The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (20 page)

The night before a prelaunch test, he called home to check in.

“Can you promise me one thing?” said Betty.

“What’s that?”

“Don’t do the flight before you are ready.”

The following morning, January 27, 1967, Gus climbed into the Apollo 1 capsule with his crew, Roger Chaffee and the “next John Glenn,” Ed White. This was a dress rehearsal for the actual flight, so while the booster was not fueled, the Apollo 1 capsule would be sealed and pressurized with pure oxygen as they ran through everything, including a T-minus countdown.

Tensions were high on the launch pad with a string of goof-ups that Gus called his colleagues out on. “How do you expect us to get to the Moon if you people can’t even hook us up with a ground station?” he radioed from inside the capsule. “Get with it out there!”

It was a drab Friday evening on Pine Shadows Drive in Timber Cove when Betty heard the doorbell ring. She hoped it was the deliveryman. She had bought herself a late Christmas gift, a modern new sofa, upholstered in a rich cream silk embroidered with cheerful orange blossoms. Gus had promised her one for years and she’d finally gotten the go-ahead. Betty had put up with the same dingy furniture since Enon, Ohio, because Gus preferred putting his cash into fast boats and cars. He’d even started a company with Gordo and Jim Rathmann called Performance Unlimited to design and build a race car for the Indy 500.

Peering through the small peephole in her orange door, she saw her freckled redheaded neighbor Adelin, whose husband, Jerry, was in charge of the Apollo program’s landing and recovery unit.

“Hi,” Adelin said. “I guess the poker game is off.”

Betty gave her a serene, almost devious smile, and she relaxed. It was the norm for husbands to stay late at the Manned Spacecraft Center, though Jerry usually tried to come home early on Fridays so he and Adelin and the Grissoms could play poker with a few other neighborhood couples. It now looked as if Gus wasn’t going to be flying home until tomorrow.

“Shucks,” said Betty. “Well then, Adelin, let’s you and I have a little drink.”

Betty made two gin and tonics. Adelin was hilarious, always telling funny stories like the one about the time she had to go to the bathroom in a four-person passenger airplane with no toilet.
“Oh God yes.”
She had to go so bad that she went in an upchuck bag and made everybody sing so they wouldn’t hear her. They were giggling and happy when Jo Schirra walked in from next door, arriving via the rabbit hole. Her face looked flushed.

“There’s been an accident at the Cape,” said Jo. “I think Gus was hurt.” She explained that she had gotten a call that something bad had happened on the launch pad, adding that “nobody knows how serious.” She told it to Betty straight; she wasn’t about to try to hide anything from her friend. But Betty knew this was it. “It’s over,” she thought.

The next minutes were the longest, and worst, of all their lives. The three women just sat there, trying to talk and drink their drinks. When Dr. Berry, the astronauts’ physician, arrived with his black bag they even knew the worst had happened. He’d come with the official word. Betty didn’t break down. She told Adelin that she’d “already died 100,000 deaths.” If you could be trained for this, Betty had been.

Her older son, Scotty, took his mother’s stoic lead. Mark, who was thirteen, asked, “Can I still come and get my shots in your office?”

“Sure. Of course, son,” the doctor said.

With that, Mark turned his back and walked away. Betty’s worst nightmare had come true. Gus, veteran of both Mercury and Gemini, had been killed, along with fellow astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee, during a prelaunch test for the Apollo 1 mission, on the ground.

Over in Nassau Bay, twenty-nine-year-old Martha Chaffee was clearing the table after giving her two young kids dinner. Even when she wore her “at home” slacks and went barefoot, she always put on her makeup. Only her short frosted blonde hair, cut in a mod style like the model Twiggy, was not as perfectly groomed as usual. It showed signs of going a little feral, but she had an appointment at the beauty parlor the next day. She and Roger were supposed to be going to the annual Time-Life dinner-dance gala on Saturday night. All of the astronauts and their wives were to attend. Roger was flying home tomorrow in time for it.

The doorbell rang. At the door was Sue Bean. Sue smiled sweetly. “I thought you might like some company.”

Then another Fourteen wife, Clare Schweickart, appeared, and then a neighbor whose husband worked for IBM. They told Martha there had been an accident; that’s all they knew.

