The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (4 page)

The wives didn’t exactly appreciate being left out of Leo’s wheelings and dealings, but then again, they were used to it. In 1950s America, women were usually excluded from business and decision making. Their realm was limited to the domestic—housekeeping, childrearing, cooking, and cleaning. Many women, like most of the wives, dropped out of college early, favoring an “M.R.S.” degree over a college baccalaureate (or in the case of Betty Grissom, her hard-earned P.H.T. degree). Even a strong woman such as Rene Carpenter said, “We were
complete
traditionalists: hats, gloves, entertaining machines, eyes glued on husbands’ careers.” In fact, one of the first jokes that broke the ice among the wives was admitting that they were a little perplexed by the press saying that their husbands all had genius-level IQs. Well, not quite, they opined, but only to each other.

Luckily, Leo had talked “Ike,” President Eisenhower, also his client, out of making the families live in secrecy. Eisenhower had wanted all the astronaut families to live in a secluded village like the Soviet Union’s Star City, so secret that the cosmonauts couldn’t even tell their babushka-covered wives what they did for a living. Instead, America’s astronauts would be out in the open, ready for public consumption. The new Mercury families were invited to live at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. Langley offered typical military base living, nothing to write home about, but there was a palpable excitement in the air because of the extraordinary reason they were all there.

The Coopers and the Carpenters moved into officers’ duplexes along pleasant Eagan Avenue. Having moved from military base to military base during Gordo’s Air Force career, Trudy got to work on the bare, no-frills quarters, deftly unpacking the family treasures, all part of the ritual of making a new home.

Down the street, Rene’s girls played dress-up in her old outfits. Gauzy creations spilled from a cardboard box—in tulle, satin, and parachute silk. There were many styles from over the years. There had been so many homes, going all the way back to their remote white clapboard house in the mountains in Colorado, its fireplace roaring with the discarded telephone poles that handsome Scott would chop into logs. His acoustic guitar had made it through this latest move unscathed. Before long, he’d be lounging in the living room, strumming away and singing.

Rene unpacked boxes of letters from over the years, pages full of memories. They were very open with each other, and now that Project Mercury was underway, they would even share journals.

“If this comes to a fatal, screaming end for me,” read Scott’s long letter about his new astronaut job, “I will have three main regrets: I will have lost the chance to contribute to my children’s preparation for life on this planet, I will miss the pleasure of loving you when you are a grandmother, and I will never have learned to play the guitar well.”

Scott was different from the other astronauts. He didn’t join Gus and Deke, who were getting to be good friends, on their weekend hunting trips in the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. He was a bit of a pacifist and tended to drift off into his own world. He loved to look through his telescope at the stars, searching for a glimpse of what he might discover when he was sent out to space.

Another unusual fellow was John Glenn. Before he’d been selected as an astronaut, John was a project officer for the Navy in Washington, where he’d sit up in the Senate gallery with his wife, Annie, and listen to the debates, as optimistic as the Boy Ranger troop leader turned senator in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
. Whatever John did he gave his all to, and Annie supported him “a hundred percent.”

When the space program began, Annie agreed that John should throw his whole self into it. They decided that Annie would remain in Arlington with their two kids, twelve-year-old Lyn and thirteen-year-old Dave, and John would live on base at Langley, 120 miles away. John spent weeknights at Langley Air Force Base’s Bachelor Officers Quarters, his spartan room furnished with training manuals and a well-worn Bible. On base, John would jog in his sweatsuit, doing his “roadwork,” as he called it. John was a cheerful, freckle-faced fellow who wasn’t afraid to puff himself up and play the alpha dog. To one of the new astronaut wives, sitting outside sipping her coffee as John jogged by, he huffed, hardly out of breath, “Oxygen. Oxygen to your brain.” Coffee wouldn’t do her a bit of good, he told her. It was the lack of oxygen to her inner circuitry making her tired. Oxygen would make her more energetic, increase her ability to best support her astronaut. Oxygen to the brain was what she needed, he assured her.

“I’ll have Annie send you our book on the Royal Canadian Air Force Exercises,” said John. “It will change your life.”

