The Astronaut Wives Club Part 7

He experienced weightlessness, which Alan and Gus had only tasted a few moments of, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world to him: "I think I have finally found the element in which I belong." He radioed to the ground when he spotted some fascinating glowing "fireflies," which conjured up theories of minuscule extraterrestrial life at Mission Control.

But there was a problem, one so threatening that ground control kept the full extent of it from the astronaut. The metal shield protecting his capsule from burning up in the atmosphere upon reentry was registering a warning signal. If the heat shield failed to deploy, John would be incinerated.

At one point during his reentry before landing, there was nothing but silence from his capsule; all signals to the Earth were lost.

Finally, a giant fireball dropped through the sky, rainbow contrails streaming behind it. John's peppermint-striped parachute was the most wonderful sight he, and Annie, had ever seen. His capsule was hoisted safely aboard the aircraft carrier Randolph before he got out, to make dang sure it didn't sink like Gus's. As soon as he had the opportunity, he switched his handheld air-conditioning device from his left hand to his right. He'd worked out this signal with Annie, in the expectation that the television cameras would record it. The s.p.a.ce-age briefcase changing hands was his way to tell her, "I love you."

A few days later in New York City, Annie sat high on the back of a convertible riding along downtown Manhattan's Canyon of Heroes next to her husband, America's new hero. It was the biggest ticker-tape parade since Charles Lindbergh's. This was Annie's sort of publicity. She didn't have to say a word. In a Jackie-inspired crimson suit and matching pillbox hat, she waved to the crowds and smiled away. In all the cities they traveled to-New York, Chicago, and Washington-they were welcomed with a blizzard of ticker tape and confetti. The other astronauts and their wives were waving from their own cars, all part of the parades because John had insisted, "They don't go, I don't go."

Squaresville

Like Betty Crocker and Mickey Mouse, John Glenn was now a household name. NASA was astounded at how great a hero he had become. His Friendship 7 mission was America's greatest victory in the s.p.a.ce race so far, packing more of a punch than Alan Shepard's first s.p.a.ceflight. Deke Slayton was scheduled to orbit the Earth next, but suddenly, perhaps realizing just how valuable their astronauts were, NASA decided it couldn't take the chance. The s.p.a.ce agency had chosen Deke to be an astronaut despite his heart murmur, but the possibility of it acting up, no matter how small, was a risk that NASA no longer wanted to take.

Deke was outraged. Dr. Bill Douglas, the NASA flight surgeon, had said he was A-OK to go up, and Deke was more than ready to go. But it just wasn't going to happen. To make matters worse, the Air Force followed NASA's lead and grounded him from flying planes. Marge was heartbroken that her Deke, all muscle and maleness, who drove his Corvette flat out at 120 mph, had been grounded.

One morning, sitting alone at home with the news, she just had to do something. The rotary phone on the kitchen wall beckoned. Oh, what the h.e.l.l.

She picked it up and asked the operator to place a call to President Kennedy. Yeah right, lady. The girl balked until Marge informed her she was an astronaut wife and it was a matter of national security. Finally connected to the White House, Marge was put on the line with a presidential aide.

"I'm sorry, but I would like to talk to the president."

The aide was very understanding. He said he knew the president would very much like to speak to Marge, too, but unfortunately he was in a meeting.

Marge had to tell her story to someone, so she explained to the aide how NASA had selected "these extra special men who were specimens of health and strength and all good things," and now they were breaking their promise, saying, "Oooops! We made a mistake!" As far as Marge was concerned, she was ready to shoot Deke up into orbit herself. She told the aide as much, and also that she didn't think President Kennedy could possibly be aware of this injustice.

That night the other astronaut wives gathered at Marge's house to comfort her. "I guess he was glad," said Marge about Deke's reaction to the phone call. "In fact, I wish I could have called G.o.d." Marge and her sob sisters cleaned out the liquor supply and Marge composed a press comment for the next morning. But no one ever called for a statement. Well, at least no one called Marge.

She and Jo Schirra sat at Marge's kitchen counter the next morning, smoking and crying. The two women had become extremely close over the past three years, and considered each other best friends. Although Jo's Wally had been Deke's backup and the natural replacement, Wally hadn't been given the flight. Scott Carpenter had. It was just so unfair. Marge and Jo had no idea why such decisions were made, handed down from on high by NASA. Why wasn't Wally kept on as next in line? Marge and Jo smoked more cigarettes and held ice cubes in dishrags to their puffy eyes. Seeing each other in such a sad state made the eye faucets turn on again. They were in the mood to cry for just as long as they wanted. This upset was rough on all of them, but they tried not to let feelings of unfairness and jealousy come between them. "Tough days for us gals, but we didn't let it louse up our relationship," said Marge. "The men had their job to do and we had our friendship to protect."

