Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (61 page)

Somewhere around this same time Shepard began to explore what he now considered an even greater challenge than making money: giving money away. In addition to rededicating himself to the Mercury Seven Foundation, he began working with friends in Houston to raise money for a school for deaf children. He helped raise money for the Houston-based Charles A. Lindbergh Fund and secretly gave money to help a child in Seabrook, Texas, suffering from leukemia. He also agreed to chair a golf tournament sponsored by the Loctite Corp. in Detroit (on whose board of directors he sat), which rais
ed money for scholarships to send underprivileged kids to a weeklong space camp at Kennedy Space Center.

On top of that, he regularly gave money to friends—including a few astronauts—to help them out of a bind or help them get started in business. He helped his Apollo 14 colleague Stu Roosa establish his own Coors distributorship and gave one of his secondhand cars to a former NASA colleague. When his parents’ longtime housekeeper’s well water dried up, he called and arranged for a new well to be drilled, on his tab; later, when the housekeeper’s husband died, he sent her $5,000.

Shepard was especially dogged in his efforts to collect donations for the Mercury Seven Foundation. He gave a few thousand of his own money here and there. Anything he
earned from one of his golf tournaments or the rare speaking engagement, he donated to the foundation. “He didn’t take one penny for himself,” Landwirth recalled.

At first the foundation had been run by a part-time, $18,000-a-year employee. But Shepard decided it needed a full-time manager and cajoled his friend, the AP reporter Howard Benedict, who was about to retire, into taking over as the foundation’s manager. Benedict found he couldn’t turn Shepard down and agreed to work twenty-five hours a week for the foundation. But as Shepard began touring the country, hosting fund-raisers and asking friends and corporations for money, Benedict’s part-time job became a seriously full-time commitment. After giving just seven $1,000 scholarships in 198
6, the foundation was handing out ten $7,500 scholarships annually by 1990, and across its first fifteen years would dole out more than $1 million. “He became passionate about it,” Benedict recalled. “I think it was a legacy he wanted to leave. It was his baby.”

The foundation was renamed the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and in 1990 moved to Titusville, a small town beside Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s coast. The foundation inspired the creation of another charitable group, the Space Camp Foundation, and an increasing flow of donations helped fund the construction of an Astronaut Hall of Fame and gift shop, whose profits would go back into the scholarship foundation. The other surviving Mercury Seven were amazed that Shepard, a man known for occasional self-indulgence and conceit, was now throwing himself at philanthropy. “He was very generous,
” Schirra said. “But he kept it to himself.” Said Glenn: “Al was the one who really persisted and got that thing going.”

Glenn and others noticed that something had considerably mellowed in the formerly hyper and combative Icy Commander. The raw whiskey of Shepard’s younger self had ag
ed and matured into a smooth and smoky bourbon. And yet, like a teenager with a new car, he became famous among his circle of friends for popping up in their cities—Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Cocoa Beach—and calling unannounced in search of some fun, a few drinks, dinner, or a round of golf. “Hey, what’re you doing?” he’d say, without ever identifying himself on the phone. “Let’s do something.”

One of the other twelve moonwalkers once said: “I think almost everyone who went to the moon became more like they really were down deep inside.” Said another: “You really end up caring for this planet.” Shepard never opened up publicly about such things, but those close to him felt that being among a handful of humans to have seen the delicate blue marble of the earth floating 250,000 miles off in the black sea of the universe did
something
to him.

Henri Landwirth certainly felt that Shepard had become a better man. In 1986, after helping create the Mercury Seven Foundation, Landwirth had started his own charitable organization, Give Kids the World. On a fifty-one acre plot of central Florida on the outskirts of Disney World, Landwirth created a wonderland where terminally ill children and their families could have ice cream sundaes for breakfast, play all day on carousels, and watch movies every night. A place of joy, but also sorrow. Landwirth’s dream was to give dying children a last chance at giddy, all-expenses-paid happiness—a f
airy tale come true. Money raised for Give Kids the World offered children and their families a week in Landwirth’s fantasy village, a break from the hospitals and doctors, a last chance to be a family before the blackness of death. Shepard began raising money for Landwirth’s project as well as his own foundation.

He would wrestle a $100,000 donation from Coca-Cola for the astronaut foundation one week. The next week he’d pressure his friends at Kmart (whose stores he had helped develop) to donate to Landwirth’s Give Kids the World. In future years, at
Shepard’s encouraging, Kmart would become one of Give Kids the World’s biggest supporters, donating millions of dollars year after year. “I saw a different Alan Shepard,” Landwirth said, “completely different from the man I’d known in the old days.”