The book featured strange silhouette diagrams of the eleven-minute 5BX physical fitness plan, detailing toe-touches, push-ups, and scissor jumps for men, as well as the twelve-minute XBX plan for women, which Annie was on. Even in the early days, it was hard to live up to the Glenns.

Every weekend John drove home to Annie in his Prinz, a boxy British clunker that got terrific gas mileage. The other astronauts teased him mercilessly about the car. Alan, Gordo, and Gus were big racers, loved fast cars, and were planning to realize their hot-rod fantasies with their
Life
money. In the meantime, Gus and Deke continued to hunt in the wilds outside of Langley.

“Hey, where’d you get that
cat
?” asked Betty Grissom’s son Scotty about the black bear his father and his new astronaut pal Deke were dragging into the garage one Sunday. They’d brought home their kill, displaying the all-American frontiersman spirit that made the press call the boys “the greatest heroes since Christopher Columbus. The men who will take us to the stars!” The wives just looked at each other with frozen eyes.

“Thank goodness we got that money for our stories from
Life
,” said Betty. She believed she and Gus well deserved their extra $24,000 a year, which was to be paid out over the three years Project Mercury was scheduled to run. She’d suffered a lot of hardships supporting Gus through college and sweating out his service in Korea. Betty, ever practical, was hoping that with this new astronaut business, Gus would have a more stable job, like a salesman taking a silver briefcase into space. Maybe he could spend some more time with the family.

The Grissoms, Schirras, and Slaytons had decided to forgo the Langley duplexes for Stoneybrook, a subdivision about fifteen miles away. The families moved into tract houses practically identical except for their color. The houses were comfortable, actually rather terrific, the gals thought, compared to what they were used to. There was even a swimming pool at the community club, private for Stoneybrook residents. Betty, Jo, and Marge, in an adorable new stars-and-stripes-skirted swimsuit, spent their off hours lounging by the pool, dipping their toes into the water, feeling a little self-conscious as the ever-present
Life
photographer snapped from the sidelines. The astronaut children liked to cannonball off the diving board and douse everyone.

Before Betty moved to Virginia for the space program, her fellow test pilot wives at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio had given her a silver charm bracelet with coins they’d engraved with all of their names,
Ginny
and
Peggy
and
Gladys
and
Violet
. They knew Betty was a homebody, and worried that she wouldn’t be socially up to par with the other astronaut wives.

“They’re all going to play bridge, and you’re not going to know how to play,” they warned her.

“That’s okay, I don’t want to play bridge,” said Betty. “Gus Grissom didn’t get where he is today because I sat around and played bridge.” She was more of a poker player anyhow.

As it turned out, the only one of the astronaut wives who played bridge was Gordo Cooper’s wife, Trudy. So Betty said to herself, “Betty, you’re safe on that one.” She didn’t care too much about getting close to Trudy, seeing as Gordo, Gus’s old flying buddy from back at Wright-Patt, had once almost gotten Gus killed in a plane crash.

One evening, Trudy and Gordo came over to the Grissoms’ house to toast their new enterprise with champagne. Gus kept filling Trudy’s glass over and over again. Trudy, who was usually uptight, let loose a bit. She loved her champagne. She was having a really good time.

After the Coopers left, Betty turned to Gus. “Tomorrow, Gordo’s going to be dead. She’s going to blame him for getting her drunk, she’s not going to blame you.” Betty had a sixth sense about these things.

Soon the boys were being sent hither and yon for astronaut training: to the Navy’s human centrifuge in Johnsville, Pennsylvania, for “eyeballs in, eyeballs out” tests where they were whirled around to see how many g-forces they could withstand; to the Morehead Planetarium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where they studied the stars to help them navigate the skies. With their husbands away so frequently, the wives often got together. Back in their Navy and Air Force days, they would lay their young children out on a bed in someone’s house and stay up all night playing cards, drinking Pepsi-Colas, staving off the loneliness. Sometimes a kindly neighbor might watch the kids. Now that they were astronaut wives, they arranged joint babysitting or dropped their kids off at military daycare at Fort Eustis, near Langley.

