The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (9 page)

She worried his personality never really came across in interviews, but Gus had a few tricks up his sleeve. “I can’t act like they do,” he’d complain, knowing he’d never be as polished as John Glenn, or as calculating as Alan Shepard. “I just have to do my work and mind my own business and that’s it.” Though he wasn’t good at kissing up to NASA, or playing the perfect family man, he kept his mind on his own business and excelled at his work.

After several delays because of rain and threatening weather, Gus’s shot finally took place on July 21, 1961. The wives gathered at Betty’s home in Stoneybrook. Louise had ridden her mission out solo, and after the onslaught of reporters she suffered, the wives realized it was too great a burden to endure alone. Hungry for some insight into the astronaut wife, her children, anything, the press had even surrounded a hapless diaper salesman. Did Louise feed her astronaut Wheaties every morning? After the press asked the man all sorts of trivial questions, they realized he was not even going to the Shepards’! Louise didn’t have a baby, and certainly no need for diapers. He was going to the neighbors’.

Betty was not intending to let the press run all over her. Gus had convinced the Newport News police to patrol his patch of green and protect it from being ruined as the Shepards’ yard had been. Everything was very tense that morning, beginning when CBS’s famous newscaster—Nancy Dickerson—accosted Betty when she was putting the Buick in the garage. Betty told the news lady not very politely to scram, and then shut the rolling door in her face. The other wives gave each other significant looks.

Betty and her two boys talked to Gus on the phone as he lay flat on his back in the capsule before he blasted off. Betty hadn’t seen him for two weeks, but they’d talked almost daily. After receiving their many wishes for a good flight, Gus finally jokingly told his family that if they stopped yakking, he might catch a couple of winks before his flight.

There were several holds on the countdown to liftoff, and at T minus fifteen minutes, Betty went into the kitchen to soft-boil some eggs, dropping them carefully into the water. But then Marge called her back out because the countdown had resumed. At T minus five minutes, Betty suddenly remembered her eggs and dashed into the kitchen, only to realize that they were not soft-boiled, but hard. She felt like one of those hard-boiled eggs, encased in a fragile shell. Perched on the sofa in her sparsely furnished home, she watched the countdown. The last two seconds before liftoff were almost unbearable for her.

After she watched the rocket blast off Gus’s
Liberty Bell 7
capsule, she stayed glued to the TV for the fifteen minutes until the news reported his successful splashdown into the Atlantic. While all of the other girls, chatting away, went into the kitchen to get something to eat, Betty alone watched the coverage of Gus’s rescue. She was the only one who heard that something had gone wrong. Gus was okay, but his hatch door had blown prematurely and his capsule had flooded and sunk.

Betty was sick to her stomach with worry that Gus had done something wrong. She didn’t understand a lot of the technical details of his mission, but she knew enough to know that the capsule was definitely not supposed to sink. Was it Gus’s fault?

The question plagued her as she emerged to face the dozen or so reporters on her lawn. Wearing her new blue dress and white Minnie Mouse heels, flanked by a son on each side, Betty said she was happy that Gus’s flight was a success, but she said with genuine regret, “But I am
so
sorry the capsule was lost.”

A reporter told her NASA had reported that her husband had been tidying up his spacecraft when the hatch blew. “Is he tidy at home?”

“He does not pick up things around the house very well,” Betty replied. She was smiling and animated with the reporters, though she felt on pins and needles. This interview was even more stressful than watching the flight on television, and she told the reporters as much.

Asked if she had prayed during her husband’s flight, she replied, “Certainly.”

Asked if she would like Gus to be the astronaut to make the big leap in Project Mercury, the first orbital flight, she replied, “I think I would because he would. I hope he calls when he reaches Grand Bahama Island. Now I can rest for a few days and get back to normal.”

