The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (23 page)

Scott’s heart was still undersea. During Sealab II, Scott had spent a record thirty days in deep-sea submergence living, a virtual isolation tank dropped to the ocean floor off the coast of California, hundreds of feet below the surface. Coming up from that mission, Scott had placed a phone call to LBJ from within his decompression chamber, which was filled with helium. He spoke in an Alvin and the Chipmunks voice. Now Scott was ready to go deeper on Sealab III.

In Washington, Rene was still writing her column, and becoming more political with the escalation of the Vietnam War. She was frequently invited to gatherings at Hickory Hill, Bobby Kennedy’s large white brick manse. His wife, Ethel, held a lovely welcome tea for Rene.

Set on a tract of family land in McLean, Virginia, Hickory Hill had been a flurry of activity since Bobby had thrown his hat into the 1968 presidential race. The Democratic nomination was up for grabs now that LBJ’s war in Vietnam was having such disastrous domestic consequences. Since the Tet offensive in January, the war news was ever more dire, and many responsible elders were joining the youth of the country in ever larger protests against the war. After peace candidate Eugene McCarthy beat out Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, Bobby saw his opportunity and announced his candidacy.

The scene at Hickory Hill was populated by PYGs, the so-called Pink, Yellow, and Green People. Composed of Pucci-loving socialites and Lilly Pulitzer–clad hangers-on, the PYGs lounged about Hickory Hill as if it were their own, blending seamlessly into Bobby’s wife Ethel’s very expensive but understated color scheme.

A true individual, Rene had her own style. She now wore her platinum hair shoulder length. A profile in the
New York Times
featured the headline “Rene Carpenter Regards Conformity as a Big Bore.” Wearing a green copy of a Pierre Cardin dress for the photograph and posing with the family’s fluffy white Samoyed, Rene brought political reporter Myra MacPherson into her bedroom closet, which included a vibrant orange-and-gold chiffon dress by Rudi Gernreich, designer of “the futuristic look.” She usually found daring designer clothes on sale—“because I like to wear what no one else dares buy,” said Rene. “I’m not the understated type. It bores me to tears.” Myra even wrote about the white fur and aqua corduroy dress that Rene had worn in high school for a dance back in Boulder in 1945.

Myra included in her article Rene’s vitals: just turned forty, size six, and “totally averse to wearing something just because it was ‘in,’” adding, “Mrs. Carpenter willingly classifies herself as ‘sort of a kook.’”

Rene said that even when she was an astronaut wife, she’d always resisted being “the professionally brave wife.” Because she couldn’t keep her political views under wraps any longer, she was giving up her newspaper column for a brand-new adventure—being Ethel Kennedy’s right-hand companion during her husband’s campaign.

Clearly, Rene was someone who was interested in more than just her miniskirt hem lengths—“from mid-thigh to three inches above the knee and she gets a sick look when anyone mentions midis,” Myra dutifully reported, along with Rene’s latest declaration: “I will never lengthen my skirts.”

“I want to discuss issues,” said Rene, ready to stump for Bobby, to make speeches to the many women’s groups proliferating across the country.

Getting ready for a psychedelic-themed neighborhood party in Togethersville, Fourteen astronaut Donn Eisele (pronounced
eyes-lee
) painted “Love Bug”–style daisies on his wife Harriet’s naked knees, using her eyebrow pencil and lipstick. Choosing something as simple as the right shade for the flowers, be it red or purple, could prove too much for Donn. He admitted to Harriet that it sometimes took him an hour to decide which hammer to use from the garage for a repair project. In Donn’s Air Force days, Harriet had a standing request from the squadron commander to encourage her husband to get to work on time. Even now when Donn was a big-shot astronaut, Harriet needed to keep him motivated and give him the occasional swift kick in the pants.

The other wives were amazed by four-foot-ten Harriet, who wore her short dark hair in a high tease. “She’s a dynamo,” they said of the pint-sized, big-hearted mother of four. Harriet was indefatigable, always doing what needed to be done.

Every morning she drove her four-year-old Matt, who had Down syndrome, to a special school half an hour away in Pasadena, Texas. The class was run by the Houston Council for Retarded Children and lasted for two and a half hours. It pretty much shot her day. Harriet also had a newborn and two other children to care for, but she never complained. Matt was very special to her. He loved Snoopy and singing songs and was so good at throwing his toys up on the roof that Harriet was constantly having to climb a ladder to retrieve them. She and Donn joked that he might one day join the Major Leagues.

