Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (60 page)

Shepard hadn’t gotten serious about golf until he was in his forties, living in Houston and working (more or less part t
ime) as head of the astronaut office. His astronaut fame exposed him to such golf greats as Masters winner Jackie Burke, who founded the Champions Club at Houston and would give Shepard pointers. But Shepard never quite found his swing and constantly struggled with his game.

To Shepard’s disgust,
Sports Illustrated
would one day list him among the hundred worst athletes of the century. The reason: Although his golf shot on the moon had made him one of the world’s famous golfers, he was a fairly mediocre duffer. A Florida newspaper also put him on its worst-athletes list, ranking him forty-fifth out of fifty, right before Sallie Blue, a racehorse that lost seventy straight races.

Still, Shepard was invited each year to the Bing Crosby Pro-Am, one of his favorite events of the year and a chance to have a cocktail with Frank Sinatra, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Palmer, and Jack Nicklaus.

But, despite many pointers from the world’s best golfers, Shepard never got better. He was especially erratic off the first tee, where crowds of twenty thousand made him more nervous than any jet or rocket ever had. “Having been a test pilot,” he said at one tournament, “I’ve metabolized a lot of adrenaline in my life. But on that first tee, on that first day, the old heart is really pumping.” Bob Murphy, a West Coast sports announcer who often met and played with Shepard at the Crosby Pro-Am at Pebble Beach (later named the AT&T Pro-Am), said Shepard took his golf seriously, “but his abil
ity didn’t always match his competitiveness.”

Shepard’s famous love of golf also subjected him to questions over the years about the frivolity of golfing on his costly, taxpayerfunded moon mission. Sometimes he’d argue there was scientific and educational value to the golf shot, which showed how objects travel in one-sixth gravity. Other times he’d joke that his golf balls—whose weight reportedly added $11,000 in fuel costs—were “chicken feed” compared to the bowling ball, dumbbells, and billiard table Ed Mitchell had smuggled aboard Apollo 14.

“Hit it like you did on the moon, Al!” someone in the gallery would yell at almost every tournament in which he played. Such heckling bugged him almost as much as the nagging question raised at most of his golf outings: What brand of golf ball did he hit on the moon? At one tournament in Houston he told hecklers, “I won’t say. But one thing I will say is that the ball went a lot farther on the moon than it did today.”

Shepard didn’t mind retelling the story of how he noticed that his friend Bob Hope carried a golf club with him wherever he went, even during a mid-1960s tour at
the Cape, and how the comedian’s love of golf had inspired him to find a way to bring a golf club to the moon. But as for the moon balls, he forever insisted that the name printed on those balls would “remain the world’s best kept secret.”

“I’ve never told anybody. I’ve never told my wife,” he once said, and even sued a ball manufacturer that had claimed to have made the balls he used on the moon.

(Shepard’s moon balls were, in fact, driving range balls made by Spalding.)

And yet despite the heckling—about his mediocre abilities, about the ball manufacturer—Shepard’s loyalty to the game of golf, his love of a sport at which he never quite excelled, was always tied to a fierce pride in having golfed on the moon. One night, after the welcome party that kicked off the Crosby Pro-Am at Pebble Beach, Shepard and his friend Bob Murphy, the sports announcer, walked out of the clubhouse into the crisp, clear night and stood looking up at a full moon. Murphy had to ask the question many had asked before: “What do you think about when you look up there?”

“You know, Murph,” Shepard finally said, “I wonder where my golf ball is.”

21

“I saw a different Alan Shepard, completely different”

The idea started when Rolling Stone magazine assigned Tom Wolfe to cover astronaut Gene Cernan’s Apollo 17 flight, the last launch to the moon.

Until that time—late 1972—Wolfe had paid little attention to astronauts or space. But as he immersed himself in the assignment, he quickly became fascinated with “the psychology of the test pilot . . . and the question of what bravery is.” The result was a four-part series of stories for
Rolling Stone,
which Wolfe then planned to expand into a book. He thought it would take a few months. But at the time NASA was just beginning to declassify many of its previously off-limits internal documents, such as postflight briefings. Wolfe was able to gain access to information that no previous writer
had gotten near. And he became both mired in and awed by what he learned.

Wolfe initially planned to tell a book-length story of the entire space race, but he realized after writing hundreds of pages that he would instead focus only on the remarkable early years of the program, particularly the story of the Mercury Seven.

