The Right Stuff (20 page)

There was no flying whatsoever on their training agenda! As the weeks went by, all seven men began to be bothered by this, but it was Cooper who voiced the complaint publicly. The early months included a heavy schedule of lectures, on astronomy, rocket propulsion, flight operations, capsule systems, and the trips to the contractors, and to the subcontractors, and to Cape Canaveral, where the rockets would be launched, to Huntsville, Alabama, where Wernher von Braun and his Germans were developing booster rockets, to Johnsville, Pennsylvania, where the human centrifuge was located. There was no end to it. On all these trips Cooper, like the others, had to travel by commercial airline. It seemed as if he spent half of every day standing around airports waiting for luggage or going through his pockets to see how much money he had. Here he was, flying half the month—as a passenger! On top of everything else, he was losing flight pay! It was no laughing matter! DeOrsey was negotiating the
Life
deal but had not yet closed it. If an Air Force captain kept up his proficiency flying, he stood to receive an extra $145 a month in flight pay, and there was not a sane blue-suiter alive who did not go out and get that flight pay each month unless bedridden or grounded. The extras—my God, it was impossible to explain to an outsider, but these things were built into the psyche of the career officer like first principles! Besides, your family always needed the money. Cooper, like the other six, was being paid by the military, and so he was losing a significant percentage of his income, which hadn't been much to begin with. Not only that, an officer in the military received a mere nine dollars a day in expenses for day trips and twelve dollars a day for overnight trips. To stay in hotels, to eat in restaurants—it was a losing proposition. Especially when they were supposed to be some sort of celebrities. They all felt like the biggest deadbeat celebrities in America. Say you were having lunch with five or six hotshots in Akron, where you went for pressure-suit fittings at B. F. Goodrich. You didn't dare reach for the check. Suppose through delayed psychomotor response or some other dreadful accident they let you
have
it! The damned thing might be for thirty-five dollars—and there went your family's food money for two weeks… And yet the flight pay itself was the least of it. It was more evidence of the curious
non-pilot
status of the astronaut. Cooper figured he was spending forty hours a month on commercial airliners in order to go through all this. What he wouldn't have given to have access to a supersonic fighter plane like the F-104B… Gus and Deke were managing to cadge rides on the weekends in T-33's at Langley. But the T-33 was pretty tame stuff, a subsonic trainer. The F-104B was something you could cut loose with. Langley Air Force Base wasn't even equipped to maintain such an aircraft, however. So Cooper was going all the way to McGhee-Tyson in Knoxville, where he had a buddy who could get him signed up for the occasional workout in the F-104B. With a ship like that he could
live and breathe
… and maintain proficiency and keep in touch with that righteous stuff…

Such thoughts were once more running through his mind as he sat down to lunch one day at Langley, when a reporter for the
Washington Star
named William Hines joined him and said hello. Well, they talked a little bit and one thing led to another, and pretty soon Cooper was painting the entire picture. When the story appeared in the
Star
—depicting Cooper's complaint, accurately, as a complaint common to practically all the astronauts—NASA officials were dumbfounded. Overton Brooks's House Committee on Science and Astronautics was dumbfounded. Gordo's fellow deservers of perks and goodies were dumbfounded, even though most of them agreed with him completely. They all looked a trifle petty. Here they were, seven heroes, warriors of the heavens, patriots, and they're all over the press complaining about flight pay and airplane rides…

Overton Brooks sent a committee investigator to Langley to see what the hell was going on. The report he brought back was a masterpiece, a veritable model performance, in the tactful handling of the grousing of his country's first single-combat warriors. "The astronauts," he wrote, "are fully aware of their responsibilities to the project and the American public, particularly with regard to the heroic role they are beginning to assume with the young people of the country. They have imposed upon themselves strict rules of conduct and behavior, which credits them with constructive and mature evaluation of their position as a cynosure of all eyes." The only thing is, they still want their goddamned flight pay and some hot airplanes.

Like most of the other wives, Betty Grissom was stuck at Langley with small children to take care of. At first she had thought she and Gus were at last going to be able to settle in for some ordinary home life, but somehow Gus was away as much as ever. Even when he had the weekends off, he would somehow wander over to Deke's house, and before she knew it, the two of them would be heading off to the base for some "proficiency" flying, and there went another weekend.

