Part 2 (1/2)
Turning a blind eye to Gordo's affair, Trudy decided to go along with him on his s.p.a.ce adventure. She let Gordo drag her back to G.o.dforsaken 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 s.h.i.+pshape 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 attache, 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 s.p.a.ce 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-cla.s.s 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
Most 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 fas.h.i.+on 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.”
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 s.p.a.ce.
Another unusual fellow was John Glenn. Before he'd been selected as an astronaut, John was a project officer for the Navy in Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton. Whatever John did he gave his all to, and Annie supported him ”a hundred percent.”
When the s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sured 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.p.a.ce 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.