The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (16 page)

Gene had been mowing his lawn in his sweaty T-shirt one weekend when one of the annoying Astro-tourist buses pulled over. The driver called from the window, “Hey, buddy? Any astronauts live around here?” As if he’d find Gene in a silver space suit walking his blonde cocker spaniel, Venus.

“I think a couple of ’em live over yonder somewhere,” said Gene, pointing down the street.

Come Monday morning, Gene would return to the Cape, leaving his wife, Barbara, to deal with the critters in Togethersville. There were skunks, possums, armadillos, and cottonmouth snakes. The wives regularly found copperheads sunbathing on the hot hoods of their station wagons. Not to mention all the gawking sightseers from the space tour buses who climbed over fences to steal a glimpse of a real spaceman.

It hadn’t taken Barbara long to realize how famous her husband was because he was an astronaut. On one of their many trips to Las Vegas, they’d met singer Wayne Newton. He was so taken with Gene and Barbara that he gave their daughter Teresa Dawn an Arabian colt.

Barbara’s best friend was Sue Bean. Both were blonde Texans, although Barbara was more outgoing than demure Sue. There were no sidewalks in Nassau Bay, so Barbara and Sue often walked together down the middle of the street, pushing their daughters in strollers before them. They always shared their concerns. “Everyone wants to touch him,” Sue mused.

“They don’t just want their autographs when they get off the plane either,” said Barbara.

Well, what could they do about that now? Not a thing.

Sue didn’t want her man’s head turned by all the women now available to him. She had met her Alan when they’d both been on the gymnastics team at the University of Texas. Soon they were doing backflips for each other. Sue always called him Alan, but everyone in the astronaut corps called him Al, or “Beano.”

The man was a perfectionist, with an engineer’s exacting eye for detail. He was very particular about Sue’s wardrobe, favoring her in pastels. He had such a precise hand that before one of Joanne Herring’s parties, Sue’s friends lined up to have Alan put on their fake eyelashes for them. He could align and glue the black wisps ever so precisely. Once he even dyed and styled Sue’s blonde hair, pinning it around her head like a crown of spilling curls.

On his worktable was a half-finished mosaic of the astronaut insignia for the counter of their bar. Alan would work on it late into the night when he was home for the weekend, cutting glass and porcelain pieces in lunar white, mauve, taupe. Sue thought what he was making was beautiful, but sometimes she wished he’d leave the damn thing alone so they could just enjoy their bar.

Sue wasn’t sure what to think when Alan also began painting. He wore an old flight suit when he did so and kept his brushes clean and meticulously organized. They didn’t even look as if they’d been used. His latest painting was of a clown, holding a red umbrella, balancing on a high wire. It was signed
Al Bean
, underlined.

One night, fun-loving Gene and good-time Barbara invited them to accompany them to a party, but Alan just shook his head and muttered about his workload. Since he’d been working all week and dined out every night, when he was home on the weekends all he wanted was a good home-cooked meal. On the other hand, Sue had been cooped up at home all week and longed to go out, or at least spend some much-needed family time together. But Beano didn’t want to be distracted from his art, which he tackled as he did any other engineering problem—obsessively.

The Mercury and New Nine astronauts had already undergone desert survival training in far-flung locations like the active volcano of Mount Kilauea in Hawaii and a secret location in the Nevada desert. There, in the 150-degree surface temperature heat, the Fourteen underwent a demanding course in how to “live like an Arab.” In billowing white robes made from parachutes, they sat for their graduation photo in gold aviator sunglasses and dirty long underwear, looking like deranged Bedouin.

Next they went to Panama for jungle survival training. The Fourteen parachuted in pairs from helicopters over the jungle, carrying only the survival gear they’d have available in a Gemini capsule. They were to live off the land for a week. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to live in nature—and eat fireside meals of iguana kabob served on a machete tip by natives in loincloths. NASA insisted that since a spacecraft might land anywhere on the Earth, an astronaut had to be prepared for every climate and terrain. To the wives it seemed a little ridiculous—were their husbands really going to overshoot splashdown by a few thousand miles and land in the jungle? And if they did, wouldn’t the natives serve
them
on kabobs? Why was NASA always finding ever more ways to keep their men away from home?

