Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (62 page)

On July 4, 1998, at a waterfront concert and picnic in Monterey, Shepard brought a couple of bottles of his favorite California chardonnay. He and Louise sat on a blanket. He waved and acknowledged the applause when the bandleader introduced him.

On July 7 Mickey Kapp met Shepard for a drink at the Pebble Beach golf lodge. Shepard seemed in good spirits, reporting that his blood test results were good. People stopped by to ask how he was feeling, and he gave them all a thumbs-up.

On July 20 Louise took him to the hospital in Monterey. He was having stomach pains. It didn’t seem serious. It didn’t seem like the end. But he slipped into sleep, and the next night, at about nine-thirty, at age seventy-four, he died.

“Only battle I ever saw him lose,” Mickey Kapp said.

Shepard would have been happy with the words in the newspapers. “One Cool Moonwalker,” “America’s Lindbergh of Space,” and “Rocket Man,” the press called him. He had once despised them—and the feeling was often mutual. But now they were kind, laudatory, and proud. They wrote how Shepard’s 1961 venture into space had given a troubled Kennedy administration a boost, how it had been a brave salvo in the cold war, how it had emboldened Kennedy to make his famous promise to reach the moon.

And above all, the papers stressed that he was first. That, to him, had been paramount. Reaching the moon in 1971 was different. He talked less about that. That was, somehow, a personal thing. He’d fought back from the Ménière’s disease to get there. But ten years before that, being picked to be first into space— that was the thing.

A man who as a boy was smaller, weaker, slower than most. A boy who pushed himself to be better than the others had become the man, the flyboy, he had always wanted to be. And so it was never the fifteen-minute
Freedom 7
flight itself that symbolized his life. He’d had more thrilling adventures as a test pilot and fighter jock. But being chosen, that was the thing. Because for Shepard, life had been one big competition. “That was competition at its best,” Shepard had said just a few years earlier.

A week later Louise flew to Houston for an August 1 memorial service at NASA. She seemed quiet but strong. Theirs had not been a perfect union, but they had survived ma
ny pitfalls, and Shepard’s name had not been lumped in with those of Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, Ed Mitchell, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and others, astronauts whose marriages ended in divorce. Or, in some cases, two or three divorces. One astronaut had seven wives in sixteen years. Partly it was Louise’s willingness to overlook things, to accept things. The payoffs were nights when she’d hear him tinkling at the keys of their piano, playing “Danny Boy” as she got dressed for a dinner date.

And now here she was at his memorial service, listening to the piercing alto of a Navy choral singer singing their song, “Danny Boy,” to a crowd of NASA dignitaries.

Glenn rose before the crowd and talked at length about Shepard the patriot, Shepard the leader, Shepard the friend, hero, and competitor—“a fierce competitor,” he called him—and then read a poem, a favorite for generations of aviators, called “High Flight.”

Oh I have skipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings
Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sunlit clouds and done a hundred things you have not
dreamed of . . .

Wally Schirra took the podium to claim how “the brotherhood we had will last forever.” But he couldn’t finish. He began sobbing, apologized, and walked back to his seat. Gordo Cooper spoke next. He looked to the sky and told Shepard, “We’ll be there before long.”

As the crowd shuffled outside for a tree-planting ceremony, all heads looked up in response to the roar of four Navy jets. Just before crossing above Johnson Space Center, one jet peeled off from the rest—the missing-man formation Shepard so hated. Then they heard the painful first notes of the bugler blowing taps.

That night Louise had dinner with her friends the Vanderhoefs, who back in the 1960s had introduced her and Alan to George and Barbara Bush and their kids. The Vanderhoefs were surprised at how composed Louise seemed. But the next day Louise spent all morning in her Houston hotel room. Another friend arrived to take Louise to lunch and found her sitting on the couch, looking terrible. The friend went to sit beside her, and like a deflated balloon Louise just folded, bursting into tears. They talked for an hour, missing lunch entirely, as Louise spoke of how much she missed him, how
much she loved him, how she didn’t know what she would do now without him.

