The Right Stuff (22 page)

As even Glenn could tell, it was enough just to
be
an astronaut, whether a handsome devil like Scott Carpenter or a gruff little fellow like Gus Grissom. As soon as Gus arrived at the Cape, he would put on clothes that were Low Rent even by Cocoa Beach standards. Gus and Deke both wore these outfits. You could see them tooling around the Strip in Cocoa Beach in their Ban-Lon shirts and baggy pants. The atmosphere was casual at Cocoa Beach, but Gus and Deke knew how to squeeze casual until it screamed for mercy. They reminded you, in a way, of those fellows whom everyone growing up in America had seen at one time or another, those fellows from the neighborhood who wear sport shirts designed in weird blooms and streaks of tubercular blue and runny-egg yellow hanging out over pants the color of a fifteen-cent cigar, with balloon seats and pleats and narrow cuffs that stop three or four inches above the ground, the better to reveal their olive-green GI socks and black bulb-toed bluchers, as they head off to the Republic Auto Parts store for a set of shock-absorber pads so they can prop up the 1953 Hudson Hornet on some cinderblocks and spend Saturday and Sunday underneath it beefing up the suspension. Gus and Deke made a perfect pair, even down to their names. Not even the sight of the boys in their Mechanics & Tradesmen's Ban-Lon could turn off the girls to the presence of the astronauts.

There were juicy little girls going around saying, "Well, four down, three to go!" or whatever—the figures varied—and laughing like mad. Everybody knew what they meant but only halfway believed them. There was no question but that the temptations for the Fighter Jock Away from Home were enormous. It was all so easy and casual on these midsummer nights. Before the missiles came to the Cape, Cocoa Beach was a hard-shelled Baptist stronghold with more churches than gasoline stations, and practically all of them were of the pietistic or Dissenting Protestant variety. But the new Cocoa Beach, the Project Mercury boom town, was part of the new face of the 1960's: the little town whose life was completely keyed to the automobile. Naturally, nobody built hotels in Cocoa Beach, only motels; and when they built apartment houses, they built them like motels, so that you could drive up to your own door. At neither the motels nor the apartment houses did you have to go through a public lobby to get to your room. A minor architectural note, one might say—and yet in Cocoa Beach, like so many towns of the new era, this one fact did more than
the pill
to encourage what would later be rather primly named "the sexual revolution."

There had always been a part of the Military Wife's Compact that tacitly granted an officer a little latitude in this area. Naturally, there would be times when a military man would be sent far from home, perhaps for extended periods, and he might find it necessary to satisfy his healthy manly urges on these far-off terrains. There was even the implication that such urges were a good sign of a fighting man's virility. So the wife and the military itself would avert their eyes and stand mute—so long as the officer caused no scandal and did nothing to shake the solidity of his marriage and his family. This tradition had originated, of course, long before the airplane made it possible for an officer to reach the distant terrain in two or three hours for a long weekend or an overnight stand. Traditions often began on a moment's notice in the military; but they took a long time to die, and this one was in no danger of dying at Cocoa Beach.

That much John Glenn could discern also… and such was the background of the Konakai Séance.

Every now and then the seven pilots would shut the door of their office at Langley, and not even the secretary could come in. If anybody wanted to know what was going on in there, they were told that the astronauts were having a séance. A
séance
? Oh, it's just a name they thought up for a meeting in which they try to come up with a common position, a consensus, concerning certain problems. The implication was that the problems were mostly technical in nature. Wally Schirra would mention that they had had a séance before going to the engineers and insisting on changes in the design of the instrument panel of the Mercury capsule. The idea was to give the corps of astronauts some of the solidity of a squadron. The seven of them might have their rivalries, their differences in backgrounds and temperaments and approaches to the job at hand, but they should be able to arrive at firm decisions as a group, no matter how acrimonious the debate might be, and then close ranks and pull together, one for all, all for one. Whether or not the session at the Konakai qualified as a séance by the usual standards was hard to say. But God knows it dealt with a recurrent problem… and the debate was acrimonious…

