The Right Stuff (46 page)

After a while, there were Herb Snouts and Gurney Frinks all over the place and the huge Hereford joints were sliding down every leg and splashing in the puddles of whiskey on the floor, and five thousand spectators watched their struggling jaws, and the smoke and the babble filled the air and the children screamed for mercy and relief. Just then, when the madness seemed to have outdone itself once and for all, a band struck up and the houselights dimmed and a spotlight searched out the stage and a show began and a mighty hearty voice boomed out over the p.a. system: "Ladies and gentlemen… in honor of our mighty special guests and mighty fine new neighbors, we are proud to present… Miss Sally Rand!"

The band struck up "Sugar Blues"… much raunchy high-hatting of the trumpets…
Oh, owwwwwwwwwwahwahwah
… and out into the spotlight pranced an ancient woman with yellow hair and a white mask of a face… Her flesh looked like the meat of a casaba melon in the winter… She carried some enormous plumed fans… She began her famous striptease act… Sally Rand!… who had been an aging but still famous stripper when the seven brave lads were in their teens, during the Depression…
Oh-owwwwwwwww wahwahwah
… and she winked and minced about and took off a little here and covered up a little there and shook her ancient haunches at the seven single-combat warriors. It was electrifying. It was quite beyond sex, show business, and either the sins or rigors of the flesh. It was two o'clock in the afternoon on the Fourth of July, and the cows burned on, and the whiskey roared
goddamned glad to see you
and the Venus de Houston shook her fanny in an utterly baffling blessing over it all.

Just three years ago Rene had still been in that dogged military wife's frame of mind in which you gladly spent three days sanding a slab of monkeypod, until your hands were raw, to save the fabulous sum of ninety-five dollars. When Scott had run up a fifty-dollar telephone bill calling her from Washington, Albuquerque, and Dayton during the testing back in 1959, it had seemed like the end of the world. Fifty dollars! That was the food budget for
a month
! That was three years ago. Now she was in the living room of her own house—custom-made, not a tract home—on a lake, underneath the live oak and the pines. She and Annie Glenn had flown down to Houston one weekend from Washington and picked out lots, just like that, but they turned out to be in the best spot in the vicinity of the Space Center, a development called Timber Cove. The Schirras and Grissoms had moved into the same neighborhood. With admirable foresight, as it turned out, they had built their houses so that they opened up in the back to look out on the water and the trees, while on the side facing the street they were practically blank walls of brick. They had barely moved the first stick of furniture in when the tour buses started arriving, plus the freelance tourists in cars. They were extraordinary, these people. Sometimes you could hear the loudspeaker inside the bus. You could hear the tour guide saving, "This is the home of Scott Carpenter, the second Mercury astronaut to fly in earth orbit in outer space." Sometimes people would get out and grab handfuls of grass from your lawn. They'd get back on the bus with the miserable little green sprouts sticking out of their fingers. They believed in magic. Sometimes people would drive up, get out, stare at the house as if waiting for something to happen, and then walk up to the door and ring the bell and say: "We hate to bother you, but do you suppose you could send one of your children out so we could have our pictures taken with him?" And yet they weren't like the fans of movie stars. There was no frenzy. They thought they were really being considerate by not asking you to come out for the snapshot session yourself. They really meant it. They had more of the attitude of being at a living shrine.