She knew his illness had been terminal but never let herself believe it. Just like his “incurable” ear disease, she believed that he—they—would get through it somehow. She had prayed for him, was optimistic and hopeful like a good Christian Scientist. But this time it hadn’t worked. And now she dreaded the thought of returning to the house on the hill alone. Louise’s friends feared she might not be cut out for widowhood.

Indeed, without her husband, Louise’s heart wasn’t right.

Earlier that year she had begun experiencing a mild heart flutter, caused by an extra heartbeat. Despite her Christian Science instincts, Alan had convinced her to see a heart specialist, who had prescribed medicine for the occasional fibrillations. Some friends now wondered: With Alan gone, would she continue to take her heart medicine?

After Shepard’s memorial service, Louise flew to Colorado to visit her daughter Laura. A month later she seemed ready to tackle the Pebble Beach house alone. She took a Tuesday morning flight to San Francisco, where she had to wait three hours to catch her connecting flight back to Monterey. The small propeller-driven commuter plane took off that afternoon, August 25, 1998, and Louise sat quietly by herself, looking out at the Pacific.

It was just a small plane, a short hop. There was no defibrillator aboard. When her heart stopped, there was nothing the flight attendants could do, and she died high above the Monterey Peninsula and the Pacific. The crew found a tag with Laura’s phone number on it and called to break the news.

In the span of five weeks, they were both gone. The only minuscule sliver of consolation to the family was the timing of Louise’s death. She died at exactly 5 P.M.—the precise time Alan used to telephone her, year after year, when he was out of town. As their daughter Laura told a family friend, “Daddy called Mommy at about five o’clock in the afternoon, just one last time.”

Louise hadn’t wanted to bury Alan. In the days after his death she’d begun making plans to have his body cremated and have the ashes scattered above a special place: the rocky cove visible from their back deck. When Louise died, the family decided to have both of them cremated and to have their ashes scattered together.

On the afternoon of November 18, 1998, a handpicked crowd of Alan and Louise’s closest friends stood on the seventeenth green of Pebble Beach’s Cypress Point course. The helicopters seemed to explode from thin air, fluttering from over the hills, over the house on Bonaficio Drive, and out over the water. The two craft stopped suddenly above a rocky inlet called Still-water Cove and turned slowly toward each other as ropes snaked out from their bellies. Tied to the end of each rope was an urn— one carried Alan’s ashes and some dried flowers, the other Louise’s ashes and dried flowers.

On cue, both urns tilted forward and the ashes and flowers came spilling out, got caught by an ocean breeze, and swirled and swished together before slowly sprinkling down onto the rocks below. Then, almost as if it was choreographed, two seals swam at each other from opposite directions, slid up onto a rock, and touched noses.

NOTES

Prologue

page xv, John Glenn was furious: John Glenn,
John Glenn: A Memoir
(New York: Bantam Books, 1999), pp. 232–233; Fred Bruning, “Glenn’s Return to Space: A 2nd Launch Into History,”
Newsweek
(October 11, 1998); John Glenn, “A Detailed Plan,”
We Seven
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), p. 304.

page xv, [Gilruth:] stop “backbiting”: Jay Barbree et al.,
Moonshot
(Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1994), p. 81.

pages xv–xvi, Shorty—“[Shepard] had what all the others had . . .”: Jewel Spangler Smaus and Charles Spangler,
America’s First Spaceman
(New York: Doubleday & Co., 1962), p. 147.

page xvi, Shepard was the most capable . . . : Walt Williams,
Go
(unpublished manuscript).

page xvi, “[W]anted to put our best foot forward”: Ibid.

page xvi, “Come on, Al . . .” [entire conversation with Douglas]: Oriana Fallaci,
If the Sun Dies
(New York: Antheum House Inc., 1966), pp. 85–88.

pages xvi–xvii, Glenn’s “maudlin sentimentality”: Alan Shepard, “The Astronaut’s Story,”
Life
(May 19, 1961), p. 26.

page xvii, “I was hoping it was you”: Barbree et al.,
Moonshot,
p. 103.

page xviii, “I love you” [entire conversation]: Ibid.

page xix, “that little rascal”: Alan Shepard, interview, Academy of Achievement (1991).