One day all seven of them were out in San Diego for a tour of the Convair plant and a look at the latest progress on the Atlas rocket. Convair wanted to do it up right and had treated them all to their own rooms at the Konakai, a rather high-toned hotel built in a Polynesian motif on Shelter Island, overlooking the Pacific. It so happened that Scott Carpenter had drawn a room with a double bed. That evening one of the boys approached him in a comradely fashion and said that his room had two twin beds, whereas in fact he was going to require a double bed for the evening. Would Scott mind switching rooms? It was all the same to Scott, and so they switched rooms. Scott mentioned it to his buddy John Glenn with a smile, as an amusing local note, and thought no more about it.

The next day the seven of them were in the living room of a suite that had been set aside for their use, when Glenn launched into a lecture, along the following lines: the playing around with the girls, the cookies, had gotten out of hand. He knew, and they knew, that it could blow up into something very unfortunate. They were all squarely in the public eye. They had the opportunity of a lifetime, and he was sorry but he just wasn't going to stand by and let other people compromise the whole thing because they couldn't keep their pants sapped.

There was no doubt whatsoever that Glenn meant every word of it. When he got his back up, he was formidable. He was not to be trifled with. In his eyes burned four centuries of Dissenting Protestant fervor, nailed down by two million laps that his legs had pounded around the BOQ driveway.

But there was more than one hard customer in the room. Staring straight back at Glenn, volt for volt, was Al Shepard. The others, Glenn included, understood Shepard least of all, because there seemed to be two Al Shepards, and no one ever knew for sure which one he was dealing with. Back home at Langley you saw one Alan Shepard, the utterly, and if necessary, icily correct career Navy officer. Shepard's father, Colonel Alan Shepard, Sr., was an impressive figure whom few people cared to challenge. Shepard was always a good son. The colonel sent him to private schools, and in due course he followed the colonel's model of a military career, graduated from the Naval Academy, and became a pilot; and although he had never served in combat, he was considered one of the Navy's best test pilots, drawing important assignments in testing the F3H, the F8U, the F4D Skyray, the F11F Tigercat, the F2H3 Banshee, and the F5D Skylancer, including the tricky business of proving out some of these monsters in their first landings on the then-new angled carrier decks. He was regarded as a topnotch Navy aviator, tough, quick-witted, and a leader. He had married a good-looking woman of great charm and poise—"a real lady," people always said—named Louise Brewer. She was a Christian Scientist. Shepard was from New Hampshire, and in New England the Christian Scientists had considerable social cachet, since they were on the average the wealthiest church members in the United States and had an intellectual tradition somewhat similar to the Unitarians'. Although this side of Christian Scientist life was not generally known in America, it was not lost upon the Navy, where the brass traditionally kept tabs on religious affiliations. Being an Academy man was the most important thing, but belonging to a socially correct Protestant denomination was the next best thing. The Episcopal Church ranked first, unofficially, throughout the military (both Schirra and Carpenter were Episcopalians). Well, the Christian Scientists, although smaller in numbers, were even tonier. Such were the general contours of the correct life of Commander Shepard, the icy career officer. But inside his locker he kept… Smilin' Al of the Cape! In point of fact, Shepard himself had never joined the Christian Scientist Church or even come close to it. In his secret heart he was probably stone atheist. At the original press conference he had rather adroitly finessed the point by saving that he belonged to no church but attended the Christian Science Church regularly. Somehow the impression was left that Shepard was a Christian Scientist who had done everything but sign on the dotted line. (The press, the ever-proper Gent, was happy enough to see it that way.) As long as he was at home, however, Shepard could have passed for a model Christian Scientist husband, had he chosen to. He did go to church with Louise regularly. He did not drink, smoke, swear, or let his lips—his eyes and lips were his most pronounced features—spread into a warm and winning fighter jock grin when a pretty girl came by.

