Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (3 page)

On the morning of May 5, 1961, one of the greatest crowds Florida had ever seen descended upon its beaches. Men and women skipped work, pulled their children from school, and to the north and south of Cape Canaveral arrived early, carrying lawn chairs and binoculars, hoping for a glimpse of history.

Across the nation, millions sat glued to their televisions. President Kennedy stood in his secretary’s office with his wife and brother by his side. Shepard’s parents sat side by side in their New Hampshire living room; even though Shepard’s father had opposed his son’s decision to become an astronaut, he now sat in
an easy chair, watching calmly and proudly. Louise Shepard kneeled before her television, reaching to touch the frail image of the thin rocket that would soon carry her husband.

At that moment John Glenn’s hands were reaching into Shepard’s cramped capsule. Glenn retrieved the handball sign and the centerfold, then helped strap Shepard tightly into his couch and attached the many hoses, wires, and sensors from his suit to the capsule’s dashboard. In the months leading up to that morning, a certain dignity had befallen the relationship between Shepard and Glenn. They were inseparable during the final weeks of training. To escape the tension-filled cacophony of Cape Canaveral, they’d jog on a nearby isolated beach, chase sand crabs, and dive into the cool waves of
the Atlantic; at night, they’d sit for hours after dinner, discussing each detail of the upcoming flight, then retire together to the same room, sleeping just a few feet apart.

Just before they closed the hatch Glenn reached in one last time and shook Shepard’s gloved hand. Shepard was suddenly moved by how gracious Glenn had been. He thanked his colleague and then jerked a thumbs-up.

“See you soon,” he said, his voice muffled inside his helmet.

“Happy landings, Commander,” Glenn responded as the crew standing behind him shouted good luck and goodbye.

Technicians closed and bolted the hatch, and Shepard was alone. Monitors showed that his heartbeat quickened a bit as they shut him inside, and Shepard thought,
Okay, buster. You volunteered for this thing. Now don’t screw up.

It was dawn. He’d been awake five hours, and the rising sun began to shine through the periscope screen two feet from his face. He started going through his checklist—a newspaper the next day would accidentally print that Shepard was reviewing his “chick list.” Then he started through all the procedures he and Glenn had practiced for months. As he did this, he began to think about where he was and where the others were.

I’m going to be the first,
he thought. Glenn was on the outside of the capsule, helping disconnect hoses and cables. The other astronauts were performing various backup duties. Shepard’s rocket would soon leave them all behind in its fiery dust, rising higher and farther and faster than any of them—than any American—had ever been.

There would be many battles in the years to come: personal, professional, financial, physical, marital, legal. But in the battle to be first, which was the biggest prize of the astronaut game, it appeared Shepard was about to win. The boy who had been smaller, weaker, and slower than the others had forced himself to become better than the rest and had become the man, the flyboy, he’d always wanted to be.

Years later, when asked about his greatest accomplishment, Shepard would say that being chosen to be the first American in space was the highlight of his career, of his life. A close second was reaching the moon in 1971, but that was more personal. He’d fought back from severe illness to get there, and spoke less about the moon’s effect on his life. But ten years earlier, being picked above the other six—that had
defined
him.

It was never the fifteen-minute flight itself that symbolized his life. He’d had more thrilling adventures as a test pilot and fighter jock. Landing wounded jets on storm-tossed aircraft carriers and working the dangerous kinks out of the nation’s newest, fastest aircraft—some of those moments had given him more of a heart-thumping rush than riding on a rocket. But being chosen, being first, winning—that was the thing.

Because for Shepard, life was one big competition. And as he sat that morning locked inside his capsule, at the tip of an eighty-three-foot bullet, with America’s most sophisticated machinery hissing and humming all around him, he knew he had won.

Just before they pulled away the gantry, leaving him atop his rocket alone, he saw a face in the screen of the periscope. The
fish-eye screen made the face appear round and distorted, but it looked “close and friendly.”

It was John Glenn.

Grinning.

Shepard was thirty-seven the day he became the first American in space; thirty-seven years later, I was working as a reporter at the
Baltimore Sun
and received a call from an editor telling me that Alan Shepard had died and asking me to contribute a few paragraphs to his obituary.

A quick Internet search that day told me that, except for a thin 1962 young-adult book, no biography existed on America’s first astronaut. When I decided to make up for that omission, I quickly discovered why no one had ventured to write about Shepard.