page xix, stopped to symbolically kick: Alan Shepard, “The First American,”
We Seven,
p. 241.

page xix,
She’s got an air of expectancy:
Ibid.

page xix, his throat choked up and he just waved: Barbree et al.,
Moonshot,
p. 105.

page xix, Douglas’ crayons: Ibid.

page xx, “I want to be first because I want to be first”: Martin Caidin,
Man
Into Space
(New York: Pyramid Books, 1961), p. 37.

page xxi, “I need your help”: Author interview with Al Blackburn.

page xxi, keeping their pants zipped: Glenn,
A Memoir,
p. 221.

page xxii, Shepard was suddenly moved: Robert Godwin, ed.,
Freedom 7: The
NASA Mission Reports
(Ontario: Apogee Books, 2001), p. 72.

page xxii, his heartbeat quickened a bit: Ibid.

page xxii,
Okay, buster . . . don’t screw up:
Barbree et al.,
Moonshot,
p. 108; Shepard,
Life
(May 19, 1961), p. 27.

page xxiv, the face . . . “close and friendly”: Shepard,
Life
(May 19, 1961), p. 27.

PART I /// BEFORE SPACE

1: “Alan was really kind of a loner”

page 3, Carpenter: “better than anyone else”: Christopher Cheney, “The
First Astronaut,”
OpenUniverse.com
(May 5, 2001).

page 3, “you’d better get out of town”: Author interview with Henri Landwirth.

page 4, “infamous stare”: Author interview with Alice Wackermann.

page 4, “the world’s greatest test pilot”: Jim Watson, “Shep
ard Sky High on NASA,” Washington Times (August 6, 1986).

page 4, “He could fly anything”: Author interview with Bob Baldwin.

page 4, “the best aviator I’ve ever known”: Author interview with
William Lawrence.

page 4, “flamboyant” and “indulgent”: Author interview with Robert Elder.

page 5, “bitterly competitive, to the point of being cutthroat”: Author interview with Gordon Cooper.

page 5, accused Shepard of “swindling” him: Scott Carpenter, quoted in “Subject: Alan Shepard,”
Federal Bureau of Investigation
(1971).

page 5, Shepard “really didn’t want to have anything to do with the rest of us”: Author interview with Betty Grissom.

page 5, “the biggest flirt in the country”: Author interview with Don Gregory.

page 6, “[T]his was his compulsion”: Author interview with Al Blackburn.

page 6, “She was the rock”: Author e-mail exchange with Robert Windsor.

page 6, “real men . . . perfect physical and emotional and aesthetic specimens”: Author interview with Robert Voas.

page 6, an “asshole” or a “son of a bitch”: Author interviews with Gene Cernan, James Schefter, and others.

page 8, “the terrain of my poetry”: Louis Mertins,
Robert Frost, Life and Talks-walking
(Univ. Oklahoma, 1965).

page 8, Frost was also rebuffed . . . : Kathleen Morrison.
Robert Frost, A PictorialChronicle
(Holt, 1974).

page 10, thirty-cent cheese sandwich: Cheney,
OpenUniverse.com
.

page 11, “a small pond”: Shepard, Academy of Achievement interview.

page 11, “He appreciated a chuckle once in a while”: Mel R. Allen, “The Disciplined Life,”
Yankee
(October, 1991), pp. 74–77, 134–139.

page 11, “two popular and prominent young society people”: Hattie Durgin interview and scrapbook.

page 12, “A people person,” Alan called her: Allen,
Yankee.

page 13, “pizzazz”: Author interview with Dudley Shepard.

page 13, Glenn called Shepard “an enigma . . .”: Glenn,
A Memoir,
p. 232.

page 13, “If he wanted to talk to you . . .”: Author interview with George Sheldon.

page 14, Shepard’s personal best was thirty-five feet: Smaus and Spangler,
America’s First Spaceman,
p. 58.

page 15, When the cider ripened . . . : Author interview with D
ick True and Sherman Brickett.

page 16, “not awed by authority”: Author interview with Dudley Shepard.

page 16, “keep a teenager with boundless energy out of mischief”: Smaus,
America’s First Spaceman;
author interview with Charles Spangler.