On Aurora 7, set to take off on May 24, 1962, Scott would be repeating John's flight, orbiting Earth three times, in addition to carrying out some new experiments. The Carpenters had decided that their kids should go to Cocoa Beach to see Scott's launch, so Rene called Shorty Powers and informed him of her plan ("the rebel," joked one of the wives). Rene would be the first wife to view her husband's launch.

Shorty didn't like a wife dictating her own plan for the mission, especially after Annie went rogue with the LBJ press opportunity. NASA expected the wives to do as they were told.

Rene asked Shorty to keep her plans under wraps; she didn't want a circus, the press hounding her.

"Oh, yeah, Rene. We'll take care of you," said Shorty. Then he proceeded to inform all the networks. Rene didn't let Shorty in on any more secrets.

When she got down to Cocoa Beach, she wore big sungla.s.ses and tied a scarf around her head because she'd been warned that the news had stakeout cars along the Strip.

It seemed excessive, but coverage of an Astrowife was hot property and could be sold around the world.

Rene was determined to write her own Life cover profile about the tense hours she spent during Scott's launch and flight. It had become the tradition that each wife got a cover profile to coincide with her man going into s.p.a.ce, and Rene could better describe what was going through her mind during Scott's flight than any ghostwriter.

She had been displeased with the prelaunch cover profile on Scott. Loudon Wainwright had written a more "authentic" take on an astronaut than he ever had previously.

Painting a portrait of Scott's young years in Colorado, Loudon had written how Scott had "filched a pair of tiger-eye taillights" as a kid when growing up in Boulder. Scott was known among the astronauts to go out on the beach alone and strum his guitar under the Moon, and it was this sensitive nature that Loudon touched upon in his article. Loudon wrote, "He is also concerned, in the words of Robert Frost, with his own 'inner weather.'" Inner weather? "I think I'd like to go to a beautiful unspoiled island and get back to basics," Scott said in Life. "There I'd just take root and grow like another tree." A tree? To readers of the time, this sort of earthy navel-gazing was dangerously close to the terrain of the dreaded beatnik, the current scourge of upstanding America. Life had recently done a glossy portrait of what they deemed the cla.s.sic beatnik lifestyle, the stereotypical cool cat and his chick decked out in black turtlenecks, lounging around in Life's mock-up set of "The Well-Equipped Pad," a cold-water flat complete with a single bare bulb and a set of bongo drums. In the pages of the wives' first Life cover three years earlier, the magazine had pitted Squaresville against Beatsville, and there was no question which side NASA wanted their astronauts on.

Rene had her own flight plan for the day. Up early, she and the kids all talked to Scott one last time on the phone as Ralph Morse from Life snapped away. Then they got dressed and went out to the beach to watch the launch.

Scott's Aurora 7 capsule careened into the sky. Scott had named the capsule himself. Aurora happened to be the G.o.ddess of the dawn, but the real reason he picked the name was because he'd grown up on Aurora Street in Boulder.

Ralph shot Rene on the beach, against the morning sun. Was that sunburst he captured in the twin mirrors of Rene's wraparound aviator sungla.s.ses the reflection of Scott's rocket riding a tail of fire? What a shot!

Inside, the live television updates used a cartoon drawing of a man in a s.p.a.ce helmet to represent Scott as if he were a comic book hero. As ground control saw it, Scott seemed to be having the time of his life up there, snapping photos with his Ha.s.selblad camera and performing the experiments the scientists had set up for him. He was the first astronaut after John to sample s.p.a.ce food. He squeezed some radioactive food into his mouth from a toothpaste-like tube. The NASA doctors would later track this Spam glowworm as it snaked its way through his system. Scott made the fascinating discovery that his friend John's glimmering "fireflies" weren't forms of extraterrestrial life at all, but in fact were urine particles, frozen after being ejected from the s.p.a.cecraft via a condom-like device attached to a tube. Fascinating!