Martha thought, “It can’t be Roger…he isn’t flying tonight.”

She felt a terrible urge to scrub the kitchen floor and wash the windows. She went into the family room and fluffed up the pillows. Then the gentlest of the astronauts, Mike Collins, came to the door, and Martha
knew
. His wife, Pat, had already arrived.

Mike was struck by how beautiful Martha looked that night. “I have to talk to you,” he said as he led her to sit down. Martha had to coax the news out of him because he was having such a difficult time delivering it.

“Mike, I think I know, but I have to hear it,” Martha said.

She felt as if she were outside of herself, looking down at what was happening. Martha felt bad for Mike, because he was having such a hard time. All three astronauts testing the Apollo 1 capsule were dead, he told her. A flash fire in the highly pressurized, pure oxygen environment of the sealed cockpit had burned them alive. The hatch had been impossible to open. The NASA technicians and doctors were still trying to figure out how they died, whether from asphyxiation or from burns.

Mike asked if she wanted to tell her children. How to explain the finality of death to an eight-year-old and a five-year-old? Martha didn’t think they even knew what the word meant. She brought in her kids and, calling them “sugar,” told them that something had happened to their daddy. Martha worried that her youngest, Stephen, wouldn’t even remember his father because Roger had been gone so much of his life.

In Timber Cove, the Grissoms’ house was filling with astronauts and their wives, as well as some security people who had been sent over under the guise of protecting Betty from the press. Betty wasn’t fooled. She knew they were really protecting NASA from what the loosest cannon in Togethersville might shoot off about that lemon.

All of Togethersville was ready to hold up its end of the social contract and take care of ole Betty, at least for one night.

Jobs were delegated, but Betty didn’t want to give away any of her responsibility. Dr. Berry volunteered to call Gus’s parents in Mitchell. But Betty wouldn’t hear of anyone else letting Dennis and Cecile Grissom know. That awful job was hers.

Some of the men said Gus had died within seconds—seconds, and that to Betty’s mind meant that he hadn’t suffered. “They didn’t feel anything,” said Betty, as she looked to the TV for more information.

All of a sudden, glancing up, she saw a woman sporting a perfectly coiffed hairdo.

“No reporters!” screamed Betty, only the lady wasn’t a newswoman. She was New Nine astronaut wife Pat McDivitt, who’d just gone to the beauty parlor.

Betty’s neighbor, Wally, was put in charge of making the arrangements for the funeral. “What do you want?” he asked her.

“The whole nine yards,” Betty told him. “The whole thing, whatever they do, do it.”

NASA called Betty to inform her that a NASA Gulfstream would fly out of D.C. to pick her up and fly her to Gus’s funeral in Arlington. But NASA wasn’t going to start pulling anything over on Betty Grissom. Being the most senior of the widows, she insisted she get to fly out on the Gulfstream already parked in Houston. “How about the Houston airplane?” she kept asking until NASA finally rejiggered the plans.

Having heard the terrible news on the airwaves—
the capsule on fire, and everybody burning up
—Betty’s hairdresser figured her client could use a touch-up. Betty had a standing Friday appointment for a shampoo and set, and had gone just that morning. She had come a long way from the plainspoken Hoosier who once upon a time had refused to have her makeup done for the Mercury wives’ first
Life
cover shoot.

“I can’t let you go to Washington looking like that,” the hairdresser said.

All the wives sitting with Betty followed her down the hall to her bedroom. Betty closed her eyes and allowed herself to relax in the girl’s expert hands. The kind stylist also worked her magic on the other wives. Betty still pretty much followed Gus’s orders of “Don’t mess with your hair.”

Over at the Whites’ home in El Lago, Susan Borman sat with Pat White for hours as Pat cried her eyes out. The following night, after seeing the capsule burned like a “fire-blackened charnel house,” Frank and Deke held their own version of the Irish wake, smashing glasses and watching a NASA man perform handstands. Frank felt very strongly about Ed White. He thought Ed was marvelous.

Back in his Edwards days when a guy bought the farm, famously tough Frank took a moment to be glad it wasn’t him. He never got all “clanked up,” but remained stoic and quiet. After the fire, his face was stripped of its fighter pilot unflappability. In the days and weeks to come, Pat White asked Susan her terrifying questions.