page 17, “Mrs. Wiggins was tough,” Shepard recalled: Allen, “The Disciplined Life,”
Yankee.

page 19, two hundred thousand copies [of We] had been sold: A. Scott Berg,
Lindbergh
(New York: Berkley Bo
oks, 1998), p. 167.

page 19,
A Literary Digest
survey found . . . : Susan Faludi,
Stiffed: The Betrayalof the American Man
(New York: William Morrow and Co., 1999).

page 19, “He was always my hero”: Alan Shepard, interview with Pam Platt, “Shepard Detailed ‘Real Stuff’ in Florida Today Interview,”
Florida Today
(July 22, 1998).

page 19, “I was just fascinated by planes”: Allen,
Yankee.

page 20, “a locomotive that has left the track . . .”: Dave English,
Slipping the
Surly Bonds—Great Quotations on Flight (New York: McGraw Hill, 1998).

page 20, “man is more than man”: Ibid.

page 21, “matchsticks”: Author interviews with Al Deal and Harold Moynihan.

page 22, “inventor’s dream” . . . “everyday actuality”: “Amelia Earhart,”
Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia
(2002).

page 22, he thought dreamily of a poem: Smaus and Spangler,
America’s First
Spaceman,
p. 53.

page 23, “a wine of the gods of which they”: Charles Lindbergh,
We.

page 24, had already traveled a hundred miles [entire DC-3 scen
e]: Smaus and Spangler,
America’s First Spaceman,
pp. 53–66.

page 24, On Sunday, February 19: Ibid.

page 25, Park sensed . . . “a good kid”: John Clayton, “Carl S. Park Sr. Made His Living in the Skies,”
The Union Leader
(September 14, 1998).

page 25, Instructors tell their students . . . “has no similes in our life on the ground”: Wolfgang Langewiesche.
Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the
Art of Flying
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1944).

page 26, “a natural”: Geoff Dougherty. “Instructor Recalls Hero’s First Flight,”
St. Petersburg Times
(August 8, 1998).

page 26, he knew he was hooked: Allen, “The Disciplined Life,”
Yankee.

page 26, New Hampshire produced a few . . . of note: Jean Batchelder,
History& Heroes of New Hampshire Aviation
(Spring Hill, Florida: Arrow Publishing Co., 1995).

page 28, “Appreciate you putting more pressure on him . . .”: Shirley Thomas,
Men of Space,
Vol. 3 (Philadelphia and New York: Chilton Co. Book Division, 1961), p. 189.

2: “I think I love you”

page 30, The U.S. Navy had first attempted to create . . . : Ja
ck Sweetman, The U.S. Naval Academy: An Illustrated History (Annapolis, Maryland: Na
val Institute Press, 1995).

page 32, There was no escape from the small cruelties of plebe
life: Author interview with Robert Williams.

page 33, Shepard was forced to dive under the table: Author int
erview with Dick Sewall.

page 33, “As an Army brat . . .”: Letter from Bob Kirk to U.S. Naval Academy.

page 34, One classmate called Shepard “ratey”: Author interview with Paul Havenstein.

page 34, One morning Shepard organized a small rebellion: Author interview with Dick Sewall.

page 35, “There’s a bigger game, a bigger battle”: William Wallace, “Pushing Aside Games for a World War,”
The New York Times
(December 7, 1991).

page 35, “Gentlemen, we are at war”: Ibid.

page 36, “Hey, that’s why we were all there”: Darrell Fry, “Army-Navy ’41: On the brink; New meaning for an old rivalry eight days before Pearl Harbor,”
The Washington Times
(December 7, 1941).

page 38, poor grades made Shepard eligible for “reassignment”: Shepard’s academic records, obtained from the U.S. Naval Academy archives.

page 39, Shepard made a habit of it: Author interview with Dick Sewall.

page 40, Shepard “appreciated the better things in life”: Letter from Bob Kirk to U.S. Naval Academy.

page 40, “he processed a lot of women”: Author inte
rview with Robert Williams.

page 41, stood side by side singing carols [entire scene]: Smaus and Spangler,
America’s First Spaceman,
pp. 88–89.

