Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (58 page)

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“When you’ve been to the moon, where else are you going to go?”

Some astronauts, upon retiring from NASA,
had no clue where to go next. They’d seen things, experienced things, and visited places that set them apart. NASA employees said they could often tell which astronauts had been to space and which hadn’t—a legit spaceman’s face carried a look of contentment, his gait had bounce, he was patient and dreamy and mysterious. Such men were special, different, and they knew it. But how to transfer the gift of space into a fulfilling life on earth? Some astronauts, unable to answer that question, dove into misery.

Shepard’s moonwalking partner, Ed Mitchell, returned to earth convinced that his ESP experiments had been a success. In his ongoing search for deeper meaning after the “epiphany” of Apollo 14, he became obsessed with parapsychology and founded an institute for aspiring psychics. Meanwhile, his marriage collapsed and he was named in a paternity suit by a Playboy bunny who later became his third wife. “My personal life has been somewhat in turbulence ever since,” he said thirty years later.

On the moon, Apollo 15’s LM pilot Jim Irwin had “felt the power of God as I’d never felt it before” an
d subsequently dedicated years of his life to finding Noah’s ark in the rugged mountains of Turkey. Buzz Aldrin often bristled at his second billing behind Neil Armstrong, arguing that they were
both
the first men on the moon (“we landed at the
same time,”
he’d say); he later fell apart, weeping and drinking on his way to a nervous breakdown from which he later recovered. Gene Cernan, who as commander of Apollo 17 became the last man to walk on the moon in 1972—a moment he called “the climax of my life”— spent many years afterward trying to top his lunar experience. “The search goes on, and sooner or later you come to grips with the fact that you’re going to have to live within the confines of what’s left,” Cernan said.

Cernan and other lunar explorers found they had neglected every
thing else in their life—wife, kids, friends, finances. Some astronauts retired from NASA and discovered they had become complete strangers to their children—after Aldrin returned from the moon and reunited with his family, he asked his son how school was going, only to be told that it was summer vacation and school was out. Aldrin wasn’t alone in feeling that life had progressed in his absence. Astronauts found that their wives had created their own lives—their husbands were now expendable. An epidemic of divorces swept through NASA in the early 1970s as the astronaut wives’ club begat an offspr
ing, the exwives’ club.

Many astronauts—especially the twelve who walked on the moon—also suffered from severe shock upon learning that, despite their wild expeditions, they were regular, flawed humans. A common conceit was
If I can go to the moon, I can do anything.
But many returned to their regular lives to find they could not do everything—they failed at business, parenthood, love, and life. The reality of life after NASA was also devoid of the astro-perks many were accustomed to: mingling with world leaders and celebrities, dining at the White House, sleeping with groupies, and having NASA jets at their disposal.

Years after bouncing across the lunar surface on his Apollo 12 mission, Alan Bean said that, having achieved his life’s goal of reaching the moon, he felt fortunate to have found another mission to sustain his life: painting gray-toned lunar landscapes and portraits of space-suited astronauts. “Some unfortunate ones didn’t have a dream to replace the dream of going to the moon,” Bean said years later.

For Shepard, returning to real life was neither a shock nor a disappointment. He did not return from the moon to find his earthly life in a shambles. In his hyperkinetic way, he had never allowed himself to slow down, even during his lengthy battle with Ménière’s disease, and had therefore paid careful attention to all matters of his life, big and small.

He had always tried to carve out father-daughter moments. Julie, Laura, and Alice were often among the only astronauts’ children at NASA events. He took them skiing in Colorado and taught them and their friends to water-ski at the lake house he and Louise had purchased near Austin, Texas. He once rented a small plane to fly his daughters and their girlfriends from Texas to Maine for summer camp—although the friends later complained that they would have preferred a more comfortable commercial flight. When Laura, Julie, and Alice began having children of their own, he doted on his six grandch
ildren, too. He’d visit their classrooms and teach them to ski. He once told a friend he didn’t realize how much fun kids were until he became a grandfather. After leaving NASA, he tried to incorporate the girls—and their kids—even more into his life.

In the years after Apollo 14, Shepard began spending more time with Louise, too. As he watched colleagues’ lives fall apart, he realized how valuable she had been to him. “He knew he had a good one,” recalled NASA secretary Lola Morrow. Alan and Louise began to travel together: biennial trips to
the Paris Air Show and a long tour of the Orient, ski trips to Colorado and golf trips to Pebble Beach, where they were thinking of retiring. “Louise never thought of leaving him, never,” said Louise’s friend Dorel. “And I don’t think he ever thought of leaving her. It was a strong marriage that grew stronger.”

For Shepard, an Apollo 14 medallion hanging around his neck was the only outward sign of the moon’s effect on his life. He considered his moonwalks something to cherish but chose not to dwell on the experience; rather, he decided “to put it in a box, and on a shelf, look at it once in a while, put it back on the shelf, and try something totally different.”

Unlike some peers, the question of what to do next was full of possibility and promise, not dread. As he’d told Oriana Fallaci years earlier when she’d asked about life after space: “I’ll make a success of some other job—I’m a m
an of many interests.”

