The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (17 page)

The other astronauts gave him the moniker Dr. Rendezvous, because when he was earning his doctoral degree at MIT, the subject of his thesis was “Manned Orbital Rendezvous,” which he dedicated to the Mercury Seven astronauts. It turned out to be the rendezvous program NASA used to get to the Moon. “Boy, he’s really something,” his colleagues said. “He could correct a computer.” Given his proclivity for spending time with a slide rule, he wasn’t exactly a scintillating dinner companion.

Buzz seemed to be able to shut off his emotions as if he were turning a valve. Part of being a good pilot was remaining totally unemotional, being on the ball and ready for anything, with the ability to make split-second decisions that saved lives. Such a man didn’t necessarily make for a good husband. Buzz could be heartbreakingly cold. Joan learned that all too starkly with the arrival of PoPo II, her unwanted Christmas present from Buzz that year.

Sue Bean couldn’t believe Joan put up with the animal. Just a regular old squirrel monkey, he was significantly bigger than darling PoPo I. As Sue sipped her tea at Joan’s, she’d see the beast scampering around. It seemed so uncivilized! Sometimes the little fellow would run up and down on their shared fence, bare his teeth, and make obscene gestures. He was just awful to Joan. Even when she locked him in his cage, the monkey danced around, mocking her.

“Buzz, I’ve had it,” Joan finally said. “It’s either the monkey or me. Somebody’s leaving.”

Buzz turned around very slowly and looked at his wife silently, as if to say,
Well, what are you waiting for?

“I’ve done it now,” thought Joan. “I’d better just shut up.”

At last came the day when she found PoPo II floating facedown in the backyard pool. Joan breathed a sigh of relief; she’d gotten her wish, though she’d never admit it. She felt very guilty about it, too.

10

The Astro
-
Pageant

B
etty Grissom and Barbara Young were thrilled that they and their husbands were being treated to a free trip to New York and prime seats for the hit musical
Hello, Dolly!
Their husbands were going to be flying together on the upcoming Gemini mission, kicking off the new two-man phase of the space program. Since a duo would be going up in all the missions, the program took its name from the twins of the Gemini sign of the zodiac.

Gus’s partner, John Young, was an animated speaker, fond of such expressions as “dam-gum-it” and “what the dickens.” Nevertheless, to some of his neighbors he was basically an introverted wisp of a fellow, just the opposite of his wife, a big brunette who had a heavy hand with the eyeliner. John was a hard worker with wildly creative ideas. For him, nothing ever seemed to be right, including his Barbara.

Betty liked Barbara well enough, but couldn’t help noticing that she acted more like John’s mother than his wife—she was always needling him about why he didn’t come home as much as the other guys. Everyone in the space burbs knew Gus didn’t come home much either, but Betty didn’t give him a hard time about it. She knew how hard Gus and his “space twin” had been training over the past few months.

As the commander of Gemini 3, Gus wanted to make damn sure the hatch of his capsule wouldn’t blow this time as it had on his Mercury flight. The new and improved Gemini capsule was fitted with individual James Bond–like ejection seats with parachutes that would lift Gus and John away from the new Gemini Titan rocket, should the beast, which had almost double the thrust of an Atlas, explode upon liftoff.

“Gemini’s a Corvette,” Gus proudly told Betty. “Mercury was a Volkswagen.”

His fellow astronauts had named the Gemini capsule the “Gusmobile.” Gus had had such a hand in its design that it fit his wiry five-foot-five frame like a glove. The others just barely fit inside it, which might’ve been Gus’s plan all along. The NASA contractor that built the capsule, McDonnell Aircraft, was outside St. Louis, so Gus and John shared a little two-bedroom apartment there in the months leading up to their flight. Betty thought it was a little weird how every time Gus called home, when she asked if John was there with him, he’d say no. The two were alone, living together like bachelors. Wouldn’t they at least have dinner together now and then?

Betty tried to push these sorts of questions far from her mind as the couples took in the grand, gaudy spectacle of Broadway. After the play, the Grissoms and Youngs were invited backstage to meet the googly-eyed star, toothy blonde Carol Channing—
Hello, dollies!
Alas, the magic of the New York trip wore off quickly.

