The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (5 page)

Betty found it just plain weird to be shadowed everywhere, even when she chauffeured her kids to school or tidied up her home. “They act like I’m the most interesting thing since sliced bread,” she marveled.

The seven wives hosted their ghostwriters at their homes and let them tag along as they went about their daily routines. The girls found their real selves disappearing behind
Life
’s depiction of what it meant to be not only the perfect fifties housewife, but the perfect astronaut’s wife, molded like the popular Barbie doll that had first appeared on store shelves that spring. The wives felt keenly the pressure to do everything just so, now that the whole country was watching them.

The
Life
feature would be a multiple-page spread with profiles of each of the seven wives complete with a portrait, as well as group shots, one of which would grace the cover of the magazine. It was Marge’s idea that they all go on a diet to firm up in light of their newfound fame. They had all read the articles about how eating avocados and taking sauna baths could help weight loss. Marge marched the gals into the Langley Air Force Base Officers Club sauna. She thought she’d won over her troops, but wrapped in a white towel, glowering at those red rocks, Betty said it was hot enough to roast a turkey! She couldn’t decide if she could breathe or not in that little cedar cell. Finally Betty just had to get out of there. “That one fell apart pretty quickly,” she said.

The wives concurred: they simply were not the exercising type. They decided they got quite enough of a workout just running after their little kids, and it wasn’t so hard to shed a few pounds, what with someone constantly following you and noticing everything you put in your mouth.

They were, however, all consumed by a burning question: what would they wear for the
Life
pictures?

The editors told them that the cover shot would be taken from the chest up.
Life
’s instructions, coordinated with NASA, were that the women wear prim and proper tailored pastel shirtwaist dresses for one of the group shots. Their big national magazine debut, and NASA wanted them wearing plain-Jane shirtwaist dresses?

The wives discussed it endlessly over the phone, starting the astronaut wife tradition of the round-robin phone call, a party line that would stretch throughout the space race. How dare the government tell them what to wear? They were astronauts’ wives now!

There was also lots of discussion about what color lipstick they should wear for the cover picture. Most of the wives didn’t wear any makeup except for lipstick, so the color was very important.

All the fashion and homemaker magazines suggested that they “think pink.” Pink was the color of the First Lady, Mamie Eisenhower. The wives had read all about Mamie and her “million-dollar fudge,” which the thrifty housewife could make as a special treat for her husband without breaking her grocery budget. They knew about Mamie’s White House routine. At 11 a.m. every day, she had her hair done in her famed Mamie bangs. She dabbled in correspondence and women’s luncheons, and then she and Ike usually had dinner in front of the five o’clock news.

In the Pink Palace, as reporters acerbically called the White House, several rooms had been repainted “Mamie Pink,” the First Lady’s signature Pepto-Bismol hue. Pink was in vogue: pink dresses, pink pocketbooks, pink carpeting, pink Maytag washing machines, even pink poodles, which were all the rage among fashionable Parisians.

So it was agreed: Responsible Pink for the perfect Astrowife.

The Astrowife round-robin kept the women up to date on what the other wives thought about this or that, and allowed them to scheme together accordingly.

“
Hmm
,” thought Betty, if one of the girls fussed over her looks too much. “She’s one of
those
.”

Betty wasn’t gung ho for group activity, but she was grateful that the round-robin gave her a chance to hear what the other wives were up to. Not that the Grissoms gave a damn about keeping up with the Joneses.

One day, Marge invited some of the wives over to her house in Stoneybrook to try out a facial mask (a favorite was the Edna Wallace Hopper white clay mask), but Betty had already decided she wasn’t going to spend an extra dime to go to the beauty parlor. Not that Gus complained about what she spent. Gus was not cheap about certain things. He was the only astronaut to splurge on air-conditioning in their car, the latest luxury for automobiles. When the
Life
money had rolled in, the only thing Gus said to Betty was, “There are two things that I request. Do not do anything different with your hair. And no frilly bedrooms.”

“I don’t think you are going to have to worry about either one of those,” Betty assured him.

