Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (35 page)

Sharing a room with Slayton was to be avoided at all costs. The man’s monstrous snores—“major-noise, high-decibel, world-class snoring,” Glenn called them—could rattle pictures off the walls.

But on this trip to California they didn’t have to worry. Slayton got so drunk after his speech—tossing back Rusty Nails and Salty Dogs—that he flopped into bed and passed out. The others rolled him onto a metal-framed cot and carried the cot out a second-floor access door onto the top of the Beverly Hilton’s neon marquee, where Slayton slept until dawn. He woke up early the next morning with the sun shining in his bloodshot eyes, the traffic noise from Wilshire Boulevard pounding in his ears.

They may not have been Spam, but the astronauts still knew—as every hard-drinking flyboy should—how to act like monkeys.

In the summer of 1960 the astronaut show moved south. The astronauts and the entire NASA workforce (which was growing fast, fed by an increasingly steady supply of cash from Congress) had emerged from infancy into adolescence, and NASA decided to move everyone closer to where the real work would happen: the launch pads of Cape Canaveral. The engineers went first, then the astronauts, and then, of course, the press.

Just south of the Cape, lazing on either side of the two-lane Highway A1A, sat the raggedy little town of Cocoa Beach. Until the astronauts roared into town, Cocoa Beach was a faded and paint-peeling stepchild to its glitzy Art Deco cousin to the south, Miami Beach. Until the astronauts electrified the place, Coco
a Beach was roughly six thousand people—just 823 registered voters—patronizing a few tiki bars, three seafood restaurants, several souvenir stands, some neon-encrusted bait shops, and motels of faded pastel pinks and aquamarines. The narrow strip of land was bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Banana River on the west; across a thin inlet to the north was the off-limits elbow of the Cape. It wasn’t quite seedy. It had a nice beach of white-sand dunes. But neither was it a destination for Mom, Dad, and the kids, what with the mosquito-infested palmetto brush and thick tangle
s of mangrove. “A stringbean of a town,” one writer called it, “a spit of sand.” At low tide, when the wind was blowing south across the swampy mud flats of Turnaround Basin, Cocoa Beach reeked of dankness and rot.

The arrival of the astronauts, however—and the thousands of engineers, technicians, electricians, doctors, and nurses, and then the reporters, cameramen, and photographers—would transform lazy little Cocoa Beach into a high-tech boom town and a rocking, rollicking hot spot. The young engineers and their families built homes, schools, churches. Narrow streets became choked with commuters, and the smells of cocoa butter, cigarettes, and beer overpowered the stench of Turnaround Basin.

At night the strip came alive. Patrons swarmed to the newly sprung clubs of A1A, where Caribbean dancers did the limbo, jugglers juggled, and Tahitian belly dancers traded time onstage with folk-singing chanteuses in cowgirl garb. A life-sized pink elephant beckoned from out front of the Carnival Club, and strippers lured men into back-alley clubs. Top jazz musicians and comedians began adding Cocoa Beach to their tours—Dave Brubeck at the Koko, confetti-throwing comedian Rip Taylor at the Starlight. The Starlight also boasted a sexy, space-themed dance act called “Girls in Orbit.” Th
e Mosquito Coast, for the moment, became the Platinum Coast, home to the latest American melodrama, an East Coast, space-themed Hollywood.

Over the next few years, surrounding Breva
rd County would become the fastest-growing county in the nation—the Silicon Valley of its era. It would also soon claim the highest annual liquor consumption in the nation—$143 worth per person. It was maybe no surprise, then, that Cocoa Beach later gained notoriety as home of America’s highest divorce rate. “A harlot of a town,” one visiting British journalist sneered.

Foreplay to the Cocoa Beach love fest actually began a few years earlier, in the late 1950s, when the Cape became the post-Sputnik launch pad for America’s imperfect experimental rockets, most of which flopped into the Atlantic or exploded. Howard Benedict, a reporter with the Associated Press, happened to be working the night of October 4, 1957, when Sputnik gut-punched America’s psyche. An editor assigned an “interpretive” piece for the weekend, even though Benedict “didn’t even know what a satellite was.” He wrote a story about Sputnik being the first step toward sending a man t
o the moon, and was immediately dubbed the news service’s space expert. “As sometimes happens in journalism, you write one story about something and all of a sudden you’re an expert,” Benedict recalled.

But when the astronauts came to town, Benedict’s job—and the entire zeitgeist of Cocoa Beach—became less about rockets and more about the new celebrities of the space age. Reporters who were there in the early 1960s would later recall wistfully how there was no better place to be, no better story to cover. At times the boozy swirl of celebrity, technology, and sexuality seemed as surreal as a Technicolor Fellini flick.

When NASA first crashed into town, there wasn’t even a church to counter all the debauchery, so a priest began holding makeshift Sunday morning services at a bowling alley. Patrons sat in folding chairs in lanes thirteen and fourteen and those looking toward heaven for inspiration saw instead a neon sign that suggested, DRINK SCHLITZ.

Sand-covered streets turned carnival-like with a kaleidoscope of candy-colored sports cars and skimpy bik
inis wrapped around young beauties drawn to the bacchanalia like moths to flame. At night you could stumble half-crocked from Wolfie’s and look north toward the reason for it all: the twinkly lights of the launch tower that would propel humans to the skies.

“We knew we were doing the greatest story in history, no question,”
Life
photographer Ralph Morse said. Then again, access to the astronauts was a lot easier for Morse than the others. “We couldn’t get near them because of that damned
Life
contract,” Benedict recalled.

