The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (10 page)

Rene usually played all the parts, changing her voice accordingly. Holding her fist up to her lips as a microphone, she launched into her routine playing reporter Nancy the Newscaster, who bore a wicked resemblance to Nancy Dickerson (the one who had accosted Betty).

“We’re here outside the trim, modest suburban home of Squarely Stable, the famous astronaut who has just completed his historic mission, and we have with us his attractive wife, Primly Stable,” began Rene, playing Nancy to the hilt. “Primly Stable, you must be happy, proud, and thankful at this moment.”

“Yes, Nancy, that’s true,” Rene’s ever-so-proper Primly said tentatively (or sometimes another wife would play this role). “I’m happy and proud and thankful at this moment.”

“Tell us, Primly Stable—may I call you Primly?”

“Certainly, Nancy.”

“Tell us, Primly, tell us what you felt during the blastoff, at the very moment when your husband’s rocket began to rise from the Earth and take him on his historic journey.”

“To tell you the truth, Nancy, I missed that part of it. I’d sort of dozed off, because I got up so early this morning and I’d been rushing around a lot taping the shades shut, so the TV people wouldn’t come in the windows.”

“Well, would you say you had a lump in your throat as big as a tennis ball?”

“That’s about the size of it, Nancy; I had a lump in my throat as big as a tennis ball.”

Nancy was about out of time, but she suddenly lit up with an idea. “And finally, Primly, I know that the most important prayer of your life has already been answered: Squarely has returned safely from outer space. But if you could have one other wish at this moment and have it come true, what would that one wish be?”

“Well, Nancy, I’d wish for an Electrolux vacuum cleaner with all of the attachments.”

Annie liked a good laugh as well as the others, but nothing could calm her anxiety about her husband being the first American to orbit Earth, not to mention having to face the press. Annie had become so worried during the month leading up to
Friendship 7
’s blastoff that she lost twelve pounds. The wives urged her to eat, but Annie just looked at them. “Just you wait until
your
launch.”

On January 27, 1962, live on the Glenns’ lawn, news reporters narrated the scene into network television cameras, affecting great concern for the poor wife while regretting that they were barred from entering the Glenns’ redbrick home. And, as Annie had learned from Louise Shepard, her curtains were drawn so no reporter could get a sneak peek through the windows.

Along with her kids and some close family friends, Loudon Wainwright from
Life
magazine was with her to watch the launch. Annie’s brown eyes remained glued to the unfolding drama playing on her three television sets. One was tuned to ABC, another to NBC, the third to CBS. As newscasters outside speculated about what the courageous wife could possibly be going through, Annie sat nervously in her living room. Save for a tension headache that had kept her up for several nights, she seemed perfectly composed.

All of a sudden, it was announced on the TV that John’s launch had been scrubbed due to bad weather and would be rescheduled for a later date. The phone rang. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was blocks away in a limousine and wanted to come and comfort poor Annie in her disappointment. Oh, and he would be bringing with him the three major network news crews.

Annie wasn’t feeling too well, but she didn’t need to be comforted. Delays were the norm rather than the exception for launches. She needed only for the press to clear off her lawn that John always took such pains to tend. Right now, she didn’t want anything to do with the swaggering Texan who would fawn over her for his own political gain. Besides, the
Life
contract forbade the wives from giving anything to the general press except for a news conference and a few measly photos. The deal was that Annie only had to come out for the post-flight press conference, and that was once John had landed!

The thought of suddenly having her home and life opened up to the general press—and her stutter revealed on
national television
? Well, it was enough to send any wife into a dither and give her a migraine. On top of that, Johnson wanted Loudon Wainwright to leave so that the networks would have a free hand. This didn’t sit well with Annie. She trusted Loudon and felt as comfortable with him as she’d ever feel with any reporter. He protected her. “You sit right there,” she told him. “You’re not leaving this house!”

Annie and John truly understood the power of the press and the importance of good relations with the politicians. Being the good Boy Scout and Girl Scout came naturally to the Glenns; it was who they were. But this was too much for Annie. She simply would not admit Johnson and his crews into her home.

