The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (18 page)

As the weeks rolled on, Marilyn’s dresses were getting harder to fit into. She was four months pregnant when Jim drove her and the three kids down to the Cape to watch Gemini 4 take off. Marilyn was sick the whole way there. Jim had to keep stopping so she could go to the bathroom.

“Oh, I have a bladder infection,” she insisted. She still hadn’t told Jim she was pregnant, and miraculously, he hadn’t noticed. He was never around long enough to notice, thought Marilyn.

They finally reached the Holiday Inn at Cocoa Beach. The Lovells were offered two one-dollar-a-night rooms for Jim, Marilyn, and the three kids to squeeze into. To stave off her morning sickness, Marilyn hid saltines underneath her pillow and nibbled away at them in the middle of the night.

“What’s wrong?” asked Jim, awoken by her mousy noises. “Why are you eating crackers?”

Marilyn sighed. She had to tell him. “You’ll never believe this.”

“Believe what?”

“Well, I hate to tell you this, but I think…I know…I’m pregnant.”

“Oh my God,” groaned Jim, “pinch me tomorrow and tell me I had a nightmare.”

After a while, Jim calmed down and told Marilyn he hadn’t meant what he’d said, but what a shock for both of them! They decided it would be best to keep the news from NASA for as long as they could—at least until Jim had proven himself irreplaceable for Gemini 7.

Back in El Lago, New Nine wife Pat White couldn’t sleep, worrying all night about her husband, Ed, who in a few hours would be blasting off on Gemini 4; he was to be the first American to step into space. Many in the neighborhood considered war-decorated Ed to be NASA’s “next John Glenn.” He’d certainly proven himself El Lago’s hero a few months before.

The Armstrongs, the Whites’ next-door neighbors, had been awakened in the middle of the night by the smell of smoke, to find their entire living room wall in flames. Ed White, who had almost qualified for the Olympic high hurdles, cleared the six-foot fence dividing their yards, landing in the Armstrongs’ backyard. Neil handed his ten-month-old son through a window into the safety of Ed’s arms. The story of Ed’s heroics spread like wildfire. Strong, athletic, and redheaded to boot, “Red Ed” did indeed seem to be the next John Glenn. He stood out in the neighborhood full of workout-obsessed, overachiever astronauts, up at the crack of dawn, jogging around the suburban streets, decked out in sweat clothes. He made the younger wives in the neighborhood swoon. At one of their gatherings, they crowded around the window to watch him go by.

Delicate-as-porcelain Pat had met Ed at a fall football weekend at West Point. Even after a dozen years of marriage, she was still very much in love with her husband. She loved that Togethersville thought of him as a hero. She’d happily go to the end of the Earth with Ed, to the Moon, maybe even the White House. He had a kind and attentive manner that some of the other spacemen in the neighborhood lacked. Just like John Glenn, Ed always tried to be home with his family on Friday nights.

On June 3, 1965, Pat sat on her bed and watched Ed taking off with his Gemini space twin, Jim McDivitt. This was the first flight to be directed from the new Mission Control at the Manned Spacecraft Center here in Texas. Previously flights had been controlled from the Cape. As would become the tradition, NASA had installed in Pat’s house a “squawk box,” an amazing space-age device that let her tune in to the transmissions going on between Ed in orbit and Mission Control. The mission would take four days, so along with the box in her living room, NASA had installed one in her bedroom so that she could go to sleep listening to her Ed, coordinating her own sleep schedule in Texas with his in space, and silently wishing him sweet dreams. Of course, there were limits. She’d been told that in case of an emergency, NASA would shut the box off, so Pat knew things were going all right as long as it squawked.

Still, she chewed on a pencil, and when the doorbell rang was presented with a beautiful bouquet of gladioli from Ed. While only the launch could be televised, he knew she’d be listening in the rest of the time, so he had timed the delivery to only a few minutes before he took his first step into space.

In grand Texas style, Lyndon Johnson was trying to do everything at once, pushing through the greatest triumph of his presidency while sowing the seeds of his destruction. With his Great Society program, which included the establishment of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he hoped to save America’s soul. At the same time, he was planning to increase the country’s involvement in Vietnam, adding another 50,000 to the 75,000 American soldiers already there.

He welcomed the festivities of June 17, 1965, when he faced Ed White and Jim McDivitt in the Rose Garden and hailed them as “the Christopher Columbuses of the twentieth century.” Especially Ed, for performing the first American space walk.