No, he didn't flash that famous Smilin' Al Shepard look until he stepped out of his airplane Away from Home—and most especially at the Cape. Then Al looked like a different human being, as if he had removed his ice mask. He would come out of the airplane with his eyes dancing. A great goomba-goomba grin would take over his face. You halfway expected to see him start snapping his fingers, because everything about him seemed to be asking the question: "Where's the action?" If he then stepped into his Corvette—well, then, there you had it: the picture of the perfect Fighter Jock Away from Home.

But now, in this room at the Konakai Hotel, it was the Icy Commander who stared back at Glenn. Commander Al, the colonel's son, knew how to put on all the armor of military correctness, in the stern old-fashioned way. He informed Glenn that he was way out of line. He told him not to try to foist his view of morality on anybody else in the group. In the succeeding weeks the Glenn position and the Fighter Jock position began to form, with various hands adding their own amendments. As for the Fighter Jock position: The seven of them had volunteered to do a job and they were devoting long hours of training to prepare for it and were doing many things above and beyond the strict call of duty, such as the morale tours of the factories, and forgoing flight pay and vacations and any semblance of an orderly family life—and that therefore what one did with what little time he had to himself was his own business, so long as he used good sense.

Shepard had struck the tone of the by-the-book commander. He sounded as utterly convinced and correct in his own fashion as Glenn did in his. Commander Al was capable of a rather formal rhetoric in discussions of this sort, complete with a little litotes.

There was no reason why one should have an aversion to the company of women, so long as one's acquaintanceships did not impair one's performance in the program or reflect adversely upon it.

John Glenn, however, was buying none of that. He stared back at Smilin' Al of the Cape and the Icy Commander, both of them, with John Calvin's own eyes. As time went by, the Glenn position became: Look, whether we like it or not, we're public figures. Whether we deserve it or not, people look up to us. So we have a terrific responsibility. It's not enough not to get caught. It's not even enough to know to your own satisfaction that you've done nothing wrong. We've got to be like Caesar's wife. We've got to be above even the appearance of doing wrong.

It went on like that, with neither giving an inch. That line about "Caesar's wife" would not be forgotten. Everybody knew there was something to what the fellow was saying… Nevertheless… Could you believe it? Could you believe that the day would come when, you would actually see a pilot, an equal among equals, give his comrades a little sermon about keeping their hands clean and their peckers stowed? Where did he get off setting himself above them this way, and what was his real game?

Glenn knew he was making no friends with this approach. Yet there were key moments in a military career when a man had to assume leadership. That was the essence of leadership caliber, and surely that fact would be appreciated-—if not by the pilots themselves, then surely by… others who would hear about it. The competition for the first flight was not a popularity contest among the troops, after all. Bob Gilruth and his deputies in the Space Task Group would make the choice. Glenn had never been afraid to alienate his peers when he knew he was right; perhaps this, too, had always impressed his superiors—and he had
never
been left behind. His faith in what was right was part of his righteous stuff.

Glenn had one great ally among the other six, and that was Scott Carpenter. Carpenter looked up to him and backed him in the debate. Wally Schirra and Gordon Cooper tended to back Shepard, arguing that when you were on duty you should be a model of correctness, but that when you were off duty your personal life was your own lookout. Schirra was finding Glenn more and more irritating. Who the hell did he think he was? After a while, they barely spoke to each other unless the job forced them to.

Grissom and Slayton somewhat dourly sided with Glenn on this particular point. Since he was making such a federal case out of it, they would acknowledge the soundness of his logic. But this didn't mean they idolized him any more than Schirra or Shepard did. A basic division was building up in the group. It was the other five against the pious fair-haired boy and his sidekick, Carpenter. Some of them seemed to derive some satisfaction from lumping Carpenter with Glenn. What was Carpenter even doing here! They couldn't get over the fact that Scott and his wife, Rene, had flamboyant cushions on the floor of their living room and they actually sat there while Scott played the guitar and Rene sang. The fact that she had a trained voice made no difference. It was beatnik stuff. Not only that, Carpenter was a great pal of the doctors. He and Glenn were both like that. They went out of their way to cooperate with the Life Sciences people, too.