She felt pleased with the all-yellow ensemble she had pulled together for the photographs—a marigold scoop neck for the cover, and for the group shot with the Mercury capsule, a sunny yellow shirtwaist dress, cinched at her slim waist with a belt. She had taken some care to find yellow sunglasses and perfectly matching yellow button earrings at a local department store, and considered herself the best dressed of the wives. Like Trudy, she would wear her NASA dress buttoned up to the top. Gus was more of a leg man anyhow. Whenever he’d tell her, “Your legs are good-looking,” Betty would shine inside.

“Betty’s a Hoosier,” someone explained on the party line, “and she’s kind of stubborn and she’s not as socialized as the rest of us.”

Nevertheless, when the big day of the shoot rolled around, Marge and Jo didn’t mind Betty chauffeuring them in her air-conditioned car. She pulled into Jo’s driveway bright and early. It was true what the other wives said about Jo. She was the perfect Navy wife with her white gloves and pearls. Today she was wearing seventy-dollar white high heels.

Marge was late, making Betty and Jo wait in the car while she put on her finishing touches, probably going to work with her tweezers on her “beauty mark.” Jo thought Marge, a fellow Navy wife, should be abiding by their code, the first rule of which was to always be on time. It was important to have a good memory for things like what O-hundred hour your husband’s ship was to sail. And as they waited, it got closer and closer to the hour scheduled with the photographer.

“Shoot,” said Betty. That was one of her favorite expressions. She honked her horn.

Jo could hardly keep from rolling her eyes at Betty’s unladylike turn of phrase; “very Air Force,” she thought.

Marge finally came out of the house, waving her hands about madly. She made some excuse about having to feed Acey. As soon as Marge offered her a cigarette, Jo forgave her.

Marge and Jo were the smokers of the group. Betty was not too happy to have these chain-smoking chimneys in her car. She hated smoke. Back in Mitchell, Indiana, she’d had to endure Sunday drives with her dad, who smoked big cigars and insisted that all the windows be kept closed. It always made Betty sick. Finally she convinced her mother to let her stay home. She’d even been willing to forgo a delicious three-scoop cone from the place that made its own ice cream in order not to have to ride around in a cloud of smoke.

Now she was an astronaut wife and had to get along with her cohorts, so she set her jaw and pressed the pedal to the metal.

At Langley, Ralph Morse, the
Life
photographer, looked through the viewfinder of his camera. The women were all noticeably nervous, so Ralph kept on moving around and talking in his New York accent while he set up hot lights. It was better this way because if he stopped for a moment, the women might pass out cold.
Life
had big plans for the wives and he needed the pictures to be perfect.

For the cover shot, Ralph arranged the wives like numerals around a clock face. Their formation mimicked the placement of their husbands, whose cover story, “The Astronauts—Ready to Make History,” would come out the week before the wives’. The wives smiled and blinked into the bright popping flashbulbs. There was plenty to chat about while Ralph set up the next shot, like how the boys had all decided to quit smoking now that they were astronauts and starting their training. Jo’s pack-a-day husband, Wally, claimed to have kicked the habit so as not to have a nicotine fit in orbit. He would still light up cigarettes, but wouldn’t inhale. Jo was almost ready to throw him out of the house, he was so irritable.

The crowning shot was taken on a grassy Langley field under a perfect blue sky. Ralph set the ladies up in a pleasing arrangement, positioning them on the metal apron of the red model of the Mercury capsule their husbands would ride into space. This very capsule had recently been dropped into the Atlantic and survived! Instead of some egghead from Langley Research Lab giving the women a little lesson about where the parachute was folded away in the capsule, the wives got something along the lines of: “You in the pink, sit next to the gal in the yellow, yeah, yellow, don’t move, you’re in the middle next to Snow White—”

The wives looked like scoops of ice cream around an upside-down cone. Just as NASA and
Life
had ordered, they were all in their pressed pastel shirtwaists, white and pale blue and—
roses
? Rene had astonished the wives by wearing red heels and a bold dress, blooming with red cabbage roses. Actually, Rene’s dress matched the space capsule perfectly! How could the
Life
editors not be amused? Rene really made the shot zing. The wives each placed a manicured hand on the capsule, like models selling a Maytag. Perfect!