He could not celebrate without thinking about the large numbers of American troops lost just the week before at Dong Xai, when the Vietcong had overrun an American Special Forces camp. The weary president hoped the spacemen would provide some relief and optimism, saying, “Men who have worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend into the depths of war and desolation.”

The space twin families had been invited to stay overnight at the White House. Lady Bird ordered a Walt Disney movie to be “laid on” for the Astrokids while their parents headed to the State Department, where the astronauts would narrate for Lyndon, Lady Bird, and a host of politicians a screening of the footage, in color, that they’d filmed of their trip into space. The lights dimmed and everyone watched spellbound as Ed, bulky in his white marshmallow space suit, pushed himself out of his spacecraft and into the void. The only thing keeping him from drifting off into space was a twenty-three-foot umbilical cord. He squeezed a gun that squirted invisible puffs of gas to change his position, twisting his body above the beautiful blue Earth.

His visor was gold-plated and it covered his face. “This is fun!” faceless Ed had said as he floated.

Some said they heard an infinite longing in his voice. He was rumored to be experiencing the “ecstasy of the deep,” a sort of space narcosis or euphoria. When his twenty-minute space walk was over, he wasn’t ready to return to the capsule. He was having the time of his life.

“Come on,” Jim McDivitt had coaxed from inside the capsule. “Let’s get in here before it gets dark.”

When Jim’s efforts to reel his partner in didn’t work, Mission Control worried things were getting dangerous and sent up an ultimatum. Finally Ed relented, but as he climbed back inside the capsule, he’d confessed, “It’s the saddest moment of my life.”

Lady Bird called it “a thrilling, incredible, heart-in-the-throat moment.” She wrote about the evening in her diary, “This was one of those incredible days that would make a book.” LBJ was elated. Ed White was his own John Glenn, not a little fellow, but big and tall like Lyndon Johnson, and with a sweet little lady who wouldn’t
dare
shut him out of her house. The president had big plans for Ed White, who, when asked how he was feeling during his space walk, said, “Red, white, and blue all over.” At the close of the film LBJ unveiled a Texas-size surprise.

“This may not make me too popular with your families,” said LBJ, glancing at the Pats—Pat White and Jim’s wife, Pat McDivitt. “But I am going to ask you tonight—in the very next few hours—to take the presidential plane and travel outside the country, again.”

The astronauts and their wives wouldn’t be spending the night at the White House as planned, but instead would leave at four in the morning to attend the American Air Show in Paris. There the astronauts would have a meeting with two Soviet cosmonauts, including the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. It was sure to be a vodka-fueled meeting.

After preflight drinks at the White House, Lady Bird led the Pats through her office into her private dressing room, with the promise of finding evening dresses, at least one for each. “After all, what does any woman think about when she hears she is going to Paris—clothes!” Lady Bird wrote in her diary.

To her delight, it turned out the Pats were both a size ten. “That’s great—so am I,” Lady Bird noted approvingly.

Picking up her First Lady’s telephone, Lady Bird called her secretary and suggested they put on an impromptu fashion show. The Pats were getting a very rare privilege indeed. “Maybe ‘Le Grand Charles’ might invite them to a reception,” cooed Lady Bird, referring to France’s president, Charles de Gaulle.

The Johnsons’ two teenage daughters volunteered to babysit for the Astrokids while their parents were in Europe. As the helicopter lifted from the White House to deliver the couples to Air Force One, waiting at nearby Andrews Air Force Base, Pat waved an excited good-bye to her seven-year-old Bonnie and her son, Eddie III, who were standing with Luci and Lynda on the lawn in pajamas and robes.

Jane’s husband, Pete, went up next with Trudy’s Gordo on Gemini 5. Perhaps influenced by his rootin’-tootin’ grandma who’d ridden a covered wagon westward when she was a girl, Gordo picked the image of a wagon for their mission patch, with the slogan “8 Days or Bust.”

Afterward, their worldwide tour, which had become a new tradition, took Trudy and Jane to Haile Selassie’s Jubilee Palace in the heart of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. When the plane doors opened, a noble and slightly bored lion greeted them at the top of the metal steps and had to be led down with great ceremony before they could disembark. Two chained leopards greeted them on the palace steps, which smelled of big-cat urine.

