The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (29 page)

For the duration of Apollo 12, Togethersville turned into a giant community slumber party. At Sue Bean’s home, guests were wrapped in blankets on the floor in front of the TV, munching on cookies and swilling Cokes at all hours. Sue’s daughter Amy and Barbara Cernan’s daughter Teresa Dawn (“Tracy,” or “Punk,” to her dad) sat with their mothers, two generations of best friends. Gene had come over with Barbara, but the lone man was soon sent home to sleep solo for a few nights.

After landing on the Moon, Pete cried out “Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but it’s a long one for me.” He and Beano went through their checklist flipbooks attached to the wrists of their white space suits. Their backups had included a surprise in their books:
Playboy
centerfolds. Miss September spread across Pete’s lunar checklist with the caption “Seen any interesting hills & valleys?” The line above Miss December’s voluptuous body was “Don’t forget—describe the protuberances.”

Setting their special Westinghouse Lunar Color Television Camera on its tripod (another technological improvement made since the primitive black-and-white camera used on Apollo 11 only months ago), Beano accidentally pointed it directly into the sun, burning out the lens. The TV networks were beside themselves—they had counted on covering the entire moonwalk—until someone had the bright idea of building a mock-up of the Moon in the studio. Actor stand-ins walked around in moon suits, synched to the live transmission of the real astronauts’ voices.

“Dum de dum-dum-dum,”
hummed Pete.

Jane hummed along with her Moon man. Her superstitious live-in maid refused to believe that Pete was on the Moon. “Oh no, Mrs. Conrad, you pullin’ my leg.”

It was the wee hours of the morning when Jane’s Moon landing party finally petered out. Wandering out to the backyard and staring up at the sky, she remembered how she used to look for the Man in the Moon when she was a girl.

“Now there is a man
on
the Moon, and it’s my husband!” thought Jane. It was amazing. There was a numinous reality in it that far transcended life in Togethersville, and for a moment, she felt part of it. She wondered if this was what it was like to be on LSD.

For their press conference, Jane Conrad, Sue Bean, and Barbara Gordon wore matching white knit pantsuits and tied patriotic Ed White Memorial Fund silk scarves, autographed by all of the astronauts, around their waists as belts. They emerged from Jane’s house wearing their best Astrowife smiles, perfected now over many years, and raised high above their heads cardboard signs they’d decorated with their kids’ red and blue magic markers. Jane held up
HAPPY
, Sue held up
PROUD
, and the third wife, Barbara Gordon, was
THRILLED
.

The Moon mission was on a roll. Jim Lovell was set to land on the Moon next on Apollo 13. This time, Marilyn got her trip in beforehand. They went to Florence, Siena, and Pisa.

On April 11, 1970, as Jim lifted off on Apollo 13, Marilyn stood in the VIP bleachers at Cape Kennedy, overlooking the eager crowd. She watched until the Saturn rocket carrying Jim, Jack Swigert—“a swinging bachelor with a girl in every airport,”
Life
reported—and Fred Haise rose out of sight. Down on Earth, Fred’s wife, Mary, was seven months pregnant.

Two days later, an oxygen tank exploded on the spacecraft. The lunar landing was aborted, but that was the least of NASA’s concerns. With the damage caused by the explosion, Mission Control was unsure if Apollo 13 would make it home. Jane Conrad arrived at Lovells’ Levels on the back of Pete’s new red Honda motorcycle and was there with Marilyn when she heard the news that Jim was stranded a quarter of a million miles from Earth in a crippled spacecraft. The three crewmembers were running out of usable oxygen and had to squeeze into the two-man lunar lander, which had now become a lifeboat.

Marilyn’s house was filled with people for days. Moon mementos of Apollo 8, which hung on the family room walls, created an ominous stage set. Father Raish was expected to come over to offer communion to Marilyn and her friends, including Jane and Jo Schirra.

Marilyn’s twelve-year-old, Susan, became hysterical when she saw the priest at the door. Marilyn found her lying facedown upstairs in her bedroom. She told her daughter that just because the priest was there, they weren’t preparing for the end. Susan didn’t seem persuaded, so Marilyn took her downstairs and tiptoed out the back door. She led her down their sloping backyard to the canal on Taylor Lake, where they sat in the shade of a favorite tree.