They tried to meet every few weeks at the yacht club restaurant at Fort Monroe, also near Langley. One night, Marge was driving Betty and Jo when she ran out of gas. They were stranded until a man came along and offered to give Marge a lift to the closest filling station. Proving she was not technically oriented like her husband, Marge said to the girls, “If you get cold, just turn on the ignition.”

Betty and Jo were still laughing when Marge finally returned with the canister of gas. “Just how exactly can we turn on the ignition, Marge, if we don’t have gas?”

Marge was always the most amusing of the wives. She loved telling stories about Japan. After World War II, before moving to Germany, she’d lived in Tokyo with a roommate. Marge would walk by the bombed-out Imperial Palace every day and had a prized photo of herself sitting on a cushion in a traditional flowered silk kimono, holding a fan.

Her stories about Japan became a euphemism for her previous life as a divorcée. She cracked the other girls up with her story about when she’d first arrived in Japan and found it very strange. One evening she went with her boss, the general for whom she was working as a secretary, to a formal Japanese house. When Marge spotted a beautiful black-lacquered tray arranged with lovely little pink melon balls, she thought, “Oh, finally something I can eat.” She popped one in her mouth and realized with horror that it was raw fish.

“I don’t think I ever chewed so long in my life,” recounted Marge. She said she just looked at her boss and her boss looked at her and it was understood:
You are going to eat that and you are going to enjoy it.

Another time, her boss woke Marge in the early hours to type an emergency memo for General MacArthur, and looked over her shoulder as she typed while MacArthur dictated. She was barely awake, extremely nervous, and hardly dressed for work in her housecoat and slippers, but knocked it out without any mistakes!

Marge seemed to have a story for everything. When the astronaut wives were invited to be guests on
The Bob Hope Show
, she told them, with a wink-wink expression, “My roommate and Bob Hope would go
out on the town
,” if they knew what she meant. Bob did not recognize Marge under all the makeup his cosmeticians had slathered on her face, but Marge didn’t mind. To the wives, she was the star of the show that day.

All of the wives were getting used to dealing with their new fame—even though it would be two years before any of their husbands would be shot into space. They prepared as best they could, coaching each other and offering bits of advice like “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do,” a message gleaned from Dr. Spock, the childcare expert whose advice was taken as gospel at the time. All of them had young kids, at least two, except for Marge with little Kent. A born leader, Marge told the ladies that if a reporter came up to them and asked about a technical aspect of spaceflight they should never admit ignorance, but just look him dead in the eye, smile, and say, “I’m sorry, that’s classified.”

She told her friends and an eavesdropping
Life
reporter about what happened one day at the Langley Air Force Base Officers Club swimming pool when she was introduced to a young woman as “the wife of one of the astronauts.”

“The girl I was meeting looked like she expected me to sprout antennae over my ears,” said Marge. “‘Oh, I’m so sorry for you,’ she said.” Marge bugged out her eyes to dramatize the story. “I honestly cannot understand that kind of reaction!”

All the wives felt as Marge did. They knew the stoic code of the test pilot wife. If any one of them lost her husband in a crashing hulk of metal, she’d have to take it quietly and bravely. That was part of the job.

One of the first challenges the wives faced was dealing with the ghostwriters from
Life
. The magazine was planning its first big cover story on them for September 1959.

The writers, when calling to schedule appointments, or dropping by for supper or to take them out to dinner, acted as though the ladies were their long-lost best friends. There were three
Life
reporters assigned full-time to the husbands and wives, including Loudon Wainwright, whose son would beget a musical dynasty. The contract stipulated that each wife would have a piece ghostwritten that would be presented as authored by her—“by Betty Grissom.” Having a ghostwriter was a relief to Betty, who’d never been much of a reader or a writer. She liked jigsaw puzzles mostly, complicated ones that she slaved over. When she was nearly finished, her boys would usually run in from playing outside and fit in the final pieces, or Gus would show up, put in the last piece, and claim all of the glory.