If Gus was home for the weekend, he was apt to get in some fast flurries of fatherhood for the benefit of their two boys, Mark and Scott. This might take the form of some good gruff-gus obedience lectures about obeying their mother when he wasn't there. Or it might take the form of something like the floating dock. The development they lived in backed up on a little lake. One weekend Gus set about building a floating dock so that the boys could use the lake as a proper swimming hole. The problem was that the older of the boys, Scott, was only eight, and Betty was afraid they were going to drown back there. She had nothing to worry about, as it turned out. The boys never took to the old swimming hole. They much preferred the swimming pool across the street at the community club. It had a diving board and a concrete apron and clear water and other children to play with. The floating dock remained out back moldering in the lake like a reminder of the kind of fatherhood that the astronaut life began imposing on all seven families.

Betty was not as upset about her husband's protracted absences as a lot of other wives would have been. When they had been stationed at Williams Air Force base, other wives had even put pressure on her not to let Gus have so many weekends off, because it was giving their husbands ideas. But few wives seemed to believe as firmly as Betty did in the unofficial Military Wife's Compact. It was a compact not so much between husband and wife as between the two of them and the military. It was because of the compact that a military wife was likely to say "
We
were reassigned to Langley"…
we
, as if both of them were in the military. Under the terms of the unwritten compact, they were. The wife began her marriage—to her husband and to the military—by making certain heavy sacrifices. She knew the pay would be miserably low. They would have to move frequently and live in depressing, exhausted houses. Her husband might be gone for long stretches, especially in the event of war. And on top of all that, if her husband happened to be a fighter pilot, she would have to live with the fact that any day, in peace or war, there was an astonishingly good chance that her husband might be killed,
just like that
. In which case, the code added:
Please omit tears, for the sake of those still living
. In return for these concessions, the wife was guaranteed the following: a place in the military community's big family, a welfare state in the best sense, which would see to it that all basic needs, from health care to babysitting, were taken care of. And a flying squadron tended to be the most tightly knit of all military families. She was also guaranteed a permanent marriage, if she wanted it, at least for as long as they were in the service. Divorce—still, as of 1960—was a fatal step for a career military officer; it led to damaging efficiency reports by one's superiors, reports that could ruin chances of advancement. And she was guaranteed one thing more, something that was seldom talked about except in comical terms. Underneath, however, it was no joke. In the service, when the husband moved up, the wife moved up. If he advanced from lieutenant to captain, then she became Mrs. Captain and now outranked all the Mrs. Lieutenants and received all the social homage the military protocol provided. And if her husband received a military honor, then she became the Honorable Mrs. Captain—all this regardless of her own social adeptness. Of course, it was well known that a gracious, well-spoken, small-talking, competent, sophisticated wife was a great asset to her husband's career, precisely because they were a team and
both
were in the service. At all the teas and socials and ceremonies and obligatory parties at the C.O.'s and all the horrible Officers Wives Club functions, Betty always felt at a loss, despite her good looks and intelligence. She always wondered if she was holding Gus back in his career because she couldn't be the Smilin' & Small-Talkin' Whiz that was required.

Now that Gus had been elevated to this extraordinary new rank—astronaut—Betty was not loath to receive her share, per the compact. It was as if… well, precisely because she had endured and felt out of place at so many teas and other small-talk tests, precisely because she had sat at home near the telephone throughout the Korean War and God knew how many hundreds of test flights wondering if the fluttering angels would be ringing up, precisely because her houses all that time had been typical of the sacrificial lot of the junior officer's wife, precisely because her husband had been away so much—it was as if precisely because that was the way things were, she fully intended to be the honorable Mrs. Captain Astronaut and to accept all the honors and privileges attendant thereupon.