“Who am I, Susan? Who am I? I’ve lost everything. It’s all gone.”

After the fire, Martha Chaffee woke up in the middle of the night and realized she’d unconsciously switched to Roger’s side of the bed to be closer to him. Her two kids, Stephen and Sheryl Lyn, were sleeping right beside her. The doorbell was ringing. It was astronaut Gene Cernan from next door. He’d been out at the Apollo contractor North American in Downey, California, and had flown home to be with her and his wife. Martha cried all over him, because he was a man, and they’d been such good friends ever since Purdue.

The cars lined up to make the trip out to Arlington National Cemetery. “I’m in the first limousine this time,” Betty said to the other Mercury wives. “Catch up to me.”

The flag-draped wooden coffin was in a caisson drawn by six black horses; three were riderless with their saddles empty. The trees at Arlington were gray and barren; it was the dead of winter. Rifle shots sounded, then a bugler played “Taps” as three jets roared overhead in a “missing man flyby,” with one peeling off in memory of the fallen astronaut. It was very moving.

Betty wore navy blue, seeing as how much Gus hated black. She squinted at the wives, watching suspiciously to make sure they acted appropriately.

Gus’s six Mercury colleagues were the pallbearers. When Betty saw the old gang together again, she thought, “Gus was a lick above them all.” She figured they all knew it, too. Why else had they dismissed him as a naïve Hoosier from the beginning?

Gus had been picked to fly the first missions of both the Gemini and the Apollo programs, and Betty knew if he had lived, he would’ve been the first man to walk on the Moon. Where were the others now? Scott Carpenter was now working as an “executive assistant to the director” at the Manned Spacecraft Center and as an aquanaut. Chief Astronaut Al and Coordinator of Astronaut Activities Deke, while in charge of the Astronaut Office, were both grounded from flight. John still peacocked around like he owned the place, but he was retired from NASA and working as an executive for RC Cola. Gordo was still with the agency but too cocky about his skills, not giving his all to learn the new technology. Wally was still flying, but today he was just plain irritating Betty, standing too close to her side by the grave. She was pretty sure that Wally had been assigned to babysit her, but Betty didn’t think she needed any damn wife-sitter! She could handle herself perfectly well on her own, thank you very much.

As her Gus was lowered into the ground, LBJ bent down to whisper into the widow’s ear.

“What did he say?” Wally wanted to know.

Betty hadn’t heard what condolences the gloomy vulture LBJ had offered, and she didn’t care to ask him to repeat them. She didn’t want to play the mourning wife. Gus had always said that if he died, she needed to have a party. She had promised him she would, and besides, Betty would never be able to say good-bye. But all things considered, she thought the funeral was pretty nice.

Next was Ed White’s; NASA had been terrible about where he was to be buried. He’d wanted to be laid to rest at his alma mater, West Point. But NASA had insisted he be buried at Arlington beside Gus and Roger.

Pat White was beside herself, but she didn’t have the guts to stand up to NASA. Her friend Susan Borman did. Frank phoned the Pentagon and convinced them. Ed would be buried at West Point. That’s what Ed’s father, a major general in the Air Force, wanted. That’s what his widow wanted.

The pilots roared over and the missing-man plane peeled off as “Taps” came to an end. Afterward, Lady Bird comforted Pat behind her black veil, and little Bonnie and Eddie. Pat was the only Apollo 1 fire widow who went to all three services: Gus’s first, Roger’s next, then two hours later she was on a plane bound for West Point. She functioned. She thought she was doing all right. Later she would remember little of those days.

“Well, I’ll get a color TV for the children,” Pat told the press, wanting one of the new marvels, “and we’ll take a trip.”

One of the astronauts had taken over Pat’s business affairs, and told her, “Now Pat, you aren’t going to be able to do these things for several months.”

NASA was still in the ladies’ business; they’d been screening their mail since the fire.

Pat shrugged it off. “It’s annoying,” she said to a friend, “but perhaps it’s for the best. Some people send pretty nutty letters. Even obscene ones.”

What would Pat do with her time now? Ed had always filled her days, even when he was off working. She had dedicated everything to him. She had cooked gourmet meals. She had handled all his correspondence.

“She just worked at being Ed’s wife,” said one of the wives, “and she was wonderful at it, and that was all…”

12

Women’s Lib