NASA couldn’t believe it. As the head of the new Space Council, LBJ was spearheading Kennedy’s Moon effort. He was also the prime mover behind NASA’s big plans to relocate from Langley Air Force Base to Houston, Texas, his home state. It was important that NASA keep him happy. Why wasn’t Annie playing ball? This was their perfect Astrowife, their patron saint? Couldn’t she just let the man come in and say hello? Didn’t she want to win the goddamn space race?

NASA pressed Annie.
Just let him come sit with you.
Come on, Annie, do it for America! Do it for Johnny!

Within a few minutes NASA was buzzing in John’s ear about how they needed the support of Washington if they wanted to get to the Moon. James Webb, NASA’s administrator, threatened to switch the flight order. If John couldn’t get his little lady to play ball and let the vice president come in and sit with her, maybe he wouldn’t get to be the first American to orbit the Earth.

From a phone near the launch pad, John, biosensor wires still dangling from his chest to monitor his heart in orbit, called Annie and said, “Look, if you don’t want the vice president or the TV networks or anybody else to come into the house, then that’s it as far as I’m concerned, they are not coming in—and I will back you up all the way, one hundred percent.”

The six other astronauts backed up John, and John Glenn was still going to be the first American to orbit the Earth. When Johnson was told no, he hit the roof, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

There were delays and delays on the road to John’s flight, which was finally rescheduled for the following month. Just before his launch on February 20, 1962, he called Annie. Suited up in his silver space suit, lying in the tiny cockpit of his
Friendship 7
capsule, perilously perched atop a steam-hissing ninety-four-foot Atlas rocket packed with 367,000 pounds of explosive liquid oxygen, he told her, “I’m going down to the corner store to buy some chewing gum.”

“Don’t take too long,” replied Annie, as she always did. They’d been having this same exchange ever since John was a fighter pilot, and after all the missions they’d lived through together, it had become a comforting ritual for them.

Living with danger had never been easy for Annie, but it was nothing new. That’s why John called her “the Rock.” She had endured John’s years as a fighter pilot during World War II, left to simmer on the back burner while her husband flew fifty-nine death-defying missions in the South Pacific against the Japanese. And then there was John’s service in Korea, where he attracted so many enemy MiG-15s that his squadron called him “Magnet Ass.” The nickname made Annie cringe; nevertheless, John looked handsome in the photo of him in his brown leather bomber jacket and white silk pilot’s scarf patterned with red hearts. And he did manage to shoot down three of the buggers from his plane with
LYN
ANNIE
DAVE
painted on the fuselage. In Korea, Johnny and his plane had survived over 250 enemy “flak holes.” His F9F Panther jet interceptor looked like it was made of Swiss cheese. The Glenns’ wood-paneled walls were so cluttered with pictures and certificates celebrating John’s fighter pilot career, he called it a
danged
museum.

Squeezed into a flying tin can the size of a bathtub, John was to spin around the globe three times at 17,544 mph and return home in a brilliant ball of fire screaming through the atmosphere. The slightest wrong tilt of his spacecraft would fry him in an instant.

Annie waited the excruciating five hours while John orbited the Earth three times and saw four beautiful sunsets and sunrises. And he did indeed see in them the handiwork of God. Space sunsets came and went in a flash. He radioed excitedly, “The sunset was beautiful. I still have a brilliant blue band clear across the horizon. The sky is absolutely black, completely black. I can see the stars up above.” He tried to pick out familiar constellations he’d known since he was a boy.

He experienced weightlessness, which Alan and Gus had only tasted a few moments of, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world to him: “I think I have finally found the element in which I belong.” He radioed to the ground when he spotted some fascinating glowing “fireflies,” which conjured up theories of minuscule extraterrestrial life at Mission Control.

But there was a problem, one so threatening that ground control kept the full extent of it from the astronaut. The metal shield protecting his capsule from burning up in the atmosphere upon reentry was registering a warning signal. If the heat shield failed to deploy, John would be incinerated.

At one point during his reentry before landing, there was nothing but silence from his capsule; all signals to the Earth were lost.

