The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (24 page)

In June, on the night he won the California primary, Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel, gunned down in the hotel kitchen. The Glenns were traveling with the campaign and staying there. Early that morning, John and Annie led five of Bobby’s eleven kids from the hotel and flew them home to Hickory Hill and tucked them into bed. When they woke up, John had the terrible task of telling them that their father was dead.

On October 11, 1968, sitting at the Formica bar in the Schirra family room, Jo and Marge sat tight for the Death Watch, smoking cigarettes and watching the NBC coverage of Apollo 7. Finally back on track after the tragic fire, this first manned mission in the Apollo program was commanded by Wally Schirra with his crew of Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham. Apollo 7 was to orbit Earth for ten days so that the crew could check all the features of the new and improved Apollo capsule.

“There’s Rene!” Marge’s face lit up, clicking the volume up on Jo’s “Zenith Space Command” wireless remote.

Smiling on the television, wearing a poppy-red shirt and a navy blue vest, Rene sat side by side with TV’s top news duo, Huntley and Brinkley.

I
’
VE
DEVELOPED
A
NEW
PHILOSOPHY
.
I
ONLY
DREAD
ONE
DAY
AT
A
TIME
.
Harriet Eisele had pinned the huge
Peanuts
button onto her sweater on the day of the flight, letting it do the talking for her.

Reporting for
Life
, embedded journalist Dodie Hamblin, who was fond of Harriet, thought she was the biggest wreck she’d ever seen. Like everyone in Togethersville, she knew that the past few months had been horrible for Harriet, who didn’t want to be caught in the glare of publicity.

Over the ten days of Apollo 7, Harriet cowered while the squawk box squawked its incomprehensible numbers and vectors. She was deeply disturbed by the change she heard in Donn’s voice. Some felt he was clearly imitating his commander, Wally, who was being a real hard-ass to Mission Control. This was Wally’s last mission and he wasn’t holding anything back. But Donn unwisely followed his lead, making inappropriate remarks. He seemed to be committing professional suicide. Harriet just thought there was something different about Donn—this was not the Donn she knew.

Finally in November, a month after the flight and right before they went to the White House for the post-flight celebrations, Donn told Harriet about “Susie.” Harriet actually enjoyed the trip—because for the first time in months, things were out in the open, and she knew she wasn’t crazy.

Harriet thought they had achieved a new openness. Then she noticed Donn had started closing bank accounts.

“You’ve got to file for divorce to protect yourself and the kids,” her minister told her, and she did.

The Astronaut Wives Club was called to order at the Lakewood Yacht Club. One word silenced the clanking teacups.

“Susie.”

The name was poison. Even though each wife knew too well that some Susie, however she spelled it, could come between her and her husband, the gals pinned all their fears onto one particular Susie, the new wife of Donn Eisele, the rookie astronaut who’d suddenly made big headlines around the world.
Paris Match
showed up at Harriet’s door wanting the inside scoop. The shit hit the fan and Harriet was terribly embarrassed. “Astronaut Donn Sued in First ‘Space Divorce’—And More Homes May Break Under Strain,” ran a headline in the UK’s
Daily Express
.

“The astronaut life is a great strain on marriage,” Donn told the tabloid. “It is like a circus. To be avoided.”

But Susie married him anyway. And now she wanted to join the A.W.C.

Susie didn’t yet comprehend what she was in for. She didn’t think she’d done anything wrong. She hadn’t hunted Donn like some of the other Cape Cookies. She was a respectable single mother who’d worked at the Cape Kennedy Savings and Loan Association. Some of the wives were exceedingly kind—space widow Beth Williams out in Dickinson was a dear—but the rest?

“It was a living inferno,” said Susie. “I figured if we minded our own business, it would be okay. But I did not know how radical this group was.”

Susie was up to her ears in alligators and figured the wives who were meanest were the ones whose husbands cheated the most. Donn’s new wife didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell in Togethersville.