In the middle of the night, Jane awoke to find palace servants at the foot of her golden swan bed, which Queen Elizabeth had recently slept in, gathering her clothes to be washed and pressed by morning. Throughout the Middle East and Africa, Pete and Gordo were presented with the traditional props of tribal warrior heroes, Masai spears and jewel-encrusted daggers (and cigarette cases). Haile Selassie presented Jane and Trudy with bracelets of gold and elephant hair. In Kano, Nigeria, the emir, in his royal robes and a striking turban that revealed only his eyes, took Trudy and Gordo aside and asked if they would consider leaving their teenage daughters, sixteen-year-old Cam and fifteen-year-old Jan, to join his harem.

A week before liftoff of Gemini 7 (which was going up eleven days before Gemini 6, with the two craft scheduled to “rendezvous” in space), the NASA electrician was installing Marilyn’s squawk boxes and emergency phone when the Lovells’ collie, MacDuff, bit the poor man in the crotch of his pants. MacDuff got him bad, and it was a good thing the doctor lived next door. It was general chaos with Marilyn running around in a flap when Susan Borman arrived to take her to a wives’ coffee at Marilyn See’s house on the lake in Timber Cove. It turned out to be a surprise baby shower! It was a real shocker to Marilyn. Pacifiers and white leather baby shoes were lovingly hung from boy-blue ribbons affixed to the chandelier. Marge Slayton and Jo Schirra were there along with the New Nine gals, who had all chipped in to buy Marilyn a beautiful rocking chair.

“Did his voice change?” asked Marge when Marilyn recounted the harrowing NASA technician dog-bite saga.

Life
snapped away, but was very nice about not taking a body shot of Marilyn, who hated the sight of herself full-Moon pregnant. In case the stork came while Jim was in space, he had arranged for a “crew” and “backups” for taking her to the hospital:

1. Call Pete and Jane Conrad, who live a few blocks away.

2. Call Ed and Pat White if the Conrads cannot be reached immediately.

Ever since Jim had found out she was pregnant, he’d been teasing Marilyn that he hadn’t been home long enough to get her pregnant. “If the baby has a gap between his teeth, we’ll know Pete Conrad is the father,” he joked.

“Gaps run in my family, too!” Marilyn laughingly reminded him.

Before Jim left for space, Marilyn told
Life
, he cleaned out the garage, balanced the checkbook, and gave the old bassinet a fresh coat of white paint.

Blown up like a balloon, a very pregnant Marilyn smiled broadly for the magazine’s embedded photographer. Jim would be going up on December 4 and spending two weeks in orbit, seeing if humans could survive up there for that long. Jim had always gone with his family to get the Christmas tree, but this year Marilyn decided to pick it out the night before he came back. She’d invited the neighbors to come decorate it with cranberries, popcorn, and gingerbread cookies.

Susan Borman’s Frank was commanding Gemini 7, and she and her two boys, Ed and Fred, went down to the Cape to watch the launch. Overcome with the emotion all the astronaut wives felt during liftoff, she couldn’t help but show it.

The newspapers printed the most devastating pictures. Susan was so upset that her face practically looked red in the black-and-white photos. In one, she was covering her face with her hands, hiding the tears running down her cheeks. Marilyn felt guilty when she saw those pictures. She was afraid that in comparison to Susan, America might think her uncaring.

Back in El Lago, looking at the pictures of Marilyn smiling for Jim, how could Susan not face the obvious? It didn’t look good for an Astrowife to appear so distraught and worried. If Susan wanted to do her part to get Frank picked to go to the Moon, she’d have to steel herself and show she had the right stuff like he did. Frank always maintained the tough-as-nails, brash, rally-the-troops manner he’d adopted when he was a test pilot instructor at Edwards.

“Next to my old boys,” said Marge Slayton on behalf of the Mercury wives, “I like him the best.”

Susan did her best to keep calm over the next two weeks until her husband finally came back to Earth. She called the scene unfolding at her house the Death Watch. When Gemini 7 finally splashed down, the cases of champagne were brought out and the corks popped.

11

The Lemon

O
ne foggy, snowy February morning in 1966, New Nine astronaut Elliot See was flying his T-38 toward the runway of the St. Louis airport. Down below, directly adjacent to the airport, was McDonnell Aircraft Building 101, where his Gemini 9 capsule was being built. Elliot and Charlie Bassett, who sat behind him, were there to see the finishing touches. Behind them in another T-38 were their Gemini 9 backups, Gene Cernan and Tom Stafford. Elliot zoned in for landing, but miscalculated his approach. He turned a sharp left to compensate and slammed into the roof of Building 101, sending his T-38 spinning like a pinwheel into the parking lot below. It burst into flames and exploded. Both men were killed instantly.