In 1979
The Right Stuff
was published to rave reviews, selling millions on its way to becoming Wolfe’s most successful book.
The Right Stuff
(which became a movie four years later) reminded the world of the exploits of seven exceptional men who volunteered to ride rockets into the sky. The book—and the 1983 film of the same name—resurrected all the glory and drama of the cold war era of the astronaut and reintroduced America to the astronauts’ antagonist, Chuck Yeager, whom Wolfe portrayed as the overlooked hero. Far more than a story of the space race,
The Right Stuff
was viewed by many as
the first book to deeply explore the rich brotherhood of the jet jockey and the only-in-America culture of the celebrity astronaut.

Wolfe’s unique voice brought to life an era that no previous writer had managed to capture so fully. Maybe it required distance and perspective, and maybe that’s why previous attempts to scratch deeper than the sanitized
Life
magazine version of the space race—by such notable writers as Norman Mailer, no less— had failed. But
The Right Stuff
’s huge success was due in part to its telling of the dark and sexy side of the astronaut story—the less-than-heroic
stuff that all other journalists and authors of the 1960s obediently stayed away from, or never got near.

Freed from the limits of being an obligatory hagiographer, Wolfe let loose with sensual references to “young juicy girls with stand-up jugs and full-sprung thighs” lurking around the astronauts. Astronauts probably wondered what the hell Wolfe was talking about when he wrote of astro-groupies with “conformations so taut and silky that the very sight of them practically pulled a man into the delta of priapic delirium.” Astronaut wives didn’t exactly appreciate the exposition.

Louise’s friend Dorel Abbot had just finished reading the book and, shocked at the portrayal of Shepard and the others— but especially Shepard—immediately phoned Louise. “Did you read it?” Dorel asked.

“Nope,” Louise said.

Dorel asked again six months later. “Did you read it?”

“Nope,” Louise said.

Finally, a year later, she asked once more, and Louise said, “Yup.”

“Well, are you going to do anything?” Dorel asked. “Say anything?”

“Nope.”

Louise said she had decided not to confront Alan. It wasn’t worth rocking the boat. Not this late in their marriage, which in nearly every other way was an ideal union. Besides, even if she did confront him, she felt he’d probably not admit it anyway. “I have nothing to gain and everything to lose,” Louise said.

The surviving Mercury Seven reacted with varying degrees of distaste to
The Right Stuff,
although they uniformly resented its portrayal of their dead friend Gus as a bumbling goat who panicked, blew the hatch off his Mercury capsule, and let it sink. Slayton said “none of it was all that accurate, but it was well done” and “captured the spirit of the times.” Schirra said Wolfe took a lot of “poetic license”; Cooper called it “literary license.” When the film was later released, Carpenter called it “a great movie.”

Glenn, whom Wolfe portrayed as the “prig” of the group, came across as a moralizing prude, but admirably so. And while it’s impossible to prove a connection, when Glenn ran for his second Senate term in 1980, a year after the book came out, he won by a landslide. Emboldened by that victory, he soon launched his presidential campaign. Glenn liked the book but said it was “not exactly our favorite movie.”

Shepard, on the other hand, more than any of the others, hated the book, calling it “just fiction.” He never hid his distaste for the movie, either. “What movie?” he’d say. In lighter moments he’d joke that the actor who portrayed him—Scott Glenn— “was nowhere near as tough as I was, and no
where near as good-looking.” It infuriated Shepard that Wolfe re-created the lives of the Mercury Seven without interviewing any of “the original guys,” he once said. Also, without coming out and specifically saying it, Wolfe insinuates that Shepard was the king of the Mercury Seven womanizers. At one point Wolfe describes how Shepard acted when he was away from home: “A great goomba-goomba grin would take over his face. You halfway expected to see him start snapping his fingers, because everything about him seemed to be asking the question: ‘Where’s the action?’ ” It’s no wonder Shepard detested
The Right Stuff.

And yet no one had ever pulled the curtain back so far on the astronauts’ lives as did Tom Wolfe. The public’s reaction was one of awed rediscovery. Those who had lived through it were reminded of the heady days of Sputnik, Kennedy, Armstrong. Those who hadn’t lived through it got a history lesson on the thrills and spills of the space race. Suddenly astronauts were heroes again. People wanted autographs again. Organizations wanted the Mercury Seven to attend their fund-raisers and their banquets.

Shepard and the others were celebrities once more.