While Scott appeared to be playing tourist up there with his Ha.s.selblad, using his rocket boosters to position his s.p.a.cecraft just so, he didn't seem overly concerned with the repeated warnings from the ground that he was using up a dangerous amount of fuel. When it was time for him to realign and burn back into Earth's atmosphere, he barely had enough fuel left to hit the proper trajectory to come home. There was silence for what seemed an eternity. "I'm afraid...we may have...lost an astronaut," reported CBS's Walter Cronkite. After a nail-biting hour, Cronkite, a.k.a. the Voice of Doom, updated his report. A member of the Puerto Rican Air National Guard had spotted Scott in his life raft, hands behind his head, snacking on leftover s.p.a.ce food.

"Well, it started out like Buck Rogers and wound up like Robinson Crusoe," said Uncle Walter.

Wearing a navy blue skirt and white middy blouse, and holding a red scarf, Rene stood before the newsmen on a stage set up for her post-flight press conference at Patrick Air Force Base. "I was dry-eyed the whole day," she said. "I'm not a brooding person."

The newsmen wanted to know if she had said any prayers, referring to a statement Scott had already made that he wasn't going to pray before his flight because it was presumptuous to pray for oneself. "I feel the same way as Scott," said Rene, and offered the reporters something more substantial than the wives' usual Primly Stable routine.

"I have to say, that clip you get of the woman in front of the house is such an innocuous, brief thing. Every woman has her own ident.i.ty. She's not just the apple-pie thing waiting back home and she's probably had to take a tranquilizer pill to step out in front. I want to say that the effort involved in one of these missions is that, at the end, we often feel emotionally drained. We tend to fall back on the comfortable phrases and words, like 'happy, proud, and thrilled,' and we feel so much more."

Though Scott hadn't lost his capsule, he had wasted so much fuel that he overshot his landing by 250 miles. Flight director Chris Kraft vowed Scott would never fly again. When Kraft saw a photo of Scott in the morning paper floating casually in his raft, it made him furious all over again.

As for the president, Kennedy had Air Force One fly the Carpenters out to Colorado, where there were various celebrations including a parade in Denver and a hometown one in Boulder. Then there was the White House visit, and afterward, since she had not been there, Jackie personally invited Rene and her daughters back to join her for afternoon tea.

Oh, Jackie. Her hair was perfect, her skin powdered, her eyes feline. So statuesque in her lavender silk dress. Her amethyst brooch glittered.

Jackie's private sitting room was furnished with French antiques, and the walls displayed eighteenth-century French drawings, and seascapes by the nineteenth-century French artist Eugene Boudin. The White House had recently been given some paintings by the French post-Impressionist Odilon Redon. Mon dieu! Everything here was so French. Jackie had a cabal of designers at her beck and call, most prominently Oleg Ca.s.sini. For political reasons, Jackie had chosen the French-born American fashion designer to design her state wardrobe.

Before her tea with Rene, Jackie changed into a different dress, one almost identical to the one Rene wore, which Rene's seamstress had made, inspired by a magazine photo of Jackie.

Everything was perfectly ch.o.r.eographed by Jackie, as if it were effortless, down to the simple tray of iced tea that the waiter brought out for their tete-a-tete in the garden. The tourists pressed their faces against the gates, hoping for a glimpse of Camelot. Although the First Lady couldn't see all of those tourists clamoring for a peek into her world-they were blocked by the hedges and expanse of lawn-she was certainly aware of them. Jackie probably felt a little trapped. Perhaps she was lonely for female companionship.

After being an astronaut wife for three years, and being covered by Life, Rene, like Jackie, knew just what it was like to have reporters and photographers wanting to capture almost every moment of her life. Jackie reminded Rene about Life's coverage of the astronauts' first White House visit after Alan Shepard's flight.

"You couldn't have missed that rear-end shot of me and my bow legs, walking with Mrs. Shepard," remarked Jackie.

The revelation that even the First Lady was insecure about her looks made one like her even more.

Jackie asked Rene to stay for dinner, and the two mothers and their children ate a perfect candlelit meal. To cap off the evening, they went downstairs to pay a surprise visit to the Oval Office. President Kennedy was working late. Jackie fixed his tie, and soon the First Couple escorted their guests to a waiting limousine, and hugged Rene and her daughters good night.

s.p.a.ce City, U.S.A.

The seven s.p.a.ce families arrived to the newly named s.p.a.ce City, U.S.A. on the Fourth of July weekend, 1962. Houston was throwing them a big welcoming parade, to be followed by a Texas barbecue extravaganza. NASA was moving to Texas, with its huge Manned s.p.a.cecraft Center being built twenty-five miles south of Houston on one thousand acres of land (a former Girl Scout camp) donated by Rice University, thanks to Lyndon Johnson's cronies at Humble Oil.