It wasn’t too long after that a new drama opened for Betty in Timber Cove. One day she found a threatening note in her mailbox. She always opened Gus’s mail for him, but her stomach bottomed out as she read the scribbled note:

How can a good fellow like you with two charming children have a no-good, two-timing wife?

It was obviously written by a woman. After all Betty’s sacrifices—slaving away as a telephone switchboard operator to put him through engineering school at Purdue, sticking with him during Korea and through a time when they lived in a trailer and he only made $105 a month (and Gus later said, “She must have felt that flying equaled poverty!”)—someone was writing to tell her husband that
she
was no good?

When Betty showed Gus the letter, he said he had no idea who’d sent it, and reassured his wife that he knew she wouldn’t cheat on him. He told her not to pay any attention to the crazy woman who’d written the letter.

“Well, maybe I should,” retorted Betty, “because if she’s after
you
—
I’m
the one who’s going to end up dead.”

Gus just smiled and shook his head. “You don’t pay any attention to that.”

He didn’t stick around to calm her fears. Come Monday morning, as always, he was off again to St. Louis. Betty tried not to think about what was really bothering her. Gus was probably screwing around on her. One particularly nasty story that circulated was that after a party in Cocoa Beach, Gus had driven Betty to the airport only to return to the festivities with another girl. Betty was the first to admit that Gus didn’t come home as much as the other guys, but she always maintained that it was because he worked harder than any of them.

“I’m not saying that Gus didn’t have girlfriends,” said Betty, “but whenever I thought of things like that, I just tried not to think about those possibilities.”

A few weeks before Gus’s launch on Gemini 3, Betty joined him at the Cape. To protect her, he never wanted Betty to be there for a launch, just in case something went wrong, but this was a little treat to squeeze in some alone time before the launch. The Astrowives called it “patting the booster.”

One day Gus and his space twin, John Young, took Betty for a ride along the Strip. Sitting next to her in the backseat was a young woman named Susy. Who was she? Betty didn’t dare ask John, who’d ushered her into the car. The gal was skinnier than John’s Barbara. “Probably younger, too,” thought Betty.

They drove in silence past Cocoa Beach’s low-rent motels. Then Susy piped up: “Oh, there’s our old apartment.”

Dry-mouthed and uneasy, Betty stayed mum, refusing to give this Susy, whoever she was, the satisfaction of acknowledging her comment.

“Okay, that’s the answer to
that
puzzle,” Betty thought to herself. “I guess he’s been living with her.”

That’s why John was never around when Gus called. He’d found himself a Susy in St. Louis. Susy was probably already in the picture during the couples’ romantic Broadway trip. John should’ve gotten a bouquet of roses thrown in his face for his performance as the loving husband.

Alone with Gus, Betty cut to the chase. “Are any of the
other
guys messing around?”

Gus wouldn’t answer, so a skeptical Betty later flared her nostrils and muttered under her breath, “I guess they are.”

Soon she was back home with the gossiping wives of Togethersville, and this time she had a
real
death threat to worry about. Gus had told her that someone was threatening to kill him.

“Why would anyone want to kill you?” asked Betty.

Gus was evasive about the specifics of the threat. He just told her that NASA had given him the warning. He shrugged it off.

She kept on asking for more details. “Okay, how ’bout John? Are they threatening to kill him?”

“I don’t know,” was all Gus said. He had been staying at the Holiday Inn and was assigned a Secret Service man.

“Everywhere I go, he’s there,” Gus told Betty when he called home. “I go into a bar, he’s there. I go to eat, he’s there. I finally just gave up, and moved out to the astronaut quarters at the Cape.”

Betty was glad to hear that.

On March 23, 1965, Betty sat in her living room with the Mercury wives, old pros watching the countdown. Her boys and Sam the Dog, “a sad-eyed basset hound,” were watching with them. The Grissom boys munched on fried chicken, ham sandwiches, avocado salad, and chocolate cake, washed down with milk. Betty ate skimpily. Following
Hello, Dolly!
Gus had decided to name his Gemini capsule after another popular musical,
The Unsinkable Molly Brown
. NASA absolutely hated the name, but after Gus threatened to rename it the
Titanic
, the space agency reluctantly agreed.

