The Astronaut Wives Club Part 15

Her woman's column would be exploring what it meant to be a wife, a mother-friends.h.i.+ps, relations.h.i.+ps, that sort of thing. (She first had to come up with twenty sample columns to prove her writing prowess.) Rene also let Gus know that having a job was something she needed to consider, especially now that her and Scott's marriage was beginning to dissolve.

Gus was relieved. Ever since it had been insinuated that he had "screwed the pooch" on his Mercury shot, Gus had come back with a vengeance. He'd piloted the first Gemini mission and now he was going to command the first Apollo mission. "I didn't give a good G.o.dd.a.m.n about the White House, but my boys did, and Betty did." Gus laughed. "Look at her, she's still mad."

Rene had come up with a name for her new column, A Woman Still, inspired by a verse from an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem: "A flutterer in the wind, a woman still: I tell you I am what I was and more."

In one of her columns, Rene tackled the dynamic of the original group of seven wives. "Now at a call we run across lawns with uncombed hair, drive at unsafe speeds to hug and hold, make coffee, fix a drink and wipe the kitchen counter."

The Mercury wives liked Rene's columns, which Jo cut out religiously and pasted into her sc.r.a.pbook. Fan letters started pouring into Rene's mailbox. She was writing three columns a week. It was hard, rewarding work. Editors around the country admired her unique voice. Soon thirty-five papers picked up her column. There was a thumbnail-size picture of her next to her byline.

Talk show host David Susskind invited Rene to be on his show. Susskind was known for flicking his cigarette ashes over his shoulder and stopping the evening's show when he was bored or too tired to continue. Guests were ushered onto his acid green and purple feltlined set, and sat in one of his big chartreuse lounge chairs. He asked Rene about being an astronaut wife, how she'd coped.

Rene slipped into her Primly Stable role, and Susskind loved it. She was such a smash that people wondered if she might host her own show. Certainly her personality could carry one. In December 1966, Neil Simon's The Star-Spangled Girl opened on Broadway. The t.i.tle character had actually been inspired by Rene, whom he'd met at a New Year's Eve party in New York.

"Eclipsing the Astronauts," headlined a Newsweek feature. "There may be a rising TV star in the family of astronauts-Rene Carpenter, wife of s.p.a.ceman Scott Carpenter. She is witty, strikingly blonde and the author of a highly personal column..."

There was a fuss over Rene, but her home was in Houston. Her kids needed her. Still, her days in television were far from over. She would later get to appear twice on The Tonight Show as a guest of Johnny Carson, and cohost for one night the top-billed Mike Douglas Show. One of her guests was producer/director Mel Brooks. Rene talked about the columns she'd written on high-pressure schools and s.e.x ed, and in the cooking segment, shared her recipe for taco pie.

A year after the T-38 accident, both Charlie Ba.s.sett's and Elliot See's widows were still lingering in Togethersville. Military custom dictated that when a man gets killed, his wife leaves right away. Her presence alone is an unwelcome reminder to the troops. But the two widows didn't want to uproot their kids from school. Besides, neither had finished college or had any job experience. At least they had their $100,000 Life insurance policies.

Everybody kept on telling Jeannie that she could afford to wait a year before making a decision about whether she should go or stay. Meanwhile, snide remarks bounced around Togethersville like, "They're coddled in this program. If they were Air Force, they'd have thirty days to get out and n.o.body would ever have heard of them." From tough former Air Force wives, "Bitterness, of course, is a part of grief...but people are supposed to get over it after a while."

The men were even worse. Deke claimed that "Elliot See flew like an old woman," and that's why he crashed the plane and got himself and Charlie killed. Nevertheless, Marilyn See stuck it out through a year of dirty looks and hushed silences. It was Jeannie Ba.s.sett who first decided to get the h.e.l.l out of Togethersville. As she put it, "When you're in the program, you're in in in. Then something happens and you're out. I don't want to hang around and be the big happy fifth wheel." She packed up and headed off to San Francisco. Besides, as Life quoted Jeannie, "My daughter has two great dreams. One is to meet the Monkees, the other is to have a new father." Actually, ten-year-old Karen wanted her old daddy back. Without knowing it, Jeannie was moving into the teeth of the 1960s, the Summer of Love just around the corner. The wives gave her a coffee before she left-and the gift of a golden whistle with the message: "If you need us, whistle."