Susie got a new job at a local savings and loan association in Houston, and as Donn was always working, she wondered what on earth she might find to do in her spare time. It occurred to her to join the Clear Creek Community Theatre, where Joan Aldrin and Clare Schweickart were amateur actresses. The theater put on the all-female Clare Boothe Luce play
The Women
, about a bunch of catty, backstabbing women. They also did
The Crucible
, Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play about the Salem witch trials. But Susie was told that an Astrowife had to ask NASA’s permission if she wanted to appear in a community play, and Susie didn’t want to. Someone urged her to attend an A.W.C. meeting, but before she even got a chance to consider what she might wear, Susie received a phone call informing her that if she dared to show up at the Lakewood Yacht Club, the other wives would walk out. It wasn’t long before Donn was fired from NASA.

14

The Dark Side of the Moon

D
odie Hamblin, a big-boned Iowa girl turned New Yorker, was
Life
’s new bureau chief for outer space. She paddled across Clear Lake in a red canoe, her preferred mode of transportation between the three space burbs of Timber Cove, Nassau Bay, and El Lago. Today she was visiting the Bormans. She’d been told that their yard looked like a pit stop with all the hot rods Frank and his two sons worked on. The grease-stained, buzz-cut trio hunted duck in the backwoods. Dodie hoped they didn’t hunt reporters.

Dodie had been getting the lay of the land since the winter of 1967, when she’d been dispatched. One of her first pieces was on the space widows. She certainly felt she’d landed in a curious place. Here, plumbers plumbed at cost, and if an astronaut family had a crisis, all the other families instantly appeared.

She’d found her best material at the gym at the Bayshore Club. One day, feeling fat and uninspired, she spied a woman clutching her bosoms as she ran around in a circle, brown ponytail bouncing behind her. Next, she wrapped the vibrator belt around her tummy to give herself a good jiggle. It was not until Dodie was on the belt next to her and struck up a conversation that somehow turned to Japan, of all things, that she realized she was speaking to none other than Marge Slayton.

Marge asked how Dodie was adjusting to Texas, and started chattering about how she used to have curly hair before she came to Houston.

“But then I got off the plane and it went to hell,” she said.

Dodie signed up for the Bayshore Club, which set her back a pricey $200 a year. Unlike the Astrowives, she didn’t receive a special discount. Dodie could often be seen at the club, clutching a white terry-cloth towel in one hand, her cigarette holder in the other, as she pedaled away on one of the club’s stationary bikes. It was hell, but she got terrific material.

The wives seemed to be living pretty large in Togethersville, what with all the freebies and goodies they were offered. Even so, they were competing to win the prizes in the club’s membership drive—postiches, and falls to add to their hair to create the currently fashionable cascading curls. The grand prize was a tacky cowboy painting that reminded Dodie of a bad Andrew Wyeth. To that end, Dodie gave her “referral” to Jane Conrad, who in turn gave it to Susan Borman, who was apparently crazy about that painting. The cowboy looked like Frank.

Dodie thought she’d better pay a visit to the Bormans. Frank was about to spend Christmas in a capsule orbiting the Moon. He was the commander of Apollo 8, the first manned voyage to the Moon, scheduled for that December 1968. The Astrowives believed the mission was the nation’s best hope to redeem the tumultuous year. After the assassinations of MLK and RFK and the riots in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, Nixon had won the election, but America was still in turmoil. The wives barely recognized the country they read about in
Life
: kids “getting high,” young men burning their draft cards, women setting bras on fire, men looking like long-haired bums.

Living in Togethersville, happily trapped in the fifties, the wives might have been on birth control pills, but they were still buying the clean-cut, all-American image one hundred percent. Barbara and Gene Cernan had actually walked out of the prime seats they’d been given to the free love rock musical
Hair
, which had just opened on Broadway, because it featured nudity and sex. They thought it was un-American. The wives didn’t even seem to know that America was in total upheaval—students had taken over Columbia University, the militant Black Panthers had hijacked the civil rights movement, and radical feminists had emerged from the women’s liberation movement. In June, Valerie Solanas of SCUM (her Society for Cutting Up Men) had shot Andy Warhol. Though they all had plenty of cans of Campbell’s stacked in their cupboards (cream of mushroom soup being a key ingredient in casseroles), most of the wives probably didn’t even know who Warhol
was
! And forget radical feminists. What about plain, garden-variety feminists?