Betty spent the rest of the day watching television and answering the phone. Finally Gus called. Betty wanted to sound casual, so she said, “I heard you got a little wet?” “Yeah,” said Gus, who was not much of a talker, especially today. The line crackled with static, but they chatted for another tense minute. Finally Betty couldn’t help it any longer and blurted out a stabbing little question: “You didn’t do anything wrong, did you?” “No,” said Gus. “That hatch just blew.” She could hear in his voice that he was wounded, but she knew he would admit it if he had done something wrong. He did not lie. He told her the Holiday Inn had lost a stack of his shirts and slacks, so when she came down to meet him in Florida, could she bring along some clean clothes?

The next day, some of the wives flew down with Betty for the post-flight press conference at Patrick Air Force Base, located just south of Cape Canaveral. Someone snapped Betty’s picture standing next to Gus’s other true love, his Corvette, which was waiting for him on the runway. With her skinny little legs crossed at the ankle, she clutched her new raffia purse and held her boys’ hands. She was wearing a carnation corsage with a red, white, and blue patriotic ribbon pinned to her lapel and a gold pin designed especially for the Mercury wives in the shape of a seven inside the circle of
, the astronomical symbol for Mercury. She felt good, dolled up in one of her snazzy new outfits. She waved excitedly when she saw Gus emerge from the NASA Gulfstream. Taken to a little waiting area, where Gus was being fussed over, she stole one peck on the cheek before Gus was ushered back to a receiving line to greet the brass.

During the ceremony, under a tent set up on the steaming tarmac at Patrick, Betty felt her anger rising. She didn’t know whether it was because the reporters wanted to blame Gus for his hatch blowing, or because NASA seemed to be only halfheartedly defending her husband, their least media-savvy astronaut, but she could see through their pomp.

Afterward, NASA honored the Grissoms by giving them a VIP beach house at Patrick for the weekend. There, Betty opened the refrigerator to find it stocked with bacon, eggs, and milk. Did she have to play perfect housewife today of all days? “What do these people think I am going to do?” she asked Gus. “I am not going to cook!”

“Well, you won’t have to cook much,” said Gus with a sheepish half grimace. “I’ll be going back to work at eight tomorrow. It’s a regular workday.”

The worst was yet to come when Gus broke it to her that there would be no White House visit. He tried to shrug it off, saying that the president was probably busy. He had a lot on his plate. He was still dealing with the fallout from the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Betty was not buying it. She knew it was because of that lost, very expensive space capsule. Not getting a ceremony in the Rose Garden was terrible for Gus’s reputation. All it would have taken was a smile from the president, a flash of that Kennedy wit with a line about getting wet, and all would’ve been forgiven in the eyes of America. But silence was damning. Betty had wanted so much to have her own moment alone with Jackie, and she felt humiliated having to tell the other wives that she and Gus were not to be given the special honors Louise and Alan had. She was heartbroken.

Soon she was fuming. That stocked fridge really pushed her over the edge. She looked around this rat-shack that was supposedly for Very Important Persons and pointed out to Gus that there wasn’t even a TV for the kids, and the beach was across the highway. “I’d have been ready to commit suicide if I’d have stayed in that place all day waiting for him to come back home,” Betty later reflected. She could call one of the girls from over at the Holiday Inn, where the rest of the astronauts and their wives were staying and probably having a ball, and say, “Somebody come get me!” But how would that look? She was supposed to be Mrs. Queen Astronaut for the weekend.

“I’m not staying here,” she told Gus. “You call the Holiday and see if we can get a room.” Gus got right on the phone and got Betty and the boys a room.

A couple of hours later, Betty was sitting by the side of the pool, still seething. “Hey,” Gus called to Betty. He had just finished revolving-door interviews with the press. “Get dressed. You’re coming with me.” Betty didn’t smile, but she got dressed. Someone volunteered to watch the kids at the pool, and Gus ushered her into his Corvette.

He drove her out toward the Cape. They got to the checkpoint, and Gus didn’t even crack a smile at the guard. He said, “You know who I am and we’re going through.” The guard didn’t argue. Gus took Betty up to see the giant Titan rocket, which was being prepared for the two-man Gemini flights that would follow Project Mercury. Betty got to go up the gantry elevator and touch the Titan’s smooth metallic body.

