corrigan’s, a high-end Houston jewelry store, the gals were promised free one-carat “Moon Rings.”

Some of the wives had already put their names on the waiting list for Pan Am’s first commercial flight to the Moon, but now that wasn’t going to happen. There would be no “orbital newspapers, updated every hour” per Arthur C. Clarke’s dream; no Lunar Hilton, which Barron Hilton had proposed; no Lunar Disney; and no chain of A&W Root Beer stands that Pete Conrad and Jim Lovell had planned, half jokingly, to open on the Moon after we colonized.

A space station called Skylab was soon to go up, as well as a “space taxi,” a kind of VW bus for astronauts, to be known as the space shuttle. But with Nixon’s budget cuts to NASA, the boys definitely weren’t going to Mars, as they’d hoped to by the eighties or nineties. The Space Task Group had drawn up a man-to-Mars program that was making the rounds in Washington, courtesy of Vice President Spiro Agnew, but at $78 billion, it wasn’t likely to happen. The wives weren’t too upset about that one. It would take a husband two years to go to the red planet and back.

The meetings of the A.W.C. diminished in size, the monthly get-together no longer a haven for its members. The faces at the card tables overlooking the boat slips of the Lakewood Yacht Club’s marina on Clear Lake were worn out and pinched. Louise Shepard still drove in for every meeting from Houston, but she could see the fatigue in Marge Slayton. Her girls were now scattered here and there like apples—some still crisp, some overripe, some positively rotten.

It had been a patriotic duty to keep one’s marriage together in Togethersville, but Harriet’s “First Space Divorce” had opened the floodgates. Until then, the men had thought they needed their wives if they wanted to leave the planet. The Susies had been a cancer to the A.W.C. First Donn’s Susie. Then John Young, whom Betty Grissom had always kept a wary eye on, left Barbara for
his
Susy. Even Gordo married a Susie after he and Trudy split up for good. There were other names, too, which the gals would just as soon forget.

One day, a friend of Nineteen wife Gratia Lousma called to commiserate with her. She’d heard that Gratia and Jack, who was soon to go up in 1973 to the orbiting Skylab space station, were getting divorced. Gratia was stunned. Unless Jack knew something that she didn’t, she assured her friend, their marriage was rock solid.

Gratia was shaken to the core. Deciding she had to do something, she went to the Manned Spacecraft Center to talk to Chris Kraft. She wondered if the formidable Kraft could engineer the saving of some marriages, or do anything to stop the domino effect of Astro-divorces. A visit to the Manned Spacecraft Center was intimidating, but just as Gratia was steeling herself to knock on Kraft’s office door, suddenly someone called her name. It was Dr. Terry McGuire. In spite of NASA’s prejudices against psychiatrists, the agency had hired him as its psychologist for manned spaceflight. Terry was involved in the interviewing process of picking new astronauts for Skylab and the upcoming space shuttle program.

Gratia told him that she was coming to see Chris Kraft. It seemed everyone she knew was getting a divorce; she’d just about had it and decided she needed to talk to someone.

Dr. McGuire invited her to step into his office. He was all too willing to help the Astrowives sort out their problems. After all, he was trained for this sort of thing. Maybe a group therapy session?

Gratia thanked him very much for his time. She walked right out of the Manned Spacecraft Center, having gotten cold feet about knocking on Kraft’s door. She and Harriet Eisele did end up forming the Survival Group with Terry, which tried to address the wives’ marital woes in a responsible manner. It was not officially sanctioned by NASA and met clandestinely in the wives’ homes. So the soap-opera, roller-coaster life of being an astronaut wife continued.

“I was looking at the book
Astronauts and Their Families
just the other day,” said Wally Schirra, who’d left the program after his Apollo 7 flight, “and I was really shocked how few of those guys were married to those women anymore.” Out of the Mercury Seven, the New Nine, and the Fourteen space families, only seven couples would stay together.

“Our marriage has only lasted so long because you were away half of the time,” ribbed Jo.

Wally and Jo had traded their Timber Cove home for the fresh Rocky Mountain air of Colorado. They stuck together; so did Louise and Alan, and Annie and John. The Mercury wives had been through a lot together. Some were just now finding themselves. In 1971, Trudy Cooper finally became a Powder Puffer, flying in the Powder Puff Derby, sponsored by Virginia Slims. The cigarette’s slogan, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” was the theme of the year’s race.

Two days before the fourth anniversary of Gus’s death in the fire, January 27, 1971, Betty Grissom filed a lawsuit suing NASA’s largest contractor, North American Rockwell, for $10 million for negligence in the building of Gus’s Apollo 1 spacecraft, breaking the code of silence among the space widows. Producers from the
Today
show invited Betty to come to New York and appear on the show to talk about the lawsuit. Betty pleaded her case to America, and hoped that the other two Apollo 1 fire widows, Pat White and Martha Chaffee, might join her in her cause—but in the press they “declined” to jump aboard her lawsuit. Nevertheless, when Betty accepted an out-of-court settlement of $350,000, shared with her sons, Pat and Martha were given comparable settlements.

Hate mail flooded Betty’s mailbox. “You said on the
Today
show that you have received no negative comments in regard to your lawsuit, well, you now have mine,” wrote one crank from Chicago. Another suggested, “Go to Russia and stay!!” The wife of a North American employee wrote, “You are nothing more than a money-hungry, stupid, selfish female and I’m very glad I don’t know you.”

Luckily, Betty received other letters praising her efforts as a liberated woman taking on the establishment. Betty would never forget what Gus had once told her: “You know, you’re really the astronaut in this family.”