Shepard’s friend Allen H. Neuharth, the founder of
USA
Today,
also saw a “gradual softening” in Shepard’s once-icy demeanor, and invited Shepard to sit on the boards of two Washington-based foundations endowed by the Gannett newspaper chain, the Freedom Forum and the First Amendment Center. Freedom Forum board members were each given an allotment of up to $100,000 a year to donate to the charity of their choosing. Shepard chose the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and Give Kids the World. “He had money and time, and he did what his instincts told him: to spend his time spending
his money on others,” Neuharth recalled.

Another sign of the kinder, gentler Alan Shepard was his commitment to a book project with Slayton. In 1992 Slayton began working on a book with Neil Armstrong, Howard Benedict, and NBC reporter Jay Barbree. When Armstrong backed out, Benedict asked Shepard to help out. Until then Shepard had never considered writing a book. Other astronauts had published their autobiographies or had books written about them. But whenever the idea was broached with Shepard, he shooed prospective biographers away. There was nothing he needed to share with the public that hadn’t been shared already
. But when he learned that Slayton had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and that his prospects did not look good, Shepard agreed: “If this will help Deke, I’ll do it.”

In 1993 Slayton died at the age of sixty-nine, and Shepard immediately flew to Houston to help Deke’s wife, Bobbie, make funeral arrangements.
Moonshot
came out a year later—the
New
York Times
called it a “swashbuckling” version of the space race— and Shepard vigorously promoted the book, with appearances at bookstores across the country. He knew that Slayton, w
ho’d spent twenty-three years with NASA, did not leave millions behind for his family. Shepard figured strong book sales could help Bobbie and her family. “He didn’t do all that for himself,” Bobbie recalled. “He did that for Deke and me.”

One night, about a year after Moonshot was released, Shepard met in Cocoa Beach with his Mercury Seven friends, now down to five. He, Glenn, Cooper, Carpenter, and Schirra, each of them in their late sixties or early seventies and easing toward retirement, sat at a restaurant table talking about Gus, Deke, and what they’d all do next in life.

Shepard had sold off his Texas business ventures and his Coors distributorship and consolidated his assets beneath the umbrella of Seven-Fourteen Enterprises, Inc., named for his two space flights. Then, in 1989, he and Louise exchanged their Houston apartment for the perfect semiretirement retreat, a cliff-side house at 1512 Bonaficio Drive in the exclusive, privately owned Pebble Beach community. He and Louise had fallen in love with California’s central coast in the 1950s, when they were stationed nearby—those distant days of earning $12,000 a year. Now their back deck loomed above the s
ixth, seventh, and eighth holes of the Cypress Point golf course, three of the most spectacular holes in all of golf.

He seemed perfectly content with the simple life he now lived, a life grounded by golf and charity events and Louise. He and Louise celebrated fifty years of marriage in 1995. On their back deck they could sip coffee each morning and wait for the thick Pacific fog to lift and expose the rocky shores below, the seals and the seabirds, the wind-gnarled cypress trees, the wildflowers, and all the deer and millionaires mingling on the fairways of Pebble Beach.

A round at one of Pebble Beach’s courses costs at least $350. Nonmembers often waited months for a tee time, and fanatic
s had been known to arrive at 2 A.M. to wait in front of the pro shop in hopes that one of the day’s players had canceled. Shepard could play there anytime he wanted. The Pebble Beach pro shop would call Shepard late in the day if they had an opening, and Shepard would drive down—in the sky-blue Camaro convertible he’d swapped for his Corvette—for a twilight round. Or he’d impress an old Navy buddy by getting a morning tee time ten minutes before the place officially opened.

When he wasn’t playing in his backyard he’d fly to Phoenix, Hawaii, or Palm Springs to play with friends or at a charity tournament. He and Louise often traveled to Morocco, where they’d play in King Hassan II’s annual tournament. He’d take friends or, one time, his daughter to Frank Sinatra’s house outside Palm Springs after a tournament. He once canceled plans with another friend so he could play a round with Tiger Woods.

At seventy-one, he was in perfect health, living high above the glory of Pebble Beach, flush with money, fame, and fortune, enjoying the type of retirement most men dream of. But the days of idyllic retirement would end all too soon.

In 1996 Shepard was diagnosed with leukemia.