Finally, a giant fireball dropped through the sky, rainbow contrails streaming behind it. John’s peppermint-striped parachute was the most wonderful sight he, and Annie, had ever seen. His capsule was hoisted safely aboard the aircraft carrier
Randolph
before he got out, to make dang sure it didn’t sink like Gus’s. As soon as he had the opportunity, he switched his handheld air-conditioning device from his left hand to his right. He’d worked out this signal with Annie, in the expectation that the television cameras would record it. The space-age briefcase changing hands was his way to tell her, “I love you.”

A few days later in New York City, Annie sat high on the back of a convertible riding along downtown Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes next to her husband, America’s new hero. It was the biggest ticker-tape parade since Charles Lindbergh’s. This was Annie’s sort of publicity. She didn’t have to say a word. In a Jackie-inspired crimson suit and matching pillbox hat, she waved to the crowds and smiled away. In all the cities they traveled to—New York, Chicago, and Washington—they were welcomed with a blizzard of ticker tape and confetti. The other astronauts and their wives were waving from their own cars, all part of the parades because John had insisted, “They don’t go, I don’t go.”

Squaresville

L
ike Betty Crocker and Mickey Mouse, John Glenn was now a household name. NASA was astounded at how great a hero he had become. His
Friendship 7
mission was America’s greatest victory in the space race so far, packing more of a punch than Alan Shepard’s first spaceflight. Deke Slayton was scheduled to orbit the Earth next, but suddenly, perhaps realizing just how valuable their astronauts were, NASA decided it couldn’t take the chance. The space agency had chosen Deke to be an astronaut despite his heart murmur, but the possibility of it acting up, no matter how small, was a risk that NASA no longer wanted to take.

Deke was outraged. Dr. Bill Douglas, the NASA flight surgeon, had said he was A-OK to go up, and Deke was more than ready to go. But it just wasn’t going to happen. To make matters worse, the Air Force followed NASA’s lead and grounded him from flying planes. Marge was heartbroken that her Deke, all muscle and maleness, who drove his Corvette flat out at 120 mph, had been grounded.

One morning, sitting alone at home with the news, she just had to do something. The rotary phone on the kitchen wall beckoned.
Oh, what the hell.

She picked it up and asked the operator to place a call to President Kennedy.
Yeah right, lady
. The girl balked until Marge informed her she was an astronaut wife and it was a matter of national security. Finally connected to the White House, Marge was put on the line with a presidential aide.

“I’m sorry, but I would like to talk to the president.”

The aide was very understanding. He said he knew the president would very much like to speak to Marge, too, but unfortunately he was in a meeting.

Marge had to tell her story to someone, so she explained to the aide how NASA had selected “these extra special men who were specimens of health and strength and all good things,” and now they were breaking their promise, saying, “Oooops! We made a mistake!” As far as Marge was concerned, she was ready to shoot Deke up into orbit herself. She told the aide as much, and also that she didn’t think President Kennedy could possibly be aware of this injustice.

That night the other astronaut wives gathered at Marge’s house to comfort her. “I guess he was glad,” said Marge about Deke’s reaction to the phone call. “In fact, I wish I could have called God.” Marge and her sob sisters cleaned out the liquor supply and Marge composed a press comment for the next morning. But no one ever called for a statement. Well, at least no one called Marge.

She and Jo Schirra sat at Marge’s kitchen counter the next morning, smoking and crying. The two women had become extremely close over the past three years, and considered each other best friends. Although Jo’s Wally had been Deke’s backup and the natural replacement, Wally hadn’t been given the flight. Scott Carpenter had. It was just so unfair. Marge and Jo had no idea why such decisions were made, handed down from on high by NASA. Why wasn’t Wally kept on as next in line? Marge and Jo smoked more cigarettes and held ice cubes in dishrags to their puffy eyes. Seeing each other in such a sad state made the eye faucets turn on again. They were in the mood to cry for just as long as they wanted. This upset was rough on all of them, but they tried not to let feelings of unfairness and jealousy come between them. “Tough days for us gals, but we didn’t let it louse up our relationship,” said Marge. “The men had their job to do and we had our friendship to protect.”