In the summer of 1969, Rene Carpenter, who had always been forthcoming with the press, told the Houston column Big City Beat that she had “no plans whatsoever for a divorce.” She added, “It’s obvious that Scott and I are separated.”

After Sealab III, Scott resigned from being an aquanaut and treaded the waters of private enterprise with his manned underwater consulting firm, which had its offices on the West Coast. He met the twenty-something daughter of a famous Hollywood film producer, Hal Roach, who ran the “Lot of Fun” where they used to shoot Laurel and Hardy films.

In 1972, Rene was given her own television show. She was no longer married to Scott. She’d spent a decade in the limelight in the role of an astronaut wife, but over the years had found her own voice and convictions. Now she was unshakable. She paused a moment as she put on the huge rose-tinted glasses Gloria Steinem had made popular, then entered the TV studio of
Everywoman
, her feminist television talk show. Its mission was “to record the current revolution, to present women who are changing their lifestyles.”

Along with hosting guests such as the Continental Airlines flight attendants who confessed how the slogan “We really move our tail for you” made them feel like prostitutes, Rene attacked Barbie and unblushingly displayed a collection of birth control devices to her audience, including a diaphragm. The camera zoomed in tight.

“This is the greatest moment on television,” thought Rene.

She was devoted to women’s empowerment, and remained unfazed when one of her influential Washington pals said, “That’s the most disgusting thing I ever saw.”

Epilogue

The Reunion

I
think we look like Stepford Wives, don’t you?” said Jane Dreyfus, formerly Jane Conrad, looking at an old photo. “Because we all tried to be so calm and so cool and everything, but we were a far cry from Stepford Wives.”

“We lived through this amazing time. It’s like people who’ve been shipwrecked together,” said Clare Whitfield, the ex-wife of Rusty, the “hippie” astronaut. “They were like rock stars. It was sickening.” All the same, it was absolutely thrilling.

“It was hard for them to come home,” admitted Faye Stafford. “Who could ever compete with the Moon? I was lucky if I could come in second.”

“I was in big-time denial,” said another Astrowife. “Somebody else might be screwing around, but of course my husband wasn’t.”

“There were people there all the time, from sunup to sundown. I was always so grateful for that,” said Susan Borman. She had finally gone through rehab for her alcoholism.

In 1991 the first reunion of the Astronaut Wives Club, now rechristened the Original Wives Club (and affectionately nicknamed the K-I-Ts for Keepers-In-Touch), met in Deer Valley, Utah. Two decades had passed since the last mission to the Moon, enough time that the women were now ready to share many of the feelings and fears they couldn’t during the missions. Many were now divorced, trying to make their own way in the world and support their kids. Some were suffering from financial hardship, others from broken hearts.

The wives had talked about a reunion for a long time, but actually pulling it off was not easy. In the mid-eighties, a reunion had been planned for the New Nine wives. A few months before, Pat White, Marilyn Lovell, and Susan Borman met for a girls’ weekend down in Florida, where one of their husbands was on a business trip.

It had been many years since the three could simply walk across a lawn to share a cigarette, a cup of coffee, tears, and talk. They were up late into the night listening to Pat’s heartbreaking confession. Ed’s death in the Apollo 1 fire still haunted her after all these years. She’d remarried a Houston oil tycoon, but she was depressed and had attempted suicide on more than one occasion. Marilyn and Susan did everything they could to comfort her, and made her promise she would reach out to them if she had even an inkling of those awful thoughts again. She was about to become a grandmother, and they imagined that would bring some new joy into her life. And there was the reunion of the New Nine wives to look forward to in only a few months’ time.

The weekend before the reunion, Pat committed suicide. The news was devastating. They all believed her to be the final victim of the Apollo 1 fire.

Finally, in the fall of 1991, the astronaut wives, from all the different groups, met for the first big reunion since the end of the Apollo program. Their get-together in Deer Valley resembled a launch party from the “good old days”—an expression that was truer than not, though it still caused some eyes to roll. Back then, each wife was essentially in her own orbit, alone without a tether. None felt she could share her deepest feelings. As Marge Slayton once reflected, “You didn’t talk about your personal life—everyone was happily married, everything was lovely.”

“Those were the golden years. All the wives were thrilled, proud, and happy,” said Joan Aldrin. On the Apollo 11 heroes’ “Giant Step” world tour, traveling alongside the other Moon couples, Joan had watched as Buzz went deeper and deeper into a depression. Returning to Earth, her husband, who later inspired Disney’s Buzz Lightyear of
Toy Story
(and MTV’s original logo), felt that he no longer had structure in his life, with no one telling him what to do and no one sending him on a mission. He eventually crash-landed, having, in his words, “a good old American nervous breakdown.” (Pat and Mike Collins’s marriage is the only one of the Apollo 11 Moon landing crew that survived.)

For the reunion, Susan Borman and Jan Evans arrived with chili (made in Jan’s kitchen and flown in for the occasion) and groceries a day ahead of everyone else, and helped prepare for the arrivals. Drinks were served in Gemini and Apollo glasses, the kind once procured at gas stations or knickknack shops at Cape Kennedy. They raised their glasses to being together, and to those no longer with them.

Annie Glenn, now a senator’s wife, had not been able to make it. Still, all the wives were extremely proud of her. Annie had overcome her stutter. In 1973 an episode of the
Today
show had featured a clinic that offered a new approach. Annie saw it and signed herself in.

It was an intensive treatment, for many hours a day. At the end, when she phoned John, he could hardly believe it was his Annie. “John,” she said, “today we went to a shopping center and went shopping. And I could ask for things. Imagine that.”