“Now, tell me exactly what you’re worried about,” said Marilyn.

“What do you mean?” Susan asked, sniffling. “I’m worried Dad’s not going to come home.”

“That?” She smiled at Susan. “
That’s
what’s bothering you?” Marilyn shook her head. “Don’t you know your father’s too
mean
to die?”

Susan looked astonished. “Dad’s not mean.”

“No, of course Dad’s not. But Dad’s stubborn, right? And he’s the best astronaut I know.”

Susan nodded.

“Now, do you really think the best astronaut either one of us knows is going to forget something as simple as how to turn his spaceship around and fly it home?”

She was right. Jim and his crewmates made it home. Two weeks later, when Jim flew out for routine NASA business, Marilyn, who had held it together through the entire space debacle, completely fell apart. She just knew that she would never see him again. Jim came home in one piece, of course, but now whenever he headed off in his car to do some mundane errand, Marilyn was gripped by fear that she’d never see him again. Finally, she decided she had to see a psychiatrist, no matter the taboo. Her fears were unbearable.

Apollo 14 took off on January 31, 1971, commanded by Alan Shepard. Louise Shepard remained as composed as ever. The day before, Alan had told her not to expect his 5 p.m. call. “I’m going to be leaving town,” he said. Louise, the wives’ own “Jackie O,” had been telling the papers, “I’m constantly aware of the Moon these days. It takes on a whole new look when you know your husband is going up there for a visit.”

But everyone wondered what was going on in her new white-columned mansion in River Oaks, referred to as a “swankienda” in Maxine Mesinger’s Big City Beat gossip column about Houston’s elite in the
Chronicle
.

Alan had made some shrewd business maneuvers, including becoming the co-owner of a local bank. He was still keeping up his reputation as a skirt chaser; like the wives, the Shepards’ rich new Houston friends wondered if he and Louise had some sort of “arrangement.”

Alan finally had surgery for his Ménière’s syndrome, defying Louise’s Christian Science beliefs. Just like that, he recovered his balance, and after almost a decade on the bench running the Astronaut Office, he was eligible to fly again.

“It’s been a long way, but we’re here,” forty-seven-year-old Alan, the oldest American astronaut, said as he took his first step on the Moon. Surveying the Fra Mauro Highlands landing site, he cried at the view of Earth. “Before I went to the Moon, I was a rotten S.O.B.,” he would say afterward. “Now I’m just an S.O.B.”

He’d stowed away the head of a Wilson six-iron on his craft and attached it to a lunar sample-scoop shovel. Holding the makeshift golf club in his thick spacesuit gloves, he swung before the live television camera. The ball didn’t go far, but Alan was no quitter. He whacked a second one, which soared, as he put it, for “miles and miles and miles.”

“Astronaut Does ESP Experiment on Moon Flight” read the headline after Apollo 14 landed. A reporter had caught wind that on the way back from the Moon, Alan’s rookie crewmate, Ed Mitchell, had tried to telepathically transmit his thoughts to his friends back on Earth. Ed’s tomfoolery enraged Alan and NASA, not to mention Ed’s wife, Louise, who’d been waiting in vain for her husband to come down to earth since long before he left it. She knew Ed wasn’t doing himself any good with his ESP talk. He’d tell her how he wanted to explore the field of parapsychology. Ed had been getting into hypnosis, also Eastern religions, as had lots of young men, including the Beatles with their very own “giggling guru,” Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Now Ed was telling her that he’d had a “Savikalpa samadhi” experience on his way home. His ego momentarily dissolved and he
grokked
the immense fire spirit governing the universe. It was enough to make Louise throw up her hands. Ed later accused her of wanting to be married to a shoe salesman. Louise and Ed divorced shortly thereafter.

Now that it was the seventies, the spirit of the sixties was finally seeping through the cracks of Togethersville. The ladies began smoking their Virginia Slims out in the open, even in front of reporters. The Bormans were long gone, packed up and moved out of town after Frank went to the Moon on Apollo 8.

And since NASA had gotten “soft,” there was no one left in Togethersville to grab the “token hippie” in the Astronaut Office, as Pete Conrad called Rusty Schweickart, throw him into the basement, and cut off his long red hair and scruffy beard. In fact, it wasn’t
that
long; it kind of curled cutely around his ears, but it was long compared to a crew cut. His wife, Clare, stumped door-to-door for liberal causes. The neighborhood kids loved her and gathered at her house, where she would entertain by playing her ukulele and singing folk songs. It was her version of
Hootenanny
.

