The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (3 page)

On the night of October 4, 1957, terror in their hearts, men, women, and children ran outside to search the nighttime sky for the Russian interloper, masterminded by the shadowy Soviet chief designer. The unmanned aluminum satellite orbiting the Earth looked like a spiky silver bug. What might the Soviets do next? America had nightmares of future
Sputnik
s dropping atom bombs onto their happy homes. Nobody wanted to live under a communist Moon. Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson feared precisely that, saying, “I’ll be damned if I sleep by the light of a Red Moon…soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks on the cars from freeway overpasses.” The next morning, the front pages of newspapers across the country bore images that looked like the old Martian-infested EC Comics, predecessor to
Mad
magazine. Nikita Khrushchev bragged that the U.S.S.R. could mass-produce rockets like “sausages.” Important officials called the launch of
Sputnik
“a technological Pearl Harbor.”

A few nights after
Sputnik
, Marge and the other wives at Edwards Air Force Base got an idea to give their men a much-needed laugh. They dressed up like Playboy Bunnies in sexy black seamed stockings, black bathing suits, and little skirts. When their guys gathered at a lonely supper club out there in the middle of nowhere, the women came out dancing in a chorus line. They had affixed miniature
Sputnik
s on top of their caps, which whirled along with the dance. Marge’s husband, Deke, whistled as the girls shook their
Sputnik
s.
Come and get me
, beckoned Marge and her
Sputnik
sweetheart revue. At one point, the gals turned around and flipped up their skirts and shook their fannies. When assembled, the secret message could be deciphered. Written in white lettering across their black bloomers were the words
TAKE
ME
TO
YOUR
LEADER
.

“Of course, I’m pleased my husband was selected as an astronaut. It’s a great honor. Do I have any fears about the unknowns of spaceflight? Do you know of anyone who’s going to be boosted out of this world who wouldn’t be apprehensive?”

The reporters’ questions brought Marge back to reality.

“Yes, I’m familiar with the dangers. Yes, I’ve lived with them for years through Deke’s service as a fighter pilot and a test pilot,” she said. “Yes, I stand by him. Yes, I support Deke all the way. No, I have no reservations about what he has chosen to do.”

Marge told the reporters how she had met Deke in Germany after World War II, where he was a bomber pilot and she was a secretary for the civil service. They met at a volleyball game on base. Marge hit a spike and broke her wrist. She described for the newsmen how tough-looking Deke carried her to the base hospital, her very own Prince Charming. Marge couldn’t help but be reminded of her Irish father, a rough-and-tumble detective for the railroads. He drank too much and was often violent. Deke was much, much kinder. They both thought there was something a bit odd about the doctor who set Marge’s wrist, but just figured he was a kook. A couple of weeks later, the doctor was found in his room, painted up with iodine like an Indian and shooting holes in the ceiling with a Colt .45. Another doctor had to break Marge’s wrist again and reset it, and throughout the whole awful process, Deke was with her every day, so gentle. They soon bought a velvety gray Weimaraner puppy together and named him Acey. Seeing Deke pet the pint-sized Acey simply made Marge melt.

Deke was so different from her previous husband, but Marge didn’t want
anyone
—especially at NASA—to know she had been divorced. Divorce was taboo at the space agency, which believed that stable home lives were essential for success in orbit. One of the first among NASA’s many unofficial rules was: if you don’t have a happy marriage, you won’t have a spaceflight.

Suddenly the phone rang. It was Deke calling from Washington after the press conference.

“Hi, honey.”

Marge pressed the receiver of the black phone to her cheek while she surveyed her quarters. Her two-year-old son, Kent, was fighting the photographers like a diapered Don Quixote. All at once, her whole world had changed. Marge brought Kent close to her, holding him out of harm’s way.

The photographers took a shine to little Kent. On one occasion,
Life
got him to ride Acey, who, now full grown, weighed ninety-eight pounds and towered over Kent. They took a photo of the astronaut’s son riding the dog like a nursery pony. Unfortunately, Acey was a maniac, and every time Kent tried to pet him, the dog tried to bite him.