The Apollo program seemed to be beyond any individual's control. The s.p.a.ce program was going corporate. Gus didn't get the same sort of input into the design of his capsule that he'd had with the Gusmobile. NASA was still determined to get a man on the Moon before the decade was out. One of the workers at the NASA contractor North American Aviation, which was building the Apollo capsule, told Gus the deadlines were so draconian, they'd s.h.i.+p the s.p.a.cecraft "ready or not." No one was listening to Gus's complaint-not only was the Apollo s.h.i.+p not a Corvette, it was worse than a Volkswagen.

Coming into the kitchen one morning before he left for the Cape, Gus held up a giant Texas lemon he'd picked from the tree in their front yard.

"What are you going to do with that lemon?" asked Betty.

"I'm going to hang it on that s.p.a.cecraft," said Gus, kissing her good-bye. Considering the slapdash way he thought North American was a.s.sembling his s.h.i.+p, he figured that's what it was.

A lemon.

After he left, Betty considered the situation. Gus was down in the dumps. There was no humor in his voice, which just wasn't like him. He liked to be havin' "a ball," but he made no effort to hide his disapproval of Apollo 1.

There was some good news. His upcoming Apollo 1 mission would only be testing the new lunar s.p.a.cecraft in orbit, but soon enough, he'd also be going on another Apollo mission, the one that really counted. Gus had told Betty that Deke, who was now in charge of flight a.s.signments, had tapped ole Gus to be the first man to land on the Moon.

On the Cape's Launch Pad 34, the lemon was perched on top of the giant Saturn IB rocket, a 141-foot behemoth that in a month's time, on February 21, 1967, was scheduled to take off with 1.6 million pounds of explosive liquid oxygen thrust. Betty didn't know exactly what about that capsule worried him, since she always told him not to bother her with the technical details, just tell her as much as she needed to know.

The night before a prelaunch test, he called home to check in.

"Can you promise me one thing?" said Betty.

"What's that?"

"Don't do the flight before you are ready."

The following morning, January 27, 1967, Gus climbed into the Apollo 1 capsule with his crew, Roger Chaffee and the "next John Glenn," Ed White. This was a dress rehearsal for the actual flight, so while the booster was not fueled, the Apollo 1 capsule would be sealed and pressurized with pure oxygen as they ran through everything, including a T-minus countdown.

Tensions were high on the launch pad with a string of goof-ups that Gus called his colleagues out on. "How do you expect us to get to the Moon if you people can't even hook us up with a ground station?" he radioed from inside the capsule. "Get with it out there!"

It was a drab Friday evening on Pine Shadows Drive in Timber Cove when Betty heard the doorbell ring. She hoped it was the deliveryman. She had bought herself a late Christmas gift, a modern new sofa, upholstered in a rich cream silk embroidered with cheerful orange blossoms. Gus had promised her one for years and she'd finally gotten the go-ahead. Betty had put up with the same dingy furniture since Enon, Ohio, because Gus preferred putting his cash into fast boats and cars. He'd even started a company with Gordo and Jim Rathmann called Performance Unlimited to design and build a race car for the Indy 500.

Peering through the small peephole in her orange door, she saw her freckled redheaded neighbor Adelin, whose husband, Jerry, was in charge of the Apollo program's landing and recovery unit.

"Hi," Adelin said. "I guess the poker game is off."

Betty gave her a serene, almost devious smile, and she relaxed. It was the norm for husbands to stay late at the Manned s.p.a.cecraft Center, though Jerry usually tried to come home early on Fridays so he and Adelin and the Grissoms could play poker with a few other neighborhood couples. It now looked as if Gus wasn't going to be flying home until tomorrow.

"Shucks," said Betty. "Well then, Adelin, let's you and I have a little drink."