page 41, made many men worship her from afar: Author interview with Tamie Watters.

page 43, “VIP girls”: Juliana Brewer, oral history, Longwood Gardens’ archives.

page 43, Each year they received gifts of fine china: Ibid.

page 43, “being a girl and knowing . . .”: Louise letter to Alan (May 3, 1943).

page 43, cold and standoffish: Author interview with Ike Evans.

page 44, “Frosty” and . . . “Miss Westinghouse”: Louise letter to Alan (October 7, 1943).

page 44, It was ruled an accident, although . . . : Author interview with Dudley Shepard.

page 44, could sometimes lead to early, unexpected death: Caroline Fraser,
God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999).

page 45, “I hope I can really accomplish something”: Smaus and Spangler,
America’s First Spaceman,
p. 82.

pages 45–47, [Crew team details]: Author interviews with
Robert Williams, H. Y. Davidson, William McLaughlin.

pages 46–47, Her shrieks filled the academy’s hospital ward: Author inte
rview with William McLaughlin.

page 47, Nyah . . . what’s up, doc?: Author interview with H. Y. Davidson.

page 48, “Spectacularly beautiful”: Author interview with J. T. Cockrill.

page 49,
Thanks seems like such an inadequate word
: Louise letter to Al
an, June 14, 1943.

page 51, “tip of my tongue”: Phone call to Louise (July 30, 1943).

page 51, “Maybe,” Louise suggested: Louise letter to Alan (September 25,
1943).

page 51, “pugilistic” features: Author interview with Tamie Watters.

page 52, “the most wonderful, handsome, loveable, bad boy”: Fran letter to Alan.

page 53, “But Alan, I was
wrong
”: Louise letter to Alan (October 7, 1943).

page 54, Fran felt “struck by lightning”: Fran letter to Alan (January 24, 1944).

page 54, “heartbreaks . . . are a part of life”: Fran letter to Alan (February 15, 1944).

page 54, George was crushed: Author interview with Don Hawes.

page 55, “I could never have been happier . . .”: Smaus and Spangler,
America’s First Spaceman,
p. 96.

page 55, “never really hit my stride”: Alan B. Shepard, unpublished interview with author Robert Sherrod.

page 56, “I was only twenty . . .”: Ibid.

3: “The kamikazes raised hell last night”

page 58, “my fiancée”: Alan Shepard letter to Robert Williams (July 28, 1944).

page 61, [Lindbergh at Biak]: Berg,
Lindbergh,
pp. 447–455.

page 61, “he could really put it away”: Author interview with Andrew Atwell.

page 61, One day the crew of a B-25 bomber . . . : Smaus and Spangler,
America’sFirst Spaceman,
p. 101; author interview with Robert Williams.

page 63, “a promising prospect” and “get my own bunk”: Shepard to Williams, Nov. 18, 1944.

page 63, “Have been running into all kinds of people”: Ibid.

page 64, “a brilliant and courageous piece of fighting”: Author interview with Howard Johnson; Howard Johnson’s personal diary.

page 64, opposition came from unexpected fronts: Ibid.

page 65, “the worst storm we have been in”: Personal diary of John F. Huber III.

page 65, “Several men have been lost over the side”: Personal diary of Howard Johnson.

page 66, “You have started me on my way as a Shepard”
: Smaus and Spangler,
America’s First Spaceman,
p. 101.

page 69, “The old ‘rump’ certainly gets around”: Shepard to
Williams, Aug. 22, 1945.

page 69, “Wholesale debauchery!”: Ibid.

page 70, Perley’s mustachioed lips: Author interview with Tom Spargo.

page 70, More than once Perley sent Shepard . . . : Author interview with Andrew Atwell.

page 71, “One of these days—if I don’t get killed . . .”: Ibid.

page 72, “We have lost a lot of classmates”: Shepard letter to Williams (August 22, 1945).

page 72, The Cogswell’s first picket duty: Personal diary of John F. Huber III; personal diary of Howard Johnson.

page 72, “If we last that long”: Personal diary of John F. Huber III.

page 72, “We have a slim chance . . . I am a little bit nervous”: Person
al diary of Howard Johnson.