Through the 1970s and early ’80s, Shepard and the other five surviving space pioneers had quietly drifted apart, each pursuing his own postspace life. Carpenter, Cooper, Schirra, and Glenn hadn’t been astronauts since the 1960s. Shepard had left NASA in 1974. Slayton stuck around longer than any of them and, after conquering the heart murmur that had gotten him grounded back in 1962, finally reached space aboard the final Apollo mission, a joint 1975 U.S.-Soviet mission called the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

But in the aftermath of
The Right Stuff
fever, the Mercury Seven began appearing together at regular events. “Thanks to the book and the later movie,” Slayton said, “we were all lumped back together in people’s minds again, whethe
r we wanted it or not.” After years of nursing old grudges over business deals, astro-politics, and hurt feelings, the original astronauts became friends again. They began calling each other on the phone, swapping dirty jokes. As Slayton put it, “old disagreements didn’t seem so important anymore.”

Shepard and Glenn still sometimes bristled against each other, however, and their strained and rusty friendship took a while to loosen up. At one commemorative banquet in Houston Shepard spoke to the crowd about the glow of fame that had shone on him after
Freedom 7,
how people called him a hero and stoked his admittedly large ego, which at the time made him wonder how many living Americans were truly great. “One less than you think,” Glenn interjected.

Prompted by
The Right Stuff
hype, the astronauts’ old inn-keeper friend from the Cape, Henri Landwirth—who had maintained his delicately balanced friendship with both Shepard and Glenn—began floating an idea for the astronauts to use their newfound exposure to raise money for charity, which could also serve to keep the Mercury Seven team together. After successfully managing the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn in the early 1960s, Landwirth had gone on to greater successes with the Holiday Inn corporation, and even partnered in a few hotels with Glenn. Landwirth the Holocaust survivor h
ad become a rich man and was now dedicating his life to charitable ventures. His idea was for the six surviving Mercury Seven astronauts—along with Gus Grissom’s widow, Betty—to create a scholarship program for needy students interested in science and engineering.

Shepard liked the idea from the start and agreed to serve as the foundation’s chair and president. But he was still running his Texas business enterprises and didn’t have time to spare. “We like the idea; there’s only one catch. You’ll have to make it happen,” he told Landwirth. “Your idea, you do it.” Landwirth, who was living in Orlando, agreed to handle all the paperwork, found an office, and hired a part-time director.

But the Mercury Seven Foundation got off to a very slow start, raising less than $100,000 in its first two years, and often teetered on the brink of collapse. Neither Shepard nor the other astronauts at first served as anything more than halfhearted philanthropists. Then an unexpected source of inspiration occurred in 1986, two years after the foundation began, and coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Shepard’s
Freedom 7
mission.

On January 28 Shepard joined other celebrities, such as Clint Eastwood and George C. Scott, and golf pros like Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf tournament (formerly the Crosby Pro-Am, the celebrity-filled tournament started by Bing Crosby in the 1950s). While playing a practice round on the spectacular beachfront Pebble Beach course, Shepard learned that the space shuttle
Challenger
had just exploded. Clutching a drink in the clubhouse after his round, Shepard watched televised accounts of the tragedy, and those around him winc
ed as they watched Shepard’s face contort with each replay of the shuttle’s destruction. Killed in the disaster were six astronauts and Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher from Shepard’s home state of New Hampshire, who just prior to her flight had told reporters how “thrilled” and “envious” she’d been watching Shepard’s flight twenty-five years earlier. Shepard was disgusted by the
Challenger
tragedy, which was caused by a faulty “O”-ring seal and which he blamed on the same “insidious” factors that had caused the Apollo 1 fire—“a sense of overconfidence, a sense of complacency.”

Three months later, on May 5, the Mercury Seven Foundation held a black-tie, $150-a-plate banquet in Los Angeles to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of
Freedom 7.
Shepard had asked his friend Bob Hope to serve as the foundation’s honorary chairman—a first step toward rejuvenating the foundering scholarship program. “We thought, as a group, we’d collectively have a lot of credibility still, and maybe we should use
that to help inspire young people to become involved in space,” Shepard told a newspaper reporter in a rare interview.

After two years during which the foundation had struggled to survive, Shepard decided to step in and help revive it. More financial support for science and engineering, he reasoned, might contribute to the prevention of deadly explosions such as happened to the
Challenger,
and might prevent the demise of the Gus Grissoms of the future.