Were any of the wives up on the current literature of the burgeoning women’s movement, from
The Feminine Mystique
to Gloria Steinem’s Playboy Bunny exposé and also the more mass-produced fare? Who couldn’t help but admire Helen Gurley Brown’s
Cosmopolitan
? As its editor in chief, Brown claimed women could have it all, “love, sex, and money,” while also advising them on beauty treatments that were quite a bit more modern than the Edna Wallace Hopper white clay mask. “Spread semen over your face,” one of Ms. Brown’s pieces advised. “It’s probably full of protein as sperm can eventually become babies. Makes a fine mask—and he’ll be pleased.”

Sometimes Dodie wanted to scream, it felt so outdated and claustrophobic here. “Togethersville can be a warm and loving family,” she typed up for
Life
, “or just a great gelatinous blob that closes around and smothers the individual.”

Docking her canoe, Dodie found her way to Frank’s newly mown lawn. The two teenage Borman boys, fifteen-year-old Ed and seventeen-year-old Fred, were huge. Frank greeted her and Susan offered her a drink.

Knocking back a round and gesturing flamboyantly with her cigarette holder, Dodie was a charming guest, offering them the use of her apartment should they ever visit New York. That was clearly the wrong thing to offer Frank Borman.

The Bormans weren’t like their sophisticated best friends, the Collinses. Mike and Pat were connoisseurs of French wine, readers of literature, and lovers of those old and dirty and crappy cities, as Frank deemed Chicago and New York. Frank felt very much at home here in Clear Lake City; he tolerated Houston because it was a new, clean city.

He even communicated in his own home via telephone, which Dodie found surpassingly bizarre. Frank called upstairs to the boys to ask, inexplicably, permission to use their car to drive to a restaurant.

“Could I please borrow it, pal?”

Ed, or perhaps Fred, said okay.

At Eric’s Pub on the banks of Clear Lake, they were shown to the best table by Helen, the maître d’. She lived on an old houseboat tied up outside. Princess Grace and Prince Rainier had recently lunched here, which pissed off Frank to no end. He’d been asked to meet them and, as a result, had missed an important meeting at NASA. Over the local specialties, Frank regaled Dodie about the future of NASA. When it became all about science and was no longer about test flying, it wouldn’t interest him anymore, he declared. He only liked the flying part.

“When we get to the Moon,” swore Frank, “I’m getting
out
.”

He also shared his feelings about how the entire country was going to hell. There were no winds of change blowing at the Bormans’. Frank couldn’t stand the long hair the boys wore: it made a man look like a girl. Hell, if he got down to it, he couldn’t stand long hair on a
female
.

Dodie was relieved to paddle toward home, a new apartment complex in Nassau Bay. From the middle of Clear Lake, she could see the space burbs all around her, so quiet, so isolated from the rest of the world. She paddled home as the Moon rose over Togethersville. Perhaps what was going on here was more important historically than the war in the Congo, or the riots in Paris, or even the throngs of hippies wandering around Haight-Ashbury, sleeping in Golden Gate Park. Dear God. This
was
where the sixties were happening. Or, for that matter, the twentieth century! The
millennium
? Certainly the cavemen who beheld the mysterious Moon never thought about meeting the Beatles. Nor would the computer-enhanced beings who might someday inhabit outer space.

A model of composure at A.W.C. meetings, Susan Borman had to work to keep from chewing on her string of pearls in front of everyone. Susan used to be an object of envy at the Bayshore, too, confidently doing her exercises while others were left huffing and puffing. But ever since the Apollo 1 fire, she wasn’t burning out her stress on the exercise machines. Nobody knew it at the time, but Susan had been drinking heavily. Eventually, in Susan’s struggle to be “the perfect wife married to the perfect husband who was the perfect astronaut in a perfect American family raising perfect children,” she became an alcoholic.

For any Astrowife, it was difficult to keep that tight, raw ball of fear inside from growing before her husband’s launch. Left unchecked, she could explode like a pressure cooker. A wife could always try to confide in her husband, but as NASA insisted, an astronaut needed to be kept
away
from stress at home. There was no way on God’s green Earth that an Astrowife like Susan would openly share her terrors with her peers at an A.W.C. meeting.