The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (6 page)

“What if that thing is up there going around and around,” she confessed to America, “and they aren’t able to bring him back? What would I do?”

In the Glenns, people across the nation saw America’s values and ideals—faith, bravery, family—personified. And in Annie’s confession, their own hopes and fears about this crazy, bold, amazing step America was going to take were reflected back at them.

If the other wives didn’t want to watch John Glenn become the first man to go into space, they had their work cut out for them.

The Cookies

A
cross the land, housewives opened their glossy
Life
magazines and saw seven glorious women they could look up to and emulate. If only
they
could whip up an apple pie or a perfect batch of chocolate chip cookies like Annie Glenn, maybe their husbands would be more productive, better fit their gray flannel suits, and get ahead in business.

Nobody wanted to be left in the backwash of the space age, so the pressure to have an exemplary family life, from Walla Walla, Washington, to Presque Isle, Maine, was greater than ever. No matter what a wife had to sweep under her carpet, keeping a peaceful marriage was not just an imperative of American womanhood, but in this day when everything could be wiped out at the push of a button, a matter of national security. The seven Astrowives would show them the way.

Soon, the astronauts were off to the Convair plant in California. Here was where they were building the Atlas rocket that would fulfill Project Mercury’s goal of putting a man into orbit around the Earth before the Russians did. As usual at these Astro-junkets, the red carpet was rolled out and the boys were put up in the first-class Kona Kai Resort, a tropical oasis of lush gardens with torchlights and white-sand beaches on the shores of the Pacific at the tip of Shelter Island off San Diego.

Alan Shepard got a room with twin beds, which didn’t exactly fit his plans for the evening, so he asked to switch rooms with Scott Carpenter, who’d been assigned a full-sized bed. Scott handed over his key and Alan headed off to his new room. Why did Alan need the extra mattress space? As the story went, Alan had gone across the border and picked up a
chiquita
in a bar in Tijuana, the den of sin for many a lonely sailor stationed in San Diego.

In the middle of the night, John Glenn was woken up by a phone call from John “Shorty” Powers, the NASA press officer known as the “voice of the astronauts and Mercury Control,” who had been a cheerleader in high school. Shorty had gotten a call from a paper that was ready to run a story, complete with incriminating photos.

John was livid. He convinced the reporter and the photographer and the editor, who he got out of bed, not to run the story. It was a matter of national security. The next morning, John asked for a “séance,” which was what the seven astronauts called their closed-door meetings. This one would be forever known as the Kona Kai Séance. As John saw it, any astronaut who couldn’t keep his “pants zipped” threatened to ruin everything and squash America’s opportunity to beat the Russians, not only in space but also on the grounds of moral superiority. They all had a responsibility to the country to be the wholesome heroes they were sold as. John went head-to-head with Alan over the issue.

They didn’t come to any agreement, but the overriding feeling was that any extracurricular monkey business was each man’s own private affair, so long as he kept it out of sight. All the same, Alan didn’t exactly try to hide his philandering. He was seen at swinging parties and golf tournaments with multiple women hanging off his arms and was spotted cruising the Strip in Cocoa Beach in his white Corvette, customized by Chevrolet with a “space age” interior and racing tires. Thank God
their
husbands weren’t like Alan, the wives thought.

“How do you think Louise puts up with him?” they asked. But of course they didn’t want to pry too much or say anything that could even remotely affect the competition that was foremost on everybody’s mind—which of the astronauts would be the Chosen One to go up first?

The astronauts were spending most of their days down in Cocoa Beach, the “Jewel of the Space Coast,” working overtime at nearby Cape Canaveral, the military base that housed the astronaut headquarters, including their “procedures trainer,” a spacecraft simulator. The Cape was where the actual launch would take place in the spring of 1961. The big day was fast approaching when, after a massive and intensive effort by NASA, the titanium Mercury capsule would be nearly complete. One of their husbands would ride this “can” into space for the first suborbital flight—just a fifteen-minute shot up and down, but long enough to assure his place in history as the first man in space.