Trudy Cooper and her husband, Gordo, were also stationed at Edwards. Any wife would be happy to leave this place where sandstorms blew through the cracks and crevices, turning base housing into a veritable hourglass, with sands pouring down through the light fixtures onto freshly set dinner tables.

One of the first household tips the Edwards wives passed down was “Don’t move a
thing
.” The sand problem was so bad that if you moved anything—a book, lamp, paperweight—it left a shadow ringed with a fine layer of dust. If you liked rearranging things, you’d be dusting until kingdom come. Another piece of advice was to watch out for the snakes; there were all kinds of poisonous ones, including Mojave greens and sidewinder rattlers.

An enigmatic woman who was always conspicuously quiet with reporters, Trudy relied on her kittenish eyes to say,
I’m happily married
. It was all that anyone seemed to be able to get out of her.

Trudy’s husband, Gordo, was a tanned, cocky little fellow with a wide country boy’s grin. He was the youngest of the astronauts, and the most experienced pilot in the group. He was real slow-talkin’ and from Oklahoma. When chestnut-haired Trudy met Gordo at the University of Hawaii, she was already a pilot herself, dashing in Wayfarers as she purred over Oahu Island in a Piper Cub. Her heart was set on entering the Powder Puff Derby, the women’s transcontinental air race founded decades earlier by Amelia Earhart and Pancho Barnes. Pancho had once run Pancho’s Happy Bottom Riding Club, a bar on Edwards Air Force Base, and led a gang of hellcat aviatrixes in Pancho Barnes’s Mystery Circus of the Air. Gordo was used to adventurous women. Hell, his eighty-six-year-old grandmother, still kicking in Shawnee, Oklahoma, was a rootin’-tootin’ cowgirl who said she’d go with Gordo into space if she could.

The reporters pressed on. It was amazing how an adventurous gal like Trudy—the only licensed pilot among the new astronaut wives—was so damn quiet. Well, maybe she’d adopted some of the stoicism of her male counterparts. Compared to some of the chattier wives, her silences were almost rude, frankly. The truth was, Trudy didn’t want anyone to find out her dirty little secret. Gordo had gotten up to more mischief than she could handle at Edwards.

Before the astronaut selection process had begun four months before in January 1959, Trudy had left Gordo after twelve years of marriage. (“Because he was screwing another man’s wife out there in California,” one of the astronaut wives would later reveal in a loud whisper.) She gathered her two daughters, Camala Keoki and Janita Lee (she and Gordo had named them with a Hawaiian nostalgia), and took off to San Diego, ready to start a new life for herself and her girls, sans Gordo. After years of supporting Gordo’s career only to find him cheating on her, she now had the chance to pursue her own dreams.

Then one day, Gordo came banging on her door wanting her to come out and talk. With his aw-shucks demeanor, Gordo could somehow manage to look both dejected and excited. He was pretty sure he’d aced the extensive testing NASA had put him through. (Sperm counts, electrical stimulations,
five
barium enemas? Good God.) He’d been thoroughly checked out, stamped, and approved as grade-A American beefcake. He scored big on all the psychological tests at Wright-Patt, and the headshrinkers concluded that Gordo was just like any other supernormal fellow with a
healthy
male appetite.

Gordo always talked slowly, even if his wheels were spinning. It was the chance of a lifetime—he’d be shot up on an Atlas rocket into space! He was about to be an astronaut; all that was left for him to succeed was to produce a loving wife. A good marriage would ensure his appointment. After all, how could an astronaut handle the pressures of getting shot into the heavens if he couldn’t even handle his wife on Earth? (Not to mention that if Trudy stuck around, she’d prob’ly reap plenty of goodies and rewards herself.)

At the very least, the flying part was enough to excite Trudy. Gordo was the best pilot Trudy had ever seen, and she was a good judge, being a damn good pilot herself. If anyone was going to outfly those Russians, it was Gordo.