Gus also screened for her the raw footage of his rescue mission, and it was terrible. Betty felt worse than ever, hearing Gus narrate the drama of flailing around in the choppy water in his silver space suit, about to drown. “Hell, I’m waving and they’re waving back, and I’m saying, ‘I want you to pick me up!’” he narrated for Betty. The helicopter over him had been blowing the water hard, and his head went under the waves a few times. He worried that the sharks would get him.

Betty knew Gus had carried a couple of dime rolls in the leg pocket of his space suit, which he and Betty had planned for him to hand out as souvenirs to their family and friends back in Mitchell, Indiana, and the boys’ classmates. Gus had regretted the added weight with each swell from the helicopter. Betty knew he was a swimmer, but not a very strong one.

Finally a second helicopter had come to Gus’s rescue and let down a harness. Gus hadn’t even managed to get in it frontward, just let himself be lifted up and away. In the helicopter he had enough strength left to grab a Mae West life vest, so called because it made the wearer look big-chested.

Back at the Holiday Inn, the nightmare replayed through Betty’s mind at the pool as she stared into the water. Betty realized her husband had actually thought he was going to die out there. She herself had never learned to swim.

Primly Stable

T
he United States was still behind Russia in the space race. It had been a year now since cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had orbited the Earth. “I didn’t see God,” the Russian told the world upon his landing. When he posed for pictures in a veritable love embrace with the bearded revolutionary Fidel Castro in his army fatigues, Gagarin’s bright smile was said to have accelerated the Cold War.

After two manned suborbital flights, both deemed a success despite Gus’s blown hatch, NASA was confident that it was time to send a man to orbit the Earth. It would take more thrusting power than the Redstone rockets that had sent up Alan and Gus. They would have to use the dreaded Atlas rocket, the one that had blown up before the wives’ eyes as they watched the test firing at Cocoa Beach. John Glenn was ready to saddle the beast and ride it to the stars.

America couldn’t have hoped for a better choice. His sunny, freckled face was sure to eclipse the smiles of those communists. As for seeing God in space? NASA was confident that with John Glenn that would not be a problem. The man taught Sunday school in his spare time, a rare counterpoint to the hard-living, hard-playing astronaut life. He saw the grace of God in everything, especially in Annie. Annie was simply lovely—dark-haired with her wide, toothy Girl Scout grin. (One couldn’t help but picture her in the sage green uniform, badge sash, and matching socks.)

Scott Carpenter, John’s backup for his upcoming
Friendship 7
mission, was less tightly wound than John, and took it upon himself to help his friend let loose a little. They enjoyed eating out at a Polynesian-themed restaurant in Cocoa Beach. They cruised the Strip in Scott’s Shelby Cobra with its sexy metalflake blue paint job. John was also putting his church choir tenor to good use, sweetly singing while Scott strummed his guitar.

Meanwhile, the wives got busy on Annie, offering to help in whatever way they could. The post-flight press conference on the lawn, by now a necessary ritual, was something all of the wives dreaded. None more than Annie. She could get through short, practiced phrases such as “Fine,” “Thank you,” “Please do,” but she couldn’t improvise without stumbling over her words. Annie really couldn’t even get through a complete sentence except when she was singing, and she could hardly sing to the press. She was incredibly independent and self-sufficient in most aspects of her life, but she often had to rely on others when called upon to speak. She dubbed her daughter Lyn her “telephone surrogate.” Lyn had been making her mother’s doctor and beauty parlor appointments since she was a little girl.

To keep spirits high and light, all the wives had their ways of dealing with the press. A favorite was the comic skit Rene came up with: a one-woman show that she called “Primly Stable,” starring the perfect astronaut wife Primly Stable, married to her astronaut, Squarely, with their little Dickie and Mary and dog Smiley. The Stables were suspiciously like the Glenns—who had two perfect children, Dave and Lyn, and a dog named Chipper.