Walter Cronkite, whom CBS sent to the Cape to capture a slice of the drama, recalled how the best place to cozy up to the astronauts was a bar. He ran into Shepard one night and they began talking about two of Shepard’s favorite subjects, cars and planes. Cronkite described how, as a cub reporter, he had flown on B-17 bombing runs during World War II and occasionally raced cars. Shepard grew immediately curious and talkative. “Maybe it gave me a little bit of an edge over the other reporters,” Cronkite said.

One day Cronkite and Shepard and a few other reporters and astronauts learned about the sea turtles that returned to Cocoa Beach to lay eggs. The females wandered far and wide but always came back to the same exact nesting spot each year. State wildlife officials tried to protect those spots but agreed to take a small group of a dozen astronauts and press out to watch. It was apparently an impressive scene, Shepard had heard, with the females screaming in pain as they laid the eggs.

The group arrived late one evening at a wooden ramp leading down to a secluded section of beach. Minutes after they arrived, they heard strange sounds coming from down the beach—moaning and muted screams that sounded almost human. Everyone wondered if it was an egg-laying turtle, but the wildlife official shook his head. He didn’t know what it was, so the group walked toward the sounds to investigate. Parked in the palmetto scrub they found a small convertible. In the backseat was Shorty
Powers, tangled up with his secretary. The secretary ducked down behind the seats as Shorty jumped into the driver’s seat and began to pull away, hoping no one would see his face. Two photographers in the group began snapping pictures, and Shorty, assuming they were all there waiting for him, started screaming.

“What kind of a trap is this? You people have entrapped me,” he yelled.

Cronkite remembers it as “one of the grander evenings” of his time at Cocoa Beach. He and Shepard thought it was so hilarious, they headed straight for the nearest bar and never saw the turtles.

Shepard might have taken Shorty’s embarrassing situation as a warning not to get caught with a woman when photographers were near. He did not get that message.

Dee O’Hara, a labor and delivery nurse at the Patrick Air Force Base hospital south of Cape Canaveral in Florida, was called into her commanding officer’s office one day. Usually such a visit meant one of two things: promotion or punishment. But this day she faced neither. The colonel explained that he and his staff had been watching her for the past few weeks. They needed someone for a special assignment, a woman who was smart, savvy, and assertive, and they believed she had all those qualities. How would she like to be the astronauts’ nurse?

O’Hara later learned that her boss, George Knauf, who was part of NASA’s vast medical team, had been criticized for suggesting a female nurse for the job. As O’Hara well knew, “It was really a male-dominated world.” But Knauf was able to argue that test pilots were trained to distrust doctors. They’d never admit to a doctor of having any ailment, which would put them at risk of being grounded. A female nurse, however—especially an attractive and perky redhead with a trim figure and a cute mole on her cheek—might be able to get closer to the astronauts than any male doctor could hope to get.

“He wanted someone to get to know them so well that she’d know if they were sick or not,” O’Hara recalled. “That was the idea behind it. Someone they could trust and someone who’d know when they were ill.” But earning their trust was not an easy task— especially with Shepard. When O’Hara had her first meetings with the astronauts, “I was frightened of all of them . . . in awe of them . . . they were good and they knew it.”

Her first few encounters with Shepard were especially unnerving. Just as he had always been with people he considered underlings, he was brusque, cocky, and rude to her. O’Hara noticed that, with his razor-sharp intellect, Shepard expected those around him to be razor-sharp as well. He liked to grill her with questions about her job, about the Air Force. She was shocked that he didn’t seem to realize how hurtful his scrutiny could be. She came to find that he introduced himself to most people by testing them. “It was a game with him. He enjoyed putting you on the spot—to see if
you knew your stuff,” O’Hara recalled. “He got great pleasure from putting you through the hoops.”

But after a few weeks of that, O’Hara got fed up. She stood up to him and they got into an argument over something. She’d soon forget what they argued about, but she’d never forget the change in their relationship after she raised her voice to Shepard. “I just sort of barked back at him,” she said. “And he smiled. And that was the end of it. We became friends right after that. From then on, we never had a problem.”

Still, even with those who considered themselves his friends, he could be maddening. O’Hara had many conversations with Shepard that began warm and friendly but ended abruptly, as though a switch had been turned off. “You only got so close to Alan and then he shut you out,” O’Hara recalled.

She assumed the technique was a source of power. But she also saw that it reflected a difficulty in making friends, something that didn’t come naturally for Shepard. In later years she’d learn he was actually kind, generous, emotional—a big-hearted softie
beneath an abrasive exterior. But for some reason, he showed his softer side sparingly. Instead, he showed glowering blue eyes and a sneering flash of those big teeth.

“Alan did not want you to know that he might like you,” O’Hara said. “He had a protective mechanism—protection from what, I don’t know.” O’Hara, like many of Shepard’s colleagues and friends, could never figure what lurked beneath his habit of keeping people off balance and at bay. Why didn’t he want people to know who he was? And, more to the point, who was he?

“Why don’t you want people to like you?” O’Hara once asked him.

“I do,” Shepard said. “I just don’t know how to do it.”

For Shepard, it was all a matter of trust, or lack of it. There were aspects of his personality—secrets, really—that required his small coterie of true friends to practice discretion and restraint. For him to expose the deeper, sometimes darker sides of himself to others meant that they first had to prove they could be trusted. Trust had always been a given in the Navy, a fraternity built upon mutual protection. But NASA and Cocoa Beach and the national press . . . this was more like Hollywood than the Navy.