Alan Shepard felt no compunction to explain to the world, to anyone, who he was and where he’d been. He hoarded his privacy, to the point of turning down many lucrative endorsement offers. In death, those loyal to him continued to protect that privacy.

Sure, there were things he was hiding—women, business deals, broken friendships, marital strife—that he knew might tarnish his hero’s image. But by venturing beyond that image, into Shepard’s past, into a few dark corners, I found a more human, complex, and complete man than the Corvette-driving stud I’d been awed by in Tom Wolfe’s
The Right Stuff.

This book began as a series of questions: How does a man reach the front lines of the cold war? Where does an edgy, competitive explorer go after he’s already gone where few men have? How does someone reach the moon and how does he survive after he’s gone there? By picking through the scattered clues Shepard left behind, by enlisting the help of some family members and scores of friends and colleagues, by
gaining access to some of Shepard’s military records and his FBI files, what emerges in response to those questions is a large, energetic, and aggressive life. A life that, before and after space, pulsed with mystery, romance, and adventure. Shepard was the military version of what Elvis was to music, what James Dean was to Hollywood, what Kerouac was to literature. Today’s man was once a boy who wanted to be Alan Shepard. But, until now, his true story has never been fully told. It’s the story of life fully lived, and entwined through it is—somewhat surprisingly for a man so famous for philandering—
a love story.

His beautiful wife, Louise, might have told the story. But after fifty-three years of marriage, she followed him into oblivion, dying suddenly and mysteriously, five weeks after he did, on an airplane, forty thousand feet above earth.

Part I

BEFORE SPACE

1

“Alan was really kind of a loner”

Alan Shepard confounded people. He angered, intimidated, and embarrassed them; insulted, taunted, or—worst of all—ignored them. Yet for all his maddening iciness, people were drawn to him, because just beneath his cold shell was an intelligent, curious man who could be charming, hilarious, warm, inviting, generous, and even sexy.

There was no way to anticipate which of Alan Shepard’s personalities would emerge on a given day: aloof and remote one day, buying you drinks the next. Possibly the only consistent aspect of his character was its unpredictable duality. That and the obsessive drive to be, as one astronaut put it, “better than anyone else.”

At every stage of his life, Shepard’s effect on family, friends, and colleagues was that of a competitor in a hurry, constantly lurching forward, with no stomach for delays or incompetence. He was attracted to people with something to offer, those with skills, information, or money who could help him achieve his goals. But if you had nothing to offer, “you’d better get out of town,” said one longtime friend.

“He was hard to get to know. But onc
e he put his arm around you, you knew he was there,” said astronaut Deke Slayton’s wife, Bobbie. “If you were a friend of Al’s and you needed something, you could call him and he’d break his neck trying to get it for you. If you were in, you were in. It was just tough to get in.”

Shepard’s frenetic, unreadable personality churned behind a pair of wide, wild eyes, his most prominent facial feature. Googly, buggy things. Heavy-lidded, they distended out from deep sockets. When he wasn’t smiling—he could ignite a huge smile, too, with long, askew teeth framed by meaty lips—it was the eyes people noticed first. Icy blue and intense sometimes, other times warm and watery, but always open wide.

Throughout his life, friends and family spoke of the “infamous stare” Shepard could inflict. Confidence, smarts, ego, anger, hunger all poured through his bulgy eyes. But, like mirrors, they worked only one way, giving nothing back.

Behind the mirrors burbled a mysterious stew of contradictions. He was swaggeringly cocky, often referring to himself in the third person or as “the world’s greatest test pilot.” And yet he could be humble and self deprecating. Despite a notorious impatience, Shepard also displayed an attention to detail that earned him key assignments as a Navy pilot. “He didn’t do anything until he had studied it, tested it, and made damn sure he could do it,” said James Stockdale, a onetime test pilot colleague of Shepard’s.

In the cockpit of an airplane, Shepard flew with confidence, without fear, always in control, and with an uncanny spatial awareness that can’t be taught. “He could fly anything,” one colleague said. Another called him “the best aviator I’ve ever known.” But Shepard also had a persistent habit of infuriating superiors by flouting Navy rules, flying dangerously low over beaches, beneath bridges, and upside down. He was “flamboyant” and “indulgent,” growled one former supervisor.

