by Tom Wolfe
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. T
he 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.
As far as the wives were concerned, their outlook was the same as that of officers’ wives generally, only more so. The main thing was not to say or do anything that reflected badly upon your husband. There wasn’t much to worry about with Life on this score. If Betty or any of the others did happen to say anything wrong, she could always remove it before it saw print. As time went by, the Life writers must have despaired of getting any personal stuff at all into their personal stories.
Deke Slayton’s wife, Marge, had been divorced, which was a matter of record, but that wasn’t about to be printed in Life magazine. A once-divorced astronaut’s wife was by now an unthinkable concatenation of words. When the selection process for astronaut had begun, Trudy Cooper, Gordon Cooper’s wife, had been living by herself down at San Diego. The writers from Life may have known about it and they may not have. It was a moot point, because in any event there were not going to be any astronauts with washed-up marriages in the pages of Life magazine on the eve of the battle in the heavens with the Russians. The exclusive rights to the “personal stories” of the astronauts and their families that Life had purchased did not encompass any such tangled terrain as that.
And it didn’t have to be that personal for them to wave the wand and make it disappear. Look at what they did with John Glenn’s wife, Annie. Annie was a good-looking and highly capable woman, but she also had what was referred to as a “slight speech impediment” or “a hesitation in her speech.” The truth was that she had a terrific stutter, the classic kind, the kind in which you get hung up on a syllable until you either force it out or run out of breath. Annie was game about it, and she would hang in there until she said what she wanted to say, but it was a real disability—everywhere except in Life magazine. In Life magazine there were going to be no ferocious stammering jackhammer stutters on the home front.
As for Betty, she came out in Life as the thoughtful, articulate, competent, much respected Honorable Mrs. Captain Astronaut. She didn’t ask for much more than that. If it pleased them, the people at Life could sit around removing dour grim grit and zits until they earned a place beside the angels in Retouch Heaven.
VII.
The Cape
Cape Canaveral was in Florida, but not any part of Florida you would write home about, except on one of those old Tichnor Brothers postcards on which there is a drawing of two grinning dogs positioned in front of a lamp post, each with a hind leg hoisted, and a caption that says: THIS IS A WONDERFUL PLACE … JUST BETWEEN YOU AND ME AND THE LAMP POST! No, Cape Canaveral was not Miami Beach or Palm Beach or even Key West. Cape Canaveral was Cocoa Beach. That was the resort town at the Cape. Cocoa Beach was the resort town for all the Low Rent folk who couldn’t afford the beach towns farther south. Cocoa Beach was so Low Rent that nothing on this earth could ever change it. The vacation houses at Cocoa Beach were little boxes with front porches or “verandas” nailed onto them and a 1952 De Soto coupe with venetian blinds in the rear window rusting in the salt air out back by the septic tank.
Even the beach at Cocoa Beach was Low Rent. It was about three hundred feet wide at high tide and hard as a brick. It was so hard that the youth of postwar Florida used to go to the stock-car races at Daytona Beach, and then, their brains inflamed with dreams of racing glory, they would head for Cocoa Beach and drive their cars right out on that hardtack strand and race their gourds off, while the poor sods who were vacationing there gathered up their children and their Scotch-plaid picnic coolers, and ran for cover. At night some sort of prehistoric chiggers or fire ants—it was hard to say, since you could never see them—rose up from out of the sand and the palmetto grass and went for the ankles with a bite more vicious than a mink’s. There was no such thing as “first-class accommodations” or “red-carpet treatment” in Cocoa Beach. The red carpet, had anyone ever tried to lay one down, would have been devoured in midair by the No See’um bugs, as they were called, before it ever touched the implacable hardcracker ground.
And that was one reason why the boys loved it! Even Glenn—even Glenn, who did not partake of all of its Low Rent glories.
The place reminded them of what they had heard Edwards, or Muroc, was like in the legendary days of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. It was one of those bleached, sandy, bare-boned stretches where the land that any sane man wants runs out … and the government takes it over for the testing of hot and dangerous machines, and the kings of the resulting rat-shack kingdom are those who test them. Just south of Cocoa Beach was Patrick Air Force Base, site for the headquarters of the Atlantic Missile Range, for the testing of the weaponry of the Cold War: guided missiles, intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. North of Cocoa Beach, on the very tip of the Cape itself, was the huge new secret launching facility from which all these rockets and pilotless aircraft were fired, a stone boondock dune plain with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Banana River on
the other, with soil so sandy that the scrub pines had trouble growing fifteen feet high, and yet malarial and so marshy that the cottonmouth moccasins stood their ground and stared you down, the sort of hopeless stone boondock spit where the vertebrates give up and the slugs and the No See’um bugs take over. The few buildings on the base were of the World War II Beaverboard Temporary variety. And like Edwards of old, the Cape, this poor godforsaken afterthought in the march of terrestrial evolution, turned out to be a paradise of Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving and Driving & the rest, for those who cared about such things. Or of Drinking & Driving & the rest, in any event. There was still no flying.
Langley remained the astronauts’ headquarters, but the Cape would be their launching site, eventually, and they went there increasingly for training. They would fly in by commercial airliner, landing in Melbourne or Orlando. Most of them would rent convertibles and head for the Holiday Inn on Route A1A just north of the old part of Cocoa Beach, a motel run by a man named Henry Landiwirth, who soon found himself becoming innkeeper to the astronauts. Quite a little 1960’s-style American Rat-Shack Strip was beginning to develop on Route A1A near the Holiday Inn: hamburger restaurants with plate-glass walls and hot magenta lights, night spots with Kontiki roofs, and little shopping slabs by the side of the highway, slabs of concrete with one-story cinderblock sheds on them broken up into store fronts with SPACE AVAILABLE signs posted.
Military units had always been great ones for creating “traditions” instantly, on the spot, and this unofficial corps of astronauts was no exception. The tradition was: the Cape is off limits to wives. This came about rather naturally. The Cape was not a good place for wives and children, because you couldn’t count on finding kitchen facilities in the motels and there were none of the usual beach resort amenities, and none of them could afford the plane fares for family trips to Florida in the first place. Besides that, the boys’ training hours were very long, sometimes ten or twelve hours a day. They did nothing at the Cape but work their butts off all day and then fall into bed, albeit this was a matter open to interpretation.