Honey
, Gordo’s smile seemed to say,
think about the girls, think about Cam and Jan. I don’t want to leave them behind when I’m a famous as hell astronaut.
Gordo had a way of making Trudy feel like she was not quite up to the challenge. He’d go around behind her back calling her a prude because she was very proper, the top button always done up on her tailored shirt. So what if she didn’t like to get undressed in front of other women in the locker room of the Officers Club on base? Perhaps it was the competitive pilot in Trudy, but she couldn’t bear to let such a choice assignment be forfeited. She’d go along with him. And she’d have to get over that stoic demeanor because talks were already under way to give
Life
magazine exclusive coverage of the astronauts’ and their wives’ “personal stories.” They would do a major story on the seven astronauts together, then on their seven wives. Separate stories on each family would be published over the course of Project Mercury. The reward would be big—$500,000.

If there was anything more amazing that Gordo could have told Trudy, she didn’t know what it was. Like all of America’s new astronaut wives, Trudy had become adept at stretching Gordo’s military pay of around $7,000 a year. The idea of half a million dollars, which was to be divvied up equally among the seven new space families (that meant over $70,000 each), was like winning the lottery. You could only laugh at that number.

Turning a blind eye to Gordo’s affair, Trudy decided to go along with him on his space adventure. She let Gordo drag her back to godforsaken Edwards. Just like that, Trudy and Gordo and little ten-year-old Cam and nine-year-old Jan were back together living the American dream. She’d fooled NASA easily.

Stork-like blonde Jo Schirra sat on her couch in her quarters at the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River in Maryland, otherwise known as Pax River, where her husband, Wally, was a Navy test pilot.

Jo was Navy royalty. Her stepfather, four-star admiral James L. Holloway Jr., known as Lord Jim, had been appointed by President Eisenhower to be in charge of all United States naval forces in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean. She knew very well the proper codes of behavior, taught to her by her Navy-wife mother, Mrs. Admiral Holloway—how to dress, how to serve tea to an officer, how never to go to an official function without her white gloves, pearls on, and calling cards. And how to always say the right thing. If Jo had any questions about the customs of the service and the management of a shipshape Navy household, she could always turn to
The Navy Wife
, the bible for any service wife, written by two inimitable Navy wives, Anne Briscoe Pye and Nancy Shea. Throughout her husband’s early officer’s career, Jo followed “the rules” to the letter.

Before she was a Navy bride, she was a Navy brat who’d spent her teenage years in Shanghai with a rickshaw running her and her sister through the city streets on their way to the American Officers Club. When she first married Wally and they were stationed in China, where he was a naval attaché, Jo felt as if she were going home. As a young bride, she had her very own amah, the lady who drew her bath and laid out her clothes on her bed canopied in mosquito netting. The more exotic something was, the more Jo loved it. And space was very exotic.

John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Alan Shepard, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, and Wally Schirra were about to report for duty at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, NASA’s headquarters for Project Mercury. Training would start there in the late spring of 1959. As Senator Richard Nixon declared in the so-called Kitchen Debate that summer with Khrushchev, the Russians might be ahead in rocketry, but America was ahead in the accoutrements of middle-class life. The wives were prime examples, helpmates in complete operational control of kitchens chock-full of nifty new gadgets—dishwashers, Frigidaires, electric can openers, and Westinghouse electric ranges. None of the seven astronaut wives knew exactly what lay ahead for them, but they believed they were living on the winning side of the Cold War.

Think Pink

M
ost of the wives would rather have gone out for a night on the town than be stuck inside the kitchen fighting the good fight on the domestic front, but over the course of being a test pilot’s wife, none had much opportunity to be wined and dined. Their husbands might take them out to dinner now and then, but it was easier to stay at home, because they didn’t have the money for both a babysitter and a night on the town. Nevertheless, the wives had become worldly through studying women’s beauty and fashion magazines. They were looking forward to tasting what they’d experienced only through pictures. Some were imagining buying designer dresses rather than having to settle for copies. All of the wives felt they were now due a little payback for waiting those long, lonely months during World War II and Korea. They were ready to be treated like queens.

Their astronaut husbands now had a hotshot celebrity attorney, Leo DeOrsey, who took everyone out to dinner. At his fancy Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Leo brought the men into a private room, ready to smoke cigars and talk business. Leo was handling the $500,000
Life
deal pro bono, as a public service to America’s new heroes. This included a $100,000
Life
insurance policy, seeing as no insurance company would underwrite an astronaut. He negotiated TV and film rights for them, as well as things they “couldn’t imagine.”