Sick of being grounded while their astronauts headed off to yet another exotic locale, Sue Bean, Joan Aldrin, and Jeannie Bassett, all part of that daisy-chained compound in Nassau Bay, had gotten to talking. It was high time they did something about these absentee husbands. The three gals decided to greet their savage beasts in Mexico City upon their return from the jungle. It was at least halfway to Panama, and was sure to be a lot more civilized and enjoyable than the Panamanian jungle.

Sharing a hotel room in Mexico City, the ladies picked a restaurant out of the travel book that turned out to be just as advertised: warm and festive, with chilies and colorful strings of lights dangling from the ceiling. They passed by a long table of women having a grand old time.

Joan spoke a little high school Spanish, and soon enough the three ladies were sitting with the locals, drinking margaritas, sampling the spicy salsas, and having a blast.

All of a sudden Joan got up and said, “We’re going, get your things.” She had a tendency to be dramatic, and was insistent they leave posthaste. Soon the three ladies were back on the street, a little tipsy.

“Why in the world did we leave?” asked Sue.

“Didn’t you see that woman put her hand on my leg? Inching ever
upward
?” asked Joan.

The gals made it back to their hotel and woke up to find their guys strutting into the room, reeking of maleness. That was more like it.

The couples spent a few days sightseeing. The wives enjoyed being regular wives, doing tourist things with their husbands, rather than serving as arm candy for macho spacemen in aviator glasses, playing “his charming wife.” It was a too-short vacation, but it was so nice to be with their men on holiday for a change.

Buzz had smuggled a monkey onto the NASA Gulfstream that had brought them from the jungle to Mexico City. It was a miniature marmoset secured in a cage for the flight home.

Buzz named his monkey “PoPo” and left the little ragamuffin to look after Joan when he flew back to the Cape. Joan fell in love with the little guy. She fed him with a spoon and tucked him into a basket on a shelf in the kitchen. It nearly killed her when PoPo was diagnosed with terminal encephalitis. Buzz had to have a NASA doctor at the Manned Spacecraft Center give him a sniff of something to hasten him to that great jungle in the sky.

Joan was heartbroken. She swore she’d never have another monkey.

Grinning jack-o’-lanterns lined the brick entryways of all the new homes in Nassau Bay. The best part about this Halloween 1964, the first in Togethersville for the Fourteen Astro-families, was that it fell on a Saturday. That meant Daddy would be coming home for the weekend after training all week at the Cape. Putting on plastic masks and eye-patches and face paint, the slew of neighborhood Astrokids got ready to ring the bells of the Cernans’ and Chaffees’ and Beans’ and Bassetts’, hoping Cinderella would greet them at the door of her castle with armfuls of Jujubes.

With her dog “Red Dammit!” generally being a nuisance, hence his name, Faith Freeman helped her ten-year-old Faithie get into her costume. The sharp-looking Connecticut blonde was finicky about details (especially her jewelry; Faith hated to jangle). She was so busy putting on the final touches, she almost forgot that tomorrow was the first day of the month, and that she’d repeat the good luck charm she’d started last month.

Ted would be fast asleep at her side, and she’d wake him up good by screaming, at the top of her lungs, “Rabbit!” Faith had heard that yelling “Rabbit!” as soon as you woke up on the first day of the month offered a bubble of protection to last all month. Like many of the wives, Faith wasn’t above using superstitious rituals to keep her man safe in the sky.

“Rabbit!” had served her well so far. She figured she’d try it again.

Truth be told, Faith was looking forward to sending her Faithie off trick-or-treating with the neighborhood kids so that when Ted got home she could settle back with him, drinks in hand, to greet the ghosts and goblins.

The doorbell rang, and Faith padded over to find a reporter from the
Houston Chronicle
at her door. He was here to find out some information.

“There’s…been an accident.”

Accident?

A Canada snow goose had smashed through the Plexiglas bubble canopy of Ted Freeman’s T-38, sending shards of glass like gigantic plastic teeth through the intake system and causing the engine to flame out. Ted, a birdwatcher who loved geese, had punched out, but he was too close to the ground. His parachute only partially opened before he smashed down by his plane’s wreckage near Ellington Air Force Base.

Faith completely lost it. Little Faithie, who hadn’t left yet to go trick-or-treating, was there to hear the terrible news. Soon the neighborhood wives found out what had happened and came over to be with Faith and Faithie.