This was the first house that Rene and Scott had ever built, the first house that had really seemed theirs. They had turned the page, all right. Things happened so fast now. At one point it looked as if they were going to be
given
houses completely furnished! The best that $60,000 could buy in 1962, at wholesale! A month after John Glenn's flight, a Houston man named Frank Sharp presented to Leo DeOrsey, as the fellows' business advisor, the following proposition: To show their pride in the astronauts and the new Manned Space Center, the builders, developers, furniture dealers, and others involved in the suburban home business would give each of the seven brave lads one of the homes being built for the 1962 Parade of Homes in Sharpstown. Sharpstown was a housing tract that Frank Sharp himself had been the impresario for. The Parade of Homes was a row of model houses that contractors who expected to do business in Sharpstown were putting up by way of advertising their wares. Sharp would contribute the land, a $10,000 lot to each astronaut; the contractors would contribute the houses; and the furniture and department stores would furnish them from top to bottom. The seven astronauts and their families would live right there on Rowan Drive in the Country Club Terrace section of Sharpstown, between Richmond Road and Bellaire Boulevard, in $60,000 worth of home and hearth each. Since Sharpstown at this point was nothing but maps, signs, bunting, Englishy thatchy tweedy-sounding street names and thousands of acres of wind-swept boondocker gumbo scrubland, Astronauts Row wouldn't be a bad way to start filling in the spaces. Sharp was the Big Howdy through and through, a self-made man and already quite a prominent citizen, close to the mayor, Representative Albert Thomas, Governor John Connally, and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. He underwrote annual golf trophies and things of that sort. He had the right credentials, or the Houston version thereof, and so DeOrsey had talked it over with the boys, and they all decided the deal was okay. It had nothing to do with the space program and didn't obligate them to anything. It was just an unencumbered
goodie
, pure and simple. None of them actually wanted to live in Sharpstown, from what they had heard about the area. It was too far from the NASA facility, for a start. So they figured they would accept the houses, shake hands with one and all, and then…
sell them
. John Glenn was as agreeable to this type of goodie as anybody else. It was that age-old concern of the military officer with the extras. John had been in the Marines for nearly twenty years now. He was too far down that road, had been through too many measly paychecks, to decondition himself anytime soon when it came to the perks, the extras, the irresistible and perfectly honorable and authorized goodies. Therefore, not even John, for all his quite sincere sense of morality, could comprehend the furor that was erupting. Gilruth and Webb and everybody else in the NASA hierarchy were blowing fuses over Frank Sharp's Parade of the Homes of the Astronauts. And that was only the start. It had touched off a true emergency: the
Life
deal was under review! From what Scott and the others had picked up, the President himself was considering putting an end to
all
commercial exploitation of astronaut status. The rest of the press had resented the
Life
deal from the beginning and had argued that it cast a venal shadow on the astronauts' patriotic service. Sharpstown showed you where the exploitation route could lead…

Sharpstown was one thing… but a threat to the
Life
deal—now, there you had something serious!
Unthinkable
was the word. The seven pilots, steeped in the honorable goodies tradition of the military, had begun to look upon the
Life
deal in the same way they looked upon the military pension that you rated after twenty years. It was an immutable condition of the service! It was part of the drill! Regulation issue! Covered in the manual! All holes in the argument were immediately vulcanized by the heat of the emotion. This was no time to sit around waiting for the orders to be posted on the bulletin board. It was only three weeks before Scott's flight, and he was in the thick of training, but on May 3 most of the others went to see Lyndon Johnson at his ranch in Texas to try to straighten the matter out. Webb was there, too. They had quite a conclave. Lyndon Johnson gave them some fatherly discourses on private lives and public responsibility, twisting his great hands around in the air in front of him, as if making imaginary snowballs. This pained him as much as it did them, and so on. The hell of it was that neither Johnson nor Webb would miss a minute's sleep if the
Life
deal was canceled forthwith. They had both been burned by the astronaut-Life connection during the incident at the Glenns' house in January. In fact, if it hadn't been for Glenn—

Fortunately, there was no getting around John. By now, three months after his flight, John had ascended to a status that only a Biblical scholar could fully appreciate. John was the triumphant single-combat warrior. He had risked his life to challenge the mighty Soviet Integral on the high ground. Through his skill and courage he had neutralized the enemy's advantage, and the tears of joy and gratitude and awe still flowed. In the Bible, first Book of Samuel, eighteenth chapter, it is written that after David slew Goliath and the Philistines fled in terror and the Israelites achieved a mighty victory, King Saul took David into the royal household and gave him the status of an adopted son. It is also written that wherever Saul and David went, people thronged the streets, and the women sang of the thousands Saul had slain and the tens of thousands David had slain. "And Saul was very wroth, and the saying displeased him; and he said, They have ascribed unto David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed
but
thousands: and
what
can he have more but the kingdom? And Saul eyed David from that day forward." And President Kennedy eyed John Glenn. The President had begun to regale John and bring him into the Kennedy family orbit. John was the sort of man a president needed to keep squarely within his camp. A vice-president, too, for that matter. Johnson had gone out of his way to be friendly to John and Annie, and they had genuinely begun to like the man. They wound up inviting Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, for dinner at their house in Arlington, on John's fortieth birthday. And the Johnsons accepted, just like that. Rene and Scott were also invited. "What on earth are you going to serve?" Rene said to Annie.