He could have been anything he wanted to be—a celebrity, a politician, a TV announcer. But he turned all of it down, preferring not to remain in the public eye. “I’ve gone to great lengths to maintain my privacy,” he once said after turning down a request to appear in an American Express television ad. “I don’t want to give it up for the lure of commercial endorsements.”

Not that he didn’t wrestle some with the issue of how to spend the rest of his days. He once acknowledged the significant weight of the question: “I’ve been the world’s greatest test pilot. I’ve been to the moon. I mean, what else is there? When you’ve been to the moon, where else are you going to go?”

One thing Shepard knew for sure was that after announcing his decision to retire from NASA in 1974, he did not want to return to the Navy. He loved his admiral’s rank, but he had little interest in actually being an admiral—which infuriated the U.S. Navy. When Nixon had promoted Shepard to rear admiral, the expectation was that he’d stay with the Navy and serve i
n some high-profile position. Instead he took his rank and retired. Some called him a “tombstone admiral”—someone who sticks it out just long enough to earn a rank to have etched into their tombstone. “The Navy was really pissed off,” said astronaut Jim Lovell. “He knew he wasn’t going to go back to the Navy.”

What Shepard chose instead was the world of business. By the time he’d left NASA, at age fifty-one, Shepard had already sold his shares in Baytown Bank and Fidelity Bank and Trust Co., earning $581,000 and $50,000, respectively. He’d sold his rural Texas oil wells—“about broke even on that,” he once said—and conceded defeat and sold his money-losing quarter horse business. “So,” he once said, “I’ve made some good business deals and I’ve made some bad ones.”

In the early days of post-NASA life he sifted through many offers from private contractors doing business with NASA who would have loved to employ a high-profile ex-astronaut. But Shepard claimed to feel strongly that he shouldn’t use “the visibility” of his ex-astronaut status “for my own personal gain.” The truth was, he wanted some distance from the astronaut world, and turned down lucrative offers to lecture and requests to seek public office for the same reason: He didn’t want to be in any spotlight.

But sorting through all the offers could be a full-time, complicated job in itself. Gordo Cooper sometimes saw Shepard at NASA functions, and they’d talk about how businessmen flocked to them “like ducks to water.” Once they stood in a parking lot outside a conference swapping business cards and stories about this one and that one.

“Did you meet this guy?” Shepard would ask, then slap a business card down on his car hood. “How about this one? Is this guy for real?”

Wally Schirra and Scott Carpenter suffered through their share of business deals gone bad, too, but Gordo Cooper slogged through some of the worst investments among the
astronauts. He lost his shirt on his boat dealer business south of Houston and had to testify in court a few times against accused swindlers, including some guys who tried to drag him into a helicopter manufacturing scam in South America. The FBI once stepped in to warn him about a certain bad apple he was considering as a partner.

Cooper recalled that Shepard also experienced “his share of close calls.” But in time Shepard came to realize that, despite his intent “not to use my position as an astronaut” to win favor with businessmen, that was easier said than done. “I tried to separate the two,” he told one reporter. “But to say that I do not use my [astronaut] position in business is really fallacious, because it’s not black and white.”

The solution—selling beer, oil, and buildings in the Lone Star State—seemed the perfect challenge for a hyperactive test pilot/astronaut. But Shepard would learn a few hard lessons in a world that Texas newspaper columnist Molly Ivins once described as the “land of wretched excess,” a land of whiskey and women-loving “sumbitches” where doing “bidness” often involved taking kickbacks or stealing public funds, a land of cattle rustlers, pornographers, racist Bible-thumpers, and sexist good ol’ boys—and that’s just among the politicians. “For virtue,” Ivins once suggested, “try Minnesota.”

Every five years, Howard Benedict—the Associated Press reporter who had been at the Cape with Shepard in the early days—would come to Houston to interview Shepard for another of his
Freedom 7
anniversary stories. One year Benedict met Shepard at his office in Deer Park, a rough Houston suburb surrounded by factories and oil refineries. In a rented pickup truck, Benedict followed the directions Shepard had given him to Win-ward Beverage Co., the beer distributorship Shepard had bought with an old Navy buddy. After a few beers in the English-style pub Shepard had built beside the wareho
use, he grabbed the keys to one of his delivery trucks and gave Benedict a tour of his new world. Suburban Houston was full of grungy little bars where oilmen and ranchers drank the local brews: Lonestar and Rattlesnake. Shepard called it “Rattlesnake country,” the bars full of posters with a half-nude woman petting a snake, saying, “I love my Rattlesnake.” (Shepard’s beer was Coors.) His partner, a handsome Navy test pilot named Duke Windsor whom Shepard had befriended at Patuxent River, had been married to a Coors heiress. Duke’s wife died in the mid-1970s, but he stayed in touch with the Coors family, and he a
nd Shepard flew to Denver one year to meet with Bill Coors, whose father, Adolph, had founded the massive Colorado-based brewery.