Though his flamboyant indulgences once took him to the brink of a Navy court-martial, those same flinty q
ualities earned him a spot as one of the nation’s first seven astronauts. “He was an egotist” and “a typical New Englander . . . hard, cold,” said one NASA official, Chris Kraft. “But he was all business when it came to flying.”

When he joined the other Mercury Seven astronauts, the same question constantly simmered: Who was Alan Shepard? One astronaut considered him “bitterly competitive, to the point of being cutthroat.” Another once accused Shepard of “swindling” him in a business deal. And one astronaut’s wife said Shepard “really didn’t want to have anything to do with the rest of us, the common folk.”

Indeed, he worked hard at setting himself apart. He’d attend casual backyard barbecues in a suit and tie, and he drove a flashy Corvette for the better part of thirty years. He befriended race car drivers, comedians, pro golfers, and millionaires, collected celebrity friends like Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Mickey Rooney, and Clint Eastwood. Then again, while he often acted the part of a self-sufficient loner with little need for others’ company, he was just as often a party boy who loved good pranks and nights of drinking with buddies. Shepard cherished good times and pursued them vigorously.
Some guessed that his need for a good time was a necessary counterweight to his constant, annoying competitiveness. Al Neuharth, who founded
USA Today,
said Shepard “wanted to win, whether it was pool or cards or whatever. He wanted to win, to be number one.”

The privacy fence Shepard erected around the perimeter of his personal life shielded another of the contradictions of his persona: that of a ferocious womanizer and, at the same time, a devoted family man and an unashamed admirer of his wife, Louise.

Like many Navy men of his day, Shepard successfully navigated among exotic women in the barrooms of international ports of call. He perfected those skills as a celebrity-astronaut; one NASA colleague called him “the biggest flirt in the country—
but it went beyond flirting.” A fellow test pilot said, “He had a beautiful wife and family. I just never quite understood it. But this was his compulsion.”

And yet, while he rarely spoke of them to his peers, Shepard loved and doted on his wife and two daughters. Few colleagues knew that Shepard also informally adopted a niece (the daughter of his wife’s dead sister) and treated her like one of his own. But his strong if imperfect fifty-three-year marriage quietly survived while so many other astronauts’ marriages crumbled around him.

One family friend said Louise grounded her husband: “She was the rock.” Astronaut Wally Schirra agreed: “She’d bring Al down to earth a lot.”

In the end, she was probably the only one who really knew him.

One of the Mercury Seven astronauts once told
Life
magazine, “You might think you’d get to know someone well after working so closely with him for two years. Well, it’s not that way with Shepard. He’s always holding something back.”

For all his vexing complexity, however, Shepard was exactly the kind of man NASA wanted. At the height of the cold war, the space agency sought nothing less than “real men . . . perfect physical and emotional and aesthetic specimens.”

In Alan Shepard, NASA got all that and more. A guy who’d fought an evil empire in World War II, landed planes on aircraft carriers during storms and at night, bailed out of test jets ten miles above the earth, downed cocktails or swatted golf balls with celebrities, water-skied barefoot, raced Corvettes, slept with beautiful women, and become a millionaire—all the things boys and teens want to do when they become men.

Shepard was a man’s man, and others strived to be like him, even if they didn’t necessarily like him or considered him an “asshole” or a “son of a bitch,” as many did. If Shepard’s character was a study in paradox, that’s possibly because, a
s a boy, he was pulled in two directions by parents with opposing but oddly complementary temperaments.

Both parents came from old-guard New Hampshire stock, with impressive lineages to the seminal Colonial days. But when Alan was born, on November 18, 1923, in an upstairs room at 64 East Derry Road—with its ornate molding, glass doorknobs, and gas lamps in each room—he was immediately positioned between two loving but dissimilar parents, one of them grim and duty-bound, the other boisterous and spirited.

East Derry, forty miles northwest of Boston in the southeastern tip of New Hampshire, was a town where everybody knew everyone. Family roots ran deep in such towns, but the Shepard family’s roots were among the deepest.

One side of the family sailed from England in the 1690s, their carpentry and blacksmithing tools in tow, then trekked inland from the coast to the folds and foothills along the Merrimac River. Later they helped draft the Declaration of Independence and fought in the Revolutionary War. Ancestors on the other side of Shepard’s family transited with the 102 passengers of the
Mayflower,
then helped govern the Plymouth Colony.

Along with Scotch-Irish settlers seeking religious freedom, Shepard’s English ancestors carved rural hillsides into potato and dairy farms, which later birthed linen, hat, and shoe factories in a triad of manufacturing towns—Derry, East Derry, and Londonderry.