Soon the wives were going down to Florida for a glimpse of what their husbands were doing. Driven from the airport in convertibles, they held on to their hats and squinted through cat-eyed sunglasses at this fabulous space frontier town of coconut palms and white stucco motel architecture, with blinking neon signs advertising nightclub acts. Along the stretch of Highway A1A known as the Strip, Cocoa Beach was exploding with rat-shack motels, popping up overnight with names like Starlite, Polaris, Sea Missile, and Astrocraft. The Satellite Motel spun its famous Earth-orbiting signpost. A rocket took off in neon from the Starlite Motel. The famous Mouse Trap steakhouse crowned a Miss Orbit every year. The Vanguard was a lousy-looking joint, but it had topless waitresses.

The Holiday Inn was the classiest of the new accommodations along the Strip. It looked like a giant live-in cocktail, garnished with a huge green neon star on top. This was where the wives would be put up for this and all subsequent visits to Cocoa Beach. The tanned, smooth-talking manager, Henri Landwirth, pronounced with a dramatic French accent, met them at the door and welcomed them chez
Henri
, offering his master-of-ceremonies services for the wives’ weekend.

As the husbands escorted them in, the women were alarmed to see a crowd of astronaut groupies waiting in the lobby. Stewardesses with flexible flying schedules, hotel clerks, and diner waitresses seemed to magically appear wherever an astronaut was to be found. Two of these Cape Cookies, as the boys called them, dropped to their knees as the group entered, prostrating themselves before the astronauts. The wives were taken aback at the sheer number of these pretty, tanned young things with their scantily clad bodies, obviously willing to do anything a spaceman desired. Dear God!

“I mean, these Hollywood types—they need this and they want this,” said Jo, looking around at the rest as if to say,
But our guys don’t, right?

The boys didn’t mind the attention one bit. The MO, as it had always been for a Navy wife worrying about her husband (who might be cozying up to an exotic Asian dancer in a dark tiki bar on the other side of the globe), was to play a cool hand.

Pretty soon the wives learned the lay of the land at Cocoa Beach. It was chock-full of promoters and public relations men, each trying to get in a word about his product and solicit an astronaut’s endorsement. The party followed the astronauts wherever they went. When the astronauts had first rolled into town, everyone went to the Cape Colony Inn because that’s where the astronauts were. After they packed up and moved the party permanently to the Holiday Inn, everyone followed them there. The hotel bar would be empty, then an astronaut would walk in; within minutes the bar would be full. The bartenders tipped off reporters, who would literally chase the astronaut children down hallways. The kids thought it was funny. The rabid press didn’t get to them the way it got to their mothers, who didn’t like their husbands being walking advertisements for the bald smooth-talking types who offered a variety of perks and bargains while picking up the cookie crumbs left in their wake.

For the time being, the boys ignored the cookies, instead reminding their wives what a terrific rate the Holiday Inn was giving them. Their rooms cost only a dollar a night, not to mention free all-you-can-eat dinner buffets, which featured shrimp cocktails shaped like rockets. And there was an even better perk: down here in Florida, each astronaut was given a dollar-a-year Corvette.

Al, Gus, and Gordo befriended Jim Rathmann, who’d won the Indy 500 that year. Jim owned the local Cadillac-Chevrolet dealership in nearby Melbourne, and, under the auspices of doing his patriotic duty, he arranged an out-of-this-world deal with the president of General Motors. An astronaut could “executive drive” a Corvette for a year, then trade it in for a new one the next year. All he had to do was plunk down another dollar. Meanwhile, the wives were doomed to drive station wagons; family rooms on wheels were deemed the perfect vehicle for these all-American mothers. Trudy, who was not only a pilot but liked to race cars, yearned to get behind the wheel of something with a little more horsepower. But the ad men of America told her that a station wagon, with plenty of room for kids and groceries, was more suitable.

As for Betty, she thought Gus was in a little over his head, always talking about his “friends” at Rathmann’s house. It was a fast crowd, and they all raced cars. Betty didn’t like it a bit. Finally she had a chance to see the place for herself. After dinner in the formal dining room, Betty, who usually didn’t like to cause a fuss, pointed out to Gus, “It’s
you
they’re after, not me.”