Over at her home in El Lago, Barbara Young was grateful for all the company she had during the first launch party starring a New Nine astronaut wife; the more the merrier. Her fellow New Nine wives were there to make sure their hostess didn’t have to lift a finger. Instead of keeping the press at bay as Betty Grissom did, Barbara brought out pots of coffee and home-baked goodies for the hungry journalists camped out under a lone tree on her property. She even offered to clear her cars out of the garage so they could have shelter.

Back inside, settled in front of her TV, Barbara began to chain-smoke, an occupational hazard of being an Astrowife. She was a former art student, and her old paintings hanging around the family room raised some eyebrows.

“John looks mean this morning,” said Barbara, setting down some napkins and lighting yet another cigarette, her big brown eyes glued to the television as her husband prepared to launch into space. Someone kept a flow of coffee on the burner and emptied the ashtray filled by the chain-smoking artiste. The special red emergency phone NASA installed in each astronaut’s home before he went up kept ringing and ringing, but every time Barbara picked it up she was met by eerie silence on the other end. Finally, halfway through the morning, the NASA repairman arrived to fix the phone. After it was rewired, Deke Slayton called from the Cape and assured Barbara that all systems were “Go.”

The reporter from
Life
magazine who had been assigned to cover Barbara’s launch party gave some of the wives the creeps. They thought his questions and comments were just plain weird, and overly focused on the dark side of things—the existential meaning of it all, which Barbara was currently too preoccupied with the possibility of John blowing up to consider.

Spotted red and white with chicken pox, Barbara’s six-year-old Johnny ran around screaming manically: “Daddy’s got a rocket ship! Daddy’s got a rocket ship!” She didn’t bother trying to control him. Dashing out the front door and into the crowd of well-caffeinated newsmen, Johnny soon returned to the living room and set loose a frog he’d caught from a tin can.

The house was abuzz. The New Nine wives were taking the launch party to a whole new level, with the kind of panache that made the old pro Betty Grissom say, “One thing that has always kind of bothered me: some of the other wives, as soon as their husband is in orbit, they had their champagne. And I thought: ‘What are you celebrating? They’re not down yet!’” There were already cases of bubbly on ice at Barbara’s. The new minimum was thirty pounds of ice. Now the regular phone was ringing off the hook, so Marilyn Lovell took control of the receiver while keeping an eye on the elaborate spread of launch party fare—shrimp and tuna casseroles, devil’s food cake, deviled eggs, always deviled eggs.
Why did her journey with Jim always seem to revolve around food?
Marilyn Lovell wondered. They’d even met in their high school cafeteria! It was fate, probably, just like with her parents, who’d met in a candy factory and later ran their own chocolate shop. Marilyn had grown up in the candy kitchen of her parents’ shop, watching her mother hand-dip chocolates while her father made peppermint sticks.

Applause broke out as the black-and-white television reported that the Gusmobile had landed.
Pop!
Marilyn enjoyed the champagne along with the rest of the wives.

The tremendous success meant Gemini 4 was on course to launch in June. This mission would feature the first “space walk” by an American. The Russians had just chalked up another space race victory by beating the United States to this feat. Cosmonaut Alexey Leonov floated in space on the end of a long, snakelike tether attached to his spaceship.

Jim Lovell was one of the backup pilots for Gemini 4, and even though he wouldn’t be flying this time around, Marilyn wanted to make sure she looked her best for the launch. She went on a diet, only this time she couldn’t seem to lose a pound. She actually gained. When she went to the doctor, she learned she was pregnant.

What a time to have a child! Jim was not only a backup, but expected he’d be assigned to Gemini 7, an ambitious two-week mission scheduled for December 1965, right when their new baby would be due. Marilyn had a terrible feeling that if NASA learned of her pregnancy they would take the flight away from him. A pregnant wife about to pop would be viewed as a major distraction for the astronaut.

“What am I going to do?” Marilyn cried to her doctor, the same one who had once confused her with Jane Conrad. “They’re going to take this flight away from him—I can’t tell Jim! Please don’t tell anyone I’m pregnant.”

“My hand on the Bible, I swear,” said Dr. Adels.