Betty made two gin and tonics. Adelin was hilarious, always telling funny stories like the one about the time she had to go to the bathroom in a four-person pa.s.senger airplane with no toilet. "Oh G.o.d yes." She had to go so bad that she went in an upchuck bag and made everybody sing so they wouldn't hear her. They were giggling and happy when Jo Schirra walked in from next door, arriving via the rabbit hole. Her face looked flushed.

"There's been an accident at the Cape," said Jo. "I think Gus was hurt." She explained that she had gotten a call that something bad had happened on the launch pad, adding that "n.o.body knows how serious." She told it to Betty straight; she wasn't about to try to hide anything from her friend. But Betty knew this was it. "It's over," she thought.

The next minutes were the longest, and worst, of all their lives. The three women just sat there, trying to talk and drink their drinks. When Dr. Berry, the astronauts' physician, arrived with his black bag they even knew the worst had happened. He'd come with the official word. Betty didn't break down. She told Adelin that she'd "already died 100,000 deaths." If you could be trained for this, Betty had been.

Her older son, Scotty, took his mother's stoic lead. Mark, who was thirteen, asked, "Can I still come and get my shots in your office?"

"Sure. Of course, son," the doctor said.

With that, Mark turned his back and walked away. Betty's worst nightmare had come true. Gus, veteran of both Mercury and Gemini, had been killed, along with fellow astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee, during a prelaunch test for the Apollo 1 mission, on the ground.

Over in Na.s.sau Bay, twenty-nine-year-old Martha Chaffee was clearing the table after giving her two young kids dinner. Even when she wore her "at home" slacks and went barefoot, she always put on her makeup. Only her short frosted blonde hair, cut in a mod style like the model Twiggy, was not as perfectly groomed as usual. It showed signs of going a little feral, but she had an appointment at the beauty parlor the next day. She and Roger were supposed to be going to the annual Time-Life dinner-dance gala on Sat.u.r.day night. All of the astronauts and their wives were to attend. Roger was flying home tomorrow in time for it.

The doorbell rang. At the door was Sue Bean. Sue smiled sweetly. "I thought you might like some company."

Then another Fourteen wife, Clare Schweickart, appeared, and then a neighbor whose husband worked for IBM. They told Martha there had been an accident; that's all they knew.

Martha thought, "It can't be Roger...he isn't flying tonight."

She felt a terrible urge to scrub the kitchen floor and wash the windows. She went into the family room and fluffed up the pillows. Then the gentlest of the astronauts, Mike Collins, came to the door, and Martha knew. His wife, Pat, had already arrived.

Mike was struck by how beautiful Martha looked that night. "I have to talk to you," he said as he led her to sit down. Martha had to coax the news out of him because he was having such a difficult time delivering it.

"Mike, I think I know, but I have to hear it," Martha said.

She felt as if she were outside of herself, looking down at what was happening. Martha felt bad for Mike, because he was having such a hard time. All three astronauts testing the Apollo 1 capsule were dead, he told her. A flash fire in the highly pressurized, pure oxygen environment of the sealed c.o.c.kpit had burned them alive. The hatch had been impossible to open. The NASA technicians and doctors were still trying to figure out how they died, whether from asphyxiation or from burns.

Mike asked if she wanted to tell her children. How to explain the finality of death to an eight-year-old and a five-year-old? Martha didn't think they even knew what the word meant. She brought in her kids and, calling them "sugar," told them that something had happened to their daddy. Martha worried that her youngest, Stephen, wouldn't even remember his father because Roger had been gone so much of his life.

In Timber Cove, the Grissoms' house was filling with astronauts and their wives, as well as some security people who had been sent over under the guise of protecting Betty from the press. Betty wasn't fooled. She knew they were really protecting NASA from what the loosest cannon in Togethersville might shoot off about that lemon.

All of Togethersville was ready to hold up its end of the social contract and take care of ole Betty, at least for one night.

Jobs were delegated, but Betty didn't want to give away any of her responsibility. Dr. Berry volunteered to call Gus's parents in Mitch.e.l.l. But Betty wouldn't hear of anyone else letting Dennis and Cecile Grissom know. That awful job was hers.

Some of the men said Gus had died within seconds-seconds, and that to Betty's mind meant that he hadn't suffered. "They didn't feel anything," said Betty, as she looked to the TV for more information.