Clare was a free spirit. She had five kids, including twin boys, Rusty Jr. and Randy (whom she used to get confused before she started dressing Rusty in red), and was taking graduate school courses at the University of Houston–Clear Lake on the African independence movements. She and Rusty participated in a couples’ book club in the neighborhood, which discussed the latest consciousness-raising literature, like a book titled
Sexual Suicide
, but she didn’t particularly love Rusty’s scruffy look either—his long sideburns were awful-looking, and what’s more, he knew how she hated them. She knew that he wasn’t growing out his hair for her and it upset her to think that he might be growing it out for
somebody else
. Clare tried to keep an open mind as Rusty encouraged her to. He was partial to picking up any New Age craze and once told her, “Jealousy is an outmoded emotion.” In fact, Clare was inclined to give him a taste of his own medicine. But was she really going to find a partner at her usual spots? The Rendezvous, a family restaurant near NASA, or Weingarten’s, the Nassau Bay supermarket? As Mother Marge once said, deploring the dearth of available men for her widowed girls, “There just aren’t any good bachelors here or in Houston.”

The signs didn’t show a very bright future for Rusty at NASA, ever since his space sickness on Apollo 9 when Mission Control almost had to cancel his space walk (because if he threw up into his helmet he could’ve choked out there and died). Now that his career was basically shot because of his weak stomach, Rusty seemed to be doing everything in his power to expand his horizons.

Like the Beatles, he’d gotten into Transcendental Meditation, and felt greatly honored when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi came to visit the Manned Spacecraft Center. Walking barefoot across the Schweickarts’ lawn and into their Nassau Bay home, the long-haired Indian guru in flowing robes sat cross-legged in their living room on a soft little deerskin one of his followers laid down before him. Smelling of flowers and incense, Maharishi gave Clare the gift of her own secret mantra.

Apollo 17 would be the sixth and final flight to the Moon. In total, the American space program had taken the work of two and a half million people and had cost nearly $25 billion. During the landing of Apollo 11, President Richard Nixon had made what he called “the most historic telephone call ever made,” from the White House to the Moon. He told Neil and Buzz, “Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world. As you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to Earth. For one priceless moment, in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one.” But in December 1972, Nixon canceled the Apollo Program.

Saddled with a major budget crunch caused by the Vietnam War, Congress just didn’t want to fund unlimited spaceflight. Critics asked what exactly was America getting out of the Moon except a few rocks? Most Americans could only point to Tang, Teflon, and Velcro. They could not imagine how profoundly the advances made by NASA would affect their daily lives. The satellite communications networks of the 2000s, a direct result of the space program, were still the stuff of science fiction. Though Saturn V rockets for Apollos 18, 19, and 20 had already been built and were ready to go, President Nixon shut down  the remaining flights.

In 1972, during the final Apollo flight to the Moon, the wives went through a particularly traumatic experience. The Black September terrorist group, which had attacked during the Munich Olympic games, announced that it might be planning something more bizarre: going after the crew’s families. Security details were attached to every family whose man was going to the Moon, with plainclothesmen following the wives and their children at all times. Miraculously, the press was kept in the dark.

The first night launch, Apollo 17 took off at 12:15 a.m. on December 7, 1972. Mission wives Barbara Cernan and Jan Evans and their families and friends watched the Saturn V lift into the sky on a brilliant burst of flame. The rocket’s tremendous vibration of the Earth woke up the fish in the Banana River, causing them to thrash and jump out of the water.

“
Aaaha!
There she goes!” astronaut Ron Evans exclaimed in his ship
America
.

Back when Ron was in Vietnam, flying combat missions from the carrier
Ticonderoga
, his wife, Jan Evans, had called up Deke Slayton and volunteered him for the astronaut program. Now a nice fellow in a semi with open side doors lay down paper towels before lifting petite Jan up to have a chance to sit for a while. Also on the scene was a forty-one-year-old journalist in a white suit, Tom Wolfe, covering the launch for
Rolling Stone
. He was inspired to go back to the beginning and write a book about the Mercury Seven,
The Right Stuff
.