The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

  Further, said the code, the wise wife of a junior officer was careful not to make her family’s style of living so ostentatious that it outdazzled that of higher-ranking families. It was on just this point that the Next Nine began to rankle some of the wives of the Original Seven and, for that matter, some of the seven astronauts, as well. They were irritated to notice what terrific houses many of the Next Nine immediately bought. Just like that—in Timber Cove even!—they began gobbling up the goodies! For the Original Seven the ascension from the drab life of the junior officer had seemed like a glorious pioneer struggle and part of the prize for winning the contest, for being chosen as the Original Seven. They found something distasteful about the attitude of the new crowd—this notion that as soon as a man was designated an astronaut, he and his family were entitled to stride out upon the golden boulevards of the Celestial City as if they owned the place.

  The Group II astronauts immediately produced an agent, their version of Leo DeOrsey, and sat down to negotiate and cut up the Life pie. He was Harry Batten, president of the N. W. Ayer advertising agency in Philadelphia. He was as much of a big leaguer as DeOrsey, and like DeOrsey he agreed to serve as agent without pay. It was a bit too much! People were already treating the Next Nine like the Original Seven! The developers in Timber Cove and Nassau Bay, the second-best development, offered them big houses for small down payments and huge mortgages at low interest—a mortgage of forty to fifty thousand dollars seemed enormous in 1962—and the Next Nine took it all on without even blinking. They were not behaving like junior officers in the presence of the Single-Combat Generals. For, as everyone understood, tacitly, this was no mere civilian agency; this was a new branch of the service.

  It was in that spirit that the “A.W.C.” was started. Without anyone coming out and saying so, it was understood that Marge Slayton was the C.O.’s wife in this outfit. By now Deke had taken on his job as Coordinator of Astronaut Activities with such determination that he was about to be put in charge of crew selection—meaning that he would be the one man who had the most to say about who flew, and in what order, particularly when it came to the Next Nine. He was about to be made Assistant Director of Flight Crew Operations. He became the equivalent of a commanding officer, making Marge the C.O.’s wife. Marge organized a couple of coffee hours for all the wives, the First Seven and the Next Nine, so they could all get to know each other. By the second time they met, they all realized, without a word—nobody had to say it—what this was. This was … the Officers Wives Club, such as existed at every base in the land. One of the newcomers who seemed absolutely tickled to death about the coffee hours was Sue Borman, the wife of one of the Next Nine, Frank Borman. Borman had been one of the first instructors at the Air Force’s new Experimental Test Pilot School at Edwards. He was a short, compact West Point man from Arizona, and his wife, Sue, was the perfect super-efficient officer’s wife. She had a fireproof cheeriness about her and a determination to get things organized. They were a great team. “This is fun,” she said, speaking of Marge’s coffee hours for the wives. “Let’s start doing this on an organized basis.” So the A.W.C. began. The initials stood for Astronauts Wives Club, of course, but the full name was never used. It was a gaffe for an astronaut or an astronaut’s wife to use the word astronaut. Marge herself was always talking about “the fellows.” Besides, the full name would make the military analogy too pointed.

  The A.W.C. was no great delight to most of the wives of the Original Seven, however. Some of the newcomers, such as Sue Borman, were too gung-ho about it all. That was what they would tell themselves. In fact, the newcomers acted too equal about it all. There was no protocol for showing the deference due Single-Combat Generals’ wives. The wives of the Original Seven began attending the monthly A.W.C. hours less and less. Betty Grissom almost never showed up; but then Betty had hated teatime functions from the very beginning. If one was going to feel ill at ease in the cheery chitchat game and not be treated as the Honorable Mrs. Single-Combat General … why bother?