22

“This is the toughest man I’ve ever met”

Shepard’s illness wasn’t apparent immediately. He w
as a proud man who tried to hide it, and at first he succeeded. But to those who looked closely, there were signs.

In October 1996 the Naval Academy’s athletic director, Jack Lengyl, called to tell Shepard the rowing team had purchased a new racing shell and planned to name it after him. At the christening ceremony for the
Alan B. Shepard Jr.,
Shepard stood at the podium on a dock beside College Creek and spoke for forty passionate minutes about what the Naval Academy meant to him. He placed flowers on the boat and, per tradition, poured water over the bow. The crew climbed into the boat, shoved off from the dock, and rowed off a few hundred yards. They turned around, and as they glided back pa
st the dock the crew lifted their oars into the sideways “stiff-oar” salute position. Shepard walked to the edge of the water and saluted back.

Midshipmen on the dock stood gape-mouthed as tears sprang to the eyes of the steely American hero. There was hardly a dry eye in the crowd. Afterward Shepard climbed into his limousine and told the driver to turn right instead of l
eft toward the exit. Lengyl would learn later that Shepard already knew he was sick. He wanted to tour “the Yard”—the launching pad of his Navy career—one last time. Indeed, it would be the last time he would set foot on the Naval Academy grounds.

That same year Shepard and three of his old Naval Academy classmates—including his roommate, Bob Williams—got together for two days of golf. Shepard’s swing had never been great, but this weekend it was particularly weak. No power, no distance, no “miles and miles.” Williams knew something was wrong. Shepard and his old roommate shared a cart, but Shepard spent very little time in it. Instead of riding in the cart from one shot to the next, he
ran.
It was a very strange round of golf, with Shepard swinging like an old man, then jogging a hundred yards up to his ball. Later, over drinks, Shepar
d confessed that he was sick. “But I’m going to beat this,” he said.

Also in 1996 Shepard played so poorly in his favorite golf tournament—the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, played annually in his backyard—that the tournament’s organizers decided not to invite the perennial competitor back again. The tournament, which began in the 1950s as “Bing Crosby’s Clam Bake,” was notorious for being marred by torrential rains and fierce winds, and for the wildly erratic play of some celebrity amateurs; Gerald Ford famously sprayed balls into the crowds, where many fans wore hard hats. One year Shepard watched in amazement as actor James Garner punched out a drunken heckle
r. It was one of his favorite weeks of the year.

The 1996 tournament coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Shepard’s six-iron shot on the moon, and Shepard allowed the TV reporters to interview him about that after playing a five-hole Celebrity Challenge charity event with Bill Murray, Clint Eastwood, John Denver, and Kevin Costner, who won the event. But Shepard, as usual, played poorly.
The AT&T accepted only golfers with a handicap of eighteen or less. Shepard was listed at the limit, eighteen, and across three decades at the Crosby/AT&T would annually end up with some of the worst scores of the tournament. After his lousy performance that year, tournament officials finally decided that enough was enough. He was crushed, hurt, and humiliated. The blow was especially painful because in 1997 he also learned that he wasn’t just sick. He was, indeed, dying.

At first, after some intense drug treatments and blood transfusions, the leukemia had seemed headed toward remission. Just as he had beaten back his Ménière’s disease, it had seemed for a while as if he might also beat his cancer. But the leukemia returned in full force in 1997. His confidence remained high, but the doctors’ reports told a different story. So he finally began telling his friends the truth.

One night Shepard and his record producer friend Mickey Kapp were having drinks at the Pebble Beach country club, and Kapp asked, innocently enough, how Shepard was feeling. “Well,” he said, “the docs tell me I have a touch of leukemia. But I’ll beat it.” Kapp had no words. He thought,
This is the toughest
man I’ve ever met.

Because of his age, Shepard was not a candidate for a bone marrow transplant. The best he could do was visit the local hospital, Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, for blood transfusions. He’d check in under an assumed name and have his diseased blood drained and replaced with donor blood. Then he’d walk out feeling better—he called it his twice-monthly “pinking up.” But two weeks later he’d be pale and weak again. If anyone asked, he’d say, “I’ve lived a good life, I have no regrets, I’m not afraid. Nor am I ready to stop fighting.” Instead, he traveled the country looking
for a cure. His almost desperate travels took him one day to the home of his old competitor, John Glenn.