Betty thought the
Life
deal was terrific. She didn't have to wrestle with the angels over that one for a second. They would be getting just under $25,000 a year from it, a sum almost beyond her imagining after all these glum ocher years. But that was only part of the beauty of this goodie. On the day it had been announced that Gus had been chosen as an astronaut, Betty had been even more terrified than Gus. Gus had only a NASA-controlled press conference to deal with. Betty, with practically no warning, had been mobbed, overrun, at their house in Dayton by the press. They came crawling in through the windows like ravenous termites, like fruit flies, taking pictures and yelling questions. She felt as if she had been engulfed in the monster Small-Talk Tea of all times, and merely the entire country would see her as an unsophisticated Hoosier grit. To her great relief, whatever answers she had come up with emerged as coherent whole sentences, and not at all foolish, in the newspapers the next day, and she looked splendid in the pictures. (Naturally she did not know that the press was an anachronistic colonial animal, a Victorian Gent who was determined to give to all important moments the proper tone.) Still, she wouldn't want to have to go through that sort of thing again. And now she wouldn't! She would only have to talk to
Life
reporters, and they turned out to be marvelous. They were polite, well-educated, well-dressed, friendly, kind, real ladies and gentlemen. They had no desire whatsoever to make her look bad. Betty and the other wives came bursting forth like great blossoms before the ten million readers of
Life
in a cover story in the September 21, 1959, issue. Their faces, smooth round white things with coronas of hair, were arranged on the cover like a corsage of flowers with Rene Carpenter's face in the middle—no doubt because the editors regarded her as prettiest. But who is that? Oh, that's Trudy Cooper. And who is
that
? Oh, that's Jo Schirra. And who is
that
? Oh, that's… They hardly recognized each other! Then they saw why.
Life
had retouched the faces of all of them practically down to the bone. Every suggestion of a wen, a hickie, an electrolysis line, a furze of mustache, a bag, a bump, a crack in the lipstick, a rogue cilia of hair, an uneven set of the lips… had disappeared in the magic of photo retouching. Their pictures all looked like the pictures girls can remember from their high-school yearbooks in which so many zits, hickies, whiteheads, blackheads, goopheads, goobers, pips, acne trenches, boil volcanoes, candy-bar pustules, rash marks, tooth-brace lumps, and other blemishes have been scraped off by the photography studio, you looked like you had just healed over from plastic surgery. The headline said: SEVEN BRAVE WOMEN BEHIND THE ASTRONAUTS.

Whether by design or not,
Life
had seized upon the idea that Luce's fellow Presbyterian John Glenn had put forth at the first press conference: "I don't think any of us could really go on with something like this if we didn't have pretty good backing at home." Pretty good backing? Perfect backing they were going to have: seven flawless cameo-faced dolls sitting in the family room with their pageboy bobs in place, ready to offer any and all aid to the brave lads. There was something crazy about it, but it was marvelous. The week before, in the September 14, 1959, issue,
Life
had ushered Gus and the other fellows out onto the Pope's balcony with a cover story headlined READY TO MAKE HISTORY that left no doubt whatsoever that these were the seven bravest men and the seven greatest pilots in American history, even if it was necessary to go easy on the details. Now
Life
was leading Betty and the other wives out onto that balcony.

Betty, for one, did not object to that at all.

They had to let the
Life
writers and photographers come into their houses and follow them around pretty much anywhere they wanted to, but that turned out to be no particular problem. Pretty soon they all realized they didn't even have to keep their guard up. The
Life
people were very sympathetic. The men among them obviously had a kind of male awe of Gus and the others; you could even detect a tinge of envy every now and then, because the
Life
reporters and the fellows were about the same age. But they were loyal. In any case, they were hamstrung, since Gus and Betty and the rest of the men and their wives had the right to censor anything that was going to appear under their names. And don't think they were bashful about it, either! Not for a minute! You'd hear one of the fellows on the telephone going over a manuscript with a
Life
writer line by line, telling him, in just so many words, what could stay in and what was coming out. Oh, the
Life
writers sometimes had their own notions of what was candid and colorful and "good copy." They liked to get on such subjects as the rivalries between the boys and such "colorful" matters as Driving & Drinking and the unspoken intrafraternal business of fear and courage… Well, the hell with that! It was not so much that the men wanted to come out sounding like the Hardy Boys in Outer Space—it was just that you'd have to be an idiot to let your personal story actually get personal. Every career military officer, and especially every junior officer, knew that when it came to publicity, there was only one way to play it: with a salute stapled to your forehead. To let yourself be turned into a
personality
, to become
colorful
, to be portrayed as an egotist or a rake-hell, was only asking for grief, as many people, including General George Patton, had learned. Scott Carpenter was a case in point. He was open and forthright by nature, and he happened to tell one of the
Life
writers how his teenage years had been anything but standard-issue astronaut-corps mom's-pie material, especially after his grandfather had died and he had drifted around Boulder raising hell when he felt like it—and some of this stuff came out in
Life
, without NASA being sent a draft of it, and Scott caught flak for weeks… on the grounds that he had put the program in a bad light.