The astronauts weren’t exactly tall, NASA’s requirement being that they all had to be less than five foot eleven—small enough to squeeze into the cramped quarters of a spacecraft. But they were enormously competitive. Anything, no matter how insignificant, might become a test of their manhood. At a mere five foot five, little Gus wanted to prove to the others that he was the most macho of them all. The boys liked to play handball, but they turned this simple street game into an epic battle. Gus was the champion, except for the one time when he supposedly let Alan beat him so he wouldn’t feel bad. To make sure that never happened again, Gus strutted around the Cape squeezing a spring-loaded handgrip to strengthen his hand and wrist muscles so that he could smack the ball even harder, faster. Gus had to win, all of the time. Dominating his peers, even at handball, just might make the hairbreadth of difference when it came to winning the prize of being first into space.

Ultimately, NASA would decide who was the One, but the question would also be posed to the astronauts themselves: “If you can’t make the first flight yourself, which man do you think should make it?” Each would vote for the man he thought would be the best among them to go first. No one was allowed to vote for himself, obviously, since each felt very strongly that he should be chosen.

So they had to prove themselves to their peers, all of the time. If the boys were going waterskiing at the Cape, whoever was in charge of getting the speedboat had to make sure he got the fastest one on the dock. Pansy tourists might like to slalom, but astronauts preferred barefoot skiing, which required far more horsepower. NASA worried that their national treasures might break an ankle going fifty miles an hour on the choppy water, but the astronauts just went faster. Even at a friendly astronaut barbecue, the boys would jockey for position to be the one manning the grill. The wives would roll their eyes while each secretly hoped
her
husband got the apron and tongs.

When the wives were together, they tried to avoid talking about their husbands’ competition because it was so ferocious. Betty didn’t think Alan liked Gus one bit, and in fact thought Gus was a shade ahead of Alan (and driving Alan nuts because he couldn’t catch her Gus). The competition reached pathological proportions one day at the Cape when Gus spontaneously started shimmying up one of the guy wires that held up the rocket on the launch pad.

“Get down!” the engineers ordered, but Gus wasn’t about to let some pencil neck tell him what to do. Strong as a bear, he climbed higher and higher. This sent the rest of the boys into a tizzy. Alan hopped on the wire and climbed after him, ready to beat Gus to the top.

“Get down!” the engineers called again, but the guys were too pumped on adrenaline to even hear them.

Wally Schirra’s gambit to beat out the rest of the boys was through practical jokes. If the astronauts were on the golf course together and Alan was about to tee off, Wally might goose him with a putter. If Wally “gotcha,” as he called his pranks, that meant he had triumphed over you, at least in his own mind. To his wife, Jo, Wally didn’t care to sugarcoat his competitive nature with jokes. They competed at everything—swimming, diving, waterskiing. One time, when they went out on the tennis court, Wally served as hard as he would to an astronaut, as if his wife were somehow competing with him to be first in space.

But Jo was no shrinking violet. Instead of thwacking back the ball to Wally, she would give it a light tap so it would just go
boop
over the net. Wally didn’t know how to handle it. Jo “got him.” When Jo won a match she didn’t brag to the other wives, lest they mention it to their husbands. Wally would go ballistic if his comrades knew he had lost in anything to his wife.

After having spent a couple of nights in Cookie Land, the wives could joke about the absurdity of the scene, and each went to sleep glad
her
astronaut was diligently sticking to his training schedule during his many months down at the Cape. But was her man
really
staying in like John Glenn with his Bible? Or, God forbid, panting around until the wee hours like Alan, chasing tail like a hound dog, taking advantage of the Strip’s easy drive-up-to-the-door motel access (so you didn’t have to sneak cookies in through the lobby).

The possibilities for extracurricular activities made Marge Slayton, for one, see double. God knows what her Deke was nailing down in Cocoa Beach. What was so top-secret that the Cape, the actual rocket launch site, was declared “off-limits to wives”? Who knew what went on at the top-secret Cape with the astronauts’ secretaries and nurses? Marge was no dummy. She’d been a secretary on an air base in Germany. That’s how she’d met Deke!