Harriet had been a nurse back in Ohio. One time, when she was in training, a psychiatrist needed help holding down a squealing patient for electroshock therapy, and little Harriet volunteered.

“Oh, honey, you can’t, you’re too little,” said the doctor.

“But I’ve got muscles,” Harriet told him as she showed him her biceps, and then she did it. After that, the doctor requested her every time and they got to be good friends.

Now that she was living in Texas as an astronaut’s wife, Harriet longed to see a DeBakey heart operation. Dr. Michael DeBakey had implanted the first artificial heart in a human in 1963, having created a prosthetic artery on his wife’s sewing machine. And he was right there in Houston! Harriet was so interested in what was going on in the world of medicine that the wives suspected she may have regretted having given up her career to marry Donn.

Harriet enjoyed the Love Bug party and the other neighborhood gatherings, be it shrimp boils or luaus. But she didn’t like the high-society galas, at least one every weekend, which took her and Donn away from the precious little family time they had as it was. With the guys gone all week, Harriet didn’t think that it was fair to their children to abandon them on the weekends. The only wife she knew who liked the galas even less was her best friend, Faye, who lived across the street in El Lago.

A pleasingly plump big-hair blonde and the Astronaut Wives Club’s top pastry chef, Faye Stafford had been Football Queen back in Weatherford, Oklahoma, but rolled her eyes at the stuffy society queens at the fancy Houston parties she was expected to attend. The ladies were too far removed from her reality to understand that the astronauts lived on government salaries, no matter what perks they received. With
Life
money going to college funds, the wives really couldn’t afford expensive gowns. Now, with fifty men strutting around the neighborhood calling themselves astronauts, that
Life
pie was sliced paper-thin.

“Casts-of-thousands dinners,” Faye called those gatherings that were becoming more frequent as NASA got closer to landing a man on the Moon.

At one of the annual Moon Balls, while others were waltzing on the rooftop of the posh Warwick Hotel, Faye snuck out onto the veranda by the pool. She took a good long look at the Moon, thinking it (or she) must be far less hostile than the upper-crust denizens of Houston.

Though she allowed her husband, Tom, to drag her from one party to the next, Faye was a homebody. Her idea of a great evening was staying in doing needlepoint with her Pomeranian pups and her two teenage daughters. She and Louise Shepard had plans to open up a cozy yarn store, the Penelope Shop, in Clear Lake.

Faye did like going to the neighborhood get-togethers, but the nurse in Harriet couldn’t help but notice her friend’s many phobias. Faye didn’t like flying in planes or traveling, although she’d go out to eat or shop with Harriet. In the future, Faye’s antisocial tendencies would inch toward full-blown “phobic anxiety disorder,” or agoraphobia. She got to the point that she was afraid of leaving her own house.

Harriet had arrived in Togethersville with her own problems. At a get-together at her and Donn’s home before they’d moved to Togethersville, Harriet had walked into her bedroom to find Donn kissing another woman. Donn could be very “wishy-washy” and it didn’t take much to convince him to do things he didn’t necessarily want to do, so Harriet didn’t make too big a deal over it, but her trust was a little shaken when she arrived in Houston as a fabulous new astronaut wife. Marge Slayton tried to make light of the situation by saying how all of the wives were in the same boat: “People throw themselves at them—it wouldn’t matter if they had two heads!” But soon Harriet had bigger worries.

“No nurse ever makes a diagnosis” was one of the key tenets that Harriet had learned in nursing school, but she’d always been good at diagnosing, and it was clear to her that there was something wrong with her son Matt. Harriet noticed blood blisters on his little body; he was cranky, and just wasn’t himself. She was certain the blisters were petechiae, a telltale sign of leukemia, not uncommon in kids with Down syndrome.

“I think I need to bring Matt in, but I’m scared,” Harriet told a NASA doctor she saw at a party. Unfortunately, her diagnosis was correct. Matt was taken directly from the family medical center at the Manned Spacecraft Center to Texas Children’s Hospital. He was in and out of the hospital for a year and a half. Only once during that time, when Donn was home from training, did Harriet ask him to spend the night with Matt in the hospital. The next morning, Donn told Harriet that he was so upset by Matt crying out in pain that he couldn’t bear to stay in the room. He never stayed at the hospital again.