  For both the wives and the men there was at first an Oaken Bucket nostalgia for the early days, the Langley era, the pioneer period, the period of youth and idealism and spartan courage and yahoo cowboy disregard for the bureaucratic proprieties. You would even see engineers and support personnel who had moved from Langley and the Cape here to Houston getting misty about those old days … three years ago … The new facility, the Manned Spacecraft Center, was taking shape out in the middle of a thousand acres of absolutely flat gumbo pasture. The buildings were great squat beige cubes set at grandiose intervals from one another and connected by wide roads, veritable highways, lined with aluminum light poles. The place looked like one of those “industrial parks” that were always being touted in the real-estate sections of the Sunday newspapers.

  Nevertheless, it was obvious that something of vast proportions was underway; and given a rosy enough picture of what lies down the road, a man could get over a case of homesickness soon enough. Perhaps Houston, the boom town of boom towns, was just the place for the expansion occurring in the space program. After a while you could begin to appreciate Houston’s energy and its sense of the grand sweep, the risk-all plunge. And Timber Cove and Nassau Bay and the other new housing developments out by Clear Lake weren’t half bad, it turned out. In fact, they were luxury itself compared to what you found around most air bases, and the locals, out here in this erstwhile farming country, were really good folks. Two-thirds of NASA was already geared up for Projects Gemini and Apollo and the great race to beat the Soviets to the moon. Just imagine what waited, here on earth, for the first man to walk on the moon … and the boys could imagine it. You had only to look at John Glenn. Glenn had not been the first man to fly in earth orbit or even the second, merely the first American. Yet he had ascended to a status so extraordinary it had no precedent. Some of the boys were convinced that Glenn had his eyes set on becoming President. (Nor was the notion farfetched; after all, it was David who had succeeded to the throne of Saul.) Glenn now moved in a world full of the Kennedys, the Johnsons, senators, congressmen, foreign dignitaries, heads of corporations, VIPs of every description. Next to John Kennedy himself, John Glenn was probably the best-known and most admired American in the world. Oh, the boys were aware of all that! Just ask Al Shepard!—although of course no one did.

  Al was now in training as backup for Gordon Cooper’s flight, which would be in May 1963. Gordo, the last in line, had drawn what was shaping up as the final flight in the Mercury series, thirty-four hours, twenty-two orbits, designed to put the United States into the game with the Soviets, who had now achieved flights of seventeen, sixty-four, and forty-eight orbits. The original planning had called for four long-duration flights, with the second one lasting three days. Shepard had been counting on that. He was desperate for an orbital flight. His suborbital flight, as well as Grissom’s, now seemed terribly insignificant. As for Gus, he was already getting revved up for the Gemini program, spending a lot of time in St. Louis, where McDonnell was building the Gemini spacecraft. Gus had put the gloom of his flight behind him and was looking ahead to Gemini and Apollo. His friend Deke was in charge of crew selection for the two new programs and was throwing himself heart and soul into the job, and not just because he enjoyed the exercise of his newly found power. The main thing was that he would be on top of every flight from beginning to end, familiar with every detail of every mission. It seemed to be Deke’s fervent belief that it would be only a matter of time—following the next physical or the one after that, or the one next year—before he was back on full flight status and into the rotation. And Wally—Wally was riding high. Wally’s flight was still the shining example of what an operational space flight should be. It had taken Wally’s performance to show that Cooper’s twenty-two-orbit flight would be possible. Wally couldn’t have been in better shape in the program. He had been as efficient and as cool as they made them.

  Wally had come back from his flight and landed in the middle of th
e Cuban missile crisis. For a week Kennedy and Khrushchev had their showdown, which appeared to bring the world to the brink of a nuclear war, but then Khrushchev backed off and withdrew all Soviet missiles from Cuba. After that things cooled down considerably. Like everyone else, the boys noticed that negotiations for a nuclear test ban and for “cooperation in space,” whatever that might prove to be, were in the news a lot. But to tell the truth, it didn’t seem like much more than the usual drizzle of words. For that matter, on May 11, four days before Cooper was to go up, Lyndon Johnson drew the lines the same way they had been drawn ever since October of 1957, when the first Sputnik went up. He made a speech answering charges that some congressmen were making about the high cost of the new programs, Gemini and Apollo, and he said: “I, for one, don’t want to go to bed by the light of a Communist moon.” Christ, that was worse than Sputnik: every night, overhead, sails the silvery moon, occupied by the Russians.