The landscape of Shepard’s youth was a succulent Americana playground of barnyards and swimming holes, apple orchards and blueberry fields, stone walls framing fields of wildflowers and shadowy forests of white pine carpeted by fern and moss. The unpredictable New Hampshire weather could be both fierce and lovely in a day. Winter brought biting winds and mounds of snow that arrived early and stayed late. Summer
s were brief, hot, and humid, followed by crisp and spectacularly colorful falls.

That landscape was sensually depicted in the poems of Robert Frost, who in 1900 bought a farm not far from the Shepards. “To a large extent, the terrain of my poetry is the Derry landscape,” Frost once said. “There was something about the experience at Derry which stayed in my mind, and was tapped for poetry in the years that came after.”

The people also made a profound impression: seriously religious, ultraconservative, and snobbishly wary of newcomers. Frost once cashed a check at the Derry National Bank—owned by Shepard’s grandfather—and forgot to sign his middle name on the check. The teller sniffed, “Since it doesn’t cost you anything, we would like your
full
name.”

Frost often felt like an interloper among haughty, superior people. After being rebuffed by the Derry school board for a teaching job, he found work at the prestigious Pinkerton Academy, where Shepard’s grandfather was a trustee. Among his students was Shepard’s father, Bart, a man steeped in that hard-edged New England culture.

Throughout his life Alan would rankle friends with the imperious and crusty attitude he inherited from the tight-knit, fiercely loyal, and wealthy Shepard clan.

In town, the Shepards wore the nicer clothes, drove the newer cars; they kept a vacation house on a nearby lake. A hue of wealth tainted the other kids’ perceptions of Alan, and many peers assumed he lived a coddled life of privilege. He did, in fact, absorb a sense of entitlement and the self-assuredness that privilege engendered. But Alan—and his sister, Polly, who was two years younger—were far from pampered rich kids. Their father valued work and made sure each child performed their share of domestic chores.

Each morning, for example, Alan grabbed a flag from the front hall closet, poked the rod into the front l
awn, waited for his father to come out, and then stood back to salute. After cleaning his room, he might lug one of the last, half-melted, sawdust-coated blocks of ice from the icehouse in the woods and put it in the ice chest. Then he’d deliver newspapers to half the homes in town. On Saturday nights he’d sit in the foyer buffing and polishing every last shoe in the house, lining them up to gleam on the stairs.

Bart Shepard was a stern and serious disciplinarian, and Alan inherited a stoicism and toughness of character from him— traits that Bart had inherited from his own prosperous and industrious father.

Alan’s grandfather Frederick “Fritz” Shepard was one of the most powerful local businessmen of his day. He owned Derry National Bank and Derry Electric Light Company, ran a stage-coach service and an electric rail line, and built the town library. Fritz Shepard was also a prominent Republican, East Derry’s town treasurer, and a colonel in the National Guard. He served as aide-de-camp at the historic month-long Russo-Japanese Peace Conference, organized by President Theodore Roosevelt in Portsmouth in 1905 (which ended the war between Russia and Japan and earned Roosevelt the Nob
el peace prize). Until the crash of 1929, Fritz Shepard was a very wealthy man.

He and his wife, Nanzie, fairly lorded above the town in their enormous house on a high knoll off East Derry Road, a Victorian mansion with a tennis-court-sized ballroom where the Shepards entertained such dignitaries as President Howard Taft.

Though Fritz’s Derry empire was battered by the Depression, causing him to lose the bank and the rail line, he subsequently threw his energies into making his own line of sodas, tonics, and ginger ale, which allowed him and Nanzie to keep in their employ the African-American couple who served for decades as their maid and butler.

While Fritz tended to his business enterprises, his wife governed the family as its rock-steady matriarch. Nanzie Shepard’
s lineage was also seriously old guard, and she became an important influence on her grandchildren—especially Alan.

Short, redheaded Nanzie was an equally important social and political figure in East Derry. She led the New Hampshire Daughters of the Revolution, became the first female president of the Republican Club of New Hampshire, and as one of New Hampshire’s presidential electors cast her vote for the Republican Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

She and Fritz had high expectations for their sons, imbuing in them an ethic of success and the expectation that they would get a good education and make their mark in the world. Two of their sons, Henry and Frederick junior, went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, en route to careers as successful businessmen in Massachusetts.