"My ham loaf," said Annie.

"Ham loaf!"

"Why not? Everybody likes it. I bet you Lady Bird asks for the recipe, too."

The Johnsons stayed until almost midnight. Lyndon had his coat off and his sleeves rolled up and was having a rare old time for himself. As they left, Rene heard Lady Bird ask Annie for the recipe for her ham loaf.

One day John was out on the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, harbor, aboard the President's yacht, the
Honey Fitz
, when the subject of the
Life
contract came up. The President wanted to know what John thought of one particular argument against the
Life
arrangement that was frequently presented; namely, that a soldier in battle—a Marine at Iwo Jima, for example—ran just as great a risk of death as any astronaut and yet did not expect recompense from Time, Inc. John said yes, that was so, but suppose that soldier's or Marine's private life, his background, his house, his way of living, his wife, his children, his thoughts, his hopes, his dreams, became of such intense interest that the press camped on his doorstep and he had to live under glass, as it were. Then he should have the right to receive compensation. The President nodded sagaciously, and the
Life
contract was saved, right there on the
Honey Fitz
.

Well, thanks to the
Life
deal, Scott and Rene could now get mortgage money and afford to build a new house in a nice area like Timber Cove. Or thanks to that and the panting eagerness of the developers to have astronauts in their new developments. It was the best advertisement they could have. They gave the boys close to at-cost deals on the land and the houses, and they let them have the mortgage money at 4 percent, with very little down payment. And for astronauts like John and Scott, who had now flown, they couldn't do enough.

The contractors and developers and the public generally thought Scott and his flight were terrific… but within NASA something… was going on. Scott and Rene had both begun to detect it, although no one ever said anything openly. Scott had gotten all the medals and all the parades and the trip to the White House, but something was up, and not even the other wives would tell Rene what it was.

Scott had flown on May 24, three months. after John. Deke Slayton had been scheduled to take the flight, but then NASA made it known that Deke had a medical problem: idiopathic atrial fibrillation. This was a condition in which the electrical firing sequence of the heart went out of sync occasionally, causing an irregular pulse and a slight lowering of the pumping capacity of the organ.
Idiopathic
meant that the causes were unknown. The condition had been discovered, said NASA, during centrifuge runs in August 1959. Slayton had been examined at the Philadelphia Navy Hospital and the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine at San Antonio, where the verdict—or so Slayton was told—was that the condition was a minor anomaly and not serious enough to cost him his job as astronaut. But, in fact, one of the Air Force doctors at San Antonio, a highly regarded cardiologist, had written a letter to Webb recommending that Slayton not be assigned to a flight, since atrial fibrillation, idiopathic or not, did reduce the efficiency of the heart to some degree.

Webb just kept the letter on file. Slayton was assigned, in November 1961, to the second orbital flight. Early in January Webb ordered a complete reassessment of the man's heart condition. His argument was that Slayton was an Air Force pilot on loan to NASA, and an Air Force cardiologist had recommended that he not be used for flights. Therefore, the case should be reviewed. Slayton's case now went before two boards, one made up of high-ranking NASA doctors and the other made up of eight doctors convened by the Air Force Surgeon General. Both approved Slayton for the approaching Mercury flight. Nevertheless, Webb bucked the case up to three Washington cardiologists, including Eugene Braunwald of the National Institutes of Health, as a sort of blue-ribbon panel. He also requested an opinion from Paul Dudley White, who had become famous as Eisenhower's cardiologist. Why this was happening so late in the game, three months after Deke had been assigned to the flight, no one could figure. All four doctors came to the same conclusion, apparently out of sheer common sense as much as anything else. Here was a case concerning a pilot with a minor heart defect. He could probably make a space flight or any other flight with no problems. Nevertheless, from the administrator on down, the entire space agency seemed to be agonizing and oscillating and spinning its wheels over the matter, which by now had accumulated a file as thick as your arm. So if Project Mercury had plenty of ready and willing astronauts with no cardiovascular anomalies at all, why not use one of them and have done with it? That was it, so far as Webb was concerned. It was now the middle of March. Two months ago, in his set-to with Glenn, James E. Webb had run up against
astropower
and had lost. This time he had his way. Slayton was off the flight.