  As for Gordo himself, he was already on top of the world. There were those among his brethren who had their doubts about the man, but he never had a moment’s doubt about himself. Once more his light shone ’round about him. Was he the last of the seven to be assigned a flight? Well, so what … it wasn’t a contest … the press had dreamed up all that crap … Shepard, Glenn, and the others had paved the way for his endurance test. The potential hazards? They didn’t bother him in the slightest. They hadn’t from the beginning.

  Confronted with any feasible form of manned flight, Gordo was a picture of righteous aplomb. This was a side of Cooper that Jim Rathmann understood better than any of his confreres in the corps. Gordo had been in Florida for a long stretch, preparing for his flight, and he saw Rathmann a lot. Thanks to Rathmann, he, like Gus and Wally and Al, had become crazy about automobile racing. Rathmann, in turn, had decided to learn to fly. Cooper took him up in a Beechcraft one day and told him: “Never fly under a sea gull—they’ll shit on your airplane.” Rathmann made the mistake of laughing, as if he thought Gordo was kidding, whereupon Gordo said, “I’ll show you,” and headed for a flock of sea gulls flying low over the Everglades. The first thing Rathmann knew, Cooper was down so low he could hear a sound that went whup whup whup whup whup whup whup whup. It was the propellers cutting the marsh grass. For more than a mile old Gordo mowed the marsh grass to make sure he stayed under the sea gulls. Rathmann could hear it the whole time: whup whup whup whup whup whup. By the time they landed, Rathmann was Jell-O. But Cooper just popped open the cockpit door and stood up on the lower frame and pointed triumphantly at the roof and yelled to Rathmann: “Look here—I told you!”

  So far as a Mercury flight was concerned, he seemed to regard it as easy enough. He had lobbied as hard as Deke Slayton himself for more pilot control of the spacecraft. But since you didn’t have it, why get excited? Why get your bowels in an uproar? Just take the ride and relax.

  Early in the morning of May 15, while it was still dark, Gordo was inserted into the little human holster atop the rocket. As usual there was a long hold before the lift-off. The doctors monitoring the biomedical telemetry began noticing something very odd. In fact, they couldn’t believe it. Every objective reading of the calibrations and printouts indicated … the astronaut had gone to sleep! The man was up there stacking Z’s on top of a rocket loaded with 200,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and RP—1!

  Well, why the hell not? Gordo had had plenty of opportunity to see how the launch days always went. You hit the sack in Hangar S about ten or eleven the night before, and they woke you up about three in the morning, in the dark, and they took you out to the rocket and they laid you down on a contoured couch for two, three, four hours while they tuned in all the systems for the lift-off. You didn’t have a damned thing to do, really, during most of this; so why not catch up on all the sleep you’d missed?

  Throughout America, throughout the world, untold millions were by their radios and in front of television sets, waiting for the moment of lift-off, wondering, as always: My God, what goes through a man’s mind at a moment like this! Scarcely able to believe it themselves, NASA never supplied the answer.

  By the moment of lift-off there was quite a circus in progress out front of Gordo’s house in Timber Cove. The Genteel Beast was outdoing itself in the death-watch department. One of the television networks had erected a stupendous aerial on the lawn of a house across the way, a gigantic thing, about eight stories high, the better to beam to the world live pictures of the house inside which Astronaut Cooper’s wife, Trudy, was maintaining her anxious vigil in front of the TV set. Milling around underneath the aerial and in the street and on the sidewalks was the biggest mob of reporters and camera crewmen you could imagine. Slovenly but nevertheless seemly they were. They treated Trudy Cooper, in their coverage, as if she had stepped right out of Life magazine, as if she were wearing a pageboy bob and playing “Moonlight in Vermont” on the old upright in the family room to keep up the spirits of herself and the children while Gordon’s life was on the line in the longest American mission yet.

