The Astronaut Wives Club Part 20

Dodie signed up for the Baysh.o.r.e Club, which set her back a pricey $200 a year. Unlike the Astrowives, she didn't receive a special discount. Dodie could often be seen at the club, clutching a white terry-cloth towel in one hand, her cigarette holder in the other, as she pedaled away on one of the club's stationary bikes. It was h.e.l.l, but she got terrific material.

The wives seemed to be living pretty large in Togethersville, what with all the freebies and goodies they were offered. Even so, they were competing to win the prizes in the club's membership drive-postiches, and falls to add to their hair to create the currently fashionable cascading curls. The grand prize was a tacky cowboy painting that reminded Dodie of a bad Andrew Wyeth. To that end, Dodie gave her "referral" to Jane Conrad, who in turn gave it to Susan Borman, who was apparently crazy about that painting. The cowboy looked like Frank.

Dodie thought she'd better pay a visit to the Bormans. Frank was about to spend Christmas in a capsule orbiting the Moon. He was the commander of Apollo 8, the first manned voyage to the Moon, scheduled for that December 1968. The Astrowives believed the mission was the nation's best hope to redeem the tumultuous year. After the a.s.sa.s.sinations of MLK and RFK and the riots in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, Nixon had won the election, but America was still in turmoil. The wives barely recognized the country they read about in Life: kids "getting high," young men burning their draft cards, women setting bras on fire, men looking like long-haired b.u.ms.

Living in Togethersville, happily trapped in the fifties, the wives might have been on birth control pills, but they were still buying the clean-cut, all-American image one hundred percent. Barbara and Gene Cernan had actually walked out of the prime seats they'd been given to the free love rock musical Hair, which had just opened on Broadway, because it featured nudity and s.e.x. They thought it was un-American. The wives didn't even seem to know that America was in total upheaval-students had taken over Columbia University, the militant Black Panthers had hijacked the civil rights movement, and radical feminists had emerged from the women's liberation movement. In June, Valerie Solanas of Sc.u.m (her Society for Cutting Up Men) had shot Andy Warhol. Though they all had plenty of cans of Campbell's stacked in their cupboards (cream of mushroom soup being a key ingredient in ca.s.seroles), most of the wives probably didn't even know who Warhol was! And forget radical feminists. What about plain, garden-variety feminists?

Were any of the wives up on the current literature of the burgeoning women's movement, from The Feminine Mystique to Gloria Steinem's Playboy Bunny expose and also the more ma.s.s-produced fare? Who couldn't help but admire Helen Gurley Brown's Cosmopolitan? As its editor in chief, Brown claimed women could have it all, "love, s.e.x, and money," while also advising them on beauty treatments that were quite a bit more modern than the Edna Wallace Hopper white clay mask. "Spread s.e.m.e.n over your face," one of Ms. Brown's pieces advised. "It's probably full of protein as sperm can eventually become babies. Makes a fine mask-and he'll be pleased."

Sometimes Dodie wanted to scream, it felt so outdated and claustrophobic here. "Togethersville can be a warm and loving family," she typed up for Life, "or just a great gelatinous blob that closes around and smothers the individual."

Docking her canoe, Dodie found her way to Frank's newly mown lawn. The two teenage Borman boys, fifteen-year-old Ed and seventeen-year-old Fred, were huge. Frank greeted her and Susan offered her a drink.

Knocking back a round and gesturing flamboyantly with her cigarette holder, Dodie was a charming guest, offering them the use of her apartment should they ever visit New York. That was clearly the wrong thing to offer Frank Borman.

The Bormans weren't like their sophisticated best friends, the Collinses. Mike and Pat were connoisseurs of French wine, readers of literature, and lovers of those old and dirty and c.r.a.ppy cities, as Frank deemed Chicago and New York. Frank felt very much at home here in Clear Lake City; he tolerated Houston because it was a new, clean city.

He even communicated in his own home via telephone, which Dodie found surpa.s.singly bizarre. Frank called upstairs to the boys to ask, inexplicably, permission to use their car to drive to a restaurant.

"Could I please borrow it, pal?"

Ed, or perhaps Fred, said okay.

At Eric's Pub on the banks of Clear Lake, they were shown to the best table by Helen, the maitre d'. She lived on an old houseboat tied up outside. Princess Grace and Prince Rainier had recently lunched here, which p.i.s.sed off Frank to no end. He'd been asked to meet them and, as a result, had missed an important meeting at NASA. Over the local specialties, Frank regaled Dodie about the future of NASA. When it became all about science and was no longer about test flying, it wouldn't interest him anymore, he declared. He only liked the flying part.

"When we get to the Moon," swore Frank, "I'm getting out."

He also shared his feelings about how the entire country was going to h.e.l.l. There were no winds of change blowing at the Bormans'. Frank couldn't stand the long hair the boys wore: it made a man look like a girl. h.e.l.l, if he got down to it, he couldn't stand long hair on a female.

Dodie was relieved to paddle toward home, a new apartment complex in Na.s.sau Bay. From the middle of Clear Lake, she could see the s.p.a.ce burbs all around her, so quiet, so isolated from the rest of the world. She paddled home as the Moon rose over Togethersville. Perhaps what was going on here was more important historically than the war in the Congo, or the riots in Paris, or even the throngs of hippies wandering around Haight-Ashbury, sleeping in Golden Gate Park. Dear G.o.d. This was where the sixties were happening. Or, for that matter, the twentieth century! The millennium? Certainly the cavemen who beheld the mysterious Moon never thought about meeting the Beatles. Nor would the computer-enhanced beings who might someday inhabit outer s.p.a.ce.

A model of composure at A.W.C. meetings, Susan Borman had to work to keep from chewing on her string of pearls in front of everyone. Susan used to be an object of envy at the Baysh.o.r.e, too, confidently doing her exercises while others were left huffing and puffing. But ever since the Apollo 1 fire, she wasn't burning out her stress on the exercise machines. n.o.body knew it at the time, but Susan had been drinking heavily. Eventually, in Susan's struggle to be "the perfect wife married to the perfect husband who was the perfect astronaut in a perfect American family raising perfect children," she became an alcoholic.

For any Astrowife, it was difficult to keep that tight, raw ball of fear inside from growing before her husband's launch. Left unchecked, she could explode like a pressure cooker. A wife could always try to confide in her husband, but as NASA insisted, an astronaut needed to be kept away from stress at home. There was no way on G.o.d's green Earth that an Astrowife like Susan would openly share her terrors with her peers at an A.W.C. meeting.

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 G.o.d, this could be me," thought Susan.

Frank had gotten to know a h.e.l.l 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 rea.s.sured 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 s.p.a.ce. "I am Flight and Flight is G.o.d" 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 s.p.a.cecraft 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed, 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, b.u.t.tery 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.cecraft, but soon he started to vomit, and green particles floated into other parts of the s.p.a.ceship. 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.p.a.ce. "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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.cecraft'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.