In 1996 NASA had announced that Glenn would be granted his long-simmering wish to return to space. Unlike Shepard, Glenn was still flying planes, was in perfect health, and had convinced NASA to exploit the scientific value of sending an octogenarian into the heavens. Shepard’s record of being, at age forty-seven, the oldest spaceman had already been shattered many times over. Prior to Glenn’s return to space, the oldest astronaut had been sixty-one. But Glenn was scheduled to surpass all records. If his late 1998 space shuttle launch was a success, he would be the first seventy-eight-year-
old in space.

As part of his training, Glenn became involved with scientists at the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. When Shepard asked for his help, Glenn made some calls to leukemia experts there. He found to his dismay that there wasn’t much the NIH experts could offer. Shepard’s disease, they’d determined, was indeed incurable; it was just a matter of time before his body surrendered. Glenn did convince NIH doctors to contact Shepard’s doctors in Monterey, and they suggested tweaks in Shepard’s treatment.

In the early summer of 1998, as Glenn continued training for his space flight, Shepard agreed to a television interview to discuss Glenn’s impending return to orbit. Shepard reminisced about his own two space flights and told the CNN reporter that traveling to the moon “wasn’t that exciting.” But standing on the surface, looking down on the earth . . . that had profoundly changed his life. He had always lacked the eloquence to explain who he was, how he felt, what the earth looked like from space, and especially what the moon meant to him. Usually he didn’t see the point in ex
plaining or exposing himself. But now, with the end of life looming ahead, he offered a rare public description of how he’d stood beside his lunar module,
Antares,
waiting for Ed Mitchell to join him on the surface and “thinking about the millions and millions of people that are down there . . . trying to get along, desperately trying to get along.” The reporter seemed taken aback: “Terrific . . . That was great.”

Shepard added that he was happy his friend Glenn was getting a chance to be up there again looking down. But when the reporter asked if Shepard would like to go back up, he said, “I think I’m through,” adding, “given a good solid physical condition, I would probably say, ‘Hell, yes, I want to go again.’ But I think I’ve . . . I’m finished.”

The reporter tried a joke, encouraging Shepard to “never say never.” Shepard’s response was “Go talk to my doctor.”

A few months before that CNN interview, in late 1997, Shepard had been roasted at a celebratory dinner in the ballroom of the Peabody Hotel in Orlando, where Henri Landwirth threw an annual black-and-white gala to thank the benefactors of his Give Kids the World foundation. Landwirth always timed the event to coincide with the annual Astronaut Scholarship Foundation meeting, and Shepard and the others looked forward to the yearly reunion. In 1997 the dinner commemorated the end of Shepard’s tenure as head of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. He had realized he was too sic
k to carry on and had decided to hand the reins over to Jim Lovell. The roasters knew he was sick, but they put on a good face, digging up funny old Shepard stories from the good old days. Louise sat by his side, still lovely at seventy-four, laughing heartily and whispering now and then in his ear, asking how he felt. He’d had a blood transfusion the previous day, but a nurse stood backstage just in case.

At evening’s end, Don Engen, a former Navy test pilot and flying buddy of Shepard’s who had become head of the National Air and Space Museum, stepped to the podium. After a few jokes he announced that he had a surprise. “You’ve
been bugging me about this for years, Al,” he said. “Well, I give up . . . Apollo 14 is all yours.”

What he meant was this: The capsule that in 1971 had been Shepard’s cocoon for nine days, to and from the moon, across half a million miles, at speeds up to twenty-four thousand miles an hour, which had been on display at the Smithsonian in Washington, would finally be his. Shepard had been asking Engen for years to donate it to the scholarship foundation so that it could be displayed among the space suits, rockets, and memorabilia at its Astronaut Hall of Fame and Museum on the outskirts of Cape Kennedy. Clearly unprepared, Shepard was speechless. Tears suddenly filled his e
yes, and his large lips trembled. “Oh, honey,” Louise said, and took his hand in hers. Glenn called it “a very emotional evening.”

“People knew Al was sick,” he said. “But we didn’t know how long he had left.”

The next day the ceremony continued at the Astronaut Hall of Fame, where Engen pulled a white sheet off the Apollo 14 command module,
Kitty Hawk.
Shepard stood at the foot of the space capsule, frail and full of drugs and disease, his hair thinned and his skin a bluish hue from the chemotherapy, looking so fragile. He reached out and touched
Kitty Hawk
’s cool metal skin. Then, surrounded by his closest friends, the Icy Commander wept. His thin body shook, and he put his tear-streaked face in his hands. It would be the last time most of his friends saw him.