The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (11 page)

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 sunglasses 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 space, 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 classic 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 goddess 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 sunglasses 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 space 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 Hasselblad camera and performing the experiments the scientists had set up for him. He was the first astronaut after John to sample space 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 spacecraft via a condom-like device attached to a tube. Fascinating!

While Scott appeared to be playing tourist up there with his Hasselblad, using his rocket boosters to position his spacecraft 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 space 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 identity. 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 Eugène 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 Cassini. 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 choreographed by Jackie, as if it were effortless, down to the simple tray of iced tea that the waiter brought out for their tête-à-tête 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.

Space City, U.S.A.

T
he seven space families arrived to the newly named Space 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 Spacecraft 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.

The Astro-families strode out of the Houston airport while paparazzi eagerly snapped away. Each of the wives slid into the backseat of a personalized convertible, the name of her astronaut on a red, white, and blue banner on the side. The ladies had to protect their hair from the breeze as the motorcade cruised toward downtown Houston.

All seven wives had by this time become expert at riding in convertible motorcades. The only decision to be made on the round-robin phone calls before the parade was “to hat or not to hat.” Jackie had begun being seen formally without a hat, so the wives felt they were no longer obliged to wear them either. Trudy still wanted to wear one, but her friends tried to convince her otherwise. The bold move was sure to make an impression on their latest admirers, the jewel-laden hostesses of Houston high society.

As the motorcade cruised through downtown, thousands of onlookers sweated it out on the sidewalks. The families were waving and smiling like mad, as they did at every other parade they had been in. But this one was different. The crowd just stared. Where was the clapping, the cheering, the shouts of welcome they were expecting? It was unnerving. The wives began to wonder if they had made a big mistake in coming to the Lone Star State.

The convertibles soon headed to the Houston Coliseum. The astronauts, wives, and children were led up onto a stage at one end of the enormous arena, which had become a giant Texas barbecue. Rodeo-style whoops and yahoos greeted the wives and their spacemen, all of whom were wearing white Stetsons to signal that they now considered themselves Texans. The sheriff was so excited, he wanted to make them all deputies. The astronaut families were introduced one by one and then the politicians and businessmen made speeches. The crowd was finally coming to life! Perhaps it had been just too hot outside for people to get excited and cheer.

Someone on the Welcome Wagon wrangled a little private dining space for Houston’s new prize cattle and folding chairs for the astronaut families to sit on. As the wives stared curiously at their hunks of brisket, a string of VIPs were ushered into the corral to say howdy.

“Hi, there, little lady! Just damned glad to see you!” said one man. “We’ve heard a lot of good things about you gals, a lot of good things.”

The cowboy tycoons with Texas-sized bellies rolling over their Lone Star–buckled belts were eager to share what they had to offer: everything from the newest appliances to the latest furnishings. Lawrence Marcus, scion of the Dallas-based department store Neiman-Marcus, would later offer to outfit the wives—and hoped they’d be able to squeeze in the time to model for one of the upcoming charitable ladies’ teas.

The families were offered free box seats to baseball games of the Colt .45s (soon to be renamed the Astros) and best of all, dream homes. The astronauts had never lived in dream homes, and dream homes were what they deserved after all the drab bases and Quonset huts they’d occupied over the years. Texas real-estate developer Frank Sharp had promised each astronaut family a free home, furnished and decorated, in his newly developed community of Sharpstown in Houston. What could be better than filling them with astronauts? Heck, they could even call it…Astronaut Row!

Unfortunately, the astronauts didn’t want to live in Sharpstown, which they heard was near a ghetto. Besides, it wasn’t exactly convenient, a ways away from NASA’s soon-to-be-built mammoth Manned Spacecraft Center.

Could they simply take and then sell these free houses? Leo the lawyer gave the A-OK. If the spacemen weren’t obligated to do anything but pose for a few photo ops of modern Astro-living, free dream homes were just another perk, like dollar-a-year Corvettes, dollar-a-night hotels, and free hunting trips at the homes of millionaire gamesmen. Said gamesmen always provided free taxidermy, too, meaning the wives would have to live with all sorts of wildlife staring at them from their dream house walls.

But the idea of a free home didn’t sit too well with the press. Who did these astronauts think they were? Superman? Soon the public was up in arms and NASA went ballistic. To make NASA happy, the astronauts turned down Astronaut Row, but by then the floodgates had opened. Tired of being barred from Astro-homes, tired of
Life
’s preferential treatment, the press took the opportunity to put a spotlight on the
Life
contract. Should it be terminated?