Matt had two remissions and was able to go back to his school for a time, but his second remission was short. In the last weeks of his life when Matt’s condition was rapidly deteriorating, the doctors told Harriet, “I think we need to call Donn.”

But Harriet knew she couldn’t find him at the Cape. She had suspicions he was with another woman and she couldn’t deal with that now. During this time, the wives supported Harriet, keeping her freezer stuffed full of Tupperware dishes, with no names so she wouldn’t have to write thank-you cards. One wife came over and mowed the lawn without saying a word.

Donn was with Harriet at the hospital the day six-year-old Matt died. Harriet sat holding her little boy and Donn was on the couch. Both were devastated, but Donn rarely talked about his feelings, saying, as many of the astronauts did, “I’m not given to introspection.”

Afterward, Donn flew off to the Cape, where he would begin training for Apollo 7, the first manned mission after the Apollo 1 fire, and Harriet was left to deal with the emotional fallout. Donn rarely came home the summer before his flight, and Harriet’s sense that there was another woman in the picture continued to grow. Donn would give her the typical excuses, blaming it on his crewmates not doing their jobs, which forced them to work overtime. “Wally and Walt are goofing off—if I don’t stay, we’re all going to be killed,” he’d tell her. He accused Harriet of ruining his concentration, suggesting that her pestering him with her crazy worries could also get the whole crew killed.

Then Donn started leaving clues—Harriet found out he’d been at some movie star’s house (which she thought was a big deal and would have enjoyed being taken along, but Donn excused it as a trifle). She also found a matchbox from the Beverly Hills Hilton. It was as if he wanted to be caught, as if he were living a second life and wanted to get rid of his first. He kept on denying it, and when Harriet raised her suspicions, Donn bought her flowers and told her she was acting even crazier than usual. She began to be afraid that she was imagining things. There was that unspoken belief, especially among the guys, that if you got a divorce, you’d be done for. At the height of the intense competition for assignments for the Apollo program, guys aching to be chosen to go to the Moon believed selection went hand in hand with a textbook marriage. The tighter the marriage, the thinking went, the better the flight position. Broken relationships, screaming fits, no matter, as long as all this remained behind closed doors.

With his Apollo 7 flight just around the corner, Donn had begun appealing to Harriet’s friends, saying Harriet was upsetting him. Even her best friend Faye told her it was all in her head.

“You’re crazy,” Donn kept on repeating to her.

Harriet finally said to Donn, “If I’m really crazy, I should see a psychiatrist.”

“You can’t go see a psychiatrist,” said Donn. “I’ll lose my job.”

Flying out in March 1968 to join her husband, Bobby, at his first campaign stop in Kansas, Ethel Kennedy worried about how the conservative midwesterners would react to her husband’s progressive platform of civil rights and social equality, and his commitment to end the war in Vietnam. The country was bitterly divided. But when her husband touched down in Kansas City and Bobby stepped out onto the metal steps, a throng of young women were waiting at the bottom, screaming, “Bobby!” As it turned out, the girls were TWA flight attendant trainees, recruited to raise Bobby Kennedy’s appeal to rock-star status with the youth of America.

In Topeka, Bobby addressed a cheering crowd in the ballroom of the Ramada Inn. “In 1960,” he began, “the American people and mankind looked to John Kennedy.” The crowd loved him so much that they ripped the buttons off his coat and his shirt.

That night at the governor’s mansion, where the campaign staff was staying, Rene sewed the buttons back on while Bobby was in the next room, walking around in his bathrobe drinking a Heineken and eating a roast beef sandwich. The next morning, Rene awoke to a frantic Ethel knocking on her door.

“Can you please help Bobby?” she asked.

Downstairs, Bobby was having his breakfast while the governor watched in awkward silence. Neither was much for small talk, so Rene came in and saved the day.

Since the beginning of his run, journalists had been asking Bobby if he was scared that “they” were going to kill him, but Bobby just shook his head and smiled. A month later, on April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Many of America’s major cities, including Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Boston, erupted in riots. America seemed to be spiraling out of control.