  That was rich. By now the very presence of the Beast itself had made any such private and personal response to the event impossible, even in households where the marriage was a lot more solid than Gordo and Trudy’s. For the astronaut’s wife the days of the lonely vigil by the telephone with the little ones tugging at her skirt, Edwards- or Pax River-style, were over. First had come the Danger Wake, as Louise Shepard had experienced it, with a big crowd in the house and a bigger one—the Genteel Animal—out on the front lawn. Since then the Astronaut’s Wife had been converted from an individual to a performer, at least for the duration of the night—ready or willing or good at it or not. It had become an immutable part of the drill: at the completion of the flight the astronaut’s wife had to leave the house and confront the Beast and all his cameras and microphones and submit to a press conference and answer questions and be the Perfect Astronaut’s Wife with merely the entire world watching. It was this grim prospect that truly lacerated one’s heart while Mr. Wonderful was aloft. It was this that gave the test pilot’s wife a royal case of nerves in the space age. For the astronaut the flight consisted of riding the rocket and, God willing, not fucking up. For the wife the flight consisted of … the Press Conference.

  The questions they asked you were unbelievably simple-minded, and yet there was no smooth way to field them. As soon as you touched one, it popped all over your face like bubble gum.

  “What is in your heart?”

  “What advice do you have for other women whose husbands have to go through dangerous situations?”

  “What’s the first meal you plan to cook for [Al, Gus, John, Scott, Wally, Gordon]?”

  “Did you feel you were with him while he was in orbit?”

  Pick out one! Try answering it!

  Problems of protocol had arisen. Sometimes the Genteel Animal besieged the Mother’s house as well as the Wife’s. John Glenn’s mother had been a great hit on television. She looked and sounded like about as ideal a mother as an astronaut could possibly have. She had white hair and a marvelous smile, and when Walter Cronkite, on CBS, cut from the Cape to New Concord, Ohio, to say a few words to her, she said, “Well, Wal-ter Cron-kite!”—as if she were saying hello to a cousin she hadn’t heard from in years. But whom should the networks interview first after a flight, the Wife, the Mother, or the President? Opinions varied, and this added to the tension. Regardless of the order, however, there seemed to be no way for the wife to get out of it. Even Rene, after hiding throughout Scott’s flight, had dutifully turned up at the press tent on the base at the Cape for the Wife’s Press Conference. By now, when the other wives came around to the house of the Wife during a flight, they were not there to hold her hand over the dangers her husband was facing. They were there to hold her hand over the television cameras she would be facing. They were there to try to buck her up for a true ordeal. They liked to do the Squarely Stable routine. One of the wives—Rene Carpenter was good at it—would take the role of Nancy Whoever, T
V correspondent, and hold her fist up to her mouth, as if she were holding a microphone, and say:

  “We’re here in front of the trim, modest suburban home of Squarely Stable, the famous astronaut who has just completed his historic mission, and we have with us his attractive wife, Primly Stable. Primly Stable, you must be happy, proud, and thankful at this moment.”

  And then she would shift her fist over underneath the chin of another wife, and she would say:

  “Yes, Nancy, that’s true. I’m happy, proud, and thankful at this moment.”

  “Tell us, Primly Stable—may I call you Primly?”

  “Certainly, Nancy, Primly.”

  “Tell us, Primly, tell us what you felt during the blastoff, at the very moment when your husband’s rocket began to rise from the earth and take him on this historic journey.”

  “To tell you the truth, Nancy, I missed that part of it. I’d sort of dozed off, because I got up so early this morning and I’d been rushing around a lot taping the shades shut, so the TV people wouldn’t come in the windows.”

  “Well, would you say you had a lump in your throat as big as a tennis ball?”

  “That’s about the size of it, Nancy, I had a lump in my throat as big as a tennis ball.”

  “And finally, Primly, I know that the most important prayer of your life had already been answered: Squarely has returned safely from outer space. But if you could have one other wish at this moment and have it come true, what would that one wish be?”