The round-robin was on fire. How could NASA have let this happen? The military had an exact protocol for how news of a death should be officially delivered. First and foremost, a man on the inside, a base chaplain or a high-ranking official, should be the one to bring the bad news to the family. But in Togethersville, it seemed nobody was in charge. The first death got the community up in arms and NASA got busy coming up with a protocol in case the worst should happen again.

On the morning of Ted Freeman’s funeral, Betty Grissom kept an eye on Gus as she dressed in his least favorite color. She added the finishing touches to her black outfit: gloves, a modest gold watch.

Gus hated black. He was still sitting on the bed, slumped over his knees, head in hands. He wasn’t budging or even looking in his closet. Betty knew what his intentions were—he refused to go to funerals, insisting he would only ever go to one, and that would be his own. He felt funerals were bad luck.

“I’m going back to work, I’m going to go back to work,” Gus kept on repeating, hardly looking at Betty.

Finally he started putting on his formal Air Force uniform decorated with honor patches.

Betty feared it was only a matter of time before Gus crashed in his own T-38. The damn thing was too fast and dangerous, especially after Gus had been working for hours on end. He’d hop in that sporty little death trap to check on the progress of his Gemini space capsule being built at a NASA contractor in St. Louis, then zip back to the Cape. Betty didn’t care to think too much about it; she had two boys to raise, and a house to clean and a yard to mow, but she strongly believed Gus was living in too many damn time zones, and she told him so.

The first Gemini mission, which Gus was scheduled to command, was only a few months away, and Betty had finally managed to convince her husband to squeeze in a little relaxation time at their ski chalet in Crested Butte, Colorado—Crusted Butt, her boys called it. They’d bought it with the Coopers, only Betty wasn’t a skier like Trudy, who could fly down the mountain, so she kept the bar open and the fire burning while working on Playboy Bunny jigsaw puzzles, which proved to be the perfect decoration for the chalet bar.

Over in Nassau Bay, Sue Bean crossed her backyard and went over to Joan Aldrin’s for their ritual afternoon tea. Joan’s mother had been of British parentage, so teatime was always a genteel treat. The poor woman was dead now from a freak accident, having crashed in a private plane into the side of a mountain. It made it a little weird that Joan had married Buzz, a pilot, a year later.

A coppery blonde Jersey girl, Joan had always intended to become an actress. She’d received a master’s degree in theater arts from Columbia University and would let you know she’d had a walk-on role on the TV show
Playhouse 90
, not to mention a couple of lines on the live mystery series
Climax!
She’d always been attracted to struggling actors and suffering artists, and there were plenty of those floating around New York in the fifties.

Then her mother had introduced her to a handsome, blond twenty-two-year-old Air Force lieutenant. His name was Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin (who when he was very young was called Buzzer by his little sister—she couldn’t pronounce
brother
, and the name stuck). Buzz was the first man Joan dated that her oil executive father approved of for her, especially because he knew Buzz’s father, a colonel in the Air Force. Unfortunately, there was zero chemistry between the two. Buzz went to Korea, and Joan pursued her acting career in New York.

When Buzz finished his tour in Korea, Joan’s mother had been killed, and Joan, who commuted to New York and lived at home, was left alone to console her father while her own heart was breaking. She didn’t lodge a complaint when Buzz pinned his Air Force “A” onto her sweater. Her father declared her off-limits to all dates while Buzz was out in Nevada working as an Air Force instructor.

A couple of months later, Joan convinced her father to go on his two-week vacation in Las Vegas, near where Buzz was a flying instructor. The night before Joan was to return to Jersey, Buzz proposed. When the minister stared into her eyes and pronounced her Buzz Aldrin’s wife, Joan felt she was playing the greatest role of her life. Joan’s first year of marriage was hell. The gregarious city girl was married and in a flash living at the Squadron Officers’ School in Montgomery, Alabama, with a hubby who was usually away flying, or locked up inside his own head. “I was always alone,” said Joan. “I was naïve; I had been brought up as an only child; probably I was spoiled. Men don’t really chatter as women do, and Buzz is not a man who talks a lot. I am a talker, and I am very direct. It was hard for me, not to have him there to talk to.”