It was torture waiting weeks for the magazine to come out, but finally the day came, September 21, 1959. The cover bore the headline “Astronauts’ Wives’: Their Inner Thoughts, Worries.” There they were, seven well-coiffed “typical” American housewives with smiling red lips. The wives had been airbrushed to perfection: there were no pimples, no puffy eyes, no crow’s-feet or fine lines around the lips. But what
about
those lips? They had all worn pink lipstick, but here they were in
red
?

The wives were completely shocked, worrying about how America would judge them. They would
never
wear such a bold-colored lipstick. They were mothers, not vixens done up in Racy Red. What had happened to Responsible Pink?

In the towering Time-Life Building in New York City, the editors had decided against Mamie Pink because it was fast going out of style. This was the space age after all, and the flare of a bright Patriotic Red on the Astrowives’ lips better promised America the Moon and the stars. Soon, bouffant hairdos whipped up to the heavens appeared on runways, on sidewalks, and in typing pools, along with frosted “Moon Drops” lipstick, launched by Revlon as “the lipstick to wear to the moon.”

The wives pored over their fifteen-page “Seven Brave Women Behind the Astronauts” spread. Through touching up and editorial tinkering,
Life
had transformed seven very different, complicated women into perfect cookie-cutter American housewives. There was not a whiff of domestic turbulence.

In her
Life
profile, Trudy came out strong for her Gordo, proving herself his biggest supporter with total faith in his piloting skills and his grace under pressure. Deke’s wife, Marge, certainly didn’t mention her ex-husband, a lesser Air Force pilot who had turned out to be a pathological liar. It was because of him that she’d left the United States for Japan and then Germany, where she met Deke. She knew
Life
wouldn’t want that piece of history anyway. A perfect Astrowife being a divorcée?

Instead, Marge’s ghostwriter had put in how sick Marge was of the Hollywood version of a military pilot wife, crying into her dirty dishwater over the loss of her man. Marge had seen more than a few girls turn into widows at Edwards, and promised herself that if she lost Deke in space, she’d take her lumps without sugar.

“You learn to take the things your husband does in stride,” Trudy told her ghostwriter, but she didn’t care to elaborate on that statement.

It had taken some overtime for the New York editors to turn Betty Grissom into the quintessential fifties housewife. Sucked dry of all her character and verve, Betty could now be admired by readers across the country and held aloft as a role model. Whatever eccentricities the wives displayed,
Life
was complicit with NASA in erasing quirks such as thirty-year-old Betty referring to herself, because of all she’d been through, as “ole Betty.”

As far as being a red, white, and blue all-American, no one could beat Annie Glenn, which led to a complaint that none of the wives could explicitly state on the round-robin: why hadn’t
they
gotten the lead? The answer was right there on the page. Annie’s dark hair perfectly framed her face, which, just like her balding redheaded spaceman’s, was sprinkled with freckles. The seemingly perfect Annie had known John all her life, having met him when they were just toddlers in their hometown of New Concord, Ohio. Annie’s dentist father, Doc Castor, stuck her in a playpen with Johnny during their local teetotalers’ monthly dinner club potluck.

Color photos featured Annie in a cherry print headscarf driving the boat as Johnny water-skied across the glistening blue Chesapeake Bay inlet, a more middle-class version of Senator John F. Kennedy’s family at Hyannis Port. Annie was just what NASA wanted the wives of its seven astronauts to be—a squeaky-clean American housewife standing proudly beside her husband with her spatula ready to whip up something tasty for her hero who was beating those godless Russians in the space race. Annie fit the part perfectly; she even played the organ for Sunday evening home sing-alongs, which featured Broadway hits and Presbyterian hymns. Like Miss America contestants, she had her “talent.” Annie was the Ultimate Astrowife.

Annie spoke of faith in God and country. When John was picked for the program, she said she went to see her family minister to make sure the higher power approved of man’s exploration of its realm. “There’s no religious reason why mankind, and John in particular, should not explore space,” Reverend Erwin assured her.